Let’s start with ECM, because that has been the point of my career for over a decade now. When we last saw it, I was talking about its future and how it is moving to becoming Omnipresent Content Management (OCM). While the term “Universal” is also apt, Oracle already stole it.

Before we get into more detail, and leave Steve McQueen, the question really is, Where does that leave ECM?

Content Management vs. ECM

Okay, this is the finale that Peter Monks has been waiting on, and baiting me about, for quite some time. Let’s hash it out.

Content Management is the practice of managing content. Period. It does not matter what type of content you are talking about, the core capabilities remain the same. What varies when looking at different systems is determining if they are generic Content Management Systems (CMS) or if they are focused on specific types of content, like documents, browser content, or XML (whose designation as content v data is a little spurious).

[Random Side Note: If all content can be served to the web now, doesn’t that make the term “web content” redundant? Shouldn’t the term address “browser content” or something more descriptive to its purpose? Flaming responses can be sent to Jon Marks.]

So what is ECM in the world of Content Management? Simple, it is a strategy. As I have put it in the past:

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy for the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to find and use content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

There is no such thing as ECM software or an ECM solution. There are ECM platforms, but they are just platforms. They enable a centralized ECM strategy. In fact, taking the risk of upsetting the boat further, I would just call them Content Management platforms. They have purposes that go beyond supporting an ECM strategy, which itself can be implemented without a platform. Should is a completely different question for another day.

The question is, is an ECM strategy enough these days?

Is ECM Dead?

This is a trick question. If you pay me enough, I can fervently defend any answer to any detractor. As most of you aren’t paying me, I’m going to straddle the fence.

Simply put, it isn’t dead. There are too many organizations that have content running amuck or a wide collection of content repositories that either need to be merged or forced to communicate and share using CMIS (token CMIS reference).  All you Documentum people rest assured, you will be needed for years to come.

That said, we can now see the limits. As Dan Elam, a really interesting and smart guy, points out in his not so obviously titled Enterprise Content Management is Dead post, there is a lot of content that is living outside control of the Enterprise. Instant messaging and text messages are two of the larger issues. They are sitting outside of the enterprise on phones, personal computers, and now tablet computers. Instant messaging can be captured, or blocked, but the text messages will live on as long as people are permitted to call each other on cell phones.

Meanwhile, Mark Mandel concurs and brings broader Records Management issues to the fore-front. What about all of that Social Media content? Records Management concerns aside (no small feat), there is still the management of a company’s presence out there in the wilds of Web 2.0. You may want the content to be fresh and exciting, but you also want to sometimes plan that fresh content days in advance of an announcement.

Finally, there is the simple fact that content is becoming less restricted to the Enterprise. I’m not talking about all that Social Media stuff. I’m talking about sharing content with other organizations. This can range from clients, business partners, and colleagues in the industry.  This is a problem I mentioned when talking about why email is such a strong draw.

Simply put, email works and allows you to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, without having to do anything else.

Box allows the same thing, but there are limits on what you can get for free. Everyone you want to collaborate with needs have an account as well. Get one person that can’t, or won’t, use the platform, it fails to be a universal solution.

For all of its size, not even Facebook is universal. My parents aren’t there. Neither is my grandmother. When I have news, I still have to call them, though calling my mother usually gets everyone in the know quickly enough. You can’t forcing sharing, but you don’t have to force email. It is there now. Oh, and email is either free or paid for by employers.

Not saying email is the way to go, just pointing out some of the challenges facing Content Management as it is implemented today. There needs to be a way for content to be accessed by anyone, anywhere, and as needed, wanted, and permitted.

That is a lot to get a handle on. As Dan pointed out, deploying solutions to the cloud is getting cheaper and easier. We just need the solutions to scale to the cloud and for those solutions to be aware of each other and able to communicate, kind of like our email servers.

It is a tall order for the future. The thing is, if we don’t start planning now, there is a lot of content that is going to be lost that many people might want to have around, like a get out of jail card.

You should read the article before proceeding much further.  In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.  Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address.  People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the “stopper” that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

Well, this scenario is something I have seen quite a bit.  There is one example that really drives home the need to get people not just out of email, but to get everyone into something that can transfer collaborative data between systems just like email is transferred using SMTP today.  That example….me.

Pie Said What?

That is correct, I am a violator.  I am not always compliant.  I have been implementing collaboration solutions for a long time.  I almost always play the role of a stopper in any organization or project that I join.  In the last six months, I’ve noticed something….

I’m spending more time collaborating in email than ever before.

I am working more with people outside my organization than I ever have in the past.  Doing a lot of work in the Federal market, my company is frequently teaming with other companies, and not always the same ones.  For each effort, we have to find different ways to share content and track actions.  Rather than supply the collaboration solution for everyone, we tend to use email.  Why? Simple, our partners use it as well.

It doesn’t stop there though.  I have also been working with people at AIIM and vendor companies on CMIS efforts.  More users and more reasons to collaborate, but still no single system.  Once again, we all use email, so that is where we work.

Doing all of this in email, I have found myself collaborating with colleagues on purely internal efforts via email.  I’m just cruising along in my workday, and before I know it, I’ve sent documents via email rather than sending an alert or a link to a document in an email.

I’m regressing!!!!!

What Can Be Done?

Well, like any good American, I’m going to blame someone else for my problem.  There are two solutions which would solve the problem:

• Universal Collaboration: So we need an incredible, kickin’, collaborative platform with no storage or user limits that is online an free to everyone.  Let’s not forget security because I want to collaborate in one place on all my efforts, not just the public ones.
• Universal Communication: Bad name, I know, but the point is simple.  If my collaborative artifacts could be sent to anyone for interaction the way I send email, but they do their work in their collaborative environment and I am staying in mine, that would be great!

I think it is pretty safe to say that the first will not happen in the foreseeable future.  The second sounds like a lot of work.  Well, the efforts we expend to push Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 adoption is a lot of work as well.

Fun fact, one old, and lovely feature of eRoom is the ability to email content to a room.  That was a first step in the right direction.  If collaborative packages could just be emailed between systems in a standard format, that might solve all the problems.

There is no easy path.  Maybe instead of trying to get over the hurdles by creating new features, selling, and evangelizing, maybe we should make the tools the obvious in-process tools.

But why solve it?  There is a lot of money to be made telling people how great the software is now.

Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:

• Going to try and use as much of Chistensen’s terminlogy as possible.  This isn’t to say that he has a perfect model, or even 80% model, of what is happening.  It just helps to keep the terminology consistent during this particular post.
• Every Content Management company is different and the observations will not apply universally.  Every company reacts differently.  That said, if I didn’t think that this applied to a large number of vendors, I would have targeted this post at particular vendors.

NOW we can get started.

Why Disruption Now?

There are several trains of thought out there that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to the Internet age because we are in a constant state of disruption.  This an important observation, so let me address this first.

The initial disruption was the Internet.  Since then, everything has mostly been a continuation of that disruption.  Much of the chaos has been sustaining technology for the original disruption.

Everyone agrees that the web impacted the Content Management industry strongly.  Stellant (now Oracle), Interwoven (now part of Open Text), and Vignette (now consumed by Autonomy)all came from the WCM space.  When you look at it though, it was just a new content problem.  Sustaining innovative technologies.  Unique needs, but no more so than Records Management, Imaging, or Digital Asset Management.

So what is qualifying as disruptive to Content Management these days?  Content Management itself has been disrupting the offsite paper record storage and microfiche industry, but what is actually disrupting the disruptor?  The Internet and the browser didn’t do it directly, but it became a sustaining technology for ECM.  The browser interfaces enhanced adoption over time for the existing vendors.  Definitely not disruptive.

