C3 Associates Inc.

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 He suggested that building applications that constrain users to work a certain way is outdated and will be eclipsed by (social) networks and common platforms.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.

Andrew Chapman has provided a good summary of what we can expect from the new Content Management Interopoerability Services (CMIS) standard. I like the way he’s broken down the impact of CMIS into a series of “what’s in it for me” statements.

He’s only off on one small point. His prediction that it will take three to five years for CMIS to see the light of day in a real live production environment is off by about three to five years. John Newton at Alfresco (one of the driving forces behind CMIS) announced the world’s first CMIS integration today on his blog.

You can just tell how excited John is about the potential for CMIS to be a true game-changer in ECM. He speaks to one of the questions I’ve been mulling over; how is CMIS different than JSR-170, ODMA, WebDav and other ECM “standards”? In brief, CMIS has the backing of all of the big players in ECM from both the open source and proprietary software worlds. While this is not unprecedented it’s certainly rare, and as someone who strives to help organizations succeed with ECM I can see only good things coming from this.

There’s been an interesting convergence of opinion pieces and hard news over the past 24 hours that speak to the future of Enterprise Content Management as we know it. I know that sounds a bit melodramatic but I sense that we’re in the midst of a seismic shift in the way organizations view ECM applications and the way vendors are providing those applications.

Yesterday, Matt Asay of CNet compared the recenty hype about Google’s Chrome browser to the quiet (or maybe not so quiet if you’ve been paying attention to the ECM blogosphere) reality of SharePoint’s massive expansion within the enterprise. His suggestion that Google has a long way to go to grab the attention of corporate IT groups and displace Microsoft is an understatement to say the least. He goes on to say that the trick for Google and others is to focus on interoperability if they have any hope of challenging SharePoint.

Matt is either incredibly astute or just plain lucky because it looks like Microsoft and friends have beaten Google to that punch as well. Today, Microsoft, EMC and IBM, supported by other key ECM vendors including Open Text, Alfresco, SAP and Oracle announced the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard (see also the Yahoo Finance article on this).

At this point in the history of ECM, I think Google Chrome and Google Sites are just noise from an enterprise point of view. Until we see significant adoption in the real world and some acknowledgement from Google that content has a lifecycle, I’m not going to consider Google tools as part of the ECM equation.

And that equation, in my mind, includes both collaboration and control. All true ECM tools enable both but each tool does some things better than others. Traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum and FileNet are very strong when it comes to controlling content but have not been noted for their ease-of-use when it comes to collaboration. SharePoint, on the other hand, is not the first choice amongst the records management community but provides arguably the best enterprise-ready collaboration platform on the market.

Which brings me back to the CMIS Standard.

My first impression about the impact CMIS will have in the ECM market is that it validates what I’ve been saying for a while. SharePoint will not be the video that kills ECM’s radio stars (hands up all you Buggles fans; be honest). CMIS allows organizations to legitimately pursue an “all of the above” ECM strategy and removes any impediments they may have in deploying SharePoint to supplement an existing ECM application. At the same time, traditional ECM vendors will continue to survive and thrive as they support content that requires more rigorous controls.

Ultimately, as the news release announcing the CMIS standard says, this should be all about the customer. Of course we all know that vendors don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s clearly something in it for them as well. Here’s hoping that the CMIS standard will help break down barriers to successful content management by providing the best of both collaboration and control to the benefit of everyone.

Open Text Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Jenkins was featured in an extensive article in the July 21 edition of the Globe and Mail. You can find the article along with an audio interview here.

In addition to several hockey references that underscore the company’s Canadian roots, Jenkins made a couple of interesting comments about the “acquire or be acquired” nature of the software business. Let’s just say he didn’t do anything to dispel the speculation that Open Text will someday be acquired. At the same time, I think he didn’t take enough credit for the good work Open Text has done to become (and remain) Canada’s largest software company. He put a lot of it down to luck and also the ability to operate in relative obscurity due to the overwhelming success of Research in Motion (the makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, in case you didn’t know).

In my mind, Open Text has done a good job of positioning its technology to address a growing need while at the same time marketing well. The supposed “threat” to Open Text posed by SharePoint has yet to materialize and as the market comes to better understand how each of the products are positioned it seems even less likely that SharePoint will erode Open Text’s market share. Open Text’s “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” strategy seems to be working. We’re certainly seeing a lot of interest in hybrid solutions (using both Livelink and SharePoint) here in Calgary and I imagine that is likely the case elsewhere as well.

I recently had the privilege of providing some input into an article on SharePoint’s impact on the Enterprise Content Management market written by Marvin Pyles of Key Analysis Research. You can find the article here.