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Recently, Robin Bew, Chief Economist in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of The Economist magazine, posted the results of an EIU survey of large businesses.

With such a complex system as the world economy, I always have my doubts as to how useful research like this is, but an interesting statistic called out was:

Companies today earn a third of their revenues from overseas. In two years time that figure will have grown to 60%.

This information impacts the way I’m currently advising clients in at least two ways:

• If digital media is the primary marketing/communication vehicle world wide, and 33-60% of your revenue is likely to come from sources other than your own country, and therefore that media is likely to be consumed (in the case of US-based companies) in some other language than English… do you have a strategy to support multi-lingual content? At all? Without excessive costs and time delays for translation and localization? If not, what revenue, cost, and competitive opportunities are you missing?
  • Due to crowdsourcing techniques, and better, faster, cheaper and more directly integrated translation technology/workflow, it has never been easier to address this opportunity – but it does require the existing technical infrastructure and business-savvy to put together an intelligent content pipeline. If you have not looked into this in the last few years, you will be astonished by what is possible and at what price tag.
• Consumer and business behavior is not the same, worldwide. With an innovation hat on, do you really understand the needs of your ultimate customers, wherever they may live? Are your “innovations” user and need focused? (rather than product/company-focused, or “purely” demographics-focused)
  • Adoption of mobile technology, for example, and “smartphones” specifically, tends to lead in the United States, even though the cellular networks of the US lag behind other countries that have significantly greater (and cheaper) internet speeds. (This according to contacts I have in telecom – non-publishable/citeable stats).
  • Serving mobile customers (or employees, partners, suppliers) is still a dramatically underserved area – whether a smartphone or a “dumb” phone. There are many opportunities to think out of the retail store “box” (quite literally the “big box” stores), and traditional non-interactive media. Customer engagement, service, satisfaction, price-checking, order checking, etc., is still quite disconnected from the online vs. offline experience – even 15 years after the rise of the web. There is a real opportunity to leap beyond ignorance of the full power of the web on the desktop, and straight into the much faster growing world of mobile content and applications.

Have you looked far enough to see and act on these opportunities?

Whether you believe the rest of the macroeconomic and microeconomic predictions/analysis of The Economist or any other source – I don’t see any easy way to ignore the two above trends. Almost every inquiry which has come in to us in the last few months has been explicitly focused on these two areas – and the convergence/integration of these trends into the siloed infrastructure that most organizations have in place.

Converging and integrating to set the stage for rapid growth opportunities seems to finally be a consensus opportunity to power out of the economic troubles of the last 1-2 years (depending on industry and location). Both the cutting edge adopters and the laggards are running as fast as they can to take advantage of these opportunities… is your organization?

No Strategy = Less (No?) Opportunity

Are you ready? What have you done to prepare? Seen compelling reasons *not* to look at multi-lingual or mobile implications for your organization?

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

The Past, Present and Future of Adobe

With the acquisition of Day Software (highly scalable, standards and open source-oriented [not as deployment/sales model, but as underpinnings]), along with the late 2009 acquisition of Omniture (enterprise-class, quite high-end web analytics), Adobe clearly has their eyes beyond the deskop, with arguably the first major moves into server/cloud territory that they’ve executed on in many years.

Of course the question is… even if they have “best of breed” solutions in what they’re calling “customer experience management” (or CEM) – a decidely “big company/large enterprise” vision of customer engagement (or “marketing” as those who haven’t yet crested the new meme will still call it), can they actually pull it off?

Can they legitimately compete with the other “big (ol’) boys” of ECM/WCM such as ECM/Documentum, Oracle/Stellent, Autonomy/Interwoven, Open Text/Vignette, and the like?

Boundaries to Break, Skills to Sink Deep

The sales model is entirely different in enterprise/server-sales from the desktop and team-oriented, more consumer-oriented sales of most Adobe solutions, and although Adobe has some experience in the enterprise sales area, given their (long past) acquisition of Allaire (Cold Fusion), LiveCycle (born of various internal components of Adobe and one-off acqusitions of various parts, stretching back to 2001, and launching as a suite in 2005), and with the high-end web marketing folks of the enterprise via Omniture (a $1.8 Billion USD acquisition). Underestimating the sales cycle and re-aligning marketing/outreach to “sell” the new Adobe are classic traps that are not as easily avoided as they would seem – and all too many mergers/acquisitions that cross boundaries of sales mentality and market positioning #fail miserably in this regard, and the early focus of Adobe and the Macromedia acquisition from years past, with a focus on graphic/design tools for individuals and small teams, the core DNA is, in my opinion, anti-large enterprise. Time will tell how this shift works out – do they lose on the low-end and win on the high-end, or learn to juggle the spectrum?

The development model that Adobe has historically undertaken has been… sluggish, to say the least. Their cycle times make Microsoft’s 3 year cycles look swift, and with a desktop-centric view, their cross-platform (Mac vs. Windows) product roll-outs can and have been unsynchronized for years at a time – ironic given that PDF, Flash and AIR are all designed to be entirely platform neutral. As they embrace server-based solutions more completely, perhaps they will be able to apply more focus into a single lens (J2EE-based solutions), and tighten the development cycle.

