Content Analytics

Talking Agile Content Services at NCC-AIIM

[Originally published on the TeraThink blog]Russ Stalters presenting at January 2018 NCC-AIIM meeting

Recently, I was at the local NCC-AIIM Chapter meeting. Russ Stalters was visiting from Texas and shared the story about how he created a new, 200+ person, data management team for the BP Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. A separate organizational entity from BP, the organization was stood up in 90 days from vision to operation. It was an impressive tale involving massive amounts of information being absorbed and managed in a highly visible environment.

As Russ spoke, it became clear that two of the key lessons were around agile processes and content analytics. It generated some great discussion that took us well past the scheduled time. I wanted to take some time to share some of the highlights.

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Acquisition of Recommind by Open Text Opens Things Up

First the basics. Open Text has purchase Recommind, a strong player in the eDiscovery space. This is Open Text’s second significant acquisition in the past few months, the other being when Open Text purchased some customer experience software components from HP including Interwoven and MediaBin. We knew more acquisitions were coming after they then announced that they were raising $600 million and are planning to spend upwards of $3 billion on acquisitions over the next five years.

Yep, the old Open Text is back. They are buying Recommind for only $163 million, meaning they have more money. Before we discuss the elephant in the room, let’s look at what this acquisition means for Open Text.

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Content Analytics at the AIIM 2016 Conference

[Originally published on the TeraThink blog]

When in New Orleans, this is one of the healthier optionsI attended the annual AIIM Conference recently in New Orleans. As expected, it was a great event with a lot of interesting presentations. I spent a lot of time talking to people, learning what they were doing, how they were achieving success, and hearing about what wasn’t working. I may also have had a beignet or two.

My chief interest was content analytics. There has been a lot of buzz in the industry regarding this capability and I wanted to learn how real it was among practitioners. It seems like a simple concept; Take the classification technology from eDiscovery tools and apply it at the front end of the business process. Instead of reacting, become proactive in analyzing and acting upon content.

I learned that it is going to take some pioneers to make this a reality.

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A Whole New World, Again

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Chris Pine as Captain KirkWhile the industry was aflutter talking about the fall and rise of the CIP certification, I was planning my next big thing. My next big thing has happened and I am now a director at IBC, a DBS Company. [Note: IBC later rebranded as Dominion Consulting].

What does that mean? Well it means that I’ve joined a team of people that focus on solving problems, regardless of scale. One observation from a client regarding IBC was that they solve problems that need solving. That fits nicely with my goal to make things work.

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Box Just Threw Down the Gauntlet

Clint Eastwood as Dirty HarryLast week, Box held their annual conference. Many announcements were expected and the announcement of Workflow coming to Box in 2015 was quite exciting. If you want a high-level look at everything that happened, check out Chris Walker’s quick thoughts on BoxWorks.

None of that is why I am writing this post.

Buried in the wave of tweets were two game-changing announcements. Box announced Retention Management and Auto-Classification of Content.

That’s right. Information Governance behind the scenes on an application that people actually use AND a way to get content in the right retention bucket without people having to intervene.

All in the cloud.

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Content Management Step 2, Organize that Information

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Donuts in a Krispy Kreme storeI talked last week how the first, and more critical, step of any Content Management System (CMS) is to actually capture information in the system. After it has been captured, information needs to be organized and categorized, which leads to the proper application of Information Governance principles.

The question is, How do we organize and categorize information today?

The simple answer is, Poorly.

This isn’t an indictment against the newer cloud vendors like Box and Google that don’t have a way for people to categorize information outside of tags and a folder hierarchy. The problem goes deeper. This is a problem born from complex metadata schemes and the desire to categorize something into a system that can appear as complex as the Dewey Decimal system.

This is as much about process as technology.

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The Unreality of Web 4.0

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Another quick little rant that I’ve been saving up…..

We all love new things. Once the Internet was new and it was fun. We were learning all sorts of things. We had no idea of the potential. I thought, incorrectly, that the Web would become a giant library of linked information (similar to the “semantic” web) but that was it. I underestimated the innovation to come.

Then came eCommerce followed by Web 2.0. Both were innovations as we went from Informational to Transactional and finally to Conversational versions of the Web. Web 2.0 definitely changed how we use the Internet and has provided a means for so many people, like my old relatives, to become regular Internet users.

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