C3 Associates

I’m writing this as I sit in the final session of the first day of the 2008 SharePoint conference in rainy downtown Seattle. It’s been a big day and I definitely need a beer but I wanted to share some of my thoughts before I head for the pub.

My most important learning has been definitive confirmation that Microsoft takes a different view of ECM than traditional ECM vendors. The ‘tone from the top’ was set by Bill Gates himself in his opening keynote. He reiterated Microsoft’s focus on the end user as the primary goal of SharePoint and related applications. This vision manifests itself in the expectation that users should be able to own team sites in SharePoint. Here’s a quote from Bill to back this up which came as part of a discussion about the horizontal focus of SharePoint. He said that “you should just allow sites to spring up in a broad fashion”. In my experience, people who want to be successful in their organizations will follow the lead of their boss, which is why SharePoint works the way it does.

A further indication of Microsoft’s unique view of ECM is the fact that this conference is opposite the 2008 AIIM Conference, which tells me that Microsoft is either deliberately trying to draw attendees from that event or simply didn’t realize that AIIM was going on at the same time. It’s probably the latter but either way, to me this is an indication that Microsoft sees SharePoint as more than an ECM application tasked with managing documents and other unstructured content. Bill Gates talked about SharePoint as the place that workers will go to access all of the information they need to do their jobs. This includes documents, structured data from line-of-business applications like CRM systems, tasks, and information about other people. By definition, a platform that is intended to give users the power to create ad hoc information structures is a platform that’s difficult to control. To make up for this, a big focus of this conference is how SharePoint deployment team can reign in the application before it gets out of control.

I am not saying any of this is a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably a very good thing because the vast majority of business use cases are inherently ad hoc. What it tells me, however, is that there are a few very clear use cases that are best supported by traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum, etc. My last blog post discussed the differences in approach and application two of my clients are taking based on the use cases they are trying to address and the tool they are using. To cut a long story short, Livelink is being used to manage a highly controlled process where SharePoint is the platform of choice for a more collaborative process. The analysts in attendance at this conference seem to agree with this (probably to the chagrin of most of the Microsoft personnel in the room), when they universally discounted the records management capabilities of SharePoint and suggested that it is not even in the same ballpark as existing RM tools. I’m not sure that’s true, but there is some legitimacy to saying that a tool that’s only had RM capabilities for a year can’t be considered as robust as applications that have been around for 15+ years.

Finally, I’ve noticed an interesting convergence between the Microsoft approach to ECM and the response by traditional ECM vendors to the emergence of social networking in the enterprise. Open Text announced Livelink ECM - Extended Collaboration at the AIIM conference today. The tool is intended to bring a free-form collaboration layer to the Livelink platform. Here’s a brief synopsis from the news release:

…[the tool] encourages people to work together, while capturing critical project information in an underlying ECM framework. Security, access control, and retention policies are strictly enforced using the native security mechanisms already in place, without adding another administrative layer.

The question organizations have to ask is whether they think a platform rooted in strong records management and content governance (like Livelink) that adds on a collaborative layer is more likely to meet their needs than is a collaborative platform (like SharePoint) that builds out content governance features over time. I don’t have a short answer to which approach is better. I suppose the best I can do is to give you the stock consultant’s response: it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Over time, we also need to consider whether SharePoint will truly dominate the space or whether there will continue to be room for applications like Livelink to continue to provide strong records management and compliance requirements even if the presentation layer ultimately becomes SharePoint. My guess is that’s exactly how things will evolve over the next decade or so. Let’s chat again in 2018 to see if I’m right.

There will be a lot to blog about over the next couple of days and I look forward to seeing if my perspective changes while here.

This is either the end of the world as we know it or a very positive move. The CIA is rolling out a social networking system modeled on Facebook called A-Space. If there’s any group who can benefit from a bit more internal collaboration it’s probably a large government agency like the CIA.