Agile or Fragile?

Can Adobe continue to leverage the more agile developer talent from their recent acquisitions? Day’s mantra for the last year or so (aligned larger with Kevin Cochrane’s entree to the management team at Day) has been in agile development and agile marketing – can they successfully infect the parent company? Or will the Adobe waterfall drown them out? As a long time proponent of Agile (everything), I certainly hope so, but this is a massive cultural change issue – and large companies, in my experience, struggle mightily to change the development mindset to Agile from traditional “waterfall” development. Let’s hope the one-two punch of Day’s agile discipline and open source participation wins the (ahem) day at Adobe.

What’s in Their Wallet?

From a size/scale/staying power perspective, Adobe’s current market cap is at $15.5 Billion USD (NASDAQ:ADBE) as compared to Autonomy at $4.01 Billion USD (LON:AU), EMC at $42.01 Billion USD (NYSE:EMC), Open Text at $2.25 Billion USD (NASDAQ:OTEX) and Oracle at $121.94 Billion USD (ASDASD). In the grand scheme of most of their competition, they are on the small- to medium-marketsize.

Adobe is certainly well out of the world of the startup (fraught with peril and struggling for mere existence), and are operating in worlds that have mostly (or damn close) “crossed the chasm” into the mainstream.

There is still plenty of growth in the world of content, and they continue to have the ability to invest in making that future happen, not only monetarily (the benefits of a war chest), and with huge “mindshare” in digital content (server/enterprise credibility not withstanding).

Assuming a majority of the talent that comes with and stays at Adobe from their acquistions, they should continue to have fresh/modern skills and experience that bridge the gap from the origins of Adobe (desktop/small teams, and individual tools) to the new Adobe (focused on seamless experience, mobile, server, and customer/employee engagement).

Closed to Open

And while the Adobe of the past was primarily about proprietary formats (Photoshop, Pagemaker, InDesign, Framemaker, Allaire Cold Fusion, etc.), Day’s focus has been heavy on the open source world, as well as in involvement in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – a specification for improving interoperability between Enterprise Content Management systems -which is one of the convergence trends that is (finally!) gaining traction, as the buyers in the market of the last two years have finally begun to get it in their heads, and consequently into the seller/solution providers’ heads, that while they will continue to have silos (inadvertently or purposefully) of content… if the goal of an organization in 2010 and beyond is to provide customer or employee experiences, you absolutely MUST find some way to unify access to content – whether via CMIS, Federated Search, modern portals, or the like. Multi-platform access, seamless access, personalized – these are all areas where the combination of Adobe and Day holds the promise of serving people, rather than serving the acquistion of more raw technology (the typical buying organization’s approach).

Most of the grumblings I’ve seen about this acquisition thus far is in concerns that Adobe will kill Day’s involvement in open source and open standards. While both Day and Adobe deny this, again, it’s not really up to the stated goals of the acquisition – it’s in what happens when cultures collide, and if the support and uptake of a new mindset truly takes root, well after the acquisition has closed.

Wherefore Art Alfresco?

Another reverberation in the open source world, is the wonder as to what happened to the Alfresco and Adobe relationship? Up until this point, Alfresco had seemed a likely acquisition, given their partnership with Alfresco as the back-end and Adobe as the front-end in the 2008 OEM agreement relating to Adobe’s LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services offerings. Where will that relationship go from here? It’s anyone’s guess – as you can read over at an Alfresco blog post, the belief is that Day has been oriented more directly at Adobe’s customer engagement/customer experience model world, while Alfresco has been more about infrastructure and tools to support developers.

That’s a fair analogy, although at this point, while I’m a fan of developers having the tools and toolkits to do the job, I trust 21st century marketers and customer service managers to be far more oriented towards user success than I do anyone wearing a “pure” IT hat (and I used to be one of the IT purists – mea culpa). Thus far, no official word from Adobe on where the Alfresco relationship will go – and as a publicly traded company, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear why Alfresco or any other number of remaining independents did not make the acquisition list… at least not YET.

Embracing Managed Content

Last thought – I’ve seen some zings directed at Adobe and Day regarding the world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), specifically that the integration of Adobe and Day’s DAM solution is weaker than their competition, such as integrated DAM in Open Text’s suite of offerings.

To this comment I will say, stop trying to silo content in your enterprise – if you have to debate internally which silo to drop your content, DM, ECM, WCM, DAM, etc., then you have already so badly missed the point of any “content management” system of any kind, that you should take the time to back up and re-think your strategy. The more respositories/technologies that are thrown into the mix, the more likely you are to kill the purposes of manging content in the first place – decreased time to create/re-use content, faster processes, more consistent branding, etc.. For every ONE organization I’ve seen who has executed this well (as a buyer), I’ve seen FIFTY who have botched it.

DAM is DM (Document Management) on storage steroids, driven by metadata (the universal glue of ALL managed content) – with perhaps (if you’ve spent many millions), the ability to auto-transcribe or semantically identify the audio and/or video content above and beyond raw metadata (makes for great demos from Autonomy, but you probably can’t afford it, and really don’t need it).

