System Adoption, More Than Yes or No

To say I am behind in my reading is like saying the ocean is wet, a bit of an understatement. Still, I hope to get through some of it regularly because usually if it makes its way to my stack of things to read it has some redeeming qualities.

Today I ran across an item that was worth the wait. I was reading the November 2011 edition of Communications, the journal published by the Association of Computing Management, when I came across the article Managing IS Adoption in Ambivalent Groups. Great! I’m getting ready to role out a major system and I’m seeking to invigorate an existing system.

This article by DongBack Seo, Albert Boonstra, and Marjolein Offenbeek, wasn’t full of solutions but it did make me realize that I had only been looking at part of the problem.

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A Night with Scott Berkun

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imageEarlier this week, I attended an event hosted by the DC chapter of the User Experience Professionals Association. I’ll admit that user experience has always been something someone else was in charge of on my projects. Even at AIIM, I manage to have someone on staff who knows it well enough to keep tabs on it.

When my web designer told me that Scott Berkun was speaking at the next meeting, I jumped at the opportunity. I’ve been a fan, since I started following him during his Confessions of a Public Speaker days. I never read the book due to time (still in my future plans), but I enjoyed his insights on his blog.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about Scott is that I agree with almost everything he says. Here was a person spouting the things I have strived to follow in my career and people were listening. The difference?

Scott can explain it MUCH better than I can.

Really, that is the biggest difference. I can talk to someone, give them advice, and they’ll understand it, but that is interactive. Scott can get it into a short post where anyone can grasp the concept.

Where I take 600 words, Scott can explain things in 200. Where people may come away from my post without fully understanding the point I was trying to make, Scott’s point are clear and concise.

That skill is invaluable and that skill was also on display that evening.

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Box, Syncplicity, and EMC

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imageThis post has been a long time coming but it really took me a while to come to grips with all the implications of the Synplicity acquisition, and there are many. (Plus there is this whole day-job thing with AIIM). There are really three angles to take when looking at the acquisition.

  1. What this does for EMC’s Content Management cloud strategy?
  2. What this means for EMC’s technology stack?
  3. The impact on the nascent cloud-based Content Management space?

Without further adieu, let’s dive in and see what we can figure out.

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What Being a Certified Information Professional Says

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoIt’s been almost six months since I took and passed the CIP exam, becoming a Certified Information Professional. At that time I said I thought it was a valid measure of someone’s worth as an Information Professional. Since then, everyone I’ve talked to that has taken the exam has concurred.

If it is a valid measure, then those who have become a CIP are the kind of person you want in a senior role on any Information-centric project. Right? Is that a true statement?

What about a Big Data project?

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You are Marketing, not Sales

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I was trying to catch-up on some of my reading the other day when I came across this article from ASEA (American Society of Association Executives) talking about how We’re All in Sales Now. The article covers the changing roles of the Association staffer and how everyone is now a sales person.

Except we’re not.

We are all marketing. This may seem like a subtle difference, but it is a critical one that needs to be made. The end-game and objectives are different. They need to be measured differently.

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Yammer and Microsoft, a Win for Both Sides

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There is going to be no shortage of analysis of Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer. I’m not going to take time to parse it all. I do want to share some quick thoughts on the acquisition while everything is still fresh on my mind and the deal seems more likely to be completed.

Yammer Cashing Out

Yammer was one of the pioneers in the the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business space. The issue that over the years as the space has evolved, the amount of evolution coming from Yammer has been limited. Their product has gotten better but they remain, at their core, a micro blogging service.

imageThe space has been moving on though. People have been learning that all these Social Business tools work best when they are part of the business process, not when they are on their own. With Yammer, you may produce less email and generate greater visibility into what people are doing in the organization, but you also have a new inbox to check. It is just one more window to keep open.

Let’s face it. Chatter turned SalesForce into a social platform. Yammer has been stuck in tool mode.

Yammer was facing a stiff uphill battle to remain relevant over the next several years. They seem to have been heading in the right direction, but there were a lot of questions about whether or not they could evolve fast enough to keep up.

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The Grass Probably isn’t Greener with that System

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imageThe other morning as I walked my son to school, I took on a little experiment. You see, every day I walk out my door and I see every imperfection in my lawn. I see the dead spots from where a dehydrated dog relieved themselves on the grass. I see the thin areas that are still recovering from the drought two years ago. I also see the beginning of crabgrass that I need to break down and fight soon.

When I look down the street, I see lawns that look greener and richer. As I walked my son to school that morning, I looked closer. Some lawns had green from lots of clover. Other had the same dead spots, they just weren’t visible at a distance. In general, most looked worse than mine upon closer inspection. There were lawns that were better, but that’s okay. I don’t strive to have the best lawn, just a good lawn by my standards and the standards of my neighborhood.

This applies to enterprise software of all flavors. You system is never perfect, it has flaws. Of course, every system has flaws, you just may not know what they are. That other system may look better but that’s because you are seeing the good side.

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Does Your Enterprise Cloud System Respond to Your Changing World?

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imageIn the last week, I’ve been busy getting a more hands-on feel for the systems at AIIM. Our system engineer/admin left for greener pastures. This is a fact of life in any organization, people leave.

During the course of the past week, I’ve been busy transitioning control over various systems to other staff members. During the course of this we’ve been updating passwords and performing a quick audit for old user accounts.

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You Can’t Sell a Platform to Users

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imageBeen working on building a new, solid, backbone for AIIM’s information since I joined as CIO. We finally reached the stage for detailed demos last week. While extremely time consuming, it was also extremely educational.

One of the things I hadn’t expected to be so obvious is the right and wrong way to demonstrate a solution built upon a platform. In fact, the dichotomy was so severe that almost every person not giving the demo commented upon it.

I thought I would share the two approaches that we witnessed and then relate it back to the Content Management industry of the last 10+ years. Before I get into that, I’ll provide some context in the form of the project background.

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The Lost Decade of ECM

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imageOf the three posts rattling around in my head, this would be the third in order if I had to set a preferred order. Problem is, one idea takes more effort to develop while the other actually needs to refer to items in this post.

I spoke last week at Momentum in Las Vegas as part of EMC World. Instead of talking about Documentum or how I had worked with a client to solve a problem, I talked about the changing landscape of the Information Industry. The SlideShare version of the presentation is at the end of this post but I wanted to talk about the Lost Decade first.

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