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License Fees Blocking the Future of ECM

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So in case  you’ve missed it, I’ve been talking about how fixation on license fees can have a negative impact on on both the customer relationships and on product development.   There has been a reason for this conversation, the need to transform Content Management into a commodity.

This was discussed at the EMC Writer’s Summit event earlier this month.  Led by Andrew Chapman, we tried to identify what we could accomplish if Content Management was commoditized and was just there to be used.  Johnny Gee followed up this discussion with a post about ECM as a Commodity, sharing some of his thoughts in more detail.

Before talking about the license fee impediment Content Management Commodization, I’m going to touch on the Commodity issue a bit.

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How License Costs Impact ECM Platforms

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I talked last week how the license commission structure can hurt customers.  There were a LOT of great comments and insights from the product side.  Would love to have customers and consultants chime in on their feelings, but I can’t have everything.

image There were two comments that I wanted to address in more detail.  The first was that money isn’t the only driver of behavior for people.  That is very true.  That said, all else being equal, ask yourself this question: Who will a sales person go talk to first? The company that will help land a commission and meet quota, or an existing customer?

The fact that money is not the sole motivator of behavior is not something to just be dismissed, but neither can the impact cannot be discounted.  The very existence of financial incentives will impact behavior.  Let’s face it, when those incentives aren’t earned by an employee, those details show up in a performance review.

Now that I’ve thrown some debate points out there, let’s dive into the details of this post.

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The Challenge for the “ECM” Vendors

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image I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I’ve been a tad busy.  Then today, I saw a post over at the Real Story Group by the ever-so-wise Alan Pelz-Sharpe.  In that post, he talks about the High Cost of Support, and how it seems to be rising.  It is a great post that cuts a little into the financial actions of some of the vendors.

This is important to understand because financial incentives is what drives behavior at product companies, and all companies for that matter.  Even startups that do anything and everything to please customers, but aside from a few founders with visions of a new world order, they are driving towards the payoff of the IPO.

With that in mind, let’s look at how some of the financial systems at Enterprise Software Vendors, not just Content Management, impact behavior of their employees and thereby impact the customers.  Keep in mind that they’re are exceptions to the rule.

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The EMC Writer’s Summit, 2010 Style

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For those that are unaware, EMC hosts writers in the Content Management space for a 1-day gabfest about once a year.  Last week was the third one, so I guess we can officially call it annual.  This is an invite only event with some of the expenses paid.  That may lead you to wonder about what was discussed and if it was biased…

Well, it wasn’t biased or tilted at all.  First of all, kudos to EMC for inviting me.  I wasn’t the nicest person on the block after EMC World, but they still went out of their way to make sure that I was able to attend.  Their were no conditions placed upon me, and my degree of rabble-rousing was left to my own discretion.

The best part was that aside from a short intro by EMCs Whitney Tidmarsh on “Why IIG” and the changes taking place within IIG, there was no EMC focused topics or discussions.  There were some EMC opinions put out there, but they were contributions and not dictates.

All-in-all, it was a great event that spurred some great discussions and debates.  I’ll be talking on some of the topics over the next week or so here.

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ECM, Wanted Dead or Alive?

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image One thing that I have been meaning to do is to dive back into the state of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a useful term and the challenges facing its use. I’ve also been meaning to draw attention to some of the excellent posts in the new AIIM Communities. I am going to try and address both deficiencies today to some degree.

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.

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The Enemy of Collaboration

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image A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration.  Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

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.

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The ECM Innovator’s Dilemma

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So I promised an ECM specific follow-up to my book review on Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.  There is a lot to talk about, so I’m not going to blather on with a long intro (though this sentence seems to be compounding the issue) and get right to it.

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.

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Quality of Documentum Over the Years

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I recently received an email from someone whom I will call…Socrates.  He asked a question and I wanted to share it for discussion publicly.  First the question, then my reasons for the public discourse.

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.

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Change of Publishing Strategy with my Tips

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I have published a fair number of Tips over the life of this blog, pretty much all centered around Documentum.  While I am not going to change my writing of Tips, I am going to do a few things:

  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.

Content Management as a Commodity

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SharePoint has the traditional ECM Generation CMS vendors trying to figure out what they can do to maintain their “leadership” in Content Management.  imageA lot are looking to Case Management, a long-time need, to provide a differentiating factor for growth.

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…

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