The divide between DM, ECM, WCM and DAM is all in your mind until you start getting into fairly sophisticated and esoteric deployments where you are doing true, large-scale content re-use, with complex interdependencies in the final output/delivery of content.

In short, if you feel that the combined Adobe/Day DAM solution is not up to snuff – I’d be willing to bet that you are overcomplicating your perceived needs and resulting solution, or you are in the 1% of the world that really needs incredibly sophisticated DAM. If you happen to be in that camp, please contact me at 617-933-9655 – I’d love to understand what factors have impacted what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We can all learn from those both on the leading and trailing edges – so if I am missing something that truly makes DAM a differentiator for your managed business content, let’s surface some use cases to show what “real” DAM can do.

Alternative Takes on the News

Find other takes from analysts (official and otherwise – aka Bloggers) via:

• VentureBeat (an investment perspective – fairly lightweight)
• Jon On Tech (an integrator’s perspective – Jon’s a pragmatic guy)
• CMS Watch (via Apoorv Durga – one of the newer CMS Watch analysts – expressing similar doubts about the enterprise mindset of Adobe vs. it’s boxed software roots)
• Tim Anderson’s ITWriting (expressing hope for Day’s openness and REST strengths to penetrate Adobe’s proprietary nature)

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Day Software’s solutions, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If you’re not using Day for WCM/DAM and/or collaboration, but are solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How Information Architected Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Day and Adobe’s content offerings, are the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise -  which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We are vendor neutral, and more often that not, can help you find ways to make whatever technology investments you have already made, greatly outperform the end results you are currently experiencing.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together to solve your needs, whether customer, employee, partner or supplier-facing. It’s all content – manage it effectively, and get the technology out of your way.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

I have blogged about the concept often over the last few years, and originally began writing about it more than 15 years ago.  Many never seemed to quite get it – but slowly over the last few years more and more apps have emerged that clearly demonstrate the value of dynamic content delivery.  The latest is a free app known as Flipboard.

Flipboard is a personalized digital magazine, created by culling social media and content pertinent to the reader.  This is the future of publishing, and it will take off – of that I am sure.  But do not just take my word for it.  Flipboard has received many great reviews, and commentary , that like this post, positions Flipboard not just as an iPad app, but another step forward in dynamic content delivery.  Initial reaction has been so positive that the provider had to ask for patience with potential early “blips in service.”

- My point, I am not enamored with Flipboard per se – but am very excited to see yet another well done app come to the market that helps all of us experience the power of dynamic content delivery. Merge this with DAM and multimedia and the possibilities for new more effective ways to communicate are endless and the boundaries of ECM are stretched once again.

Oh yeah, the ECM nerd in me is again having a very good day.

We are dealing with a large and diverse collection of content in various stages of maturity, quality,  accuracy and accessibility. The organization readily realizes that years of ad hoc, manual and individual approaches to content management have resulted in a nearly chaotic collection of content and processes. Many issues exist, from a need for enterprise search and a centralized taxonomy, to strategies for content distribution. But a fundamental issue is the state of the collection of content itself.

Among the many repositories, valuable content resides amongst  dated, ambiguous, unapproved and at times contradictory content. A critical decision has been made to clean up the content repositories before addressing findability. The merit of beginning with the establishment of search and taxonomy, under a series of UIs, and using these to expedite the discovery of dated and inaccurate content and subsequently deleting it was debated, but a fundamental decision was made not to expose users to the “garbage”, but rather, first authenticate and clean up the content and subsequently use the findability tools to expose an “official body of quality content.”

But I am not blogging today simply to relay this experience.  While deep in thought about this situation, I heard a news story that brought this decision point to mind, and ignited in me a chance to blog about the BP oil “spill”.  (Hey its not a spill -  it’s an underwater gusher. Let’s call it what it is.)

Despite many strong opinions about this disaster, I have refrained from blogging about it because the charter of my blog is ECM.  Last week’s news, however, gave me my excuse to express opinion about this disaster, ala ECM.  BP is using a form of ECM and Web 2.0 to control public opinion. They have hired “reporters” to write about the “spill” from a “more positive” perspective. These “reporters” are using phrases to describe their experience watching the clean up effort such as: “…enjoyed the spectacular ballet at sea… dolphins swimming around us. Even a shark came along to watch the show.” (Watch the show? Try struggle to survive, in disgust?  And what’s with “ballet?”).  They have also reported that “… hotels have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams.”  According to other independent, i.e non-BP owned sources, this is simply not true and the local tourist trade is seriously hurting.

I keep my outrage and disgust about this entire situation in check – the point I want to raise here is this, if left unchecked and un-managed,  garbage such as this could potentially be retrieved as “fact.”  Content authentication and source identification are critical to a comprehensive ECM strategy.

Internet and intranet sites alike have the potential to provide access to a wealth of content, but can contain “garbage” among the “jewels”,  garbage as rank and lethal as the oil “spill” itself. (OK I snuck that in.)

