C3 Associates Inc.

Not many people have heard of Duncan Stanners. Forget Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, Duncan was quietly plying his craft when the internet was but a twinkle in the DoD's eye. But make no mistake, Duncan Stanners has had the kind of success implementing knowledge management programs that most of us can only dream about. 

Duncan recently retired after 20+ years of service at Shell Canada  (which is now wholly owned by Royal Dutch Shell) and I recently had the privilege of joining him and several of our peers in the Calgary knowledge and information management community at a retirement luncheon in Duncan's honour.  In the true spirit of knowledge management, Duncan shared some of the lessons he learned from the successes and challenges he faced over the years. The summary below was shared in the context of implementing a knowledge management program but it applies equally to any RM, ECM or information management program as well. 

1. Go where the energy is. Duncan suggests that while there may be many opportunities to make a big impact with your initial implementation efforts, don't try to boil the ocean. When choosing where to focus, find the group with the most enthusiasm for your project, pick a problem and solve it. This not only builds goodwill with the folks whose problem you've solved, it also builds momentum and a positive reputation for your program team. 
    
2. If you can't find energy, create it.  This is easier said than done but by focusing on the value your program will bring their area of the business and to them as individuals you will gain their trust and enthusiasm.  Again, find a problem and solve it.
    
3. When talking to customers, don't talk about KM (or RM, IM or ECM), talk about their business.  This helps build trust and shows that you are there to help them solve business problems. It also has the handy side effect of helping your learn more about their slice of the organizational pie, which helps you apply your expertise in ways that are specific to their business context.
    
4. If you can't create a hard-dollar ROI, focus on real risks. There is seldom a conversation about information management that doesn't at some point come back to the question of value for money (and nor should there be).  But hard-dollar saving s from de-duplicating the shared drive and improving information access do not always offset the initial costs of your program. However, a risk-based approach that uses hard cost measures based on things that have actually happened will help make your case. Sell your program on the same basis that you sell a safety initiative; the benefits of working more safely are irrefutable , and once they understand the similarities between the two they will be supportive.
    
5. "You're already doing knowledge management. You're just doing it badly".  Duncan's point is that most groups within your organization are already doing knowledge management (or records, information or content management) but because they are using ineffective processes they are not managing their knowledge or information well.  Your job as an expert is to help guide them through the process to managing that knowledge or information better. Duncan suggests that you find cases where you have successful practices and repeat these until you succeed.
    
6. Tools won't sell the thing.  At best, tools and technology can facilitate adoption and at worst they can constrain it, but the best tool in the world will not help if you are not helping real-world business users solve real-world business problems.

I am often asked where I think the Records and Information Management function should exist within a company’s org chart. This question usually comes up in the context of a frustrated practitioner who is having a difficult time getting traction for their ECM program or from business users how are frustrated at being told by IT, RM or someone else that they need to manage their information in a certain way that may not be immediately intuitive to them, or does not support their business processes.

The first question to ask is whether it really matters. Shouldn’t a first class Records and Information Management (IM) program succeed by virtue of its own momentum and the value it creates irrespective of what the boxes on the org chart say? In a perfect world that would be true, but unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world (if you need proof see my earlier post about the Calgary Flames missing the playoffs).

So where should the Records and Information Management function live? Not in IT, at least not in most cases.

Notwithstanding the fact that the “I” in “IT” stands for “Information”, the mandate of most IT organizations is to keep servers running and to manage vendor relationships. I know that many, if not most IT professionals are truly dedicated to helping their customers manage their business more efficiently, but at the end of the day the great majority of IT organizations are not set up to accommodate the challenges of managing information well.

And these challenges are many. Perhaps the most important comes from the fact that Information Management implementations do not have a natural beginning, middle and end. Information Management is an ongoing process that evolves and changes over time to support changing business requirements and the needs of their user community. Information Management is not a project and it certainly is not a technology deployment.

IT groups on the other hand generally operate a project management office tasked with standing up servers, upgrading software and rolling out new technologies. Each of these tasks fit well with a traditional “waterfall” project management methodology that expects right and wrong answers along the way. Information Management on the other hand is more art than science. Yes, it is critical that IM projects are managed properly and that appropriate controls are in place to ensure the implementation stays on track, but the key aspects of IM projects are people and process rather than technology. Change management is critically important and, let’s face it, most IT organizations are not adept at the people side of change.

