Harne Your Records and Information Management Program for Innovation

The recent announcement by Marissa Mayer, new-Mom and CEO of Yahoo!, to ban working from home in favor of face-to-face office time has certainly been polarizing. Social media is ablaze with pungent opinions about it and its implications for working parents and feminism. As a working mother of three, I wince at her decision, yet get the underlying objective: spark innovation by harnessing talent in a live and collaborative environment. Being together, sharing ideas, achieving synergy is critical to bubbling up product and solution change. And although I feel strongly that in-person togetherness does not have to be 100% of working time in order to capture creativity, it is simply fact that the interchange of ideas is best enabled by being together in the same place. But being together isn't enough.

In order for an organization to mine ideation, it must have a strong records and information management program.

When companies have process, technology and people in place to govern and manage their information assets, they are better positioned to cast a net that searches across both physical and electronic records to find inspiration from the present (what's going on today) as well as the past (draw from history). Collaboration and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tools such as SharePoint get there but their full value can only be realized when they provide access to physical records as well as electronic.

If you examine widely regarded examples of innovators across various industries, they have one commonality: they took inspiration from what happened before them to develop what is new and different. Take Lady Gaga for example. On the pop star continuum, she is clearly a derivative of Madonna, yet has her own distinct perspective and offering. The illustrious Oprah has been very much inspired by Diane Sawyer but has created her very OWN unique legacy and empire. Companies can also do this by searching across their records to find examples of past successes to repeat or under-developed opportunities to grow.

If Mayer wants her people to come to the table with unique points of view and thoughts on both new adjacencies as well as radical innovation, then her people need to be able to easily conduct research internally and externally. They must be able to come into the office prepared with the Voice of the Customer, both actual customers and the internal team members servicing those customers. This information can be gleaned from their records active and possibly inactive, onsite and offsite. If they can quickly find information when they need it, they can aggregate it with other data points and voila ideas are formed.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/records-management-and-storage/harne...
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