Consumers of content need to be diligent in filtering garbage from “fact”, or be assured, as is the case with our client going forward, that systems are in place to control publication.  I am not advocating censorship, but ECM systems need to provide some approach to quality control, tailored to the scope and needs of individual situations. Fact checking,  authority and credentials of authors, and/or providing clear and blatant identification of authorship are all steps that can be taken to at least let the reader decide what is content and what is “garbage”.

In an earlier blog post, I directly addressed the need to authenticate content – of all types. As an issue  fundamentally critical to any and all collections of content – especially those that are “findable.”

In another earlier post I commented on the irony of bloggers who were “unhappy” with a regulation that compelled them to disclose any affiliations or gifts they  received in connection with their blog writing.

I have to say that at least in the case of BP, authors are identified as “BP Reporters”. So at least the potential is there for the reader to use a garbage filter on the consumption of content. – In the absence of content quality controls, such as those being implemented by my client, readers must beware.

So that said – here goes.  in keeping with tradition, I  have rolled-up my impression of the conference into an acronym.  This year the conference is characterized as

FAME

OK, to explain the acronym – lets start at the end;

E is for ENERGETIC

More so than ever before, I could not help but feel the energy level of the crowd (Yes crowd, this may have been the most popularly attended E2.0 conference yet), as the spilled out of sessions and milled around the hallways. MAybe it was all that fine Starbucks coffee that was being served – but I think not. Read on…

Now, back to the beginning;

F is for FUNDED

I came away with the impression that most of the attendees were not there for theoretical or introductory eduction – but practical insight on how to succeed with Enterprise 2.0.  Most seemed to be working on real and funded programs, (Which likely was the root of the aforementioned energy level).  I could not help but pick up on this during the various Q and A sessions and one-on-ones that I had.  Indeed, for the first time in 2 years I walked away with no less than 3 real leads – i.e. individuals seeking proposals for targeted consulting.

A is for APPLICATION-focused

The conference responded to the attendees’ focus on real-world issues with a nice mix of case studies, all focused on the leveraging of E2.0 functionality to specific business applications – many presentations in the form of real-world case studies.  My favorite was a group of three panelists all discussing how innovation was managed as a process within their respective organizations, partially based on collaborative software. Innovation Management was a popularly discussed business application at the conference, overall, including 2 of the keynotes.  The crowd was also coached several times by those pioneers of E2.0, the 2.0 Adoption Council members. Their experiences are always a conference highlight.

Lastly,

M is for MATURE

This is perhaps reflective of the other letters in the acronym.  Presentations were far more grounded in real-word examples, workshops were provided by industry veterans, and attendees came seeking practical advice to move funded project forward.  The market has matured.

Both of my presentations focused on implementation issues, each illustrated by real-world examples. The first looked at how culture impacts the implementation of E2.0. (Download slides)

My second presentation, based on a study done with the 2.0 Adoption Council, provided insights into deploying E2.0 in a controlled environment (in this case focusing on privacy issues in the European Union).

In the presentation I broadened the definition and scope of E2.0 (See slide 4) – positioning it within an integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy.  (ECM – at least the way I define it.)

In the end, I would have to say that Maturity was the big take away for me this year. In fact,  as I was presenting  E2.0 and Privacy it struck me, and I stated, that I believe the success of the E2.0 show – characterized by the maturing of its focus and audience,  will be the demise of the show or at least the label Enterprise 2.0. Typical of many nascent technologies – they are couched in definitions and frameworks that position them as  business applications. I draw the analogy to imaging. Circa 1990 imaging was discussed as if it were a business application.  People spoke in phrases such as “we do imaging”;  “I am the manager of our imaging application” . It may seem odd to think of scanning technology as a business application,  as opposed to a way to create and share content within business applications – but I assure you that was the case.  Imaging too had a trade show built entirely around it – less we forget that AIIM stands for the Association for information and IMAGE management.

The focus, attitudes and energy surrounding E2.0 are changing.  I do think that the success of E2.0  will be the demise of the conference, as we know it.  But this is a good thing, and it is actually critical. In its nascent state the market focused on E2.0 as an application: “Does your organization have an E2.0 project, budget, leader/champion?”.   This will fade into obscurity as we realize you don’t “do E2.0″, . you leverage this genre of capabilities to facilitate and strengthen and redefine business applications.  This was perhaps foreshadowed in the subtext of this year’s conference title,  “Business Powered by Collaboration.”

I give the conference 2 – 3 years tops,  before it either fades into history, or morphs into something related – but bigger.  This is not a reflection on the show, but market maturity.  In fact once again, Steve Wylie and crew are to be congratulated for their skillful orchestration and attention to detail.  The show was a huge success, but with success will come obscurity (and likely something bigger and better.)

As is always is the case when I speak on a webinar , I intended to provide repsonses to all unanswered questions posed by the audience, here in my blog.  Well, history was made two weeks ago. For the first time, all questions were answered during the one hour time slot. (You can listen to the webinar complete with Q and A here.)

So, this follow-up blog post focuses exclusively on the results of the quick polls we took of the approximately 200 attendees during the webinar.

