Before moving forward, I want to clarify. I was not slighting SharePoint. If anything, it was a recognition of what SharePoint has achieved as a legitimate Content Management system.

Let’s now take a step back and look at keeping Content alive.

The Tools

I learned years ago that no one tool is right for every job. While this is true in the Content Management space, for many challenges, multiple tools could be effective. What usually defines “success” is the planning and governance involved.

Let’s face it, SharePoint is generating a lot of document graveyards because it is being deployed a lot. It isn’t a weakness of SharePoint. It is the same weakness that existed before SharePoint when organizations threw Content Management solutions over the wall and expected them to stick.

If there aren’t already, there will soon be graveyards built upon Box. It is a sign of success of the platform and a sign of failure by Information Professionals.

Granting Life to Content

Gabor Fari (who should write a post on this topic) and Billy both say that a strong collaborative system, properly designed and implemented, can give Content life. I think Billy puts it best when he says that Content should be exhibited.

I think that this type of system where Content is developed and readily revisited and leveraged is great.

It just isn’t the only way.

A well designed Case Management can give life to Content. Why? Let me give an example…

Let’s say I’m performing Correspondence Management. A piece of correspondence comes in and I have the responsibility to respond. I should be able to quickly locate other items on the same topic or from the same person. I can look at the previous responses and craft the new response appropriately. Meanwhile, metrics can be run to identify trends and see what is happening.

All About Context

What both examples have in common is that the Context of the Content is providing the value. Whether that Context is provided collaboratively or through using proper use of processes, that is the value. The sum of the information around that Content and its Context is the value.

No tool will give that to you. Only a well thought-out design, implementation, and proper governance will give it to you. Sure, some tools will fit some business problems better than others, but the tool cannot provide Context. That is up to the people using the system.

Is it frustrating that there are a lot of document graveyards? Yes, without question. Does it mean that my career has been wasted? Absolutely not. I’ve created many systems that aren’t graveyards and I’m proud of those systems. There are also a couple graveyards that I had a hand in building.

The existence of these graveyards existing universally should be a wake-up call. We as Information Professionals should strive to eliminate them. If you are reading this, it is your responsibility. These systems should not be dumping grounds. If people can’t find what they need or decided it isn’t worth looking, then why store the Content at all?

That is the real question. If nobody accesses the Content because it is buried, why not just kill it once and for all?

Well, I’ve been on “vacation” for the past week and feel rested enough to take some time to write. Coincidently enough, I have two posts to write quickly, the first being this post evaluating the predictions for 2011.

As I did for the 2010 predictions, I am going to score them as either correct, incorrect, or partial (50%).  The partial is for predictions that were correct in the causes, but the effects were off.

1. There will be a major acquisition that doesn’t involve Open Text. Correct! HP acquired Autonomy in one of the strangest and largest acquisitions in the past few years.
2. EMC will determine their Content Management future this year. Correct. They have a plan for the future that they have been executing upon consistently. It is the Next Generation Information Server along with EMC OnDemand. When you throw in the mew mobile client and the addition of the D2 interface from C6, EMC is saying that they aren’t going to be marginalized without a fight. The question of whether it is enough and in time is something we should learn in 2012.
3. “Enterprise 2.0” vendors will be reclassified. Partial. The theory is that people would using Enterprise 2.0 and start referring to tools by what they did. This is happening, but it is gradual. Too many marketing people aren’t ready to let go of the term yet. I feel I got this partially right but it is hard to prove.
4. Content Management in the Cloud will make a big splash.  Correct. Box is attacking the world while Nuxeo and Alfresco have jumped into the fray. EMC is working to provide a true cloud solution and DropBox has begun creating a non-consumer version of its product. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a project to implement Documentum in an IaaS cloud provider for the Federal Government. The cloud has reached the CMS world and will only expand and mature.
5. Peter Monks will try to blackmail me. Correct, though he isn’t very good at it. You would think a recording of singing karaoke while wearing a mullet would be enough, but he can’t pull it off.
6. An iPad challenger will emerge, driving the tablet market. Partial. Instead of one challenger, there are lots of them. Samsung seems to be doing okay but the Kindle Fire seems to have the best shot at challenging the iPad.
7. eBook weaknesses will come to the forefront.  Correct, though I picked the wrong weaknesses. People just want more from their eReader. Just ask Amazon why they introduced the Kindle Fire, a simplified Android tablet. It isn’t an eReader in the traditional sense, yet it is doing well. My niece has one and she lives in an Apple family.

So that is a 6 out of 7. Not bad overall, especially when you consider that I graded fairly harsh. Apple is not the only tablet player in town anymore and the term Enterprise 2.0 seems to be in remission even according to Google.