It’s interesting that they’ve made it voluntary to use. This is likely counter to their command-and-control culture but paradoxically probably the factor that will most contribute to its success. I’m curious to see if this works for them. If it works for the CIA, is there any reason that blogs, wikis and other social networking tools can’t work in your organization?

It looks like I’m going to have a lot more time on my hands now that my Calgary Flames are being badly beaten by the Detroit Red Wings in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. It’s not over yet but it will be soon if the Flames keep playing the rest of the series the way they did in the first two games. Oh well, more time to blog, right?

Speaking of blogging, I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Barry Oxby of Sierra Systems last week at the monthly CIPS luncheon. Each year for the past several years Barry has shared his views on the trends shaping the world of IT. His past predictions have proven prescient, correctly calling Y2K as the non-event of our lifetimes and identifying web services as slow to catch on way back in 2002 (we’re just getting there now). He was also good enough to admit some of his predictions haven’t quite hit the mark (like calling Google a ’side show’ in 2004…oops).

This year, Barry framed his discussion with his thoughts on how social computing is going to change the way we work (you can find his entire presentation here). He noted that ‘prescriptive computing’ has failed miserably and used an interesting model to illustrate how he feels organizations will interact in the near future. Here is his “New Hierarchy” model:

Barry used this model to talk about how traditional organizational hierarchies are changing to accommodate the way that individuals want to interact, both internally and externally with business partners, customers and suppliers. This is driven by an increased availability of easy-to-use collaborative tools and an increased familiarity in using these tools in our everyday lives. It also tends to be the domain of those people now entering the workforce who have “grown up digital”, but not exclusively. To me this is an excellent visual representation of the Enterprise 2.0 concept popularized by Harvard professor Andrew McAfee. In a nutshell, Enterprise 2.0 tools are social software applications like blogs and wikis used behind the firewall that are free-form, optional to use and egalitarian (or at least indifferent to formal organizational identities). See this post for more detail on Enterprise 2.0.

What is interesting to me is not whether organizations will change as Barry predicts, but how quickly. Expecting a baby boom-era engineer to start blogging about her projects might be a bit ambitious, but then again maybe not. What if it finally gives her the tools she needs to share information with a far-flung team and gather feedback in a way that no amount of “reply-all” email ever could? If the tools are easy enough to use and are as unconstrained as their Web 2.0 brethren, why not? But there’s the rub. Many (most) organizations are going to struggle with granting the freedom necessary to enable free-form collaboration. Putting this is a Calgary context, can we really expect large oil and gas exploration and production companies to be the first to embrace corporate blogging? Probably not. Yes, many E&P’s are starting to deploy collaborative tools to enable project teams but these tend to be constrained by traditional organizational boundaries.

To me, that’s one of the great paradoxes of the oil and gas industry. While there is a stunning array of technology employed to make sense of seismic data and to communicate with drilling crews in Zama and beyond, the same level of investment doesn’t tend to be made for things like collaboration tools that don’t have as clear a cost-benefit relationship. That doesn’t mean there is no cost-benefit relationship, just one that’s much more difficult to quantify.

Further compounding this problem is the fact that many companies are organized along geographical lines (often to the point of a single company really being several vertical companies complete with their own admin staff and IT budget) and there is often little, if any communication between groups. This may make sense when running drilling rigs or gas plants, but it has always struck me that there’s a huge opportunity for the organization that can tap into the collective wisdom of smart people from throughout the company to find more oil and gas and to pull it out of the ground cheaper, faster and safer than everyone else. Enterprise 2.0 tools seem to be a good fit, but how is this going to happen? I see three things that need to be in place:

1. Trust that the community will police itself;
2. Tools that are easy to use and just flat-out work, and;
3. A business problem to solve (i.e. a need for innovation, communication challenges in dispersed project teams, etc).

I recognize that I’m generalizing here, but it has been my experience that oil and gas companies don’t tend to be world leaders when it comes to communicating across organizational boundaries. I’m not as familiar with other industries but I imagine this sounds familiar to at least some of you out there?