It is interesting to note, right from the start, that  nearly half (47%) of the audience members worked in organizations that had an ECM strategy.

Why is this interesting? For a few reasons. First, it indicates that the ECM market still has lots of legs, and that the need to build a deliberate strategy for leveraging the capabilities of ECM still exists in many organizations . In fact, the fact that the 47% that have a strategy nonetheless attended this webinar indicates, IMHO, that a need to maintain that strategy and weigh new options is a important to many organizations. Again, IMHO, this is a best practice, to keep the ECM strategy green by continuously updating it in order to take advantage of lessons learned and emerging new technologies and techniques (among these today SharePoint and Cloud Computing.)

The value of having an ECM strategy is reflected in the percentage of organizations that have or  plan to have document-based applications between themselves and customers and partners.

I believe it is no coincidence that 48% of the webinar audience indicated that they planned on having document-based applications with their customers and partners. This is likely the same group (note the 1% difference in groups)  that indicated that they had an existing ECM strategy.  An organization might be able to cobble by with a lackadaiscal approach to managing its business content, but when that content is integrated into serious business applications, especially those that involve outside parties, a defined strategy for managing the content is essential.

As mentioned above, SharePoint represents a new offering in the ECM strategy equation. It is clearly a technology that has garnered much attention. So, we asked those webinar attendees that indicated that they had an ECM strategy, if SharePoint was a component of that strategy. The results were a bit surprising. Only 57% indicated that it was.

I say the results are surprising because most other market data concerning the take-up of SharePoint, including our own earlier research, typically positions the presence of SharePoint in organizations a bit higher. (In our own study it was 65% and 23% more planning on it.)  What I believe the results of this poll may indicate is that SharePoint  is still predominately  used as an ad hoc approach to file sharing and simple collaboration, and thus for some, is not positioned as part of an official ECM strategy.  Positioning Sharepoint as part of a corporate ECM strategy requires significant further investment in time, money and effort – involving integration with complementary functionality including process management (e.g. BPM and workflow). This was a topic discussed in more detail on our last webinar.

Given that the webinar included advice on extending ECM into the Cloud, we asked the audience members if their organization had deployed any applications in the Cloud. Not surprisingly, a small majority, 56%, indicated no. Past market research I have conducted on this point has yielded similar findings.

Despite the success of SaaS-based applications, such as SalesForce.com, for example, many organizations have yet to fully embrace the Cloud. I believe this will likely change in the next year, based on my unofficial tracking of market activity (e.g. related webinars, trade-show presentations, traditional press coverage and Twitter activity.)  In fact this observation prompted me to tweet yesterday “Is it me, or is Cloud Computing the new SharePoint? Is seems to be everywhere.”  The comment sparked a fair amount of Twitter activity and a discussion thread on LinkedIn.

Lastly, we asked about application priorities in the upcoming 18 months. Respondents were given 9 candidate applications to select from. For the most part, responses indicated that a wide variety of business applications are being targeted. The most popularly selected (by40%) application was project collaboration.

Herein lies the value proposition for having an ECM strategy. By establishing an ECM platform (whether a single product, or conglomeration of products orchestrated as a single platform in which best of breed approaches and functions work seamlessly together), organizations can deploy any number of targeted and specific business applications on top of the platform. Even in cases where a turnkey vertical/horizontal application is deployed, it often makes good sense to deploy such an application built on the underlying enterprise platform, to minimize further customization and integration.  This point was further discussed in the last webinar.

So on that note, I’ll remind you that if you missed the first webinar in this series, focused on ECM, SharePoint and  Cloud Computing specifically, you may want to read that follow-up blog . It contains links to the slides and recorded session, as well as many definitions – including – what is ECM.

Relevant? yes. Interesting? Somewhat, to me. Do not get me wrong. I have been following the advent of iPad closely, but not from a “wall street” perspective. From my ECM-er perspective, the reason the iPad is so important is because it marks the beginning of the end of the old generation of publishing, and the popularization of e-publishing.  The ability to publish electronically – not just create and layout content electronically for a paper-based print run – but content created specifically for electronic delivery, is clearly not new. But, the overall market understanding of and appreciation for the full value of electronic content delivery has been lagging.  The popularizing of electronic-based content delivery, (yes, I think the Apple entrance into the market will help finally raise awareness and market demand overall, similar to the way Google raised the general market appreciation for the value of search) will not only allow publishers to take advantage of e-based delivery, but compel them to do so, and race to leverage the unique powers and capabilities of the media.

ECMers such as myself have been heralding the ability and associated benefits of designing content for e-based delivery for years, (see earlier posts ). Despite the ability to do so, however, the majority of business applications that involve content delivery remain rooted in paper-based delivery. Even in cases where content is created electronically (which is nearly exclusively now), design concerning output is almost always mired in paper-based metaphors.  (A simple case in point, just today I was asked to complete a form – it was available on-line, i.e., I could print the form from my web browser, complete it ala ink on paper, and – are you ready – fax it back. Just days ago I completed another form totally online, but the “publisher” of the form did not leverage any e-based delivery capabilities. I was asked to skip over irrelevant sections. Relevancy of sections was something that could have been handled automatically based on data I had already entered.)

