by Angela Guess
Kon Leong recently wrote in GCN.com, “Despite the rapidly advancing processing and algorithmic tools available today, organizations are having a difficult time reaping the insights that these technologies are supposed to generate. This is largely because of to the mismanagement of data; data that hasn’t been managed and cleaned is of little use for analytics, no matter how slick the user interface is. Unstructured data, in particular, is resistant to uniform management. Its multiformat nature and ongoing, rapid generation spawn a wildly diverse and rapidly evolving ecosystem of content. Nevertheless, structured data is critical to daily business productivity and is needed for meeting legal and regulatory requirements. It also has immense potential for business insight.”
Leong goes on, “At the heart of this struggle are the records and information management (RIM) professionals, who experienced a rapid metamorphosis of their roles as data volumes expanded and paper dwindled… We’ve entered a new era of RIM, with big data at the forefront. Paper is out; analytics are in. RIM professionals are eager — rather than apprehensive — to use partial automation to tackle the volumes of data that they could never have classified by manual means alone. But there is still a layer of frustration. Top organizational leadership often champions a holistic and singular management strategy for data, but those in the trenches know that the nuts and bolts of implementation can become a nightmare, drawing out original costs and timelines.”
photo credit: Flickr/ ogimogi