Well, Content Management is being disrupted from a couple of directions:

• SharePoint: It isn’t SharePoint, but what it represents, basic Content Management for the masses.  It may not be the most functional, or scale to handle any situation, but it is easy to buy, install, and integrate into the most used productivity application suite, Office.
• The Cloud: Many SaaS Content Management offering cannot currently compete on functionality with the established ECM bigwigs, but that is just a matter of time.  They are established, have found a starting market, and are adding functionality.  As SharePoint demonstrated, they don’t need to match the established solutions to eat into the market share, they just need to hit the minimum requirement level, document sharing.

Open Source isn’t on the list because that is a model for solving problems, but not truly disruptive.   It is a just a different business model and not a sustaining technology.  For many, it boils down to appealing to people’s inner nature and a different pricing structure.  This is a gross over-generalization, but so is this entire post.

The Cloud could be called just a different pricing structure, but it is also a different delivery model. It is disruptive because no matter what the established vendors say, their software has not been architected for that environment, so it is not plug-and-play.

Those are the disruptions.  They are fundamental shifts in how Content Management is delivered.  They are shifts towards Content Management becoming more of a commodity (though we aren’t there yet).

Microsoft’s Attack

Okay, you can argue that they are disruptive at all or that they will just become a “sustaining technology” down the road.  If the latter is the case, most of the established vendors will survive. (Acquisitions and consolidation aside, we are talking about the actual software offerings).

When SharePoint arrived in the 2003 timeframe, it was nice, quaint, and not nearly functional enough to really have a significant impact on the Content Management market.  It wasn’t until the advent of the 2007 edition that it became an issue.

The initial response was pretty consistent, “Yeah, it does that, but it will fall apart under any real work.”  Well, the market didn’t care.  A large number of people didn’t, and still don’t, need the complicated solutions offered by the established vendors.

Over time, as SharePoint started to erode sales, the vendor strategy shifted to enhancing SharePoint.  This was fine and it started to drive sales, but SharePoint hasn’t stopped evolving.  In 2010 is has the ability to store content outside of the database, manages data better, scales better, and has better Records Management.  The need for SharePoint additional Content Management style capabilities is shifting towards archiving and governance.

When you look at this even more closely, it isn’t that SharePoint is a disruptive technology as much as it is a disruptive new vendor in the existing landscape.  So while SharePoint is very disruptive in its nature, it isn’t a “disruptive technology” as discussed by Christensen.

Still, ignore at your own risk.

The All-Encompassing Fog of the Cloud

Meanwhile, in the bushes, the cloud-based SaaS offering are lurking, ready to pounce.  They have realized a few important things:

• Not only do many people not need all of the functionality provided by the Content Management vendors, they don’t want to manage the data center either.
• Users are getting used to a rapid pace of innovation from their increased exposure to the ever-evolving Internet.  The three year “big release” has become a detriment  from an user expectation perspective, not to mention the nightmare for the IT and Change Management personnel.  Lots of incremental changes are easier to deal with than huge massive changes.
• The ability to share content outside of an organization is becoming more important, and not easier.  If I still have to email that 10 MB presentation to business partners (copying my colleagues), that really cuts into some of the important selling points of ECM.

The SaaS vendors don’t have all the answers, yet.  They are still working on security and many of the CYA features that your average CIO wants.  The thing is, those requirements are well defined, so it is just a matter of addressing them.  Research is only needed to prioritize, not define.

When those gaps are addressed by the SaaS solutions, who will win the market?  Those that are ready from day one, or those that try and create/market their solution after the questions are answered?  There is more to being a solid cloud offering than fancy marketing and a feature list.  The processes and the business value that they support is different than from a traditional software vendor.  Running a successful, secure, reliable, scalable online service is not the same as writing a COTS software package.

The Reaction

Some of the established vendors may tell you that their clients aren’t asking for the Cloud at this time.  They are asking for better business solutions, like Case Management.  Existing clients are asking for Case Management.  I’ve heard it.  The thing is that people that I talk to who are looking for new Content Management solutions are seriously considering cloud-based solutions.

How consistently are they asking? Well, in 2009 I was helping a large, 50K+ user, organization look at vendors, and they invited a SaaS provider to present their solution.  I knew going in that the vendors didn’t meet all the critical requirements, and I even told the client as much.  Didn’t matter.  They want to move in that direction as part of an overall strategy, so they were going to talk to the vendor about what the vendor offered and tell that vendor what was lacking for them to make a purchase.

Did the lack of a cloud-based solution get mentioned to the other Content Management vendors?  No.  The closest was when someone asked about external hosting and they mentioned that they had partners that can offer that service.  A savvy market research person would be able to see that question that as a potential need for cloud-based solutions, but a sales person, even if they are smart, don’t have the same channels.

But I digress and this post is already pretty long.

So the Content Management vendors, looking for double-digit growth, are pushing Case Management so they can land the multi-million dollar deals required for that growth.  Smaller cloud-based vendors don’t need to close deals of that magnitude to have double-digit growth in a quarter, much less a year.  The ECM vendors are chasing the large deals while the smaller deals get left to SaaS and SharePoint.

Christensen talks about this as companies moving up-market while the new vendors, based upon the disruptive technologies, tackle the lower market.  As the the firms innovate faster than the needs of the average customer, they can move up-market and take revenue from the established vendors.

So right now, SaaS vendors are doing this in the Content Management space.  They aren’t able to compete on functionality yet, but they are adding it faster than the market is demanding new features.  It is only a matter of time before they hit the minimum level needed for them to be a player.

There is Not Plenty of Time

As I discussed in the review, there are a ton of examples focused on the hard drive industry.  I think a more relevant example is the excavator industry.

In the first half of the 20th century, cable-actuated excavators ruled the construction world.  Each new model could scoop more thanks to larger buckets and deposit it further away.  The market drivers were bucket size and reach.

Then came the hydraulic excavators.  Made by new companies, these had smaller buckets and a smaller reach.  They couldn’t compete against the established cable-actuated vendors, but they worked well for people needing to dig precise trenches and other smaller tasks.

Over time, years and years, the bucket size and reach grew to the point that the larger construction project started to buy them.  While they could not in any way out-perform the cable-actuated excavators, they were more reliable, cost less per unit (though not less per cubic ft. bucket size), and were generally cheaper to operate.

By the end of the transition, which took decades, of the over 40 cable-actuated excavator vendors, only FOUR successfully transitioned to survive in the new market.  That is less than 10%.  Let me repeat a key fact here…

DECADES!!!

The technology was there and it was obvious.  Many established vendors entered the market once it was a viable solution for their clients, but by then it was too late.

Why didn’t they enter sooner?  Like many victims of disruptive technology, the margins were less on the new technology, which led to different processes within the makers of the disruptive tech.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s assume that I have historically made a 20% margin on my products.  I get two proposals.  One is for an innovative enhancement on an existing product that will increase sales 10-20% at the current margin.  The other is for a newly engineered solution that will increase sales around 5% at a 10% margin.  With finite resources hich do I approve?

It doesn’t matter if in 5-10 years that the second option will over-take the market, stockholders want results this year, and CEOs want their job next year.  The new markets for the disruptive tech are always fuzzy and ill defined.

This is why startups are the “source” of truly disruptive technology.  They can start with new business structures, values, and processes, that can take advantage of the different margins.  They also get more excited about that $50K deal.

Do you think EMC, Oracle, IBM, or Open Text get exited about $50K deals?

Where Does that Leave Implementers?

