So, if you missed it, Whitney Tidmarsh announced at the info360 AIIM Conference that she was leaving EMC. In fact, her last day was March 31. She quickly handed keynote duties over to Jeetu Patel who is taking her role and assuming the mantle of Chief Strategy Officer.
The first instinct is to panic at yet another person leaving EMC. My second instinct was to put myself into Whitney’s shoes for a minute. When I took that minute, this is what happened…
I have traditional gone to the annual AIIM conference, info360, in order to quiz/grill/annoy the vendors and network with people. The presentations were always secondary. After all, how many times can you see a presentation on the ROI of an invoice processing system?
The last two years, I was there evangelizing CMIS to the community, but I basically skipped most of the sessions because they were the same thing as past years. Oh, Real Story Group was always there offering some honest insights, but most of the information the present you can get just by following them throughout the year (which you ought to be doing).
This year was different. The first difference was I was presenting something that clearly wasn’t a case study or CMIS. What made it better was that mine wasn’t the only presentation that was different. There were tracks on Mobile, Cloud, and Social Media. You couldn’t escape those terms this year but in previous years they weren’t barely present.
Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at the info360 Conference. My topic was The Future of Content Management, with the cheesy tagline of Cloudy with a Chance of Innovation. [I’m going to ramble a bit, the the slides are below].
This presentation was originally conceived when I was tired of not seeing a solid keynote/vision for the Content Management industry. The Web folk have a vision, even if they can’t agree upon a name for that vision. Wanting one, I wrote An ECM Keynote for 2010 last summer. I took that post and presented, Revisiting “Enterprise” Content Management in a 2.0 World at Gilbane this past fall. My presentation at AIIM was an updated version of that presentation.
What changed? A realization that began when I updated the presentation and crystallized at the conference. The thought was inspired by, of all people, Andrew Chapman and his posts on ECM as a Commodity. The question he asks is this…
As I covered in my last post, Implementing an ECM Strategy without a Platform, you don’t need an Enterprise CMS Platform to implement a successful Enterprise Content Management Strategy. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use one or that using one would be the wrong approach. Just like there is no one-size-fits-all CMS, there is no single way to define and implement an ECM Strategy.
I am going to look at this in two stages. The first is going to focus on the purpose of and foundation for an Enterprise CMS Platform. The second is going to look at what capabilities a CMS needs in order to be a Platform.
It has been stated here at the Word, and elsewhere, that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy. You can’t buy Enterprise Content Management. You can buy products that support an ECM Strategy, but without a blueprint, it is just a bunch of stuff.
Semantics aside, do you need a central Content Management System (CMS) to serve as the basis for implementing the strategy? This is a subtle way of asking if I need to buy a big honkin’ CMS which just happens to be marketed as ECM. I prefer to call those products Enterprise CMS Platforms. The term ECM Platform is so 2010.
The thing is, you don’t need an Enterprise CMS Platform to implement an ECM Strategy. Heck, you can do it with what you have now.
Been a while since I posted anything. Having a new kid will do that to a person. I read an article last week that all but set me off. Luckily I didn’t have time to write it because I am going to be biting the hands that feed me, or at least ones that have been nice to me.
The article in question was published on CMSWire. When I saw the title, The Future of ECM: Looking Less and Less like SharePoint?, I was very interested. Then I started reading and nearly died.
First off, I’m going to state that SharePoint can readily be used as a Content Management System. When I compare SharePoint’s capabilities with features that I documented when I wasn’t thinking about SharePoint, it fairs well.
There has been a lot of talk over the past year, especially on my blog, about the issues with the traditional vendors. While I’ve focused on EMC, most of these issues face every Content Management platform vendor. The challenges of from the Open Source vendors and the emergence of the cloud as a concept broader than simple hosting have beset the establishment.
The thing is, the vendors are not in immediate trouble. There are a lot of organizations that require more functionality, trust, and faith than Open Source or cloud vendors can provide. For the next several years, as long as the older vendors can provide value and show progress towards a viable future, they are going to be a significant piece of the Content Management landscape.
With that in mind, let’s look at EMC and its allure as a real partner.
So a funny thing happened on my way to the West Coast this week, I was invited to a product launch at Box.net. I’ve always been a fan of the concept of Content Management in the Cloud and the direction Box has taken in the Content Management space.
The established vendors are having to determine how to change both their business models and architecture before they more to the the cloud. Box is already there, they just need more features.
There has been a lot of talk of late regarding the demise of the Java Content Repository (JCR) specification and what to do when a standard does die off. Much of this is blamed on the emergence of CMIS as a standard, but that is just a contributory factor. Many Content Management specifications and standards have withered over the last decade without a standard positioned to replace them.
Well, I’m doing it again, making predictions for the next year. The sad thing is that I am even more cynical about making predictions this year than last. That is why I wrote an article for CMS Wire on Trends for 2011. I’m confident on trends but it is hard to determine if a trend will result in anything measureable.
Well, here we go. A list of predictions, and things to watch, in 2011.
Word of Pie 