Services, The Open Source Hedge Against the Cloud

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I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how the traditional vendors are being disrupted and are going to face an increasing number of challenges from the new cloud vendors. I want to take a minute to talk about why the Open Source vendors, like Alfresco and Nuxeo, are likely to not be disrupted.

Don’t get me wrong, the question of usability that hurt the likes of EMC, IBM, and Oracle still applies to the Open Source vendors. The key difference is that usability is the open door, not the actual disruption.

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Does Records Management Give Content Management a Bad Name?

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I’ve been ranting on and off for a while that Information Management has failed because we haven’t met the needs of the user. This is leaving the market open for the Cloud vendors to try and disrupt the Content Management market.

What I haven’t delved into is that the primary reason we have been failing is also the key to the potential success of the Cloud vendors…Records Management.

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Addressing Denials by an ECM Disruptee

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Lane Severson posted a rebuttal to my statement that Information Management has Failed. My first thought is that he doesn’t see it. That was also my second thought. Then I remembered a truth about disruptions that I shared on Twitter the other day,

The very nature of Disruptions is that those being disrupted live in denial until it is too late.

Lane is caught in the disruption. He works for Doculabs who makes money by being good at helping customers select and implement traditional Content Management systems. A shift to the cloud means a change to the expertise they deliver.

Still, Lane is pretty smart and his points deserved to be addressed.

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Box Isn’t Disrupting Because of the Cloud

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I recently realized this truth which seems both contradictory and obvious at the same time. Box and the other cloud vendors aren’t disrupting the industry because they are Cloud/Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) vendors, they are disrupting it because they put people ahead of the Enterprise.

Think on it a minute. I talked about this in my AIIM keynote but I didn’t link it all together. SaaS may be the disruptive technology but it is the ease-of-use built into the applications themselves that is giving them market share.

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Snowden, the NSA, and Ethics

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Before I get any deeper, I am not here to discuss whether or not Edward Snowden should have released the classified material. That is a debate for another day and another forum.

I am going to say that Snowden violated some of the core ethical principals of the Information Technology as a whole. It wasn’t the releasing of the PRISM slides that angers me. It is the fact that a Systems Administrator should not have been aware of the presentation in the first place.

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), with whom I’ve been a member longer than AIIM, has a published Code of Ethics. It is long and covers all sorts of situations in which members may find themselves. Section 1.8, Honor Confidentiality, applies to Snowden:

The principle of honesty extends to issues of confidentiality of information whenever one has made an explicit promise to honor confidentiality or, implicitly, when private information not directly related to the performance of one’s duties becomes available.

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Review: The New Kingmakers

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newkingmakers

I will admit that I have been following what Stephen O’Grady and James Governor have been doing over at Redmonk for quite some time. They were doing for developers what I wish people had been doing when I was a developer. When Stephen published his book, I promptly went out and got it…and then had to wait to find time to read it.

I am so glad that I did. It took a little more time to get around to writing this review, but it is important to write because The New Kingmakers is full of truth. What Stephen has written about is the critical start of the trend we are seeing all over the world of technology.

Before I go into that, let me talk about the book.

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The White Board Reality

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Recently, Ron Miller wrote a nice little article explaining that there is no need for collaboration to be done in the same room anymore. He says, based off of a tweet of mine, that those that think that face-to-face interaction is needed are living in a White Board Fallacy.

Well, I hate to break it to Ron but he’s fallen in love with marketing hype and his lower complexity of collaboration. I think Ron is a great guy and a wonderful writer, but his personal experience and collection of anecdotes only goes so far.

Cold Shower of Reality

Ron is a writer. He works on articles and interviews people. This is readily done via Skype. When editing an article, or having one edited, even email works for this level with no problem.

But collaboration isn’t always so easy.

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The AIIM Website Tribulations

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If you’ve been to the AIIM Website recently, you may have seen this message:

Thank you for your patience as we undergo a major system migration to improve the services we bring you. We ARE available to assist you if you encounter any problems.

While a majority of the issues have  been resolved, the message is still there until I am 100% sure that every open ticket is unrelated to the migration.

What migration do you ask?

The one I hinted earlier this year when I talked about AIIM’s Website Performance. The migration is part of our long-term plan to improve the services we provide to our members.

The future is here but the ride has been bumpier than expected.

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Information Management has Failed

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New PictureIn March, I gave a keynote at the annual AIIM Conference. It was based upon my post, Silicon Valley’s War on the Enterprise. I’ve been hoping to share the video with everyone, but that doesn’t seem probable due to some bad luck.

Given that it is a very text-light presentation, I am going to try something new. I’m going to walked you through the whole thing…..

This is War

Seriously, it is.

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Six Years of Pie

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You may not know it looking at my last two months of activity, or lack of it, but I’ve been writing, tweeting, and generally being loudly opinionated for the past six years. What started as just a way to vent my opinion over the direction of EMC/Documentum has become a platform for trying to push for change in the industry.

Thing is, the change is here. This June I’m going to pull my best Howard Beale and I’m going lay out why things are changing and why we can’t act as if it isn’t or that we have control.

But before all that, let’s review what has come before.

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