Now, with the popularizing of e-based consumption of content, it is likely that content publishers (taken in the strictest and loosest sense of that phrase), will wake up and actually leverage the publishing media to its fullest value. Dynamic links, multimedia, content in context – by person, geography and time of day, will more readily be embraced and supported by those that provide content – from books and newspapers to coupons and name badges.

The market is at an inflection point, much like it found itself circa the 1980s, with the popularizing of imaging technology. Scanning technology had been around for quite some time before that, but organizations were still mostly thinking in terms of paper.  Imaging was a “new capability” that augmented paper. It was not uncommon to find organizations that were printing content, only to scan it into an online imaging system.  Hard to believe? (Hey, I still occasionally find examples of people doing this.) This mentality is not so different from that of organizations today that create volumes of content online and then design output for paper– either exclusively, or online versions of paper metaphors.

Practices and approaches to publishing (i.e. electronic content delivery) have started to change, and will surely begin to pick up speed. I was recently talking to a very good friend of mine who has been in the text book publishing industry as an editor for over 15 years. We began talking about our careers colliding and she shared with me that she was currently working on over 130 e-based books – not publishing the same paper-based book online – but books specifically tailored to take advantage of the dynamics and flexibility of electronic delivery, exclusively.

For those electronic content management technology vendors that have focused on dynamic delivery, there time is here.  I have commented on the opportunity that this represents for ECM many times.

Folks such as MarkLogic, PTC, Tridion, and SiberLogic should find a burgeoning market that “suddenly” better understands their value proposition. Others such as Astoria and HiveFire, may likely reposition their underlying capabilities to more directly address this growing need. ECM bastions such OpenText and EMC (especially with their X-Hive acquisition) are well positioned to re-direct attention to these capabilities they have touted for years, to a mostly blind and deaf consumer.

DITA will become the “new html” and gain far greater market awareness and adoption.  The onus will be on  the distributor of content to become innovative to leverage the new capabilities and to think beyond  8.5 x 11 static media.

So, take a deep breath, we are only getting started – but we are surely entering the beginning of the end of publishing as we know it.

Additionally you can listen to the archive of the webinar.

In the webinar, I reference a survey and study I conducted on SharePoint user experiences.  You can access that paper here.

There were many questions asked and some answered during the webinar.  As has always been my policy, I will answer all outstanding questions, in this case, in this blog post, save for those posed to my co-presenter,  Jeff Piper of SpringCM.  Jeff has posted his answers separately.

So without further ado, here goes:

Q: What is ECM?

A:   I find this question eye-opening because all too often, those of us in the industry forget that terms and acronyms we use on a daily basis have not yet been fully absorbed into the general business lexicon.  ECM stands for, at least in the way I use it,  Enterprise Content Management. There is no standard definition for it, but it is an acronym and phrse that I am very opinionated about. Rather than state my definition here, I refer you to another recent post, in which I define ECM.

Q:How can SharePoint and/or SpringCM be used for project management?

A: I find this question somewhat confusing, and hope that my answer addresses it properly. Neither SharePoint nor SpringCM (or any ECM product for that matter) provides project management per se. There are methodologies, practices and programs that specifically address project management. Indeed, these could be used to manage the roll out of an ECM and/or SharePoint implementation. Functionality in either product (e.g., collaboration and wikis) could be used to augment project management. Functionality in SpringCM (e.g., workflow) could be used to manage specific processes.  But again, neither provides a full-fledged project management system.

Q: Does MS SP 2010 provide new or added functions for integration to third party applications via .Net?

A:  Microsoft has added much to the integration capabilities of SharePoint in 2010. Programmer interfaces exist for not only .Net, but also REST, XML, and JavaScript.  In addition to enhanced APIs, there is better integration support in Visual Studio 2010, Visio, and SharePoint Designer 2010.The list of improvements made in this regard is extensive, and I will not try to list them all here. You should refer to the Microsoft site for more details.

Q:  How can SharePoint work in a cloud environment?

A:  This question is not as simple as it may seem. First – Microsoft provides 2 SaaS (Software as a Service) versions of SharePoint.  So there are 2 ways to access Sharepoint in the Cloud (Saas).  But it must be appreciated that these are limited siloed deployments. The access to SharePoint in these cases is “in the cloud”, but the focus of the webinar was how to EXTEND SharePoint into the Cloud, not how to simply access it that way. Extending SharePoint via the Cloud refers  to making SharePoint an integral part of cloud-based business applications. In order to do that you either have to undertake a rigorous amount of customized development, or leverage the connectivity of SharePoint into a Cloud-based application – such as SpringCM for ECM, workflow and other related applications.

Q:  Is it best to utilize SharePoint as your ECM or use it as a portal that is integrated with other Document/Records Management solutions that have all the existing features such as image capture?