In reality, waiting for another post.  Let’s just say life can be good and move on to the wrap-up…

Is Pie Nuts?

While an in-depth study would be required to answer that question, not to mention my forced participation, I’m really talking about selling out to the concept.

Did I read the book, proclaim it as genius, and then seek to fit the world into the model proposed by Christensen?  Not at all.

I’ve been seeing this for a while.  Then this past Spring, I was talking about my observations about what I was seeing in the industry with some others and I was asked if I had read a couple of books.  One was Christensen’s book.  A month later, we were talking again and the book came up a second time, so I went and bought it to read.

What the book did was make me realize that what was happening was actually normal.  This happens in lots of different industries.  It is just harder to determine what qualifies as a disruptive technology in the IT field.  As computers disrupted microfiche in Content Management, the Internet is giving birth to the cloud, which is beginning to disrupt traditional data-center-based enterprise apps, like Content Management.

The best thing is that I realized that this isn’t happening because there are bad executives or managers at the established Content Management vendors, but because of the opposite.  Back to that hypothetical investment question.  What good manager would pick the investment that will increase sales by double digits?

In many ways, the established vendors are trapped by their own success.  There are ways out, but there is no set formula, I may not have the right answers, and I’ve rambled enough for now.  More later.

Flame on….

Clayton M. Christensen

Before I went to EMC World and marveled at how the management was missing the boat on the cloud and was diving wholesale into Case Management, I was told that I had to read this book.  After EMC World, I broke down, purchased it, and then fought to find time for it.  The book is over a decade old, so what was the rush? Let me tell you, I am glad I found the time.

I was told before I read the book that it was going to make me a little sad and despair for the future of Documentum.  It did in a way, but it also helped explain everything that was happening.  It actually increased my opinion of some people at EMC.  I am going to talk about the specifics to EMC, and other legacy Content Management vendors, in a subsequent post.  For now, let’s dive into the book itself.

Pass the Disk Drive

Christensen starts by explaining the basic problem.  Well managed companies have no problem keeping up with sustaining technologies in the market.  Need better performance?  We can innovate that for you.  The issue is around disruptive technologies.

He observed that no matter how good management was, there was an inherent inability for companies to respond for disruptive technologies.  In fact, it was because they were good managers that they were unable to respond effectively to the disruptive technologies.

Disruptive technology, by there very nature, do not fit in existing markets.  They start small and do not provide the capabilities required by existing customers or the profit-margins required by companies.  They don’t lead to double digit growth so they don’t get picked for investment.

When evaluating sustaining technologies these market and profit concerns are dead on, but they lead to very smart companies missing the boat on the technologies that will one day supplant them as leaders.

This point is driven home, ad nauseum, by Christensen using the disk drive industry.  I now know more about that industry than I ever wanted.  I also know that this is a problem that can impact any company, and will likely impact all companies.  Starting from a disruptive technology past does not immunize you from the risks.

To be sure, more examples from other industries are used as well.  It doesn’t matter if the innovation is fast (disk drives) or slow (excavators), disruptive technology has a way of wiping the previous generation off of the playing board.

One reason is quite simple.  Products add more functionality and capability with each new version.  Typically this occurs faster than change in the minimum consumer requirements.  This change does lead to more customers that need more, but adds capabilities that go unused by most of the market.  While leaders are making products better, the disruptive technology appears and offers lesser functionality, but in a more convenient and reliable package.  This new product finds a new market, which allows the the product to evolve and gain functionality until it hits the minimum requirements of the mainstream market.

When this happens, it is too late for the existing leaders.  If they haven’t successfully attacked an upper market, the attack from below may wipe them out completely.  Regardless, they will lose their mainstream market lead.

I’m over-simplifying quite a bit and leaving out details, but that is why there is a book.

Do We Just Quit Now?

So the obvious question is, What can be done? Well, that depends on the nature of the disruptive technology.  How does it fit in the organizations values and processes?  How accepting will the value network (suppliers and distribution network) be to the change?  There are a lot of questions to be answered before deciding on the appropriate action.

The simple, generic solution seems to be to create a spin-off or to acquire a company to run as a subsidiary, thought this approach is not always the answer.  With a little Enterprise 2.0 mythos, Christensen says that the resulting organization needs to be able to fail, and in fact, it will fail along the way.  The key is to not fail so big so there are enough resources remaining to take the lessons learned and make course corrections.

The book is relatively light on recommendations and spends more time talking about the perils and less upon the remedies.  I guess that is why he wrote more books later.  That said, if you can’t identify a problem, the solution will do you no good.

Who Needs to Read This?

Simple.  If you run (i.e. in management) an established product company, physical or software in nature, you need to read this.  If you are in Marketing in one of those companies, you need to read it.  If you are in Sales, it wouldn’t hurt.

If you are running a start-up, I wouldn’t worry too much at this time.  Just keep in mind that if you are successful, then it will apply to you one day unless you take a buyout before it matters.

If you are in a leadership position at a legacy Content Management company, and you haven’t read this book already, go buy it from your local bookstore or download a copy Now!  Don’t wait for shipping, it is too important.

In my next post, I’ll tie this more directly into the Content Management industry, with a focus on EMC because I am most familiar with them.  Keep in mind, every first-generation Content Management company is in the same situation.

Laurence, I have been working on Documentum since version 2. I am now working on DCM 6.5 sp3. I find that the quality of the product is going down every release. What do you think?

The reason that I am bringing it up publically is because I don’t have a clear-cut answer.  As with products from most vendors, some releases are better than others.  I also only have direct experience with Documentum since the 4i release at the end of ’99.  To top it off, I haven’t used every component, much less every component of every release.

Of course, I have some concerns.  I saw Rick Devenuti speak at EMC World and he seemed preoccupied with addressing quality issues.  Whether these are long-standing or new is something we can discuss at the end, where I have a couple more thoughts.

In between, I am going to share some of my “quality” stories here, both good and bad.  I’m hoping that Johnny, Scott, Lee, and Robin all chime into the conversation.  Please do so yourself.

Remember, there is no “right” answer.  We are merely looking for experiences.

Life with 4i

I entered the Documentum world less than a month after the release of Documentum 4i.  The “i” should tell you all you need to know about the timing of the release.  I am hard pressed to describe the highlights of the release, but there are a few a gleaned while working with my colleagues who were old hands at EDMS98.

• Workflow: It was new in 4i, replacing the old router method.  It had some issues with larger, more complex, workflows, but it was also the 1.0 version of a major feature.  Documentum worked hard to get it fixed, but I remember old Bob cussing at the machine when it would blow-up.
• RightSite: Was better than EDMS98, but man did it have limits.  This wasn’t a quality thing though, just a limit to the technology and design.  All web interfaces were pretty primitive back then.
• Goodbye WorkSpace: That desktop client was an old standby.  The install was kept around by Documentum techies for years and used until the old DMCL library was removed.  That shows a lot of quality in WorkSpace and in the backward compatibility of the DMCL over the years.

That is my baseline.  Interesting days.  The Workflow issues made me worry about quality, but back then I was more concerned with learning the complexity than dealing with the quality.

Carving a Path to 5.3

There were some basic iterations of 4, but with the 5.x product, there were some issues.  I didn’t deal with a lot of them as I waited until 5.2.5 to put it into a real production environment, but forget 5.1 and 5.2.  There were a lot of general issues.

There was a lot going on in this release.  Everyone’s favorite was the new Web Development Kit (WDK) and the growing usage of the DFC.  I think the Java Method Server may have been new in the 5.x release, but that is a little fuzzy.  If anyone knows for sure, please share.