That bump over 1.0 line, point “F”? That’s the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Social Buness seems to be picking-up the slack, which is a much better descriptor of many of the products. Spigit, a stalwart of many Enterprise 2.0 conferences seems to ignore both terms.

Now, onward to 2012!

There is a lot of uncertainty in the Information Management space these days. Is Case Management the future of Enterprise Content Management? How much will SharePoint 2010 impact the market? Where is all of this Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud hype going to take us? The one factor that has not changed is the need for people to collaborate online to get work done. The real question is, why is it sometimes so hard to deploy a collaborative solution?

The Big Collaboration Picture

Collaboration, simply put, is multiple people working together to accomplish a goal. They could be working a case, using SharePoint to manage a project, or leveraging the Cloud for content sharing. In all situations, they are working together. Take the solitary case worker who collaborates with others simply by searching to find similar cases to the one sitting in front of them. Even if the person that worked the old case is no longer around, they are still collaborating to some degree.

Knowledge Management efforts of the 90s were based around this model. The challenge was how to capture the knowledge of employees and convince them to enter it into the system. Needless to say, this failed. Part of the failure was because it just seemed like more work to the people involved, which it was. They had to take time out of their day in order to enter information for little gain to themselves.

While many blamed the technology and the lack of incentives, the core of the problem sometimes comes down to culture. The first question you need to ask yourself is if people want to collaborate on their work.

A Collaborative Culture

The question to be asked before any technology is even considered is, “Do people want to collaborate?” To those that grew up with Facebook and MySpace, this seems like a silly question, but it is of utmost importance. Even older people that have no problem sharing what they did over the weekend online may have a completely different pattern of behavior at work.

You can tell people that collaborating will help the company operate more efficiently and build a usable knowledge base of information for everyone to draw upon, but most people don’t care. They want to know how it will make their job easier or get them more money. If collaborating with the new system makes them more replaceable, they are less likely to use it. If they can see how their job will be easier by eliminating frustrations and allow them to focus on getting things done, then they will listen.

Let’s look at two examples.

In the U.S. Intelligence community before 9/11, collaboration was limited. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to share information; there just wasn’t a mechanism to enable that level of sharing. Afterwards, management removed many of the barriers and Intellipedia was able to enable cross-agency sharing. It was a situation of a collaborative community just waiting for an enabling technology.

Let’s look in a large insurance company. Some people have worked there and have gained a reputation as the expert in all of the rules and regulations regarding the Ad Review process (which is not simple). In fact, they may be jealously guarding that expertise as a form of job security. Usually when I encounter a situation with an expert like this, I can be sure that there are many more experts that have spent years becoming indispensable within the same company.

In the second situation, it doesn’t matter how good the technology deployed is because people aren’t going to use it without a compelling reason.

Making Collaboration a Core Business Value

To accomplish this, there needs to be clear gains for people.

Let’s face facts; there are some people that will never want to collaborate. It isn’t in their blood. If you can make the organization much more open to collaboration, those people will eventually become less critical in executing the daily business. While losing people is never a good thing, achieving a collaborative organization that is more nimble and working together is worth that sacrifice.

This isn’t just about using a “new” system. This is about people realizing that collaborating and working together is good for them, not just the company. This is the core of Organizational Change Management and it is something that needs to be addressed before bothering to invest in any of those fancy Enterprise 2.0 tools.

[Note: This was going to be my CMS Wire article for March 2011, but I got frustrated with it. I instead wrote Social Media, Information Management’s Dream]

Well, here we go.  A list of predictions, and things to watch, in 2011.

1. There will be a major acquisition that doesn’t involve Open Text. This isn’t to say Open Text won’t acquire someone big, but that there will be another acquisition that will be major.  It will likely involve one of the newer kids, founded 2005+, or EMC.
2. EMC will determine their Content Management future this year. This is a turning-point year for EMC.  After taking a little bit of abuse here, they started to right the ship and point in the needed direction.  Was it in time?  Will EMC give up on Content Management and just sell it?  Will the path to the future not be given the necessary focus or just dropped?  This year will have the answers.  By December, I’ll know if we will be talking about EMC as a Content Management leader in 2014.
3. “Enterprise 2.0” vendors will be reclassified. Organizations are going to realize that the Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a class of application, just marketing slang to identify new technologies to help business get things done.  The vendors are going to start falling into Collaboration, WCM, WEM, or other buckets.  Some will be acquired and become part of a larger bucket.  The focus is going to shift from “Enterprise 2.0” and onto the actually problem being solved.
4. Content Management in the Cloud will make a big splash.  This is a easy prediction.  We will hear of a massive success story, a  massive failure, or both.  That may seem wishy-washy, but what we hear will be directly related to how much people try to achieve in the Cloud.  The more complex the requirements, the more likely they will fail.  Those that are ready for everyday file-sharing will succeed.  Either way, I’m sure I’ll be writing a post at some point.  Maybe even one inspired by the decision by the GSA to use Google Apps.  We should hear some outcome next year.
5. Peter Monks will try to blackmail me. I’m actually going to meet him in person next year.  I suspect he will try to get some sort of incriminating picture and use it as leverage.  He’ll probably try and make me say that WordPress is a CMS or something silly like that.
6. An iPad challenger will emerge, driving the tablet market. We will see the emergence of a leading challenger to the iPad, which will be a great thing.  It will push innovation and make Apple have to push to maintain their early lead.  In the long-run, it will even lead to a significant price-drop in some tablet editions.  While I don’t expect to see significant price relief until 2012, the feature war will begin in earnest.  I expect it to be from an Android-based competitor, but RIM could surprise us (though I think they only get one chance).
7. eBook weaknesses will come to the forefront.  This is going to get its own post later, but there are some issues to eBooks really taking off.  Lending capabilities don’t reflect what happens in real life and I there is a paradigm conflict that can be centered around the odds of people re-reading books.  I think that this will evolve and begin to be addressed.  I don’t think any of the issues I see are permanent, but if you want to replace physical books, they have to be addressed.