A: The essence to the answer was a major theme of the webinar. While the webinar focused on leveraging the Cloud to extend the reach and capabilities of SharePoint, it started by  making the case that few organizations use SharePoint as an ECM solution.  It is part of a solution. Based on market trends, SharePoint is best used as an internal website for simple document management,  file sharing and simple collaboration.  Based on the definition of ECM provided above, it should become apparent that SharePoint should not be positioned as the ECM solution or even platform, it is a component.   (See the next two questions and answers for additional examples of how/why SharePoint would not be positioned as the ECM solution.)

Q:  What are the Records Management capabilities of MOSS 2007 vs MOSS 2010?

A: SharePoint users ranked the records management capabilities of SharePoint very low in the survey I conducted. Overall market opinion is  that records management is not a core strength of SharePoint.  I am aware of more than one system integrator that make a good business integrating records management into SharePoint.  While SharePoint does provide some records management capability , the Microsoft product development blog site itself states that the records capability is “not intended” for customers with serious/confidential records needs. Little has changed in this regard between 2007 and 2010.

Q:  Has anyone added  MOSS 2007 Records Management Application to SP?

A: (See the response to the preceding question.) Additionally, yes, I am aware of  organizations that have integrated records management products/functionality into their SharePoint environment, and know of  several system integrators that make a fair living from doing this. I suspect the genesis of your question stems from the fact that MOSS 2007 lacks “serious” and simple to deploy records management capabilities.

Q:  Can you give me some more examples of what complex applications are?

A:  Let me put this question into context, for those who were not part of our live audience. A major theme of the webinar was the need to extend SharePoint with complementary tools and functionality in order to support complex business applications. This was specifically stressed in this webinar because a strength of SpringCM is workflow and BPM functionality, functionality required in order to automate complex business applications. But, the audience wanted to know what is meant by the phrase “complex application.”   This is somewhat of a subjective question –  complexity is in the eye of the beholder. That said, complex applications typically involve intricate multi-step and multi-participant workflows. They often encompass multiple sub-processes, and several decision points. They often require access/integration between several content resources and applications.  Some examples include: contract management, case management, claims management (e.g. processing an insurance claim), event planning, on-boarding new customers and employees, product lifecycle management, loan applications, SOP (standard operating procedures) development and management, and new drug submissions.

Q: You talked about scaling.  Did you mean development or performance scaling issues?

A:  Both.  Development scalability relates to the issues  addressed in the webinar around tools, skills, and complexity in delivering business process and document management applications.  Performance scalability is something that cloud can address by accessing a shared resource optimized for Enterprise Content Management, but perhaps more importantly by eliminating the complexity of operating and managing all the hardware and software components necessary in, for example, a customer-facing case management application, where crossing the firewall creates all kinds of challenges in native SharePoint.

Q: ­We are just getting ready to install MOSS 2007 at our company.   What areas of SharePoint are noticeably strengthened in versions 2007 and 2010?

A:  Wow – loaded question. Improvements made in SharePoint 2007. I will not attempt to answer that here. SharePoint 2007  is now 3 years old. I do not succinctly recall what was added in 2007, but do recall that it was this release that turned the general market perception about SharePoint around. This was the first release of SharePoint in which organizations began discussing real application development. But there still lacked much functionality.  Some of that is addressed in 2010.Enhancements include: improved user interfaces (especially concerning content creation), tighter integration with MS Office, better integration capabilities (see discussion above regarding .Net), enhanced support for virtually all web browsers, much improved and centralized administration capabilities, enhanced navigation and search through increased support for meta data (i.e., tag clouds, formal taxonomies, user-created folksonomies,  bookmarks), support of  “in-place records,” (i.e., locked official files),and inclusion of three different types of search (including integration with FAST search, which Microsoft acquired a few years back – cost of this functionality still not released). It should be understood that the statements made here are speculation as SharePoint 2010 has not been released yet.

And now for the final question:

Q:  Our gov’t agency deployed SharePoint 4 years ago without a formal deployment plan, project management plan, or governance. Now, SharePoint is unwieldy…no guidance on site design, permissions are not managed.  How do we get back control and add some management?­

A: This question reminds me of the old joke “A tourist in New York stops a man on the street and asks ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’, and the man answers “Practice, practice practice’.”   Unfortunately there is no easy answer to your question. You need to undergo a full-scale ECM strategy development project.  This will include an inventory of all the current SharePoint sites.  There are two pieces of good news I can provide however:  1.  Misery loves company – you are not alone. Many organizations have released SharePoint without a strategy and suddenly find themselves in a runaway uncontrolled environment.  In fact that was one of the findings in teh SharePoint research I conducted. A significant portion of user organizations did not know  the number of SharePoint sites or volume of content housed within SharePoint inside the organization.   2. SpringCM will be hosting another webinar on April 13, with me as a guest speaker, this time focusing on how to conduct a needs assessment and build an ECM strategy.  Register now,

But then this morning, serendipitously I heard a story on NPR about the dramatically changing world of television watching and the impact that is having on the services provided by Nielsen.  For decades Nielsen has had a monopoly on this market; reporting on the “popularity” of television programs based on eyeballs on TV sets at a particular time.  This data is extremely valuable because it provides potential advertisers with insight on how much a spot on a given program is worth, and to which audience. But television watching just isn’t what it used to be (echo newspapers and magazines).  Television content consumers have  alternative ways to access content (e.g.TiVo and Hulu) via alternative viewing devices that include smart phones and laptops, to name just a few.  (I know my kids are forever watching TV without the TV on.)

