C3 Associates

Continuing on with the catch-up work, here are a couple of links to presentations I gave late last year.

The first was to the first ever (and hopefully first annual) AIIM Calgary Chapter Conference, which was a huge success. Over 150 people attended the event and there were nearly a dozen vendors represented in the vendor showcase. A big thank you goes out to the committee which was ably led by Kit Bright and Shelly DiGiovanni. Great work you two!

The impact that SharePoint will have (and has already had) on the ECM landscape continues to be a hot topic and this was the subject of my presentation. SharePoint and the Future of ECM led to a lively discussion about whether Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 can really be considered an ECM tool. In a nutshell, my take on this question is:

1) SharePoint is a big deal;

2) SharePoint really is an ECM application;

3) There is room for everyone: Traditional ECM applications will survive and thrive.

Check out the presentation and please let me know your take on this issue.

The second presentation was to a group of senior managers from small to mid-sized companies. This group gathers regularly as part of the Renaissance Executive Forums program. We discussed the issues surrounding the management of knowledge in smaller organizations and had a great discussion about both traditional ECM tools and the use of emerging ‘Enterprise 2.0′ apps like Facebook.

You can find the presentation here. I hope you find it interesting and again I’d appreciate your feedback.

It’s been a busy couple of months for the team at C3 Associates and I’ve done what I said I would never do when I started blogging, namely, let my blogging duties slide. We’ve been very busy adding new clients and building up our team of Associates. Our once small and mighty group is up to 15 at the moment so I’d say we’re not exactly small anymore (but no less mighty, I assure you).

Now that we’re well into the new year and I’m finally settled in to my new office setup I’m better able to spend time doing important things like blogging. As I and many others have discussed, I really enjoy blogging because it helps keep me sharp and engaged in the goings-on in the exciting world of ECM. It also allows me to connect with others in the ECM community and to give back a bit by sharing my perspectives, both which I really enjoy.

Here are a few of the things we’ve been up to in the past couple of months:

1) We’re working on a website refresh, including a new blog template. This will be available by the end of Q1 if not sooner.

2) I’m working on a few new speaking engagements. Watch this space for details.

3) I had the opportunity to do a couple of analyst interviews. This was a new and very interesting experience for me; there’s nothing I love more than geeking out on ECM.

4) We booked a trip to Seattle for the upcoming SharePoint conference, heading down from Calgary via Phoenix where John and I will watch our beloved Calgary Flames beat up on the Phoenix Coyotes. For those of you with even a passing knowledge of geography, no, Phoenix isn’t exactly on the way to Seattle but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Should be a good time.

In the meantime, I look forward to blogging a lot more than I have over the past couple of months. I’ve got 19 things tagged “BlogThis” in del.icio.us, so there should be no shortage of things to talk about in the coming months. Looking forward to reconnecting with my pals in the ECM community.

One of the mandates of this blog is to talk about ECM in a Calgary context, so it was gratifying to read about a local company in one of our industry’s leading publications. The most recent edition of KM World magazine has a feature article about Suncor Energy’s efforts to manage CAD drawings. You can read the entire piece here.

Suncor uses a combination of Open Text’s Livelink and Cimmetry Systems AutoVue to manage and access drawing files. The article is an interesting read and provides a good illustration of the excellent work that’s going on in the Calgary ECM community.