That’s it, just 7.  I can’t think of any others I want to put out there that aren’t obvious.  I highly suggest reading the 2011 predictions of Jon Marks, which I feel are the best set of predictions out there.  The Real Story Group and Lee Dallas also have some good ones for your enjoyment.

The best thing is that no matter what we think may happen, something really interesting will happen that will catch us all off guard.  That is why we are still in this industry.  There are always enough new twists and turns to keep everyone engaged.

So onward into 2011!

Here are my notes from the webinar.  You can also download the presentation for details to blend with my notes [and my thoughts].

Setting the Context

• Gartner has noted that there is a 8-year feast/8-year famine IT growth cycle.  The current 8-year famine is theoretically coming to an end.
• Built large Systems of Record.  Transaction systems for global commerce
• Enterprise IT focus recently has been on optimize and take System of Records burden and spread it out.
• There are 3 factors refining IT for Consumers”: Access, Broadband, and Mobile. [The latter two are just instances of the first]
• “How can it be I am so powerful as a consumer and so LAME as an employee!!??”
• What will force Enterprise IT to adopt Consumer IT?

Next Generation Content is “Social”

• New IT is Systems of Engagement. Interacting in the moment [If you know Enterprise 2.0, you know Systems of Engagement]
• Impact on B2B Enterprises
  • Increased demand for Collaboration and Relationship Management
  • Challenge: To engage with peers globally to solve problems
  • Burden falls on the middle of the organization (where there hasn’t been a lot of IT investment)
  • Need to invest in “IT for the middle tier”
• Impact on B2C(onsumer) Enterprises
  • Commoditization, massive volumes at low margins
  • Transition from Transactions to Interactions
  • Relevant offers in real time, driven by math based upon preferences and history

The Future of Content Management

• Change from Systems of Record (SoR) to Systems of Engagement (SoE) [SoR not going away]
• Content is going from one (SoR) Author to Many (SoE) [Yes]
• Documents becoming Rich Media
• Searching gets harder [And it isn’t easy in SoR now]
• Regulated/Security to Open/Liability
• Social Content Management [Another TLA? Really?]
  • Artifacts are NOT enterprise content (ownership is blurred)
  • Artifacts valuable to enterprise [Which makes them enterprise content]
  • Need to manage social content due to value, but we aren’t there yet
• Evolution in B2B applications:
  • Productivity: Collaboration, online and recorded
  • Collaboration: Multi-site dialogs, social media marketing
  • Market Insight: Extract information to enhance business
  • Cycle Time Reduction: Support real-time decision making
  • Co-innovation: Secure workspaces with partners [Talks about firewalls, important but wrong context]
• Evolution in B2C applications:
  • Broadcast
  • Connect
  • Learn
  • Support: Predictive and consumer friendly
  • Personalize

Closing Thoughts

Time for some more thoughts on this report now that I’ve heard it discussed.  Essentially, AIIM has caught up to where we are now.  This isn’t the Future.  These are challenges that people are tackling now.

I think what we are talking about here is the challenges facing companies now.  These are important, but the term “Future” is a stretch.  This research avoids the obvious issue of exponential content growth and only lightly touches the issue of users in the B2B world needing to collaborate without a firewall.

It definitely doesn’t address any thoughts on what should be done to address these challenges and it complete ignores the cloud, specifically SaaS.

