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Happy New Year!
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Another year, another opportunity to wish my readers all the best for the New Year, and to promise to continue to look for interesting tidbits to report on IT strategy and knowledge management topics for another 24 issues of the KIT throughout this year.
I'm not planning drastic changes in 2018. I'm now settled in the new San Rafael, Calif. location and my small client base in the U.S. and Mexico has been stable through 2017 (but we're always willing to help more!). I've been increasing my interactions with a group of French consultants called XMP-Consult (from the initials of the names or nicknames of the three grandes écoles from which most of us hail). So, if you need management or IT consultants in Europe, especially in France, let me know and I will refer you to very capable people there.
Each year, the Cutter Consortium asks its affiliates to forecast a trend for the new year. Mine (to be published soon) is called "The Year of Data Governance?" (the question mark is a precaution in case I'm wrong). I see a convergence of information security issues (exacerbated by the Internet of Things), privacy compliance (including Europe's General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in May) and data residency challenges. All this will require much more attention, not just from CIOs but also from CEOs and Boards of Directors. Stay tuned for a link to the paper, and let us know what you think -- we'll be happy to publish your thoughts on this.
Meanwhile, Happy New Year!
Claude Baudoin
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Personal Information Management
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There was a flurry of activity (mostly marketing...) around the concepts of personal information management (PIM) and personal knowledge management (PKM) about ten years ago. In the end, nothing changed much in our daily routine of storing, searching and retrieving information among thousands of e-mails and files stored on our computers. Hierarchical file systems certainly don't help: did I store the presentation I gave client X about digital transformation under "IT Trends" or under "Clients"? And if you hope that employees of a large corporation will move all their useful documents to SharePoint and tag them properly for future retrieval... dream on!
You may not be totally left at the mercy of Windows Explorer's limitations if a tool like Pinker (www.pinkerfind.com) succeeds. Created by a Dutch/German startup, and currently available as a fully functional free trial version until March 31, 2018, Pinker indexes your hard drive as well as your e-mails (whether local or on a mail server). The user can define a taxonomy of "topics" that can be used to focus searches, use Boolean logic in searches (I want documents about X or Y but not Z) and save searches for reuse.
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KM Buyers' Guide
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As it does every year, KMWorld Magazine has updated and published its Buyers' Guide, a catalog of products and services that covers many aspects of KM... from Big Data to Content Management to Enterprise Search to Workflow, with many more in between.
The Guide can be downloaded as a PDF, but the website also allows you (this may be new with this year's edition) to search online for a specific type of product or service and/or a specific industry.
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The Cloud and Data Residency Compliance
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Privacy and data residency restrictions, including but not limited to the EU's GDPR, are starting to have an impact on the provision of cloud services. Two weeks ago, Amazon Web Services launched a new Paris region for French customers, assuring them of compliance with the strict French data sovereignty regulations (as well as GDPR) and also claiming reduced latency as a benefit. This is AWS's fourth region in the European Union and its 18th worldwide.
We're seeing a fragmentation of cloud services due to data residency concerns. While Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google and a few others can handle this challenge, smaller providers will be hard-pressed to follow suit. The impact could be a reshaping of the cloud market, with large companies gaining even more market share at the expense of their smaller competitors.
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Seen Recently... |
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"A bad system will beat a good person every time."
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"Firms which view AI not as a tool with which to expand their offerings but merely to cut costs will become lords of an ever-diminishing manor."
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