| | July 20158CIOReviewin myopinionWhat Folder did you Save That In?By Aaron Lepperd, GVP of Enterprise Architecture, BMTAs an Enterprise Architect, your role is to marry the business' strategic initiatives with IT goals for a secure yet scalable infrastructure. Our role has become increasingly in demand over the recent years as companies strive to reduce costs, standardize environments and still be agile enough to pivot like a startup company. The problem of file storage usually falls to IT because of the lack of governance in place for the enterprise. Although you may feel as though adding more disks to your SAN is the easy solution, your underlying problem is enterprise content management.Tackling a project involving enterprise content management can be difficult because by the time you realize you have a problem, you're already well behind. Many of the responsibilities that an Enterprise Architect holds are similar to the rules you'll need to adhere to in order to successfully introduce this new idea.· Decisions are to be made consistently across the enterprise- define exactly what your enterprise content management platform is for and how it should be used by every department.· Design a governance and compliance policy-identify business sponsors for each department and define their roles and responsibilities, usage policies and best practices to help define success metrics that can prove adoption of the product.· Create auditable and transparent results-change management is crucial to recording decisions that are auditable and have business approvals, not IT opinions.· Build a repeatable process users will take the path of least resistance, use their input to build a system that they feel they helped design while guiding them toward best practices.· Architect a scalable solution the last thing management wants to hear is that they spent money on a new application that interfaces with nothing else the business already owns.If your company doubles in size tomorrow, is your infrastructure capable of handling it? What about the business processes for storing and accessing data? Without a clear vision, users can and will create their own policies for storing personal and business data wherever they have the access to do so. With new technologies built into server operating systems now allowing for file deduplication without IT Aaron Lepperd
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