Part of the problem may be a little bit of Group-Think.  Look at the vendors that participated:

• Alfresco
• EMC
• Hyland
• IBM
• Iron Mountain
• Kodak
• Microsoft
• OpenText

The only non-“old school” vendor is Alfresco.  That said, Alfresco always seem to be trying to take down the established players.  They always seem to be following the trail blazed by others, just with a story combining Open-Source and fresh architecture.

There is still a White Paper to come out of this, so I will withhold final judgment.  Just not feeling very positive about this really addressing the future.  What I think they may have here is a better approach to helping people with today.

As a side effect, I have to evaluate them now.  I am going to score them as either correct, incorrect, or partial (50%).  The partial is for predictions that were correct in the causes, but the effects were off.

So, let’s dive into the juicy goodness.

1. Constantly Hyping Acronyms Of Systems: Correct.  Web Engagement Management (WEM) is all the support I need.  Web Delivery System is another one I saw out there.  AIIM just introduced Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement as terms, though not as concepts.  Actually, any year that this prediction doesn’t come true would be a big surprise.
2. SharePoint 2010 Won’t Matter: Partial.  If you read the description, my point was that there wouldn’t have been a large number of upgrades.  That has largely held true.  New customers are adopting it and there is a lot of interest, but MOSS 2007 is still the leader.  It was a bigger deal than I thought, so I am only giving partial credit.  Feel free to dispute.
3. 2010 Will Not be the Year of CMIS: Correct.  After its completion, there has been steady progress, but it has been quiet.  Look at my blog if you want evidence.  2011 will be a much bigger year for CMIS.
4. Google Wave Gets More Hype: Partial. There was some hype, then it was killed.  As predicted, the 1st generation UI was no good.  When combined with its resurrection as an open source project under Apache. There hasn’t been a new UI, but the fact that not enough people could find something to do with it, even when invites were plentiful is enough for partial.
5. Records Management and Enterprise 2.0 Will Collide: Partial. The recent AIIM research talks about this, but they call it Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.  There hasn’t been a large 2.0 scandal, though the Wikileaks thing is quite interesting. The spirit of the prediction was missed, so I demote.  Almost made this one Correct.
6. The Kindle and Nook Will Die: Correct. Did you notice the iPad?  When you look at my prediction, and the intense debate in the comments, it is clear that this one was aimed at replacing the eReaders.  eReaders will survive, but they are already well on their way to being  just a niche product in the market.  Before the iPad, people always showed my their Kindle. Afterwards, not one person showed it off.  I’m definitely not seeing significantly more Kindles than I did before the iPad’s release.  The iPad is constantly seen everywhere.  The fact that Amazon refuses to share the number of Kindles sold reinforces my belief.  Then again, if Amazon’s ultimate goal is to sell e-books, do they really care about the device?
7. The Cloud will Remain a Fog: Correct.  There is still a lot of confusion around the cloud.  When I asked Tony Byrne which cloud technology would most impact Content Management, even he said he was just making a guess (though a Tony guess is very valuable).  This should improve next year, but it won’t be like flipping a switch.
8. Open Text will Make a Major Acquisition: Correct. They acquired Burntsand and Nstein.  The latter qualifies.  Autonomy made the biggest splash by acquiring Interwoven though.  As I didn’t say someone else would make a bigger acquisition, no penalty.

Wow! I did better than I thought.  6.5 out of 8!  The eReader one could easily be a Partial, but I like to stir the pot a bit.  Besides, the SP2010 prediction could have been rated higher.  Even switching that to a partial would still give me 75% which is a passing grade.

You know, I may be inspired enough to try again for 2011.  Now I just need to think of some predictions.  Trends are easy, but figuring out when they are going to come to a head, challenging.

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.

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.

• 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.

Here is their requirements as presented.  The highlights are theirs.

leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)

specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities

access with only a browser and an internet connection

no reliance on proprietary systems or technology

development based on open industry standards

built upon a semantic web framework

embraces and enables BYOC model

no operating system dependency

provides web service capabilities

tuned options for mobile devices

no browser dependency

no net cost increase

no desktop footprint

100% cloud ready

Vision into Reality

Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality.  Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?

After what I saw, I would say Yes.

They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product.  When they didn’t, they were replaced.  This isn’t the act of rash adopters.  This is planned and thought-out.

For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements.  With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.

They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs.  They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.

Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it.  He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop.  With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.

They are looking into Semantic capabilities.  They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes.  They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute.  They aren’t leaning on one “expert”, but seeking a complete picture.

How Do You Measure Up?

I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies.  I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work.  This is a complete transformation.  Will users leverage the new stuff?  Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored.  The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.

It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date.  I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.

This is one project I would not delegate to my team.  I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.

I saw the title and was intrigued.  I then read it and realized that the author had started falling for some market speak.  I quickly determined that the fault was not completely with the author.  Yes, they had fallen under the spell of some marketing and should have been strong enough to resist.  The real villian here? Box.

