This is the work part. Posts here relate to the craft of my career and profession.
This is a rant. I rarely write rants, but here is one. It is based on one of my largest pet peeves in the technology industry. It is about a commonly accepted term and not about the people who use it.
It is about “CMS”. This is a term that for many is synonymous with Web Content Management. This just gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. Let me illustrate.
There has been a lot of debate of late on Twitter about whether or not WordPress is a CMS (ignoring the “WCM v CMS v ???” issue for now). Peter Monks is an proponent against the concept [Edit: He isn’t, see comments], as is Irina Guseva, a senior editor for CMS Wire. Ron Miller over at Fierce Content Management says that WordPress is a CMS and Tony Byrne at CMS Watch says it is for a simple reason: Many organizations are using WordPress as a CMS. That makes it a CMS.
That is a fallacious argument. I’ll explain why in a second, but some important facts. This blog, Word of Pie, is hosted by WordPress.com and I love it. If I decided to host the blog personally, I would use WordPress. For my blogging needs, it is perfect.
So do not read into any of this as an indictment against WordPress.
This is going to be a busy week for me. I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary). The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference. The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.
Before I jump into it, a funny little joke. When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face. They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8. Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7” reference.)
Haven’t I Heard This Before?
So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side. I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies. I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.
When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:
It is already happening, and I couldn’t be happier. There are CMIS-base custom clients being developed and released that are taking some of the pain out of using ECM systems. I’m not talking about open source clients, but commercial clients with dedicated teams and one goal, to make money.
I know that there is pain in the use of ECM systems, and not just because I use them. I know this because of one simple metric; In my list my most successful ECM projects, the top of the list is dominated by systems that do not use the default user interface. I’m not talking about customized clients. I’m talking CUSTOM clients.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Box.net. In case you missed it, I basically called their term for their solution, which I refuse to use again, “market speak” and hype while implying much worse.
A week later, Aaron Levie, the CEO and cofounder of Box.net, was interviewed on Fierce Content Management. Here he espoused a solid vision for Box’s hosted version of Content Management, though that term was heavily featured, again.
During all this, a very surprising thing thing happened, Aaron contacted me and asked if we could setup a time to chat so that I might better understand their vision. I accepted his offer. Our scheduled meshed today and I thought I would share.
Last week I went to the Drug Information Association’s conference on Electronic Document Management (DIA EDM). I was there to get my feet wet again in the pharmaceutical industry. I wanted to see what had changed and how things had evolved.
I learned a few things. The first was that the drivers are basically the same in the industry as they were a few years back. I’m still digesting the material on the conference, and there should be more on what I learned later. The most important thing that I learned wasn’t about Clinical Research Organizations or any other of the latest trends in managing electronic submissions.
It was in marketing.
Yesterday, Fierce Content Management published an article that I wrote entitled The Future of CMIS. I discussed what I see as a very busy, and important, year for CMIS. It is a good article, at least on the Scale of Pie, and I am not going to be regurgitating it here for you.
Instead, I feel the need to clarify an inconsistency. In the article I stated [bold added]:
The past year was a good year for the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The specification was released for public review and efforts began to build an Open Source implementation of CMIS, Apache Chemistry. The next year promises to be even bigger…
I even proclaim that The future is now. That is all well and good, but there is one thing hanging over that statement. I predicted in my mandatory 2010 predictions post that:
2010 Will Not be the Year of CMIS
These statements appear to contradict each other. Now I could just say that my thinking has evolved and excuse myself that way, but I’m not. I’m sticking with both statements.
Every now and then, I read a post/article/tweet that makes me slam my head against the nearest hard surface. The culprit this time was an article titled Cloud Content Management to Challenge ECM?
I saw the title and was intrigued. I then read it and realized that the author had started falling for some market speak. I quickly determined that the fault was not completely with the author. Yes, they had fallen under the spell of some marketing and should have been strong enough to resist. The real villian here? Box.
Okay, lets think this through, logically. First, let’s look at Box’s definition of Cloud Content Management. When you look at it, you see them describing a SaaS offering. More importantly, you are seeing them talk about the advantages of hosting it on the internet as opposed to your server room.
As promised, here is the “official” announcement of what the iECM Committee is doing this year for CMIS demo at the AIIM Expo. This year we are trying to create a reference application that we can actually use for a long time and grow with new functionality.
We are looking for participants to help us out. Read through and see if you would like to contribute. There is also be a formal presentation on the demo scheduled for the AIIM Conference, and there will most likely be a panel discussion like the one held last year.
Here we go. I copied it here, but you can download the PDF version if you prefer.
To analyze and evaluate the CMIS standard in terms of it usability and the benefits of employing CMIS in the development of new services and applications which leverage one or more existing ECM systems; and to develop experience reports that capture best practices in the use of CMIS and CMIS compliant products.
I’ve published a lot on the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard since it’s initial public announcement in September of 2008. One problem is that a lot of that content is spread out in multiple blog posts.
Well Thomas Pole, the AIIM iECM Committee chair, and I have written a whitepaper talking about the demo that the committee built for the AIIM Conference last year. It talks about the ups and downs of designing and building the demo. It classifies the demonstration using the three fundamental CMIS use cases that I crafted this past summer and talks about what the upcoming demonstration is going to achieve.
If you want to read it, you can download the PDF version right here.
Did I mention that it has pretty pictures?
The section talking about the future is excerpted below. There will be a more detailed post on that shortly.
Word of Pie 