Brilliant Leap

That's Not My Name

That's Not My Name is the refrain of a fun little song byt the TingTings  I hear it playing in clubs (those that feature SPIN bikes, treadmills and dumbbells NOT golf clubs or booze). I have a feeling that if EMC's CMA division could sing, Joe Tucci would have it blare out that refrain every time someone refers to it as Documentum.

Why am I saying this? Here's a list of tweets from EMC World:

Joe Tucci wants us to stop using the Documentum branding, and focus on the EMC brand. Did someone forget to tell Mark Lewis? #emcworld

at cma aka artist formerly known as documentum bash at #emcworld with karin, jerry, geoff

Tucci is trying not to say Documentum. Winding-down the branding. EMC and VMware only. But doc management and archiving important

The intros are over. Time to see if #EMC has learned how to keep the #Documentum / CMA people from feeling cut-off. #emcworld

Now, does Documentum de-branding matter? To many well-established Documentum professionals I think it might; after all, they've spent years building their expertise with the technology and it has only recently become pervasive enough that it's no longer mistaken for some  specialized form of documentation. "Documentum" has only recently won its own place on drop-down menus on professional and career-related sites as well, and I doubt that most professionals who identify with the term "Documentum" identify as comfortably with the term "EMC" or "EMC CMA"

On an enterprise level Documentum is most often seen as a product/platform in its own right though users clearly recognize that licensing fees are payable to EMC.

Wikipedia says that: Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now delivered by EMC Corporation, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum platform is part of EMC's content management and archiving business unit, one of EMC's four operating divisions. (Maybe someone at EMC wants to correct this last part?)

So is there anything wrong with thinking about Documentum as an ECM platform which may, or may not, have anything to do with the rest of the EMC stack? Surely EMC sales and marketing pros are savvy enough to sell the value-add and ease of interoperability achieved when used with other EMC products.

Now, after writing the above, I did a little more due diligence and watched a video interview with Mark Lewis who seems to say that calling Documentum, "Documentum" is ok; as long as it's clear that Documentum isn't a brand. He says that EMC is the brand. And though I think the reporter in this interview did a great job, I wish she had asked a few follow-up questions:

1. Is EMC a brand of Enterprise Content Management System or is Documentum?
2. Is Cheerios a brand of cereal or is General Mills?
3. If you sent your kid to the store to buy Cheerios would you even bother mentioning General Mills?

General Mills seems to be ok with Cheerios being its own brand, here's what the say on their site:

General Mills markets some of the best loved, most trusted brands in the world. From Betty Crocker and Pillsbury to Cheerios and Green Giant, our brands are consistently category leaders.

So, come on Joe,  if Cheerios can be its own brand, can't Documentum be a brand as well?

What do you think? Reply here OR there's a poll on LinkedIn.

Will the Enterprise Ride the Google Wave? (and what could this mean to CenterStage and Sharepoint?)

I should be blogging about all the conversations I've had with folks pre and post EMC World right now (to which I did not go for numerous reasons: (a) Staffing Documentum and eCTD related gigs  (b) Staffing a BRAND NEW Documentum installation (c) writing about Twitter for the mainstream media (here's a link to one of the articles that's already published) (d) other)), but  someone just told me about Google Wave; I want to blog about it instead. (The other stuff will come soon.)

If you haven't heard about Wave yet, here's the skinny.

Google says:

         What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Mashable says:

Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

I know that many of you will want to know a lot more about Wave, so I've done the googling, reading, and rating for you, in case you don't want to do it for yourself. Here's the developer demo (WARNING: It's 90 minutes long)  If you don't want to sit through it, here's a summary from TechCrunch's MG Seigler.