Remove the Cloud

Okay, lets think this through, logically.  First, let’s look at Box’s definition of Cloud Content Management.  When you look at it, you see them describing a SaaS offering.  More importantly, you are seeing them talk about the advantages of hosting it on the internet as opposed to your server room.

What we are seeing is a change in platform, not actually a change in the solution.  (Well, they talk about that some, but hold on a second.)  When we talk about ECM, we talk about solving problems and making content available throughout the organization.  The Enterprise signifies that we are dealing with all of our content, not just images or the content from the finance department.

When you go to the cloud, you remove the firewall headaches and the scaling headaches and make them someone else’s problem.  You are still solving the same problem of managing your content.  You still have to manage security by creating accounts.

When we started consolidating servers and placing them into server rooms instead of in people’s offices back in the 90s, we didn’t rename anything.  The applications and the problems they were solving were exactly the same.

What is changing is the delivery model.  SpringCM calls it right when they say they provide a SaaS ECM Platform.  PERFECT!  A Cloud ECM Platform would also work as a title, though a little less specific than SaaS.  You are qualifying ECM, not “Content” or the “Content Management”.

The platform should not be in the description.  When was the last time you saw Windows Content Management or UNIX Content Management?  How about LAN Content Management or WAN Content Management?

Note that Box is pitching themselves more like Google Docs than SpringCM, but you will notice that Google Docs doesn’t throw hype terms around. (Aside from “Google”)  Box’s pitch actually describes Omnipresent Content Management to some degree, though it is a stepping stone due to constraints imposed by technology.

That said, the article itself cared less about the “Cloud” and focused on the interface.

The Cloud Doesn’t Make the Interface

This is where I blame the author of the article.  He does makes a very good point about the standard ECM interfaces:

arcane user interfaces and culture of exclusion that’s associated with older software. ECM has this tendency to lock everything away in its place, and the Web is opening up news ways of working with content that allows us to view and interact with it in a collaborative, constantly refreshed context.

The solution isn’t the cloud.  The solution is creating new interfaces.  It is leveraging Enterprise 2.0 solutions.  It is being created by independent vendors that hope to leverage CMIS to create new, powerful, universal clients for ECM systems.

The web is a great proving ground for the interface technology, but it can live outside of the Internet.  Just because you have only seen a feature on the web doesn’t mean it can’t be part of a non-Internet solution.  That is one thing the ECM industry has to work on.  Separate the applications from the platform and allow the interfaces to evolve more rapidly in response to the changing environment.

The interface may be sweet, but it is actually not a feature of cloud computing.  It is a result of clever developers and product managers that have either figured-out what users want, or got lucky.

Let’s keep one thing in mind, many organizations like their firewalls right now because security in the wilds of the Internet has too many unknowns.  Check-out this summary of some of the current trends on ECM in the Cloud over at CMS Wire.

To Sum Up

I’ll put it simply.  Anyone that buys into the term “Cloud Content Management” probably doesn’t know the space.  I understand vendors want to create the next catchy term and make a mark. We don’t have to play along.

If you try and use the term in a conversation with me, be prepared for a million questions.  You will have to defend that term to the death.  I will spare employees of Box that have no choice, but anyone else is fair game.

Box’s offering looks neat.  They have a good vision.  Just don’t call it Cloud Content Management.

Enterprise 2.0, New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

Andrew McAfee

I’ve been following Andrew on Twitter for a while and have enjoyed his posts.  So when I heard that the author of the term “Enterprise 2.0″ had written a book on the topic, I was initially skeptical of the value to me.  How much new stuff would there be in the book for someone who, while not an expert, was very familiar with the topic?  After hearing about some of the hype, I decided to give the book a try.

I am glad that I did.

Aside from having a handy book that I can hand people to learn about Enterprise 2.0, the book helped me crystallize my understanding of Enterprise 2.0 and helped me think of better ways to explain it to people.

So money well spent, but what did I learn?

What is Enterprise 2.0?

Andrew spends the first two-thirds of the book defining and explaining the value of Enterprise 2.0.  This section is critical because it clearly explains the what and the why.  On page 73, he gives his definition:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.

This definition has been criticized for being too technical and not focusing enough the people or processes.  There are two basic defenses to the definition against that criticism.

1. We are talking about the pursuit of the organization’s goals.  The technology is clearly listed as a tool that helps to achieve those goals.  It doesn’t say that Enterprise 2.0 is the deployment of the tools.  It is the USE of those tools to accomplish the goals that are the purpose of being an organization.
2. This is defining the WHAT of Enterprise 2.0, not the HOW.  The how, which is addressed in more detail in Section 2 of his book, is almost all about the people.