5.2.5 was okay, but 5.3 was a total nightmare.  Forget the core product, the issue was the new Index Server.  FAST was “fast”, except in getting it to work correctly.  There was a large difference in the wilds of the data center from the clean world of the Documentum test-beds.  It took several service packs to get it right.  I think SP3 was the SP where you actually had to blow away your index and start over.  The lessons learned from this debacle have led to a much more conservative course for releasing the new Enterprise Search Server.  The slow pace to release is frustrating, but so was search blowing-up in production.

By 5.3 SP4/5, life settled down.  Since then I don’t think I’ve upgraded because I had to upgrade, only because I wanted to go ahead and do it.

Which brings us to the world of 6+…

Attack of the D-Versions

Starting with a large number of presentations in 2007 talking about D6, every version has been referred to as Dx.x.  I think some people in the marketing department wish they hadn’t let that one hit the slides at EMC World 2007.

Aside from that, I’ve been following a simple approach, only upgrade to SP1 or higher of any version.  Since I’ve done that, I’ve only had two real problems.

• LDAP Synch: To be fair, this is suffering from old age.  They have spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but I keep having to find all sorts of new ways to work around it.  It works great for smaller user populations, but when you start to cruise past the 5,000 mark, things start to become fun.
• Federations: This isn’t a loss in quality. This stems directly from the fact that the Federation process hasn’t changed in 10+ years.

Now, I know that there have been problems here and there.  I know the Branch Office Caching Server had some issues when it first came out.  I also know that most of the products that I see having issues are usually shiny new “1.0″ products.  The core Content Server has been doing fine, as have many other products that are just “evolving”.  While it is a shame that you don’t want generally want to install the first release of a new product, that has actually been consistent for years.  I also use the same approach with Microsoft and other major vendors as well.

There is a lot to test, and a lot of permutations in the real world.  There will always be things that aren’t found in testing because you and I will always be throwing these products into unclean, old, cluttered repositories that EMC just doesn’t have lying around.

So the real question is two parts:

1. Have you seen lots of issues in existing products that seem to be creeping up in each release?
2. With new products/major features, have they been more problematic or do they have the same (or less) issues than previously released products.

Other food for thought…was Rick harping on fixing new quality or old quality issues?  I suspect old.  Is the “focus” on quality just typical marketing, realization that they need to fix it, or something they are going to fix instead of innovating further?

Let’s figure this out…

1. Publish Documentum Tips on the EMC Developer Network: I started a blog there, Pie on Content Management, which I have infrequently used.  I am going to keep my tips there so that they are searchable by the community by the average user.
2. Link to Remote Tips: As I create these new tips, I will continue to add links to them from my Tips page.  If I create other Tips posts in other locations, I will add those as well.
3. Notification: If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can still track the tips.  I will try and keep the alert on this page updated with any recent remotely posted tips.

I have just posted my first tip on the EDN titled Tips: Installing Documentum 6.6 on SQL Server 2008 and 64-bit.  I recently performed this feat and wanted to share some specific things that I learned.

Enjoy.

Meanwhile, other, newer CMS vendors are working to build solutions in the cloud.  What they lack in functionality/scalability, they make up for in drive, vision, and price.  They also have a plan to match, and surpass in some cases, the capabilities of SharePoint and the big boys.

These two new challengers to the CMS throne are making basic Content Management available to the masses.  The traditional vendors don’t see profit in the commodity game.  We’ll explain why this is a problem for them in a bit…

Scaling Beyond Your Data Center

Right now, I work on a project that has well over 50 Terabytes of content.  It is growing at a fair clip, 2TB/month, and the rate of increase is scheduled to increase by 50% in the next six months with further increases down the road.  Another little requirement, every action that the 10,000+ users perform in the system, including searches, has to be tracked and reportable for a period of seven years.

Did I mention that they want to double the users and then open the system up to other organizations for access?  Have I mentioned that the current growth is mostly just trying to keep up with new content and that there is a backlog that scales well beyond the current planned capacity?

SharePoint can’t handle this system.  To be fair, for a traditional vendor, this isn’t necessarily an easy system to design.  Every aspect needs to be well architected.  If there is a weak link, the system will have issues.  Improve one link and then the attention switches to a new one.

Here is the thing.  You can architect it well, balance the load, buy all the right devices, and design a streamlined content model, but in the end, you are still at the mercy of a data center.  It isn’t just people (who may or may not be capable), is it space and power.  Lots of storage takes physical space, requires cooling, and consumes power.

Now take that setup and setup a disaster recovery site.  Include a reliable backup plan and be sure that everything meets the High Availability standards.  Before you know it, you are spending a lot of money just to keep things going, much less adding new capabilities.

Ready for the kicker?  This is just one of the many systems that are needed to manage electronic content for this single organization.  We are creating more everyday and less of it is going to be stored as paper.  The scalability question needs to answered without Ed Bueche stepping-in to fine-tune everything.

This is just one “small” piece of the pie.  It is estimated that in 10 years, there will be over 30ZB of content out there in the big bad world.  To put a zettabyte into perspective, the difference between a terabyte and a zettabyte is the same as the difference between a kilobyte and a terabyte.  It is over 1,000,000,000 times the size.

Where Do You Put It?

That is a lot of content.  That is a lot of processing and metadata.  Now let me ask you this question, what is the core purpose of your organization?  Is it to run a data center?  It may need to be at the current rate of growth.  Get ready to learn about deduplification, IOPS, backup strategies, and the fine are of disaster planning (Tip: If you have a backup diesel generator, make sure you have back-up roads for the diesel truck to get to your data center to keep the fuel tank topped off.)

If you do have a data center, you have likely hired someone to run it for you.  My experience has been mixed on this front and I find you still do a lot of the planning work.  Even so, this approach has been used for a couple of decades, but the answer moving forward seems to be the cloud.

Now, before you accuse me of jumping on the cloud bandwagon, think back to the numbers above.  Remember that with all the hype, the cloud is merely the act of turning over your Software, Platform, or Infrastructure to a really big data center provider to share resources with other organizations and thus share the costs.  That is an extreme over-simplification, but when you think on it, it is just the next-generation of outsourced data centers.

Now let me add this.  I’ve been managing content systems for a long time.  They have been growing in size and complexity.  This isn’t just because I’ve moved up the ranks.  It is because the average system tackled by the ECM vendors seems to be getting larger.  In that process, I’ve had to be more and more involved in the details in the data center.  This isn’t  a good thing.

Look, I come from a software/database background.  I know content. I know how people use it. I know how to convince people that Content Management is a good thing.  I know how to design a content model and application optimized for performance. I can even convince a business owner that the latest system crash was not my fault and that it will actually be good for the program.

Okay, maybe not that last one, which would be pretty cool, but I am not a data center guy. My understanding of storage is high level.  That is all it should be in my position as a content guy.  The odds are that if you are reading this, you shouldn’t have to worry about it either.  We are trying to solve problems that involve content, be it collaboration or case management.

Moving the software/platform/infrastructure to the cloud takes us out of that business and throws me back into solving business problems and writing overly long blog posts.  We can now stop worrying about scale and just worry about defining scope and matching it to costs.  No thoughts about implementing the needed scale or expanding capacity.  More importantly, no lost hardware costs when I decide that I don’t need capacity as much as I first thought.

The systems of the future will be in the cloud because that is the future of the data center.

Show Me the Money!

Let’s think about this issue.  If content is going to be in the cloud, it will still need to be managed.  It will still need full-text search that is link, Google approach, independent.  I will still have records to be retained and purged.  I will still want Rights Management, Digital Asset Management, workflow, APIs, and standards compliance (token CMIS reference). I’m going to need a great collaborative interface so users have a place to work together.