That leaves the question of where the Records and IM function should live within your organization. In my experience there are three good answers depending on the makeup and business challenges of your organization.

1) If you are in a heavily regulated industry or are likely to face more than your fair share of lawsuits you likely want to align your IM program closely with your corporate legal group, reporting in to chief legal counsel.

2) If your objectives are to enhance operational efficiency or improve the bottom line of your business by managing your information better, align your IM program with an operational support area or even a strategic marketing or R&D group.

3) Finally, if you are in a situation where the only logical spot is within IT, try to ensure that you carve out the IM function from the other core teams in the IT group. One of my clients appointed a Director of Information Management a s a direct report of the CIO, which made her a peer of the more traditional IT roles of Infrastructure and Application support and gave her a seat at the table to advocate for IM.

In the end, when push comes to shove the core mandate of each part of your organization will ultimately prevail. In the case of IT, generally speaking their mandate is to keep the servers running and as a result the processes and political power tends to support this objective. Many IT groups can walk and chew gum at the same time but if they start to stumble they’ll spit out the gum before they fall over. Placing IM in a part of your organization where it can fulfil its mandate is one of the first steps on the road to success.

Cross-posted to the AIIM ERM Community blog.

My two part series on the impact Microsoft SharePoint may have on the information managment marketplace was well recieved so I thought I might try another two-part article. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the characteristics of successful records management and Enterprise Content Management implementations; why can some organizations successfully deploy ECM where others struggle mightily?

Much of this has to do with organizational culture and the fit of a particular ECM strategy to the business problems faced by a given organization. Readiness is key as are executive buy-in and a well-chosen and well-implemented tool. But these things can be said for pretty much any software application; if the bosses aren’t onside and a good change management strategy isn’t in place, the implementation will fail.

Jeetu Patel of Doculabs recently summarized his perspective on why ECM implementations have high falure rates and what you can do about it on John Mancini’s Digital Landfill blog. I highly recommend you read the post and watch the associated slide show. I’m hopeful that my post is complementary to Jeetu’s perspectives.

So what is it that makes information and records management implementations so special? What challenges do these implementations present that other systems do not? In my mind, there are two big differences;

1.Information Management hits people where they live, for better or worse. At best, records and information management are tied in with business processes and improves them to the point where users can’t believe they ever lived without proper RM / IM and ECM tools. For example, scanning invoices and initiating an automated Accounts Payable workflow process will make any approving manager wonder why they ever thought hand-coding invoices and routing them in multicoloured folders was a good idea. Same for users of Business Process Management applications like insurance claims processing or engineers using a GIS map integrated with a document repository. On the flip side, ECM asks users to change deeply ingrained work habits. Most of us have been using “File / Save as…” then navigating 10 folders deep on a shared drive for as long as we can remember. While most users don’t like storing documents on their shared drives (often lovingly called the “S: mess”), most will take this over a different structure imposed by an ECM system any day (even when you can prove that it’s actually less work to store documents in the ECM system!). Add to this the complexity that many organizations add by expecting their user community to remember a complex records classifications scheme or other detailed metadata and you have a recipe for failure.

2.The other big difference with ECM tools is that they are largely optional. An accountant may not like the way the new ERP system works, but she doesn’t have much of a choice when creating quarterly financial statements. ECM systems, while core to many business processes, can often be worked around by users who insist on storing documents on local drives or USB keys. This isn’t always the case, but it crops up most often when phasing out shared drives with ECM systems and is related to the work habits noted above.

In my next post I’ll talk about what you, the budding ECM deployment guru, can do to overcome these challenges and give your implementation the best chance for success.

Cross posted to the AIIM ERM Communities blog.

This is the second of a two-part series that summarizes the main points in the ongoing debate about the impact of Microsoft SharePoint on the ECM community.  Last week I reviewed several reasons why traditional Enterprise Content Management vendors will continue to thrive despite Microsoft's push into the ECM space.  This week, it's Microsoft's turn.  As before, my goal is to summarize the key points in the discussion about the impact of SharePoint and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

Please leave your feedback or comments below, drop me a note on Twitter or feel free to contact me directly at greg.clark@c3associates.com.