My only issue with the definition is the term “social”.  This is an accurate term, but full of negative connotations in the business world.  As I read the book, I realized that “collaboration” was a better term, not in definition, but in the business context.  This may warrant a post unto itself as it isn’t central to how good the book is, but it is an important part of the ongoing evolution of Enterprise 2.0.

Throughout the section, there is a talk about the ties between people and how Enterprise 2.0 tools can connect people with different degrees of ties.  Andrew illustrates each level with a different case study to show how the tools work to allow people to work together better.

• Strong Ties: These are people you interact with regularly now.  His case study talks about the implementation of a wiki to allow people a new way to capture items and collaborate.  I would put many of the existing, Enterprise 1.0, collaboration tools here as well.  eRoom and SharePoint are two such products.
• Weak Ties: These are people that you know of and may have met, but don’t really now.  Andrew talks about using Facebook here to connect a dispersed work force and to build a better sense of community within the company.  The goal is to get to know people and make weak ties into strong ones.
• Potential Ties: Here we are talking about people that you don’t know and are unlikely to run into during the normal course of business.  Here Andrew talks about a blend of software, including wikis and blogs.  People discover each other be discovering content.  The information isn’t organized in the traditional manner, but is tagged, allowing structure to emerge. By finding information, and learning about the contributors, connections can be made.
• None: No ties and there may not be a reason to form them.  Tools like prediction markets can allow them to work together to create intelligence from the masses.

It is important to note that any tool in an outer ring of Andrew’s “bull’s-eye” can be used in an inner ring to strengthen and maintain those ties.

Making Enterprise 2.0 Work

The second section was a little disappointing.  It wasn’t that I thought that it was wrong or incorrect, but I was just hoping for more.

In this section, Andrew talks about the challenges. He addresses many misconceptions and how to work to dispel them.  He addresses the ROI issue and the fact that adoption is more than implementing tools, but getting people to use the tools.

Andrew makes lots of great points, but I just wish there was more detail. Then again, the purpose of the book isn’t to tell you how to make it work.  Every organization is different and brings different baggage to the table.  This means that there is no correct way or correct platform that will work everywhere.

This is a bitter truth, but an important one to understand.  Andrew does offer good tips and tells you that it will not be an overnight success.  It will take time to succeed, but the benefits are tangible.

The strength of this section is that it lets you know that Enterprise 2.0 is not a silver bullet.  The section makes you think about your organization and helps you start to formulate, in your mind, how you might begin to make it work.  Section two makes you think, and that is a good thing.

I have now butchered Andrew’s thoughts. Go read the book. It will all make sense then.

Miscellaneous Wrap-Up

I received nothing, not even a copy of the book, for writing this review.  All that ever happened was that Andrew asked me to write an Amazon review, which I did using excerpts from this full review.

If my word isn’t enough to help you decide that you need to read this book, check out these reviews.  I didn’t read them until after I wrote mine, but I think they add to the overall picture of the book well.

• Thomas Otter of Gartner shared his thoughts.  I’d have to agree with most of his points, especially regarding the addition of a reading list at the end of the book.
• Gil Yehuda wrote a review as well.  While the first part of the review sounds like someone who drank too much Kool-Aid, the latter part raises quite a good point that Thomas Otter had hinted at in his review, Chapter 8 could be a book unto itself.  Be prepared to read that chapter a few times and to research some of the underlying concepts if you aren’t in management.  As I said above, would love more details.
• Jon Ingham wrote a review which is a little more critical.  John thinks that Andrew focuses on the technology too much, but as I said in my review, that is a discussion for another day. Jon has the HR perspective and I think it is an important one in the broader discussion. I am confused as to whether or not he recommended the book.

I am debating jumping into the technology/people debate.  Maybe when I have a little more time.

One thing I am not debating is this: If you have any interest in Enterprise 2.0, read the book.

For more information on what CMIS can do for you, here are some useful references, including three of my posts on the topic (newest first):

• Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases: A slide-show introduction to CMIS and the types of business problems it is trying to solve.
• CMIS, Beauty is More Than Skin Deep: Addressing how CMIS is more than just what you see in the spec.  With some creativity, CMIS can address more use cases than the creators set out to do in version 1.0.
• Vendor Support for CMIS: Here I talk about the importance of vendor support for the standard.  So far, so good.
• The Gilbane Group, with the support of OASIS and several ECM vendors, has produced a Beacon report that is freely available from their website after you register.  It is a pretty solid write-up of what CMIS is and what problems it solves.
• Advanced CMIS: Written by Florent Guillaume of Nuxeo, this write-up covers many of the concepts supported by CMIS beyond your Basic Content Services.
• Three Reasons to list CMIS in your Document Management RFP: The folks over at CMS Watch, specifically Alan Pelz-Sharpe, provide some insight as to why you should care about CMIS now, even if you are just getting started.  Nice to see them agree with my assertions from March.