That, plus all that storage, is going to cost money.  If you have only a few customers, you will lose money.  If you can scale and have the proper processes, you can scale to support thousands of organizations.  They will pay money to not only solve their data center issues, but the Content Management component as well.

How much money do you think a five nine’s (99.999% uptime) CMS system will cost for 100,000 users who are randomly accessing the records of millions of Federal constituents?  How about ALL the content for a global bank, providing access to all of their clients and employees?

That is a lot of money.  Even if you look at 20-25% of the current CMS expenditures from a TCO perspective, that is a lot of money.  Managing zettabytes of content will not be cheap and there will be some companies that will make a killing providing that service.

Once everyone starts moving to the cloud, how many case management solutions will be run on internal systems?  There won’t be a reason to do it as cloud-based Content Management will be cheap for the small to mid-range solutions.  Why? Because they won’t add that much overhead to the cloud provider, so they can offer a good deal.  Those solutions will be almost pure margin for them.

You want money??? It will be everywhere.  If you want to be a leader in 5-1010 years, you need to be getting there quickly to be a thought leader and start building the references.  When the world is comfortable with cloud security, those that will lead will need to be waiting for them with fully functional solutions.  As with any market, the companies that get there early have the advantage.

Personally, I can’t wait.  Getting to design/implement solutions that hit against that cloud-based CMS will be wonderful.  Why?  Because I’ll be back to spending more of my time doing what I was doing in the 90s when I got into this crazy business….Solving business problems.

Keep in mind that I’m not an analyst or expert and I don’t play one on TV.  I can write a mean Haiku though.

Adobe Buys Day

If you don’t follow the CMS open source world and/or the CMS industry at large, this announcement may leave you scratching your head wondering “So what?”  Day Software has been one of the leading open source companies in the Content Management world.  They are headquartered in Europe and have been working to build a footprint here in the states.

Meanwhile, Adobe is, well, Adobe.  They are critical players in the publishing industry.  They’ve had a really neat little product called LiveCycle for a few years that you could get bundled with Alfresco or integrate into your favorite little ECM platform.

If you want a great collection of viewpoints, head over to CMS Wire.  Irina wrote a great summation of the first day of activity.  Read that before proceeding any further.

I see the fit.  I see the synergy.  I see Adobe picking up a profitable, growing, company that can fit nicely into their portfolio.  I see Day gaining broader access to the U.S. market and some substantial financial backing which will calm potential large customers.

What I don’t see is overwhelming success.

I’m not a fortune teller.  I do know this…Adobe sales people will have no idea how to sell Day.  They sell product.  They try and sell LiveCycle, and they don’t do as well as they should given the quality of the product.  Selling Content Management is even harder.  The EMC core guys have been trying to get a handle on selling Documentum to their high-spending storage customers and haven’t been succeeding.  Adobe at least starts closer, but there is no slam dunk.

Then there is all the cool stuff that will be available to users of Day’s CQ5. I’ll bet right now that there will be a license cost.  I bet they could buy it now.  I’m not saying there won’t be a better integration or that it won’t cost less, but it won’t be a magic panacea.

Meanwhile, there is one important thing to note.  Day is the first of what I call the “2nd Generation” CMS vendors to really get bought by a larger company.  The 2nd gens are maturing and becoming attractive.  I expect that more will start getting bought by people that have been waiting for that maturity so that they can get one that they want, and not whatever is left.  It won’t be quick, but the wheels are going to be turning.

Autonomy to Buy Open Text?

This is a RUMOR that has been gaining traction.  It is an interesting one though for a few reasons, not the least of it would be the reversal of roles for Open Text.  If I was a competitor of either company, there are two things I would want to happen.  I would want to perpetuate the rumor because it cause a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).  Second, I would want it to happen.

For years Open Text has been fighting the reputation as the acquirer of all things Content Management.  Recently, Autonomy has been making a few acquisitions that were overlapping in nature as well, though not to the degree of redundancy of Open Text.

If this took place, you would have so many CMS solutions under one company that it would be almost ridiculous.  Vignette, Interwoven, iManage, LiveLink, and eDocs to name just a few.  If they came in and their first demo didn’t click, they could just show a different product until you liked one.

The only reason I can see for this deal is to build an O&M cash cow.  That’s it.  Sad though it would be, I would have to laugh at anyone that tried to make a serious argument that the resulting company was one of the leaders in the industry.

This would also create an official place where the Content Management systems of today can go and die their slow death.  It would also officially mark the passing of a significant number of the 1st Generation CMS vendors.  The ECM generation is trying to redefine themselves under pricing pressure from SharePoint, Open Source, and cloud-based solutions.  While more capable, not everyone needs all of those features.  They also cannot master the calculus required to determine the cost, competitive or not.

This also has begun to beg the question, which of the 1st generation vendors is going to evolve enough to become the “godfather” to the 2nd generation, or will they just slowly be wiped from the face of technology over the next decade?

Haiku

I hinted at a Haiku, so here we go….

Collecting money,

Not growing organically.

Oooo, shiny penny.

This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area.  I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.

I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people.  For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion.  We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.

SP2010 Overview and Upgrade Planning

There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation.  I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.

• Competition: There was a discussion on competition.  If you stick to the public website , there is a wide selection in the WCM/CMS market.  If you look at the Intranet usage, you are really looking at some of the newer Enterprise 2.0 players that offer a broader set of capabilities.  The legacy competition, eRoom and Lotus Notes, each have their own issues in regards to they’re being long-term players.
• Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of SharePoint.  SharePoint is not designed for WCM.  It has a lot of requirements that drive other license revenue for Microsoft.  It has complexities and requires a Microsoft platform and .NET expertise.  That said, if you have SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, you are likely going to be on SP2010 in the near future.
• Future of SharePoint: We had a fun discussion on this.  It is my opinion that this version of SharePoint will mark the peak of SharePoint’s popularity.  The next version will likely ride on the coat tails of SP2010.  After that, I believe SharePoint will fall into the legacy category.  It is simply too big to innovate enough to maintain a lead over a long period of time.  Someone new is likely to come in and supplant them.  Of course, even with this estimate, that is some time away.
• SharePoint for WCM, Really?: Yes really.  While I have stated in the past that maybe SharePoint is not ideal for WCM, it doesn’t change the fact that people still use it for that purpose (at least the 2007 version).  They will likely continue to do so in the future as SP2010 is better suited to WCM than MOSS 2007.  The question you want to ask if someone proposes SP2010 for your website it this: What are you using for your website? Oh, and get references. Plural.

There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes.  Feel free to drop questions.

References

These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation.  I am providing them here for easy reference.

• Microsoft Upgrade Resource Center
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Foundation 2010
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Server 2010
• Websites hosted on SharePoint

Good luck.

Let’s face it, if an architect leaves, it is hard to replace that skill and knowledge.  Regardless, attempts are made to try and minimize the change.  Obviously there is not a lot transition when someone is fired versus their resigning, but that is hopefully a case of addition by subtraction.

Every now and then, you come across an example that reminds you of the importance of the social skills you learned in kindergarten.  Before we get into that though, let’s look at the reality of our industry.

