Brilliant Leap

EMC Documentum Exec Joins Box.net- Should you care?

I'm guessing that most of you don't pay all that much attention to the comings and goings in ECM-vendor land, so unless you follow me @BrilliantLeap or Laurence Hart @piewords on Twitter, you may not know that long time Documentum marketing maven Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck has left EMC.

When Hart heard the news, he worried that the citizens of Documentum-land might panic, or jump to wrong conclusions, about yet another senior level exec leaving EMC's ECM group. Like a reassuring Papa Bear, he assured his readers that Whitney was leaving for her own reasons, not because something was wrong with Documentum (or EMC's ECM group, or IIG or whatever we're calling it this year.)

ECM's "big thinkers" share an Aha! moment

Someone please explain, why is it a radical idea to put ECM technology users at the center of their content rather than an ECM system at the center of their content?

User-centered design has, after all, been around since the early 1990's and end-users typically foot the bill for solutions, don't they? Aren't they, and not IT, a technology company's real customers? 

To me this seems obvious, but ECM speakers and bloggers seem to be experiencing Oprah-like "Aha! moment" around this idea. Better late than never, I guess. I was talking about this with a good friend last night- he's one of the smartest computer engineers I know.

He explained the evolution of a new technology to me this way:

1. An emerging technology has few features and is hard to use.
2. A developing technology grows many new features but remains hard to use.
3. A mature technology keeps the good features and becomes easy to use.

The Game-Changer for Enterprise Content Management

There's a term I don't hear mentioned in the ECM world very often, at least until last Tuesday that is. What am I talking about? User-experience. Chris Preston of EMC called it a "game-changer" at AIIM's info360 Conference last week.

Hooray! I wanted to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I heard the words. And, if I wasn't, I wanted to give him a standing ovation. A bit over-dramatic? Don't think so. If EMC had realized this five years ago, Sharepoint might not have won some of Documentum's marketshare, and if CenterStage had been ready,  vigilante corporate teams wouldn't be working with MarkLogic or clandestinely checking-out Box.

But what's past is past. The good news is that enterprise ECM vendors seem to be finally learning things from consumer-facing software designers; namely that that it's their customers' customers that they need to please. Sure, you sell to IT, but the end-users foot the bill for the product and, if they ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

 

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey drove this point home in a talk he recently gave to his team at Square, the hot new payment processing company he now runs. Here's part of what he said:

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago, as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

Info360 Conference- Will Box.net be a disruptor?

AIIM (the Enterprise Content Management Association) is kicking off its annual conference tomorrow. It could be a rather interesting event. There's a disruptive vendor (Box.net) in the morning's lineup; its co-founder Aaron Levie is giving a talk "Making Enterprise Software Sexy. No, Seriously."

While I'm looking forward to hearing what Levie has to say, I wish I could tap into the thoughts of the traditional ECM vendors (Documentum, Open Text,IBM/Lotus Notes/ FileNet) as they listen to him. Can Box.net compete in terms of features, fuctionalities, compliance and secure collaboration? 

What does Microsoft and Alfresco think of Box.net? We know that Box.net thinks that you'll prefer it over Sharepoint. (See picture.)

Can/should/will legacy vendors play nice with Box?

In my fantasy life (when it comes to ECM presentations), the stage at AIIM tomorrow would look something like this:

HP sets its course for the Cloud, Big Data and Analytics. EMC no like

Watching the tech world can make movies like Wall Street seem kind of boring. Here corporate leaders and employee bloggers use strobe lights to illuminate flaws in each other's business strategies; they taunt each other's marketing campaigns on YouTube, and sometimes they even sue their employees when they jump to a competitor's ship. Grant it, these behemoths have something to fight over-- position, customers, and a market that's worth billions of dollars; but they don't cop to that, instead they poke holes in one another's business strategies. 

Earlier this week Hewlett Packard's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, laid out his vision for HP's future. And while some of it centered around consumer devices which run/will run the much talked about Web OS, Apotheker's focus was on HP's planned enterprise service offerings which center around the cloud, Big Data and real-time analytics. It's the same formula that's being used by many vendors.

Now while most stayed mum while HP had its say, Chuck Hollis EMC's VP – Global Marketing CTO did not. Instead he wrote a blog post that ever so subtly referred to HP as a "beast" and a "big elephant" (nothing sexy or sleek or agile conjured up by those images) and then went on about why HP's decision to offer cloud services (we do it for you)Vs. cloud enabling technologies (we give you the stuff and the services you need to do it yourself) may be the wrong choice.

It didn't take long before storage expert, Marc Farley of HP, reacted to Hollis' post on Twitter, calling it a FUD 

What's the Big Deal About Big Data?

What's the big deal about Big Data? I asked this question of a client about six months ago. He had come to me requesting that I conduct a search for his firm- he needed two sharp Knowledge Management/Content Management experts who were eager to extend their experience into this "new" frontier.

"What's the big deal about Big Data? Your kidding, right?" said my client. There was both laughter and disbelief in his voice. Without him needing to say it, he was telling me that this was something I should know.

Now I knew that he'd trust me with the assignment anyway, and this would be an opportunity for me to learn more. In exchange for letting me pick his brain, there'd be some ribbing to bear in my future; he'd remind me, and everyone we knew in common, that there was a time when I didn't know what the big deal about Big Data was about.

