Just back from my presentation and it seemed to be well received by those in attendance. I certainly had a good time. Thanks to everyone who showed up at 4:45 on a wet Wednesday afternoon to hear me talk about my experience “rescuing” failed ECM implementations. I was particularly impressed by the excellent questions throughout; most of the attendees seemed to have had varying levels of success implementing ECM (from total failure to a reasonable amount of success: I’m very pleased to report that the organization that seemed to be most successful was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which will certainly help me sleep at night).
You can find a copy of the presentation here.
Day 2 Summary
The day started with a series of keynote speeches. The most interesting was from Andrew Lippman, founding director of the MIT Media Laboratory. He talked about the “cracks” forming in institutions (he used banks as an example, but says the example can apply to many / most organizations) as a result of four things:
1) Inability to scale – Things that work well when an organization is small don’t usually work well when they get too big. Ethics comes to mind here.
2) Monocultures – Tribes of political beasts roam through most large organizations limiting its ability to thrive.
3) Opacity – Because of the first two points, it becomes difficult to understand exactly what’s going and innovation tends to be stifled.
4) Blurred mission – Organizations forget why they existed in the first place and start to exist only to sustain themselves.
His solution to these issues is “living content” generated by networks of people working from a common platform to build what they need. He suggested that building applications that constrain users to work a certain way is outdated and will be eclipsed by (social) networks and common platforms.
Extending this to an ECM example, I see this broadly as the approach Microsoft has taken with MOSS; although it is a proprietary server-based application its extensibility has attracted a large developer community who are busily building custom Web Parts that integrate nicely into the SharePoint platform. Although traditional ECM vendors have a similar model, theirs is closed and limited only to official partners whereas anyone with some .NET skills can spin up a web part and get to work.
The open source folks may disagree with me that SharePoint is a true platform but it is certainly more so than the traditional ECM applications on offer. This is not the death knell for traditional ECM but more of a shot across the bow that they too will likely need to open up to survive in the brave new networked world.
Enough thinking and more drinking! I’m off to the pub to talk ECM (or not) with my conference colleagues. As always, comments are welcome.