The Shrinking CMS World

I’ve been in the Content Management industry for a while.  I’ve worked with, and met, a lot of people.  Let me throw you a couple of examples of how small this world really is:

• I worked in professional services for PC DOCS, later Hummingbird a long time ago.  While at that job, I met, and shared a boss with, Cheryl McKinnon.  Years later, I ran into her on Twitter and talked to her about what Open Text was doing with collaboration because it was quite interesting.  Last year she took a job as the CMO of Nuxeo where we have interacted when working on the AIIM CMIS demo.
• I interviewed someone a year ago who seemed familiar.  I went home that night, looked through my stack of old business cards, and found his card from 4-5 years ago that I had gotten at some conference.  On his first day on the job, I handed him his card.  We recently went for drinks with Scott Liewehr of CM Pros when he was in town on business.  I wanted to meet Scott in person as I am the new CM Pros Standards Chair.  Turns out the two of them already knew each other from having worked together in the past!

Those are examples that are more national in nature.  There are many more that are purely local.  When you look at the senior Documentum people in the DC area, we are spread out between multiple companies.  We can trace our roots and find common crossed paths everywhere.  Johnny Gee an I used to work together.  Scott Roth was with a company that almost bought my then employer; I later almost joined his company individually.

If you are an experienced Documentum person with more than 2-3 degrees of separation from me in DC, the odds are that you are either new to the area or have been sitting on the same contract for a very LONG time.

Same goes for Johnny, Scott, Fabian, and many more that I could name.

The Side Effects

So the thing is, since we know each other well, we talk.  We have drinks.  When we come across a new local resume, we can usually identify people that may have worked on the same project.  We call and trade information on how good the person may have been at that time.

People change over time.  When I make that call, I’m looking for a baseline.  If someone says that this person was great with Java, I can be pretty sure that they are rusty at worst.  If they say that their client skills were weak, I know to focus on that in the interview to see if that has changed.

Usually people do get better, so make sure to take what I hear as a baseline.  I also qualify what I say about others in the same way.  Anyone can change.

Then there are the high-risk examples.  There are three in my book right now.  You will not get names, so don’t ask.  I am using fake names and casting them all as male in the descriptions to make it harder to identify them.  I worked with all three, though they were not part of my company.  They also, to my knowledge, have never worked for EMC or any of the more well known system integrators.

The Saboteur…

The first, Arnold, deliberately sabotaged a project at a very sensitive stage.  Luckily Arnold wasn’t thorough enough and the rest of the project team had enough experience/knowledge between us to fix the system within a few days.  No real impact was noticed by the client, but it was some of my more stressful workdays ever.

Arnold’s resume shows up every 8 months or so and I have been asked about his more than once by others.  I never understood his motives or the cause for his behavior, so he could be just fine to hire.  There may have been, and evidence suggests, some mitigating factors.  It is an unknown risk.  It is just a risk that I choose to never take.

The Dangerous…

The second, Wally, has a great resume.   He looks like a great resource.  This is a complete misread.  Dangerously incompetent is a fair description.  He joined a project of mine as a developer.  He was shifted to be the admin of the system when that didn’t work out.  After the accidental erasure of the full-text index, it was determined that Wally’s job would consist of making sure that all the components were running correctly, compiling reports on the system, and letting people know when he found a problem.  While this didn’t stop all incidents, it minimized them in number and scope.  He eventually left the project with some encouragement.

When his resume later came to my HR departments notice, they asked why I didn’t want to consider him.  I turned to someone who had been on the project, shared Wally’s name, and the reaction was swift, “Oh God No!”  HR moved on to the next candidate.

The Unprofessional…

This third one is the recent addition, and the most unforgivable.  You’ll have to take my word on that fact.  Michael was leaving for a new job.  I was asked to come in and get briefed on the current state of the project so that there would be minimal impact to the client.  I hadn’t been on the project for a while, so I needed to get an update on the status, players, and confirm that I could access all the systems, including the project’s collaborative site.

Michael refused to come into the office to meet with me face-to-face to ease the process, even at the urging of his soon to be ex-bosses.  Michael claimed, over the phone, to not remember how to access the project collaboration system.  I was able to hack into the system and I found something really interesting.  Michael had added content just one week before.

I tried to find out from Michael what EMC resources he had been working with so I could talk to them as well.  I know that they had a close working relationship.  Michael claimed to not remember who their EMC contact was.  When I pressed, because I knew that I was now dealing with a “hostile witness”, I was given a name of one EMC resource.  I contacted both the resource and the account manager.  They quickly identified the real EMC contact.  I made plans to talk with the real resource in the near future to get an update on the joint work.  Let’s face it, Michael wasn’t going to tell me anything.

I cannot figure out the point of this behavior.  I was acting at the request of the program and project managers.  I just wanted to learn what I could so that if needed I could assist on the project.  I did it to help the client and my business partner.  What I got was hostility and resentment from Michael.

While I do not know the reasons for the his departure, I do know that I was in no way involved.  I hadn’t worked on the project for a several months and always thought that Michael brought value to the project.  Michael had room to improve, but so does everyone, including me.

Survey Says

This unprofessional behavior was unwarranted.  Don’t like your boss?  Don’t take it out on the your colleagues.  Your colleagues treat you poorly?  Don’t punish your client.  Client is unbearable?  Don’t leave your colleagues defenseless.

Let’s face it, not everyone is a rock star.  Even those rock stars aren’t good at everything.  The key is to find a persons strengths, let them use those strengths, and give them safe ways to build new strengths.  On a large, long-term project, this is critical to success.

If you are unstable, incapable, or unprofessional, I can’t use you.  If you pit people against each other for your benefit, cannot follow directions, create a crisis to be the hero, or don’t put the needs of the client ahead of personal issues [Edit: This refers to personal issues with team members, not issues in one's personal life. See comments.], then you need to look elsewhere.

Be a professional.  If you live and work in the U.S., you will likely have a 30+ year career.  You will run into the same people over and over again.  People you work with now know people that you will work with in the future.

The only thing that you cannot change quickly is your reputation.  Take care of it.  Nurture it.  Don’t sabotage it.

It is a small world after all.

This is a little like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.  Most of the vendors out there have announced Case Management strategies.  After my comments on EMC’s approach, many have felt that I thought that Content Management vendors should stay out of Case Management.

That is completely wrong.  They need to be involved.  So lets talk about the how…

What the Community Needs

So, what do we, the implementers, need from Content Management vendors.  Two words.  The first word is flexibility.  The second word is where it gets tricky…simplicity.

You didn’t think this would be easy did you?

Why flexibility? Simple, I need to be able to leverage my existing investments and to configure the system to reflect the types of solutions I am building.  As I’ve already discussed, for all their similarities, there is a lot of variety in the Case Management world.  There is no one-size-fits-all.

Here are the problems I face regularly when I tackle Care Management:

• Matching data schemes with legacy data models
• Synchronizing relevant data
• Synchronizing security between systems
• Creating a record of a case, not just the content for that case
• Working directly with external constituents, both people and organizations (not just through email)
• ONE interface that is intuitive
• Not having to redo everything when one product needs to be upgraded

As you can see, there needs to be a lot of poser and flexibility in those Content Management products.  The thing is, a lot of companies have been providing that flexibility for years, many with more than enough power.  The issue has been, and continues to be, simplicity.

This is where it all falls apart.  In my experience, the client rarely knows exactly what they want the first time out.  The first prototypes are usually torn apart in the review session.  That’s fine.  After I learned that this was actually normal for a Case Management system, I stopped getting upset.

One rule is this: If it takes a lot of work to create the first version of a Case Management system, then it usually takes a lot of effort to change the system.  If you change a component system, you usually need to ask for more budget.

