Brilliant Leap

ECM without a paddle

At least twice a week I get calls from a IT Managers or Business Process owners who want to chat about ECM Technologies. They're not looking to me to get the same kind of information they get from Gartner or Forrester or Alan Pelz-Sharpe; they want to know what the folks who are working with or using a specific technology think about it. I'm a pretty good source of information in that regard because I talk to somewhere between 50-100 people a week, all of whom are somehow involved in the ECM space.

The questions these ECM-shoppers tend to ask are:

We're shopping for an ECM technology to do xxxxx. Do you know of anyone who has used [insert ECM technology] to get that done.

Do you know what the pain-points were?

Did the user community accept the solution? If yes, did they like it?

I almost always answer these questions with as much detail as I can. I often offer to introduce the information-seeker to someone who has already done what they want to do. I usually get follow-up calls. They're invariably about "people "; namely, , how hard is it going to be to find the people that can make this work? And when they leave, how hard will it be to replace them?

What about the SharePoint train?

Those of us who have been playing in, or around, the Documentum sandbox since the early 1990's, looked at SharePoint with some suspicion last year when our employers, customers, and peers started to rave about it. Looking back on it now, perhaps Microsoft's intrusion into ECM shouldn't have taken us by surprise. After all, Guy Creese  blogged about it on his Pattern Finder blog. "EMC's Getting Out of the Way of the SharePoint Train" was his post in 2006, and Sharepoint MVP Ivan Wilson made note of it as well. I didn't give it much bandwidth at that time because I saw the news to be more connector-related than game-changing.

But not too long after, I started to get e-mails and phone calls from folks who wanted to know why they were picking up the seemingly powerful scent of the "Seattle Mafia" in their ECM enclaves, "Are you hearing of this from any one else?" they wanted to know.

And I had heard of it, in a few places: A pharma client had "retired" a Documentum app and created a new one which was SharePoint-based (it didn't seem like a big deal); A SharePoint Architect got the nod over a Documentum Architect to design the ECM strategy at another client firm; and still another client was going to dump Documentum and use SharePoint as the ECM system that fed its New Drug Application (NDA) and electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) creation (I put them on my listen and learn list.) As I searched for further instances of "invasion", I discovered that while SharePoint was quite prevalent in many organizations, it wasn't being used for ECM. But with the introduction of SharePoint 2007, was that going to change? Why had Microsoft attended DIA shows prior to 2007? What was their pitch and why had they gone largely unnoticed (they shared a booth in a back corner with their buddies from Vorsite.)

The un-Gilded Age

It's all about the financial crisis, not just here in New York, but everywhere. I was in LA last weekend and it, rather than Britney Spears or David Beckham, was the hot topic.

When LA drops its gilded facade, I worry. When people who were paid five digit sign-on bonuses last year get the boot because of their employer's fiscal instability, I worry some more. Job security has less to do with individual performance than I've ever seen before.

Because I live just outside of Manhattan, I'm watching my neighbors and friends lose ,or live in fear of losing, their jobs. The same is true for friends and family members of folks I've placed over the years. And while I can't help (or even talk to) everyone who needs advice, that doesn't mean I'm without opinions or ideas; so I wrote an article, Wall Street Dead End, for the New York Post; it ran as the cover to the @Work section on Monday.

On another note, EMC got some Wall Street-related coverage on the same day my story ran ; RSA chief Art Coviello was mentioned in eWeek, Wall Street's 'Colossal' Risk Management Failure was the headline.