For every success story on the move towards social business, there are more examples where collaborative software didn’t take off. When you sit down and ask why, it becomes apparent that the issue isn’t always that people don’t want to collaborate. They just don’t want to do it in a forced manner.
I attended the Greater Washington, DC ARMA Spring Seminar recently and was able to participate in a lot of discussions around governing email. Even after all these years, many organizations don’t have email under control.
As I was sharing details from this event on twitter, I received an interesting response from Gina Minks over at Dell.
@piewords I thought email was dead?
I laughed a little at this response. We have all heard many times about email’s demise over the years. I realized…
.@gminks Nope. Email is like Godzilla. Huge, lumbering, & always around for a derivative sequel #ECM
— Laurence Hart (@piewords) March 26, 2014
When you get down to it, email isn’t going anywhere.
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.
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.
One of the joys of working for AIIM is attending a wide variety of events. In fact, one of the unexpected joys is is the board meeting.
The reason is it brings a lot of smart people in one room to talk about the Information industry’s direction. Every single person there genuinely cares about the future of the industry.
As a result, we have a lot of good discussions on the drivers moving the industry forward. Last year, prior to my joining AIIM, it was observed that Big Data, Social, Cloud, and Mobile were emerging and important issues that Information Professionals are having to start addressing.
This year, as we reviewed the list to see if the items were still relevant, we turned these concepts on their head.
Last week I called SharePoint a legacy system and that there were many document graveyards/coffins out there built upon SharePoint. I also said that SharePoint was just the latest Content Management system to host document graveyards. This lead to an entertaining discussion as well as related articles by Ron Miller questioning the point of Content Management and Billy Cripe discussing the need for a new focus for Content Management Systems.
Before moving forward, I want to clarify. I was not slighting SharePoint. If anything, it was a recognition of what SharePoint has achieved as a legitimate Content Management system.
Let’s now take a step back and look at keeping Content alive.
After waking up to discover that I had a sick kid, I decided to spend my Martin Luther King holiday relaxing and making sure the kid got some rest. I made the mistake of logging onto twitter and retweeting something by Melissa Webster from today’s Lotusphere 2012 conference:
A.Rennie “Content at rest = cost, content in motion = value”, “Sharepoint is today’s document coffin”. Social ->relevancy, currency
The tweet was read by Gabor Fari who took immediate dislike to the tweet. Two facts that are important to know before proceeding. Gabor works for Microsoft and while I have worked with all major versions of SharePoint, most of my experience is with platforms that were mature when SharePoint was first released.
I’m going to recount some points of the discussion and expound now that I’m not limited by 140 characters. If you want to see the tweets, check both his and my tweets from Jan 16.
I always like looking over a new analyst report. While I don’t always put much faith in where the dots are on the graph, I can always count on:
Forrester has usually been pretty good. They list the categories and share the scores. While I don’t always agree with the weighting of the scores, it is always interesting.
Now I have an exception to prove the rule, the Mobile Collaboration Wave. It was, in short, nearly useless. I think the tone was set with these quotes:
We included vendors in four collaboration categories: document-based collaboration, webconferencing, videoconferencing, and activity streams.
…
We evaluated only the mobile characteristics, not the collaboration category features.
To sum up, they reviewed a lot of different products as tightly related as everything under the “Enterprise 2.0” banner and didn’t evaluate how well they actually worked.
Time for Jeetu Patel’s keynote. Expecting some more details on yesterday’s announcements. Not expecting anything earth-shattering, just some more insight into what questions I need to be asking next. Not going to repeat details from Rick’s keynote in these notes.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the session we have been waiting for, the keynote. Will be interesting to hear what Rick Devenuti says. I already know he is a better presenter than Mark Lewis, but let’s focus on the content. Based upon what I heard from the European Momentum and saw at AIIM, it should be better.
This is just the notes. Analysis will follow later. Enjoy.
And you thought I wasn’t going to blog anymore…WRONG! Just getting practical. I’m also going to be dumping my half-crazed ramblings that I started writing but never got into a coherent state. This is the first of those. Enjoy…
There is a lot of uncertainty in the Information Management space these days. Is Case Management the future of Enterprise Content Management? How much will SharePoint 2010 impact the market? Where is all of this Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud hype going to take us? The one factor that has not changed is the need for people to collaborate online to get work done. The real question is, why is it sometimes so hard to deploy a collaborative solution?
Word of Pie 