Things need to be simpler.  More configuration, less customization.  More standards-based integrations, less vendor specific APIs or interfaces.  Do you know one of the beautiful things about using CMIS in to solve a technical problem?  You don’t have to worry about deprecated calls or changing your code when the CMS changes.  That is a very nice benefit for those of us doing the work (or managing it).

So that leaves the question, what do we want?

When All You Have is a Name…

Let’s face it.  There is no way that I can evaluate, personally, every Case Management offering out there in the CMS market.  I have a day job that frequently spills into the evening.  I have to look at approaches and strategies from each vendor, mix in the existing systems at a client, and createa short-list.

In general, configuration is better than customization.  The ability to customize needs to always be there, but the more that can be done through configuration, the quicker the implementation and any subsequent changes.  Configurations also tend to survive product upgrades which much less pain.

To classify approaches, here are some generic terms.  It is important to note that some companies use a term for marketing purposes that may not reflect what they actually provide.  This can be good or bad.

• Frameworks:  These are nice.  They offer pre-built starting points.  They are very flexible and provide a nice starting point.  They also tend to need more customization versus configuration (though mileage will vary).  This is still much better than starting from scratch.
• Solutions: This tends to be a more complete offering.  Many scenarios can be handled through configuration, though customization is still required for many options.  Often, the difference between a “solution” and a “framework” is just a question of the maturity of the offering.  Solutions take more time for a vendor to develop as they get feedback from clients.
• Product: This is taking it too far usually.  This can become too rigid and not offer enough flexibility.  That said, products aimed at specific types of cases, like correspondence management or insurance claims, can do quite well.  These should be confined to 3rd party integrators and ideally should be based upon a vendor framework or solution.

For those offerings, the key is that they are built upon an Enterprise Content Management platform.  The need to manage the content is the reason that these vendors are in such a good position to capture this market.  It is important that the focus of the company remain Content Management in order to continue to be a viable platform for Case Management and all of the other solutions needed by the community.

After all, not everything is a case.

I thought I would take a moment to share some of my Case Management experiences and why I think that Content Management vendors NEED to be involved in solving the problem.

My Case Management 101

As I’ve discussed previously, well over a decade ago I was the tech lead for a Correspondence Management system for the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force (SAF).  The system was called SCATS (Suspense Control and Tasking System), and in the late 90s, it was the system for managing correspondence  for SAF.

It was pretty simple.  Incoming correspondence was scanned into the system.  The content was then OCRed and indexed.  Based upon the topic, it was assigned to an organization, who then assigned it to a sub-organization, and so forth.  This continued until it reached the Action Officer.

The Action Officer would work the case, potentially asking sibling organizations for input, and craft the response.  Once completed, it would work back up the chain for approvals, and depending on the signature required on the response, would go through a different review cycle before being printed, signed, and delivered.

Over the years, I learned that each piece of correspondence could be modeled as an individual case.  I encountered many other types of “cases” and learned that while the terminology varied greatly, the overall approach to successfully managing cases were the same.

• Capture: All cases are triggered by something.  An email, letter, phone call, or form are examples of common things that can initiate a case.  These triggering actions need to be captured.
• Classify: There is a process by which the case gets to the person or group that will work the case.  For very small organizations, this isn’t so much a process as a quick check against business rules that are either recorded or just known.  There must be enough information collected in order for this to occur.
• Work: This is the gooey, collaborative center where the real work is done.  Research may be done to identify prior, similar cases.  Second opinions may be sought and it is possible that a whole team of people may work on a case.
• Close-Out: Finally, there is the final process where the outcome of the case is reviewed, approved, carried-out, and then stored as a record.

There is a lot of variations in this and there can be quite a bit of complexity.  I’ve seen a process embedded in the Work stage, but in my years of experience, most cases can be boiled down to these four steps.

There are lots of little details for execution though.  The user experience for the case worker needs to be different than the one for those involved in the management of cases.  People don’t also don’t like changing between systems to work on cases.  You have to track lots of data about entities (people, locations, items) that may exist across multiple cases.

These complexities are why the one-size-fits-all approach has failed so effectively over the last fe decades.

Why Content Management?

One thing that is common across a majority of case management scenarios is content.  They pretty much all have content.  This is because you cannot model every conceivable piece of data or identify/control every possible source of data.

When you have an car insurance claim, there are reports and inputs from third parties that don’t all collect the same set of fields.  Your insurance company has several fields that they may need from the police report, but in the end, they still want that report faxed in as a supporting document so they have all of the data.

So, where do we store this content?  In a BPM suite?  Well, most of those do okay with content, but they don’t always do well when it comes time to perform true collaboration.  They also have varying degrees of effectiveness in sharing common content, and data entities, between processes.

How about using a collaboration platform?  That does work will for more collaborative cases that are lighter on the defined processes, but many don’t scale well.  In addition, in order to have the ability to archive a case, you need to have all of the related artifacts in one unit, which usually translates into a workspace/site/room.  The number of these work areas can quickly become a nightmare for case workers.

There are other systems, CRM, that can also be brought to bear, but they all have weaknesses.

This is where Content Management systems come into play.  Most have decent collaboration interfaces, the ability to perform at least basic workflow, and Records Management.  This will usually get you to the 80% mark.  Some have full-fledge BPM capabilities while others have great collaborative workplaces.  Most importantly, they usually support CMIS, allowing content to be accessed by external systems.

What this means is that Content Management can readily be used to support Case Management, and in many ways, makes it easier.  Need a place for the gooey, collaborative “Work” for a case to take place, find a system with good collaborative features.  Have a nice area to work, but need some more advanced BPM or RM capabilities, now you can find a system to leverage.

What to start all over and just tie into existing systems for data?  A Content Management system may make a good starting point.

Obviously there are a lot of issues involved in making all of this work, but that is a topic for my next post…What we need from the Content Management vendors to support Case Management.

I for one agree with the observation. What I feel we are seeing is the flattening of our overall relationship depth.  To explain this, let me talk about the positive impact upon relationships first.

My Social Network Gains

My use of social networks is divided up into two groups, professional and social.  I know that this is not necessarily the norm.  That said, I have seen the tools that I use overall fall into two categories, regardless of focus:

1. Network Mapping: This is LinkedIn (professional) and Facebook (personal).  If I know someone well enough, I link to them.  Essentially, the tie has to already exist. Obviously there is more that can be done with these tools, but we’ll hold off on that.
2. Idea Sharing: This is Twitter and my blog, both professional in nature. I share ideas, both short and long, and over time the audience has grown.  This growth has been through connecting and sharing other ideas.  The connections are to mostly “new” ties.

LinkedIn, by itself, has not significantly grown my network.  It has just helped me keep track of my professional network.  LinkedIn’s capabilities have grown over the years, but my usage has not to a large degree.

As for Twitter/blogging, as of right now, I have about 900 people following me on Twitter and I am following about 200.  I’d guess that there are at least 10-20 people that I have met that I could readily reach out to and have a drink with if I was passing through their town.  A small handful of them might be upset if I didn’t reach out if I was passing through their neck of the woods

This is purely counting people that I wouldn’t otherwise know, not those that I’ve met through real life that I’ve connected to online after meeting in real life.

Overall, a net gain.  Let’s look at Facebook…

Weakening my Strong Ties

On Facebook, I have about 150 friends.  Most of them I knew before I joined Facebook, and a vast majority I met in real life first.  They include family members, my best man, and my closest friends from high school.

The people that I listed are people that I kept in touch with before Facebook.  There are many that I have resumed contact with since joining.  Typically we exchange a few messages and maybe meet-up once.  After establishing a ne “baseline”, we track each other through Facebook, exchange comments, and move on with our lives.

