C3 Associates Inc.

C3 Associates Principal Greg Clark’s article “Eight Things SharePoint Needs to be a True ECM System” was published in the January/February 2010 edition of AIIM Infonomics Magazine, the ECM industry’s leading publication. An electronic version of the article can be found here: http://www.aiim.org/Infonomics/ArticleView.aspx?ID=38351

Our blog post “Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System” was the most popular post of 2009 on AIIM President John Mancini’s Digital Landfill blog. Thanks to John and the AIIM team for all of their support this year. Thanks to them and the hard work of the Calgary ECM community, the 2009 Calgary AIIM conference was a big success and proves once again that information management is alive and well in Calgary.

I’m working on an update to my SharePoint 2010 post based on what I’ve learned since it was released in beta this fall. Look for that post early in new year. Until then, I wish all of my readers the best of the season and a fantastic 2010!

C3 Associates Princial Greg Clark and Associate Pankaj Bhawnani presented at last week’s AIIM Western Canada conference. Panjaj’s topic was “How to Build an Information Management Strategy” and Greg’s was “What Success Looks Like – The Anatomy of a Successful ECM Program”.

You can download both slide decks in the Presentations section of our site.

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.

I arrived in Philly today for the AIIM conference (yes, a day late; life would be so much easier if it weren’t for client commitments…wait, scratch that) and my first impressions of the city are as follows:

1) It’s called the City of Brotherly Love for a reason. On a lark I decided to take the train downtown rather than a cab, which is a great way to get a feel for the spirit of a city (and save a few bucks). The first thing I witnessed was a train conductor realizing he’d short-changed someone and going out of his way to make sure they got the correct change. Doubt you’d see that in NYC (or Toronto for that matter).

2) History is everywhere. In 30 minutes of aimless wandering I saw the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and Benjamin Franklin’s burial site. For those who know Philadelphia this will come as no suprise given they’re basically all in the same place, but this kid from the Canadian prairies was impressed all the same.

3) Philly cheesesteak really is that good.

So it’s on to the conference tomorrow. I’m looking forward to my presentation; “ECM Rescue – Recovering from a Failed Implementation” at 4:45 in Room 111. I’ve got the graveyard shift but I promise to keep it light and interesting. If anyone reading this is here at the conference, stop by after the presentation and say hi.

I’ll post a summary tomorrow night along with a link to the slide deck. Until then, it’s off for a second helping of cheesesteak…