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This is the work part. Posts here relate to the craft of my career and profession.

Preaching to the Content Management Choir

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image Been doing some thinking and I’ve decided that my blog is worthless. I have been talking about things that I’ve covered before and things that practitioners in the industry pretty much take as a given. I occasionally manage to string things together in a new way, but very little is truly new at this point.

The reason why is fairly simple. As an industry, we are facing the same technical challenges that we faced when I started this blog. There are still no vendors that can readily solve those challenges today. There is a lot of promise out there, but promise isn’t something that I can take and implement for clients.

So what is the point of talking about all of this?

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Splintering of the Content Management Market

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Life was so easy 10 years ago in this market. Web Content Management was simply publishing unless you were one of those companies doing business online. Enterprise Content Management wasn’t a reality, but we thought it was just waiting for the blending of the core technical capabilities. When it came to selecting a technology, it was a simple matter of matching capabilities with requirements.

Today, Web Content Management is much more complicated. ECM is more “challenging” than we thought it would be to execute. When it comes to selecting solutions, the traditional vendors usually can check every box but it is slightly more complicated. Do you want open source? Do you want to be in the cloud? These questions are frequently asked by users. Those questions have re-segregated the Content Management market.

None of this is really new, but let’s look at the impact to the consulting world.

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Take a Break from ECM

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I have been trying to shift the topic away from “Enterprise” Content Management for a while now. I’ve said that it isn’t something you can buy because it is a strategy. I’ve said that you don’t need a single Content Management System (CMS) platform to implement your strategy. I even gave a presentation at AIIM where I said that the tech gets in the way.

I just read a great post by Lane Severson on the term ECM and the ongoing debates. In some ways he wants to get rid of the term and completely remove it from the dialog. He essentially calls ECM a vestigial term that no longer serves a purpose but is still around.

Well, I’m done. I’m not debating the term any more. It is what it is. What people are missing isn’t that the term is invalid. The problem is that there is a gap between our ability to execute and the “ideal” of ECM.

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Changes at info360, Yee Olde AIIM Conference

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I have traditional gone to the annual AIIM conference, info360, in order to quiz/grill/annoy the vendors and network with people. The presentations were always secondary. After all, how many times can you see a presentation on the ROI of an invoice processing system?image

The last two years, I was there evangelizing CMIS to the community, but I basically skipped most of the sessions because they were the same thing as past years. Oh, Real Story Group was always there offering some honest insights, but most of the information the present you can get just by following them throughout the year (which you ought to be doing).

This year was different. The first difference was I was presenting something that clearly wasn’t a case study or CMIS. What made it better was that mine wasn’t the only presentation that was different. There were tracks on Mobile, Cloud, and Social Media. You couldn’t escape those terms this year but in previous years they weren’t barely present.

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Looking to the Future of Content Management

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Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at the info360 Conference. My topic was The Future of Content Management, with the cheesy tagline of Cloudy with a Chance of Innovation. [I’m going to ramble a bit, the the slides are below].

This presentation was originally conceived when I was tired of not seeing a solid keynote/vision for the Content Management industry. The Web folk have a vision, even if they can’t agree upon a name for that vision. Wanting one, I wrote An ECM Keynote for 2010 last summer. I took that post and presented, Revisiting “Enterprise” Content Management in a 2.0 World at Gilbane this past fall. My presentation at AIIM was an updated version of that presentation.

What changed? A realization that began when I updated the presentation and crystallized at the conference. The thought was inspired by, of all people, Andrew Chapman and his posts on ECM as a Commodity. The question he asks is this…

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Using a Platform for an ECM Strategy

As I covered in my last post, Implementing an ECM Strategy without a Platform, you don’t need an Enterprise CMS Platform to implement a successful Enterprise Content Management Strategy. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use one or that using one would be the wrong approach. Just like there is no one-size-fits-all CMS, there is no single way to define and implement an ECM Strategy.

I am going to look at this in two stages. The first is going to focus on the purpose of and foundation for an Enterprise CMS Platform. The second is going to look at what capabilities a CMS needs in order to be a Platform.

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Implementing an ECM Strategy without a Platform

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It has been stated here at the Word, and elsewhere, that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy. You can’t buy Enterprise Content Management. You can buy products that support an ECM Strategy, but without a blueprint, it is just a bunch of stuff.

Semantics aside, do you need a central Content Management System (CMS) to serve as the basis for implementing the strategy? This is a subtle way of asking if I need to buy a big honkin’ CMS which just happens to be marketed as ECM. I prefer to call those products Enterprise CMS Platforms. The term ECM Platform is so 2010.

The thing is, you don’t need an Enterprise CMS Platform to implement an ECM Strategy. Heck, you can do it with what you have now.

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Throwing ECM Terminology Around Like Candy

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image Been a while since I posted anything. Having a new kid will do that to a person. I read an article last week that all but set me off. Luckily I didn’t have time to write it because I am going to be biting the hands that feed me, or at least ones that have been nice to me.

The article in question was published on CMSWire. When I saw the title, The Future of ECM: Looking Less and Less like SharePoint?, I was very interested. Then I started reading and nearly died.

SharePoint as “Traditional” ECM

First off, I’m going to state that SharePoint can readily be used as a Content Management System. When I compare SharePoint’s capabilities with features that I documented when I wasn’t thinking about SharePoint, it fairs well.

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Solving Revenue Cycle Management with Documentum

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Right now, I am sitting at a confluence of events. Not earth-shattering events like those impacting the Muslim and Arab worlds right now, but a confluence nonetheless.  In my last post, I talked about why it might be worth investing in a partnership with EMC right now, given the right circumstances. That has happened and today my company announced a new solution for Health IT, the afore-mentioned Revenue Cycle Management, built on EMC’s Documentum xCP platform.

So how did this come to pass? Let’s look back over the past year.

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Investing in an EMC-Documentum Partnership

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There has been a lot of talk over the past year, especially on my blog, about the issues with the traditional vendors.  While I’ve focused on EMC, most of these issues face every Content Management platform vendor.  The challenges of from the Open Source vendors and the emergence of the cloud as a concept broader than simple hosting have beset the establishment.

The thing is, the vendors are not in immediate trouble.  There are a lot of organizations that require more functionality, trust, and faith than Open Source or cloud vendors can provide.  For the next several years, as long as the older vendors can provide value and show progress towards a viable future, they are going to be a significant piece of the Content Management landscape.

With that in mind, let’s look at EMC and its allure as a real partner.

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