If you're wondering why I think Google Wave has anything to do with Enterprise Content Management, Document Management, Information Management, Workflow...(I'll stop short of collaboration because I hope that's obvious), consider how the look, the feel, the functionality and the overall Wave-experience might  potentially and eventually impact the way people work or might want to  work. While CenterStage does a great job on delivering Web 2.0 functionalities within the enterprise, Google Wave could change the way we interface with the web. If it delivers on its promises, then it will, as W. Edwards Deming used to say, "delight the customer" rather than simply give workers an interface that they already use as consumers (which is, in a sense what technologies like Yammer, and dare I say, Centerstage seem to do.)

On a more ECM-related note, Thomas Claburn of Information Week says that:

Wave also has the potential to blunt the success of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s SharePoint. While Google isn't positioning Wave as a SharePoint competitor, Gundotra at a press conference following the Wave demonstration highlighted Wave's openness as something lacking in SharePoint. Within a year or two, businesses considering SharePoint but worried about vendor lock-in may have an attractive lightweight alternative.

The other thing that I can't ignore is that Google says it will open-source a "lion's share" of Wave's code. Gundotra has already released the preview product to over 4000 developers. You can find the developer preview here, the APIs here, and the protocol draft here.

Why do I think this matters? Think iPhone. How much less cool would it be if there weren't all those independently developed downloadable toys.

The other thing to think about, and I know this from my reporting rather than recruiting career, is that  Gen Y and Millennial workers demand that their interface experiences on the job be at least as good as their interfaces off-the-job. So if Wave becomes widely adopted, it changes the game everywhere. True, this could cause compliance headaches, but Google has been more enterprise- considerate than usual in Wave's design (this from the Register)

While waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.

Enough from me, go have at it yourself.  A few short years from now, you'll be able to comment on my blog as I post it. We (you plus me) will be smarter than I alone. I'm off to recruit, I'll need brilliant folks to engage with.

Tags: Documentum, EMC, Sharepoint, Google, Wave, Sharepoint, Web 2.0

What have you done to improve yourself lately? EMC Documentum Developer Edition

Many of you know that I've been recruiting and placing Documentum professionals as both employees and contractors since the early 1990's and this is the first time that supply of Documentum professionals has exceeded demand. Now that's not to say that there are more top-tier Documentum Pros looking for work than there are available jobs/assignments, that's certainly not the case; but it used to be that anyone with any kind of Documentum experience could get a job easily and that's no longer true.

What this means for companies is that they can be picky, now is their time to hire the best. I know that several of my clients have been thrilled with the caliber of talent that I have provided and their user communities have been thrilled as well. If there's a Documentum-related project on your horizon, now is a good time to start it. You'll get better manpower for your dollar.

If you're a Documentum professional who's looking for work, now's the the time to improve your skills and up your game. If your current project doesn't give you the reach you need, that's no excuse; you can now download the Content Server Developer edition for free. And if you're between projects or jobs, you should create a project that allows you to expand your skill set and to strut your stuff. If you're one of those folks who hasn't yet touched D6, you can touch it now, there's no excuse not to.

Someone once said that every problem comes bearing its gifts, download yours now. Once you've done that and done something with it, give me a call and tell me about it.

EMC News and Poorly Written Headlines

There were three big pieces of news mentioning EMC this week:

1. 1)EMC's sales slumped 9.2 percent from the year-ago quarter to $3.15 billion, $100 million below the Thomson Reuters consensus forecast
3. 2)EMC said it's looking to cut most employees' pay by 5 %
5. 3) Joe Tucci said Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL)'s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems (NSDQ:JAVA) will be a game-changer

Which of these statements are causal in nature? If you vote 1&2, then I'd reckon to guess you are right. If so, what's up with the headline below?

EMC to cut salaries because of Oracle-Sun deal

Talk about misleading the reader!

Forgive My Rant

Thanks to all who answered our Linkedin poll, "Documentum Managers: Does EMC Certification Matter When You Hire?" The conclusion seems to be "not so much." You can click here to see the real time results.

One of the nice things that has happened while conducting this survey is that we've both spoken to, and received back-channel e-mails from, folks who wanted to give us their two cents on the subject. Almost everyone said that certification is not enough, that Documentum and its application tends to be quite complex, and that a broader skill set is required.