I’ve been looking at CMIS 1.0 from a functional perspective, along with some others in the community.  If I want to solve business problem X using a CMIS-based application, what do I need?  What would make things easier?  Using my experience from building the AIIM iECM demo and many discussions with others in the industry, I’ve come up with a few things that I’d like to see CMIS support in 2.0.

Note the assumed nature of the next version of the spec.  If there isn’t another version coming, then what is the point?

Advanced Metadata Support

There are a few gaps in the metadata model support.  This realization came about while trying to solve some business problems with CMIS with some others in the ECM space.  We were looking at how well CMIS might support the modeling of different knowledge domains.  We were also trying to think of some of the folksonomy tagging approaches in the world of Enterprise/Web 2.0.

Two areas for enhancement were readily identified:

• Hierarchical Metadata: This is roughly defined where the value of one metadata field drives the value of another metadata field(s).  I personally dealt with this most often in the legal industry with the Client/Matter fields.  To support this now, you have to set and save the parent field and then run the lookup on the child field.
• Tagging: Right now, CMIS does not support tagging.  You can have a repeating field, but it is assigned per object and doesn’t handle different people wanting to apply different sets of tags.  If I tag it one way and Sarah tags it another way, the resulting collection of tags should be aggregated and displayed as a small tag cloud.  The underlying ECM system would determine the weights for each value (Authority, number of tags…), but CMIS needs to support individual tagging and the retrieval of tags that includes weighting and the set of tags the current user has set.  This support would need to include strong querying capabilities.

Okay, we have some areas for improvement, but now we need to look at the gaps in managing these domain models.

Managing Metadata Models

One thing I learned from the AIIM demo was the need to be able to define and query a logical domain model that was distinct from the implemented physical model on the repository side.  There is some initial support there with the localName representing the repository’s name for a field and the queryName representing the logical name, but no way to collectively manage them.

The issue is that while there is some support for a localNamespace, but no corresponding queryNamespace.  I cannot create and plug-in a custom domain model.

Let’s think about this for a second.  Let’s take the AIIM demo domain model, AIIMContent.  Let’s say I more thoroughly defined it and published it, creating some URI.  Vendors, or integrators, should be able to create a back-end implementation for the model for any desired vendor.

Then, using CMIS, I could query to see if the AIIMContent domain model is supported by the current repository.  If it is, then I can create that supported object type(s) and query the objects using the universal names (queryName) of the metadata attributes without know any of the implementation details in the underlying repository.

This feature is not there.  When the AIIM demo was created, I had to map, in my code, each attribute name.  All three vendors implemented the model with different naming conventions within their repository.  This support for common domain models would solve that problem and allow the developers of Content Applications to do that much less grunt work in their code.

Oh, and the support for an “Aspect” type of domain model does not exist either, but I consider that a 3.0 request.

Supporting Semantic Models Through Relationships

One advance feature that Florent didn’t discuss in detail was the concept of Relationships.  This is basically relating two content objects to each other with a defined relationship.

Here is where the need for relationships hits the modeling world, Semantic Modeling.  Looking at the different scenarios, you can actually create and navigate a nice semantic model using relationships.  The only point of failure is the lack of query support.

That’s right. I can create all the relationships in the world, but I can’t include them in a query. I can create a concept as a content-less object and create a relationship from content to that concept, but I can’t create a solid way to retrieve that information without browsing.

Problem.

Is That All?

I haven’t even touched on Transactions or Identity Management. Those are whole other balls of wax.  Look around and throw business solutions out there and figure out how to implement it using only CMIS as in interface. Come up with your gaps.

Keep thinking on it. CMIS 1.0 is an important first step, but we need to make sure that 2.0 continues the progress by solving a broader set of problems.

One of the discussions is whether Enterprise 2.0 is evolutionary or revolutionary.  The simplest answer is yes. How others answer this question is most likely directly related to their belief in the importance of the technology in the equation of building Enterprise 2.0 success.

The Evolving Technology…

I would hope that most people would agree that the technology involved is just the next step in the evolution of collaborative platforms. Let’s look at a few components…

I could have written a Blog back in the 1990′s.  I almost did for a game that I played. I just didn’t have the time to really sit down and update a website with the latest “news/stories” that I wanted to publish.  I had to update links, move things around, archive my old content…it was a hassle. Now I just pull out a little rich text editor, type up my post, and click publish. Links are Web 1.0 stuff and comments are just small discussion forums associated directly with a post versus an interest area.  All those cool widgets, portal technology from the early part of this decade.

Blogs are clearly evolutionary.

Wikis are just rich-text documents with version control, simple linking, and a mechanism to handle edit conflicts. Each item is nothing new. At this point, Wikis aren’t new.

