Information

What is Content?

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A couple months back, Deane Barker wrote an article where he declared himself a Content Management Professional. This is a true statement by every definition of the term I have ever encountered. If that was all there was to it, this would be a boring post.

Deane then made the mistake of defining Content.

I can’t really fault Deane because I am going to make the same mistake in a few paragraphs. Everyone in the Content Profession eventually writes about the very nature of the work we are doing. Some do it to establish a reputation as a leader. Others do it in order to support a point.

I do it out of hope that by coming to some sort of agreement, we can better solve the Content problem.

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When is 30% Better Than 80%?

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There is a basic misconception that is plaguing the Content Management industry. This misconception is that 80% is better than 30%. Without context, it doesn’t seem like much of a misconception, but trust me, it is a problem.

The missing context? What percentage of features that organizations are looking for does a solution have out-of-the-box?

The answer is never 100% unless you are the ONE organization that matches the generic solution template. Still, you can usually find a solution that gets pretty close if you tweak a few internal business rules that are more of a business tradition than an actual need.

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Fresh Start with Alfresco

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After announcing my departure from AIIM yesterday, today I start my next adventure. As you can tell from the title, it is with Alfresco. That still leaves open a lot of questions.

  • Why Alfresco?
  • What will Pie be doing at Alfresco?
  • Won’t having Pie working with Peter Monks be a bit odd?

I shall take time to answer them all. I will also answer the Why isn’t Pie taking any time off? question. That one is simple. I am very excited and I wanted to get started as soon as possible.

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Box Defends Against Office 365

In case you missed it, Box introduced some new pricing last week. While the details are not relevant right now, the key detail was that if you have only 10 people, your price per user is now $5. This is great if you are a small shop because you don’t need as many features and you do need secure sharing.

So why bring Office 365 into this? Because this new price range is same as the Office 365 Small Business tier. Sure you can get more with Office 365, but Box still has that “easy to use” feature going for it.

Still, why Office 365? Because Office 365 is great for small shops. It bundles email with SharePoint and Lync. For a organizations with minimal to no infrastructure, it is a very quick setup and before you know it, you have your basic productivity tools.

I suspect that Box is looking at Microsoft as the big Gorilla in the corner. If they aren’t then they should be doing that. Microsoft has a decent cloud solution and a ton of money. It should be possible to fix SkyDrive, make an interface that works on Apple, and market to the same people that Box targets.

Box used to market against SharePoint to get attention. Now they need to work against them to make sure they stay safe.

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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Looking at the Legacy Content Management Vendors

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In my predictions for 2013, I made the following prediction on the future of the traditional “leaders” in the Content Management space.

First Major On-Premises Traditional ECM Vendor will become Obsolete: I know, obvious right? Statistically speaking, one of those vendors will likely still be a market leader in 10 years. In 2013, we’ll see our next elimination for that spot (though they will be in denial). To make this easier to measure, I’ll name the contenders: EMC, IBM, Open Text, and Oracle. Microsoft falls into this category but it won’t be them, at least not in 2013.

Aside from simple statistical probability, I saw a few things this fall that led to this prediction.

  1. Talked to people attending the IBM Information OnDemand while I was in Las Vegas.
  2. Attended the Open Text conference in Orlando.
  3. Watched the news out of Momentum Europe.
  4. Kept my eyes open.

What I’ve seen is a scary amount of consistency among the players.

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Future of the Cloud, Suite or Best of Breed?

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The last few weeks have been very interesting. Oracle held their annual conference, followed by SalesForce, and then Box. It was a good time to be in San Francisco as you had three distinct approaches to helping the Enterprise.

  • Oracle, for all the jokes around them “discovering” the cloud this year, offered a story about their tight stack of hardware and software.
  • SalesForce announced Chatterbox which makes Content Management a native feature to their platform.
  • Box announced new partners and new tools for integrating Box with all sorts of other cloud-based applications.

What you have are two suites and a best of breed approach. A recent NY Times blog post on Open vs Closed covered the two approaches well. What is the right choice? What is the future?

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Records Management and the Cloud

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imageIt should be obvious to you if you’ve spent any time on this blog that I firmly believe the cloud is the future. It solves so many of the stumbling blocks and time consuming tasks that people face during implementations and ongoing growth that it is silly to think of a different future in the face of overwhelming volumes of information.

Still, things aren’t perfect in the world of the cloud. As of this writing, there is no system with solid Records Management (RM) capabilities. Sure, some older vendors offer hosted solutions but those aren’t cloud solutions, merely hosted.

The reason for this is two-fold. The first is that the current crop of cloud vendors are growing fairly quickly without RM features. The second, the calling card of vendors like Box is simplicity and Records Management is traditionally not simple.

The first reason is going to fade over the next couple of years. Before that happens, how do cloud vendors address the second issue? How do they make it simple for the users?

By changing the equation.

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Checking the Industry Trends

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I was playing with Google Trends the other day. I was curious what terms people were searching for on Google and how they related to the terms we seem to throw around the industry. This particular bout of curiosity stemmed from distinguishing between the technology and the business problems that people are trying to solve.

The first search was a set of standard terms we use when we talk about what we do on a regular basis.

  • Content Management, 1.00
  • Information Management, 1.52
  • Records Management, 0.32
  • ECM, 1.26 (Enterprise Content Management got 0.02)

It is a pretty consistent downward trend across the board. We can hypothesize as to why they are trending down, but I suspect it relates to the saturation of the term among those in the technology industry.

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