That being said, I did get at least two responses that suggested that certification might be a huge plus when companies in need of Documentum resources didn't have in house expertise to conduct a technical interview.

EMC CenterStage- Keeping Enterprise Information Safe in a Collaborative World? (and what happens to eRoom ?)

Quick note: We are in the process of moving our website, so please excuse any odd typefaces or colors. We'll have a much simpler site very soon. That being said...

A new comment on one of my older posts sparked my interest, for a few of different reasons. First, because it came from an intelligent ECM professional (and former EMC employee), and second because it wasn't self-promotional in the least.

If you don't feel like clicking over to the original post, I'll clue you in; Brian Shin aka "shiningarts" had this to say about 2.0 technologies, eRoom, Documentum and CenterStage (I've edited one political comment out because I don't want it to be a distraction.)

Documentum/ EMC Proven Professional Certification- Does It Matter?

With the economy faltering and the supply of Documentum professionals at an all-time high, people are calling and asking whether becoming certified would give them an edge.

My answer is "no"; I have never had a client list it as a requirement or even as a "nice to have", and because I work on filling more than 100 Documentum-related jobs a year, I think I have a pretty good view of the marketplace. But who knows, your experience may be different.

Selling ECM in a Recession

I got a call from an ECM Solutions business-driver the other day; he asked me to advise him as to whether he should take a job building an ECM Practice or not. "Why wouldn't you?" was the first question I asked. I had watched him build two large ECM practices in the past dozen years (one during the .com crash), there was no doubt he could both architect great solutions and outsell most of the competition. "Because there doesn't seem to be much software being sold," he said. And when I asked him what "not much" meant, he answered in single digits.

Now, of course, I do know that there is a recession and that companies have substantially less money to spend; but, in the sales school I come from, an economic downturn that means that I have a little more time to understand my customers' business and their needs and to discover how the products and/or services I sell can produce a win for them.

Those of you who have been selling in the Document Management space for the last dozen years should be familiar with the sales and marketing strategies of Geoffrey Moore. His book Crossing the Chasm was required reading at many of the Documentum partner firms at which I placed executives from 1993-2000. Maybe it's time to look to him again for a strategy.

Not quite a freebie, but it's pretty close: Join AIIM- you name your price! (offer expires 6 PM EST March 17)

For any of you who might be unfamiliar with AIIM, it's the membership association for individuals who work with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies and for the organizations that create them. You might say, it's a vendor-agnostic, all inclusive hub for the ECM community. (What's up with the AIIM acronym, you might be wondering? The association was formed before the web and technologies like Documentum became mainstream; A=Association, I=Image, I=Image, M=Management). AIIM has since re-branded itself as the Association for Enterprise Content Management.)

In any case, the folks at AIIM are responding to the recession in a creative way; instead of asking you to scrape up the $125.00 membership fee, they're inviting you to name your own price when you join.

If you're wondering how belonging to AIIM might benefit you; here are some things to consider;

Hands Up, Baby, Hands Up

Maybe it's because I grew up in Virginia, or because I'm a first generation American, or because I spent too many years as a member of the National Honor Society, or something; but I've never bribed anyone to do anything, even if it's cost me some business.

Why not? I think that's an interesting question and, in my case, I think the answer is as much about value as virtue. More simply stated, if the product/service I provide can't stand on its own, then you shouldn't buy from me. How do lap dances, fridges full of steaks, and kickbacks add value to my company's business offerings? I don't care what other people do to win business; I need to make sure that the services I provide stand on their own. I like to believe that the people I partner with operate in a similar fashion.

So why am I writing about this on an ECM blog? Because yesterday it was all over the press that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that EMC provided improper payments and other things of value to systems integrators and other alliance partners on contracts with government agencies. As of this posting, a ComputerWorld article on the subject has received 309 diggs. That's a kind of popularity nobody wants.