The viewing audience, including the way they view is changing. Nielsen customers (i.e. advertisers) are demanding that Nielsen keep pace and monitor these viewing habits. The television ad market is not dying – it is morphing and as a result is potentially more valuable.  Through ECM-based technologies,  it is possible to compile BI on multiple consumer habits, at unprecedented levels of granularity. In the case of television viewing, for example, not only what viewers are watching, but also when, where, what was skipped, re-played and shared.  As Nielsen’s president Steve Hasker put it. “”We’ll be able to tell what type of video they watch, what type of sites they go to, how they interact on those sites, what they buy on those sites, what types of news articles they’re reading.”

That is BI at a far lower and wider level of granularity than Nielson provides today.  Now think this new proposition through. Advertisers, using more ECM-based technology (e.g. e-publishing and DAM) advertisers can deliver more personalized and granular messages, in a timely manner – ads in context. Yes, once again, CONTEXT is king, and BI is the keys to the kingdom.

ECM is at the foundation of great new opportunities and challenges for organizations. I recently completed an article for Ron Miller in which I focus on the circle between ECM, KM and Innovation Management. This triumvirate will soon become a requisite to remaining competitive in virtually any  market. The article discusses this concept in some detail, more than here. Here, I draw attention to the tie between Innovation Management and ECM (in that order). In a phrase: get innovative with ECM.  As highlighted in this blog post, the integration of new content types and new means of content distribution and consumption, coupled with new approaches to BI creates amazing opportunities; truly personalized real-time publishing, contextual publishing and a constant loop of feed back (including web 2.0 emergence) that allows the content provider to continuously fine-tune the presentation and make-up of content.  The future for advertising and marketing is ripe with positive change, and ECM is at the foundation of this.

Yesterday I was watching to a video podcast interview between two colleagues.  Both will remain anonymous.  Who they are is not important.  Their posture and what they said are important. Both are noted industry advocates in the ECM and Enterprise 2.0 space. Both provide advice to the market, which is what concerns me. One of them made a statement that was simply naive and misleading, and the other one did not correct or modify it.

My angst is grounded in the further worry that history will repeat itself, and not in a positive way. The interview was focused on the use of collaborative social technologies in an Enterprise 2.0 setting. The comment made that caused my concern – and I paraphrase – was that many enterprise users are using tools such as Twitter (Twitter was specifically mentioned in the discussion),  without any real thought as to the management of the content created.

There were two distinct points made that were misleading – possibly downright wrong.

1. My colleagues casually pondered who will “own’ the content and if indeed it will be considered subject to discovery. I believe that the courts, at least in the United States, have already ruled on this. As I stated in an earlier blog post, in a class action suit regarding patient/individual privacy rights, the courts ruled that content in “FaceBook, MySpace, instant-messaging threads, blog posts and whatever else the plaintiffs might have done online” was discoverable. The plaintiffs’ objection that this violated the plaintiffs’ privacy was shot down. These tools and their content were viewed as public, not on a private network, but the public world wide web. Who “owns” the content.  Apparently Twitter, in the example given by my colleagues, and, Twitter content is “public” content and therefore discoverable.  There should be no speculation about this.

I believe part of the reason these individuals got it wrong was that they confused Web 2.0 tools with Enterprise 2.0 tools.  This is an issue that also caused frustration for me and Ron Miller during the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, an issue we both blogged about.

2. The second statement that caused angst was the more serious one.  In further discussing how and why organizations should take a proactive approach to managing Twitter content (again – I am being liberal here in accepting their example of Twitter as an Enterprise 2.0 tool, my commentary is more focused on Enterprise 2.0 content – not public-based Web 2.0 content),  a statement was made that organizations need to take a specific look at the Enterprise 2.0 content and develop a management strategy specific to it.  A comment was made along the lines of “You should not want to apply the same rules and policies to the Twitter threads that you do your contracts.”  WRONG.  As stated in the title of this blog post, it ain’t the medium it’s the message.

This perspective and advice was the same naive opinion that got too many organizations in trouble with e-mail.  You should not have a different management policy for e-mail, or blogs, or microblogs. The medium or format should not dictate policy (other than acceptable use of the tool of course). It is the content that matters no matter what format or tool it was created in.  My two colleagues made somewhat light reference to “Twitter streams” as if they could not really contain any mission critical content.  This was the same way many felt decades ago when e-mail was emerging as an “unofficial and casual” means of communication.  If commentary regarding contract terms (sticking with their example) are made in a Twitter stream then they should most definitely be subjected to the same policy and scrutiny as the contract – just as any relevant and related e-mail is now subjected to e-discovery.

Do not trivialize Twitter or any other form of Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 created content.  The tools used do not determine the value of or discoverability of the content – the content does.