Brilliant Leap

The Blissful Ignorance Effect?

I keep getting phone calls and e-mails from clients and readers asking whether I've actually run into anyone who has abandoned Documentum and gone with SharePoint (and if the answer is yes, are they happy with the end result ?), whether EMC's embrace of SharePoint is a good thing (it depends on who you are-a shareholder, a developer, a customer, an eRoom enthusiast, someone whose income is/would be affected by Documentum becoming a more potent technology or more widely used), and whether I foresee any front-end vendor giving Microsoft a run for its money in this space.

Why am I being asked these questions you might wonder. Simple. I speak to more that 100 ECM professionals each week. And while I'll be answering these questions in longer, individual posts later, here are some things to consider.

If you're charged with integrating SharePoint into your existing ECM environment, do yourself a favor and read Andrew Chapman's blog.

On the other hand, if you're hell bent against anything Microsoft invading your space (I trust you to supply your own reasons) and you want to bring a hip presentation into your next meeting, turn up the volume and click on the little movie below.

 

If you need to bide some time investigating alternatives to eRoom and SharePoint, Google launched Google sites last night. If you look into it, let me know what you think, Google's a brand that can give anyone a run for its money.

And finally, if you feel powerless over the onslaught of technologies good/bad/unproven, I want to remind you that you still have power. Consider the Blissful Ignorance Effect which reasons that customers (trans. your upper management and end- users) don't want to be burdened by all the details inherent in the choices available to them. It's how you (or anyone else) spins the truth that matters. Scientific findings suggest that decision makers "will often engage in whatever distortion is needed to justify the purchase." It may be as simple as playing up the positive aspects while downplaying the negatives.

It's all good?

I have long been saying that Microsoft's entry into the ECM marketplace may NOT be good thing for established ECM vendors  (See my posts Microsoft Does It Better? , A New Kid On the Block , and  Documentum + Microsoft:The HookUp- How Does It Affect You? ) and now, finally, someone seems to concur. From what I can tell, EMC seems to be drinking co-opetition kool-aid (It was less than a month ago that I heard an EMC employee say something like "Microsoft needs us!" to a customer and to then go on and explain how they'd spent time in Redmond co-plotting shared solution strategies), while Microsoft peers over its shoulder, gathering domain knowledge, and readying itself to take flight untethered.

Take the Regulatory Life Sciences space as an example. I'm not sure Microsoft is being, or has been, all that sneaky about its intentions. They've just kept a low profile until they've had something to say. They've attended DIA/EDM conferences for a few years now, sharing a booth with the likes of Zorch Software. I caught notice almost right away; I even called Marc Deckner a few years back to ask why Microsoft was at the DIA (they had no product to offer as far as I could tell.) Though I don't remember his exact words, he pretty much said, "We're on our way". Visit the archives of his blog and see if you can't connect the dots.

What's a developer anyway? (Part 1)

For those of you who may not know, I write about jobs for some national publications. My most recent article is about where the job growth will be for 2008, and the foreseeable future. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources, the market for IT professionals, on the whole, will continue to grow BUT the demand for what career experts call "routine coders" or "code monkeys" is actually expected to shrink. 

While this may sound like bad news for some of you, it's excellent news for the rest. Why? Because the "code configurators", as one of my readers calls them, who may have been driving your salaries and hourly rates down, will disappear, or at least become a less significant part of the Western economy.

What matters in the interim, I think, is that we re-establish what a "developer" actually is and does. As someone who has spent more than two decades interviewing and placing a large number of individuals who earn at least part of their living writing code, I want to start, or chime in on the conversation, if it has already begun. Bear with me, and contribute, if you wish; this will take more than a single post.

Prize Inside

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. We seek problems because we need their gifts.

-Richard Bach

 

I've been thinking a lot about storage lately and also about accessing data from someplace other than my C drive. My laptop had a difficult to diagnose problem (it was taking more than 3 minutes to open a document and it couldn't multi-task at all) and I was wishing that my stuff (programs and data) was accessible via the word-wide web.

And sure, with a little awareness and forethought, my wish could have been granted compliments of on-line storage and SaaS. But I had set-up neither. It was my good fortune that a client overheard my moaning, pointed me to Mozy saying I'd never have to have this problem again.