denotes premium content | Feb 7 2012 
Enterprise Information archive
Volume 2 Issue 7
The great compliance debate
Compliance is insignificant relative to disaster recovery and business-continuity planning, according to research by storage-management vendor BridgeHead Software. And, despite the widespread prominence of the ‘big’
For storage vendors, this must be a huge – if slightly worrying – revelation. Marketing departments for archiving and data-management tools have been jumping on the compliance bandwagon for months now. Those of you responsible for your organisation’s e-mail management policy will no doubt have heard “it will help to make your system more compliant” in sales pitches. But, if these findings are to be taken seriously, it may be time for vendors to start re-thinking their selling points.
In the storage space, compliance has remained a prominent theme. Indeed, industry analysts and vendors alike have linked the current boom in the market for storage solutions on a rush to comply with legislation. This month’s cover feature (page 10) explores this area in more detail and examines some of the other drivers for improved data management.
Collaboration is another area that is experiencing growth at the moment, particularly as organisations start to realise the benefits of consumer technologies such as instant messaging, blogging and podcasting. Jessica Twentyman charts the progress of the latest real-time collaboration tools and talks to
Elsewhere, Paul Chin returns with the first part of another workshop series. ‘The intranet post-mortem’ covers the main causes of intranet failure and what action to take should an intranet project fail.
If you have an interesting project implementation story to tell, or would like to share your knowledge of a particular area in a workshop, do not hesitate to get in touch. Your experience is invaluable to others and EI is always on the look out for high-quality articles. If you would like to contribute, or if you have any comments or ideas for the magazine, please contact me at the e-mail address below.
Kate Clifton
Deputy editor
kclifton@ark-group.com
Features
Trend tracker: Real-time collabration
For conservation charity the Woodland Trust, managing costs is a top priority, in order that the bulk of its funds can be targeted at the important work of protecting the UK’s native woodland heritage.
But progress in that work, which is achieved through a mixture of acquisition, lobbying, education and fundraising, is only possible when its 230-strong team of woodland officers, project managers and administrative staff are able to collaborate closely with each other.
Cover story: Compliance - driving the storage boom?
“I was talking to an end user who had been in a situation where he had lost his organisation’s back-up tapes,” says Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. “When we got talking about the processes in place at the time, he told me that tapes often sat on the counter for up to three days before being taken off site for storage. Can you believe that? It is one big flaw.”
Case study: Johnson & Johnson
There were numerous, disparate intranet sites across JJM’s functions, geographic locations and franchises. We saw these as ‘first generation’ intranets, as each needed technical personnel (usually a single individual) to update content, which often created bottlenecks. Supporting and maintaining these sites involved duplication of costs, data and information.
Workshop: The intranet post-mortem
The first step in fixing or re-designing an unsuccessful intranet is understanding where you went wrong first time around. The first of this four-part workshop series looks at some of the contributors to intranet failure.
Case study: The Royal Bank of Scotland Group
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group is the eighth largest bank in the world with a market capitalisation of £49bn. The three principal areas of its income generation are the UK, Europe, and the US. The bulk of both the group’s income and assets continues to be generated in Europe. Its mainstream, UK banking operation has a ‘back office’ processing strategy run through the Manufacturing division, which consists of ten separate business areas and around 28,000 manufacturing employees, who work in 92 specialist centres.
Workshop: Portal implementation - Part V
The seventh step of our implementation involves the integration of information, collaboration tools and applications with the portal. The ‘information’ element covers unstructured information, such as office documents, images and digital media, as well as semi-structured information that has been tagged in some way.
Workshop: Building a successful e-learning strategy
Like most organisational change implementations, a successful e-learning strategy requires very careful planning and execution. Generally, the usual project-management principles are applied to e-learning, but special attention should be placed on managing expectations, ensuring management commitment and involving all key stakeholders.
Regulars
The last word
For decades the late management guru Peter Drucker suggested that a collaborative dynamic of networks, joint ventures and partnerships would become a key feature of the developing knowledge-based economies. Today, in a world of growing e-commerce, we can see increasing efforts being made by organisations to achieve collaborative ‘win-win’ situations, as opposed to the typically ‘win-lose’ scenarios that flowed from more adversarial approaches in the past.
Opinion: Lynda Rathbone
Over the past month I have been reading up on technological trends: ‘The best of 2005’ and ‘What’s in store for 2006’ kind of stuff. Most of it was what you might expect – trends that have been progressing slowly like the declining use of Java, or technology with a bit more spring in its step, such as wikis and the debate over the use of sites like Wikipedia.org as a factual resource.
