Most information management systems do not fail because of the technology. 
They fail because organisations place the wrong people in charge of them.
It might sound tough, but I’ve seen the same issues over and over in documentation, governance, migration, and digital transformation projects for years.
A company buys a shiny new platform. Perhaps it is SharePoint, Asite, OpenText, Confluence, or some other enterprise repository promising collaboration, governance, and a “single source of truth.” Senior management signs off on the budget. Consultants arrive. Workshops take place. PowerPoint slides appear with words like transformation, efficiency, and digitisation.
Then reality arrives.
The people tasked with implementing the system often do not understand:
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- Information architecture
- Metadata strategy
- Document lifecycle management
- Governance
- Retention
- Taxonomy
- Search behaviour
- Classification
- User behaviour
- Migration risk
- Audit requirements
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Instead, the responsibility falls to:
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- Project managers are trying to keep timelines alive
- Administrators are learning the system as they go
- Engineers or operational staff are given “document duties”
- Junior analysts following configuration guides
- Contractors brought in late with no authority
- Teams follow instructions without understanding why the rules exist
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The result is predictable.
Folders become dumping grounds. Metadata becomes inconsistent. Naming conventions collapse within months. Nobody owns review cycles. Duplicate files spread everywhere. Obsolete documents survive for years. Search becomes unreliable. Staff stop trusting the repository and return to shared drives, desktops, Teams chats, and email attachments.
The system technically works.
The information ecosystem does not.
One of the biggest problems is the culture of “learning on the job” without experienced guidance. There is nothing wrong with learning. Every profession requires it. The danger appears when organisations assume complex information governance can be improvised by whoever is available.
Information management is not merely administration.
It is a discipline.
A proper information manager understands:
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- Governance structures
- Risk
- Regulatory obligations
- User behaviour
- Retrieval logic
- Version control
- Controlled publishing
- Retention schedules
- Audit defensibility
- Migration integrity
- Operational continuity
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Without that knowledge, teams often follow instructions mechanically.
“Upload the files.”
“Apply metadata.”
“Move everything into SharePoint.”
“Create the folders.”
“Archive old material.”
But few stop to ask:
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- Why are we storing this?
- Who owns it?
- Who reviews it?
- Is it duplicated elsewhere?
- Is it authoritative?
- What is the retention requirement?
- What business process depends on this information?
- What happens if somebody follows the wrong version?
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That lack of understanding is where many systems quietly begin to decay.
The harsh truth is that some organisations confuse software knowledge with information management expertise. Knowing how to create a SharePoint library does not make someone an Information Manager, just as knowing how to use Word does not make someone a technical author.
Technology alone cannot compensate for weak governance.
Another recurring issue is leadership detachment. Senior management often sees Information Management as an IT deployment rather than an operational control mechanism. Once the platform is installed, they assume the job is complete.
It is not.
The difficult work starts afterwards:
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- Governance
- Ownership
- Review enforcement
- Classification
- Rationalisation
- Training
- Audit checks
- Lifecycle management
- Repository discipline
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Without these controls, entropy takes over.
This is why many migrations fail to improve anything. Organisations transfer chaos from one platform to another. The old shared drive becomes a badly organised SharePoint site. The same ROT — redundant, obsolete, and trivial information — survives the migration untouched.
A poorly governed system can often outperform an excellent platform without it.
The uncomfortable conclusion is this:
Most information management failures are not technical failures.
They are failures of leadership, governance, experience, and understanding.
Until organisations place experienced people in charge of their information estates — people who understand both systems and governance — many so-called digital transformations will continue to become expensive storage exercises disguised as progress.