Information

When Does the Software Vendor Matter?

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Recently I wrote a post discussing the importance of the selecting an implementation Partner in the success of a Content Management project. I even went a little off of the proverbial deep end by stating:

Software is Secondary

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For the first project, assuming you pick a vendor doesn’t significantly mislead you, success isn’t going to be defined by the product you select.

For someone who works at Alfresco, a Content Management vendor, this seems a little crazy even if it is true. The key words in that statement are “first project”. The reality is that the Content Management System (CMS) you select is going to have a much longer life than the time it takes to implement your first project.

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Selecting Software and an Implementation Partner

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When I was in the UK last week, I availed myself of the opportunity to catch-up with some friends in the industry. There were both product and delivery people in the crowd and we had a good time.

At some point, we hit the topic of Partners delivering software and how organizations should go about the process. We agreed on the right ways to use Partners and promptly celebrated with another round. As a rule of thumb, when that crowd agrees as a group, it is usually accepted knowledge. Even so, we all could readily recall multiple stories of people doing it poorly.

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What Constitutes Industry Leadership?

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File:Aston Martin DBS V12 coupé (front left) b-w.jpgOne of the debates that I have often had with other Information Professionals is the question, Who are the “Leaders” in our industry? This was always up for a good debate because we could never agree on the basic ground rules:

  • What role does the technology play?
  • Do you measure by sales or install base?
  • Do we care what Gartner, Forrester, or others say on the topic?
  • What players are even in our industry?

With all these open questions, it is a debate that usually lasts until someone gets fed up and forces a topic change upon the group by asking, Who is buying the next round?

This is a question that is important for me to address and I thought I would open it up for discussion.

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Making Plans for Alfresco Summit 2013

New PictureYesterday, Alfresco announced the agendas for the upcoming Alfresco Summits. This included our keynote speakers who include, Andrew McAfee, Stephen O’Grady, and Jimmy Wales. I’ve met and reviewed books here on the Word from both Andrew and Stephen. If you don’t know who Jimmy is, go look him up on his website, Wikipedia.

Of course, more importantly, I am going to be speaking at both the Barcelona and Boston editions of Summit. I’m actually very intrigued by the back-to-back nature of the Alfresco Summits. I am used to vendors having conferences in different geographies. Having them back-to-back is an interesting concept. Speaking at both, it means some concentrated traveling on my part, but I won’t be alone.

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The Ugly Truth Behind Compliance and Records Management

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Yesterday, Joe Shepley wrote an incredible post on the simple fact that No One Cares about Compliance. While an overstatement, it is true. When it comes time to invest the money, organizations don’t care.

Sure, everyone sees the need, but they don’t do it. It is too hard, too expensive, and prone to failure. There are too many project with a better promise of success. If those things weren’t true, everyone would be compliant and conferences like ARMA would be celebrations of success, not spent drowning sorrows in beer.

Yesterday, Joe shared some realities from his time in the field. I’m going to do the same.

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When is 30% Better Than 80%?

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There is a basic misconception that is plaguing the Content Management industry. This misconception is that 80% is better than 30%. Without context, it doesn’t seem like much of a misconception, but trust me, it is a problem.

The missing context? What percentage of features that organizations are looking for does a solution have out-of-the-box?

The answer is never 100% unless you are the ONE organization that matches the generic solution template. Still, you can usually find a solution that gets pretty close if you tweak a few internal business rules that are more of a business tradition than an actual need.

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Death of the CIO…No Way

I have been seeing rumors on the death of the Chief Information Officer for a long time now. After just serving a stint as a CIO at AIIM, I can tell you that the concept is silly.

This silliness recently came-up in a LinkedIn discussion and a blog post from an AIIM Board Member, Dan Antion. Dan went into several examples showing the need for a CIO which were dead-on.

I’m going to further illustrate the craziness of not having one.

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Security, Real or Imagined?

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I’ve opined on the security of cloud solutions in the past, usually stating that the odds were good that established cloud vendors have better security than the average data center. Yesterday, I saw an shared an article about how researchers reversed engineered the Dropbox client. While this isn’t necessarily a critical issue for Dropbox, it does raise some interesting discussion points around security through obfuscation.

First, the Research

The researchers decompiled the Dropbox client which was compiled in a manner that decompiling was difficult. Once the researchers were able to do it, they hijacked the account. Given that a program would already possess full access to a person’s machine to accomplish this, there wouldn’t be new data to access through the client.

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Box Defends Against Office 365

In case you missed it, Box introduced some new pricing last week. While the details are not relevant right now, the key detail was that if you have only 10 people, your price per user is now $5. This is great if you are a small shop because you don’t need as many features and you do need secure sharing.

So why bring Office 365 into this? Because this new price range is same as the Office 365 Small Business tier. Sure you can get more with Office 365, but Box still has that “easy to use” feature going for it.

Still, why Office 365? Because Office 365 is great for small shops. It bundles email with SharePoint and Lync. For a organizations with minimal to no infrastructure, it is a very quick setup and before you know it, you have your basic productivity tools.

I suspect that Box is looking at Microsoft as the big Gorilla in the corner. If they aren’t then they should be doing that. Microsoft has a decent cloud solution and a ton of money. It should be possible to fix SkyDrive, make an interface that works on Apple, and market to the same people that Box targets.

Box used to market against SharePoint to get attention. Now they need to work against them to make sure they stay safe.

The Real Job Description

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Had a couple beers the other night with a former boss of mine. He hired me at Washington Consulting and I have always liked him because, despite his fascination with the Red Sox, he and I see eye-to-eye on things. As he currently has an ownership stake in a consulting firm right now, I chose to view our similarities in a positive light.

One of the things that came up during the second beer was the nature of the job. How should an owner be spending their time? The answer is simple,

An Owner should do whatever is necessary to insure the success of the business.

Anyone disagree?

If that means getting your hands dirty to keep a key client happy, that is what you need to do that day.  Sure, you shouldn’t spend your whole year down the proverbial rabbit hole, but as an owner, your job is to do whatever it takes.

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