Let’s look at the close friends.  We would regularly call each other, go out of our way to catch-up over drinks, and generally interact as much as our lives and the distance would allow.

Now, we mostly track each other through Facebook.  We feel we know what is going on in each other’s lives.  The urge/need to reach out over the phone isn’t as pressing.  This seems good because I spend so much more time online, so it helps save time.  Aside from maybe commenting on their statuses more than average, I interact with them online as much as most others on Facebook.

My strong relationships seem to be becoming weaker.  My interactions with my close friends are, on average, more superficial than they where before Facebook.

My friendships seem to be moving towards the mean.

Is this Good?

Let’s quickly sum-up:

• Lots of new ties professionally.
• Average strength of new ties, and of previously existing weak ties, is stronger
• Average strength of old, strong ties, is weaker

The answer really depends on your goals.  In my professional life, Social Networking is making things better as I meet more people and gain new opportunities.  The entire Enterprise 2.0 conference is a direct result of my use of Social Networking tools.  My social activities were also entirely the result of my Social Networking. On the whole good things.

That said, there is nothing like talking to good friends all night about anything and everything.  My professional life exists to support my personal life, so the weakening of my personal ties is actually a concern.

Then there is Dunbar’s Number.  Simply put, this is the number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain.  The number is 150.  So, with more professional relationships, personal ones will invariably be pushed aside.  As bad as it sounds, this is probably a wash given that it is relationship 151 that will be dropped.  If that particular relationship was more important to me, it wouldn’t be the one that gets neglected.

Let’s be fair, there is nothing stopping me from calling people like I used to do.  on the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from calling either. It happens much less on both sides, so it isn’t just me.

Will I give up Facebook? No, it still serves a purpose that was not being met before. I am going to make a more concerted effort to connect the old fashion way with my close friends.

So excuse me while I go call my best man.

For quite some time now, there has been a running joke on Twitter when people changed jobs, leaving/entering consulting, that they were joining the Dark Side.  When Jon Marks (@McBoof) left his old consulting gig job to work for a large company to lead their internal efforts, it was joked that he was joining the “Dark Side”.  I have decided that it is not the case.  Jon joined the forces of good.

Defining the Sides

Their are three basic roles in the content industry, the vendors, the clients, and the “neutral” consultants.  Let’s start with the vendors.

The vendors, like all companies, have one primary goal, to make money.  They may claim other goals, but those other goals merely influenced HOW they choose to make money.  This isn’t a bad goal, after all, money lets us do fun things with friends and family.

For IT vendors to make this money, they have to compete for the finite set of funds out there.  Methods vary, but the goal is to beat the competitors and collect money from clients.  Success of their clients is only important in that it allows them to leverage that success to make more money from new clients.

There is nothing wrong with this, but it is critical to understanding the motive behind everything a vendor does in the industry.  This purely selfish behavior in the relationship makes THEM the Dark Side.

Opposed to the vendors are the clients/customers.  They want to solve the problems in order to gain an advantage over their competition.  While they also act from selfish interests, in this relationship, they are the ones trying to solve problems and make everyone better off than they were before.  They are trying to judge the promises from different vendors.  If their project succeeds, both sides gain, but if it fails, only the vendor stands to gain anything.

In the middle are the “neutral” consultants.  That is me.  The degree of neutrality varies.  Some don’t hide it well, while others appear to be neutral.  The thing is, nobody is neutral.  It is like water in nature.  There are degrees of cleanliness.  You have clean water with a few minerals all the way to the “water” in the Gulf.  The better consultants may strive to be natural spring water, but it is hard to leave behind all the baggage that you accumulate.

The consultants are really only after increasing their personal power.  They use both the vendors and the clients to increase their influence.  Conflicts between the two is an opportunity to increase power and show how indispensible and smart they are.  We are like a Senate, always working to be the top dog, taking advantage of issues, blaming everyone but ourselves for problems, and always pontificating on how our ideas are the way of the future.

Shades of Gray

There are no absolutes here.  As stated, some consultants have definite leanings.  You can usually see those leanings from their job history.  Do they jump to clients or vendors between consulting jobs?

Consultants working for vendors sometimes try and be the good guys, but their existence is defined by their ability to increase the product revenue.  Their success leads to support renewals, references, additional product sales, and the denial of that client to another vendor.  Regardless of their motives, they are just tools of the Dark Side.

Clients run the spectrum.  Some are very good.  Others can be manipulative.  That doesn’t mean that they are bad, they just realize that the vendor is on the other side and that they can’t just sit there and take it.

I’ve already talked about the spectrum for consultants, so I won’t repeat it here.

There are those on all sides that try to “partner” with the other side.  Let’s face it, that is a great strategy.  As Sun Tzu said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

And lets remember one thing, Good can go to Dark, Darkness can be redeemed, and sometimes they hide in the Senate to manipulate things for their benefit down the road when their true nature is revealed.

Needed Balance

These roles are needed.  They maintain a needed balance in the industry.  When the clients have full control, vendor innovation cannot take place and clients cannot learn lessons that others have learned or are learning.

When vendors have control, clients become unhappy, they waste fund, and eventually stop buying.  This leads to stagnation.  Clients have good ideas and unique situations.  If vendors ignore them, they are signing their own death warrants.

As for consultants, if they have too much power, clients are trying to do things that their companies, or the vendors, may not be able to execute.  Engagements last too long and analysis paralysis sets into the projects.

Conflict stimulates change.  By not blindly following a vendor and always looking for solutions to solve their problems, clients force the vendors to evolve and provide new and better solutions.  Vendors always are themselves are always trying to look enticing to the clients. The proverbial Devil in Disguise.

So now that I have classified myself as a bickering senator, how do I feel?  I like to say that I am fighting for my clients, and some of my posts support that statement.  When you look at my work history, I’ve been a consultant.

There was one job where I worked for a vendor as a consultant.  It was only a year, but it is there on my resume. I did interview with a vendor company afterwards, so I can’t say I “learned my lesson”.  So maybe I have leanings towards the Dark Side.

Can we change this?  Do we want to change it?  I’m thinking No on both counts. We can, and should, make things more civil, but the underlying conflict of interest will remain.

The question is, where do you want play?

• Don’t just buy software, it needs to connect to other systems and possibly replace an existing system.
• 93% of organizations have reported having issues collaborating (114 people), why? Real work is messy.
• The Info-Juggling Knowledge Worker: Diagram showing all the different systems, and sources of content/information, in an organization.  Lots of places for people to get information, and none was integrated.
  • Adding more tools, even E2.0 tools, will not make the problems go away, especially if it doesn’t further integrate those systems
• Employees are the GLUE and manual workflow to connect all of the systems, aside from rate “corporate-wide” initiatives that integrate capabilities. If Down-sized, the workflow is gone
• IBM Global CIO Study
  • High Growth CIOs actively use collaboration and partnering tech with IT organization 60% more than low-growth CIOs
  • High-growth CIOs spend 94% more time integrating business and tech to innovate than low-growth CIOS
  • Business angle first over tech and tactical
• Federated Search is a “simple” way to perform the integration, people are familiar with it and it is a one place to find things
• Integrating security is an important approach
• Portals can be a great way to bring things together (When done right)
  • Need to be designed to help do work (like a dashboard)
  • Cisco Quad (soon-to-be) product from the keynote yesterday is a good example.
  • Search, communication tools, and information all present.
  • (Lots of before-after screenshots, worth downloading to look at)
• Process is another area for integration
• Integrate the software into the context of the daily work

Going to spend a little bit of time getting some work done and attending the keynotes.  You can probably find me in the lobby until lunch.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.