Twitter, just a way to use the SMS protocol to group and sort statements. My “feed” is nothing more than the results of a search of all tweets that mention my name or are from a list of people I follow.  Each of their names is just a search term on the “author” field of a tweet. Nothing complex in concept, just some good technology to implement.

Tagging…advanced keywords.

Web 2.0 tools are evolutionary.  Placed in the workplace on an Enterprise 2.0 platform, still just the next step. The revolution is HOW we use them.

Worker of the World Unite!

I think the revolution comes when the tools are given to organizations that already collaborates.  They might not collaborate across different operational units, but if they work together during the course of their day, the roots of the culture are there. Maybe they chat over the water cooler or wander down to each other’s offices, but they work together.  The culture is there, ready for better tools to enable better collaboration.

For those organizations it is only a shift in the mindset to open up and work with everyone with an interest and something to contribute.  If you give them the tools and make it easy and intuitive for them to use those tools, you can drive adoption. If you get the adoption, you’ll get the revolution.

The Enterprise 2.0 revolution is about people working together in ways that weren’t possible, or at least not feasible, in the past. The Enterprise 2.0 evolution is about the technology. Without the people and the technology working together, you may as well go back to trying to collaborate in email and live with all of those problems.

AIIM saw this trend a while ago and did some research.  In May, AIIM updated their research. I was “lucky” enough (lucky being defined as someone who follows AIIM leaders on Twitter and clicks on links) to get an early copy of the results, AIIM Industry Watch: Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0, on Friday before the general announcement of availability. I thought I would share what I found.

Numbers, Numbers, Everywhere…

The survey was completed for 2 weeks in May and respondents were primarily AIIM members or otherwise associated with AIIM. Invitations were sent by email, and broadcast over Twitter. It wasn’t the most scientific approach to gathering respondents as the respondents were most likely either a) Dedicated AIIM members or b) ECM people with an Enterprise 2.0 interest. Next year it would be interesting to know the demographics regarding the respondents’ experience in the ECM field.

As a whole, the report is very good and I recommend registering at AIIM, no cost, to download your copy. There are lots of cool facts and useful tidbits in the report. Some interesting things

• 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems. A sad fact and reality in most organizations, though technology won’t solve the problem if the culture doesn’t match.
• Whereas almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs, forums, and even the company’s Wikipedia entry. I checked my company’s entry and found it MIA. My parent company has one and it is very sad. Something to take care of soon.
• 39% use marked-up paper copies and 83% email suggestions and changes when collaborating on documents. Respondents could select three answers, and those were the top two. Those are scary numbers when you recall that AIIM people are the ones responding to this survey.
• 43% have a lack of understanding regarding Enterprise 2.0 tools that is impeding any efforts. That lack of understanding must be driving some of the poor manual collaboration in the previous point.  Would love to correlate that data.
• 47% use SharePoint team sites to collaborate more than any other platform. SharePoint is now the Borg of the ECM world.  Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

One more thing, the glossary in the back is great.

Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

As you might have guessed, there are more numbers than you will know what to do with once you get the report.  This is possibly the greatest thing about the white paper. It is also the problem.

Having dabbled in statistics, I tend to look at numbers and try and find the gaps. The gap that I repeatedly see here is the missing comparison between last year’s numbers and this year’s numbers. Occasional references are made regarding some trends, but the raw data is missing for the most part.  That is a shame.

When something is new, like Enterprise 2.0, measuring the current adoption, drivers, and understanding is only half of the picture.  What gives the full picture is the amount of change over time. Let’s take a random example…

(Imagine me flipping to a page with no notes.)

The questions regarding Levels of Personal Use, illustrated on page 6, show how respondents use various technologies for personal and business uses. Knowing the results from a year before would be useful. 40% of respondents at least consume information in corporate social networks, with about a third of them also contributing. That seems pretty good, unless last year had 35% consuming. I suspect the number is actually closer to 18% (don’t know though), which would paint a picture of a technology rapidly growing in usage.

There are a few places that do show last year’s numbers, but while very useful, they mostly serve to show the void in other places.

Analyze This

There are some nice numbers regarding ROI needs and business drivers. This section highlights another gap, the lack of analysis.  I wouldn’t mind some analysis behind those numbers.  Is ROI more important in some industries, or company sizes, than others? Is there a correlation, or lack thereof, between the ROI need and the other drivers?

This report just keeps making me want to dig deeper into the numbers to find meaning. Those people that use 45%, what is the breakout of their numbers?  Do they use/understand Enterprise 2.0 more or less than the rest of the population. Are they planning on spending more money overall in the near future? More money than the respondents or less? Oh the possibilities.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the report.  I just wish there was more of it.