Enterprise Content Management Legacy Vendors, A Window of Opportunity?

As some of you may know, I regularly write cover stories for the @Work section of the 2.1 million reader NY Post.

One of the advantages of  writing for the sixth largest newspaper in the country is access. Experts and industry leaders want to talk to you, and they will generally give you all the time and information that you need to do a great job reporting. This, of course, is helpful when you‘re gathering data to reveal trends.

Every January I write about where the “hot jobs” will be for the coming year. While Information Technology has almost always been among the high growth areas, this year a new category in the IT sector claimed a “hot job" title;  namely, “Business Intelligence Analysts“. 

While some might argue that this job title doesn't belong in IT, consider what the experts I interviewed said these new hires will be doing- looking at their employer's/client's current IT systems and identifying areas in which they fall short in providing executives, managers and workers with the information they need to gain competitive advantage. While it seems that companies would have an ever-present requirement for workers in this job function, there's something special going on now.

ECM in 2010-Did anything BIG happen? (Part 2)

This post is a continuation of ECM in 2010- Did anything BIG happen? (Part 1)

5) Alfresco becomes a contender in the ECM space. Although Alfresco has been around since 2005, the average ECM buyer, architect, or developer didn't know much about it until 2010. Sure, there were early-adopters and ECM and Open Source enthusiasts who could have given you an earful as far back as 2007, but it wasn't until 2010 that Alfresco became a recurring entry on most short lists.   

Why now? There are several reasons: First, it simply takes time to make your name in the enterprise software space, especially when a good number of companies who need ECM platforms already have them . Second, and strangely, there was the "Open Source thing"; decision makers heard "risk" rather than "advantage" when they heard the term. (In fact one of them once told me that he couldn't risk bringing a technology into his company that was created and supported by a small group of "geeky idealists.") Third, Alfresco has now built a community of well-reputed systems integration partners, some of whose members have led extremely successful  ECM practices in the past. And finally, there's just plain good marketing: consider that there seems to be an Alfresco Lunch n Learn happening somewhere nearly all of the time; that Alfreco's John Newton and Luis Sala appeared on the very cool TWIT TV; and finally that Alfresco really supports its developer community (whose members then go out and evangelize about the technology.)

While we don't know by what percentage Alfresco's sales grew in 2010 (their fiscal year doesn't end until February 28 AND they're privately held and therefore under no obligation to disclose) we do know this: they gained customers in government (as in US Government), financial services, high-tech, and manufacturing; they have sold primarily to Global 2000 firms (70% of their customers have over 10,000 employees); that their developer's conference sold out; and that they not only compete for business against  SharePoint, Documentum, Filenet, and Opentext, but that they've been known to win.

6) CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) was approved in May. It is now the Enterprise Content Management Standard. For those who aren't clear about why that's a big deal; there is now a repository to repository protocol for document and content management systems which enables information sharing across disparate repositories regardless of vendor. (This means, for example, that users can see content stored in a Sharepoint repository from Documentum, Alfresco, FileNet etc.

If this standard endures the test of time, industry analysts say it will not only enable companies and organizations to do more and glean more knowledge from their stored content, but that it will help them  avoid vendor lock-in. 

ECM in 2010- Did anything BIG happen? (Part 1)

This is one of those blog entries that's not particularly concerned with answering a question, instead it's more intent on presenting some information and letting the reader figure out what it all means. After all, you can (and should) read vendor announcements, analyst presentations, descriptions of solutions sets offered by systems integrators, "what's hot and what's not" lists etc... but at the end of the day, from where I see it, what matters is who is shopping for what, who is buying what, what's working where (and what isn't), what's being phased-out or replaced...and, of course, how this affects the demand for talent.

Though I attend vendor conferences and read a great deal, my looking glass is shaped primarily by the executives who are ECM leaders in their organizations; the consultants who evaluate, architect, design and implement solutions; developers and configuration specialists, end users who love (or hate) the solutions they've been given to work with; and the developers and administrators who bring apps to life and keep them running.

All of that being said, here's what happened (or didn't happen) in 2010 and what it might (or might not) mean:

1) ECM is dead. Long live ECM.- This little diddy got a lot of buzz this year. For anyone who's unaware, XXX is dead. Long live XXX is a spin-off from the King is dead. Long live the king. The fill-in-the blank format was brought into vogue in 2010 when Arianna Huffington proclaimed that Publishing is dead. Long live publishing and Wired magazine's Chris Anderson proclaimed The Web is Dead. Long live the Internet. So why not be cool and use the same framework when talking about ECM?

After all, it wins attention, leads people to believe you are "in the know" and part of the "smart crowd",  and it confuses everyone. I have not spoken to a single ECM professional (who was not employed by a vendor) who wanted to spend a second pondering this topic. The bottom line is that ECM did not die in 2010. Some vendors tried to give it another name, but it didn't catch. And you know what else? If everyone else wants to be labeled something other than ECM, Microsoft will cheer you on. Already a favorite in the collaboration game, Sharepoint will gladly stand up and be counted when folks go shopping for their next ECM solution.

Monday funnies...The Cloud, the cloud or is it vapor?

Welcome to a new week. Why not start it off with a laugh?

So, instead of some long post about ECM, CMIS, EMC or big data, I thought I'd share a video about the cloud. It's a few years old, but it's hilarious. There should be moments like this at every tech conference.

Courtesy of TechPlus360