Here are a few reasons SharePoint may become the dominant force in the Enterprise Content Management space. 

1. SharePoint 2010 is more than just basic ECM.  Where SharePoint 2007 could still be considered "basic content services", SharePoint 2010 has addressed most of the shortcomings that prevented this platform from competing head-to-head with traditional ECM tools.  A couple of months ago I summarized the eight reasons SharePoint 2010 is a true ECM system and based on the feedback I have heard from several of my clients, most feel that SharePoint has reached the tipping point where they will start to seriously consider shifting their ECM platforms over to SharePoint.  For most organizations considering a net-new ECM implementation, SharePoint is often the only candidate, especially where the organization is already committed to the Microsoft stack.  Microsoft has invested heavily in building out key ECM functionality like records management and has significantly improved SharePoint's ability to handle metadata and very large lists, among many other improvements.  The list of functional differences between SharePoint and traditional ECM systems has become so small that traditional ECM vendors will have an increasingly difficult time differentiating their products from SharePoint.  
2. SharePoint is the silver bullet of user adoption.  User adoption is a challenge that has dogged the ECM industry from the very beginning.  Many organizations feel the only thing preventing ECM from becoming truly successful is a poor user interface that limited user uptake (for an excellent summary of this question, read the wisdom shared by experienced ECM practitioner Mike Alsup, who reminds us that user adoption is about far more than a slick user interface), it seems that everyone wants to believe that SharePoint 2010 is the answer to all of their prayers.  Whether it is or not seems almost beside the point; perception is reality and that poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  The fact remains that SharePoint offers an excellent user experience. To Microsoft's credit, SharePoint has been designed with the information worker in mind.  The tool "thinks the way the worker thinks" and user uptake of SharePoint tends to be quick and requires minimal training. This can pose a problem where the implementation is unplanned, leading to a rapid  proliferation of SharePoint sites and some would argue simply replicating the shared drive mess in SharePoint. However, as integrators and Microsoft partners learn how to plan and govern SharePoint deployments, the intuitive user interface will help SharePoint dominate the ECM space in the same way that MS Office has dominated the desktop.  
3. Size matters. The sheer scale of Microsoft poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  They clearly can't outspend Microsoft on marketing and Microsoft's partner ecosystem is unmatched anywhere.  In the first part of this two-part series I said that one key advantage for traditional ECM platforms is their strong vertical story. This could be quickly eroded by many of the partners who have built and continue to build tightly integrated solutions suited to nearly any industry you can think of.  Yes, traditional ECM vendors have a head start in this area but Microsoft and their partner are hot on their heels.  Further, there is a wealth of SharePoint information freely available from MSDN, Codeplex and the many thousands of SharePoint MVP and partner blogs and websites.  It seems that if it can be known about SharePoint, it will be available somewhere for free and this will lead to rapid innovation and an improved product.  
4. SharePoint has a strong social story.  SharePoint started life as a collaboration platform and has evolved from this into a social computing platform. As the demands grow to provide Facebook-like tools in an enterprise context, SharePoint is very well positioned to meet this need. SharePoint may not be best of breed but many enterprises seem comfortable collaborating using a platform from a know n quantity such as Microsoft. To date, the efforts of traditional ECM vendors to "socialize" their platforms have not received widespread adoption and there are questions about their continued desire to play in this space in light of stiff competition from Microsoft.  
5. SharePoint is much more than just ECM.  SharePoint is a portal, a document management system, a business intelligence tool, a records management system, a social networking platform, a web content management system, development platform and an enterprise search tool.  Many established ECM vendors can say many of these same things, but the Microsoft story is especially compelling for organizations already committed to the Microsoft stack.
6. Microsoft will win because they're Microsoft.  The intangible advantage that Microsoft has is based on their history. Whenever Microsoft sets their mind to do something, very little will get in their way.  Remember the early days of the relational database wars?  Ask yourself when the last time was that you came across a Sybase database and you have some idea what that might mean for some traditional ECM vendors.   And if you don't think Microsoft is targeting traditional ECM vendors with SharePoint 2010, think again.  With SharePoint 2007, Microsoft started the process of embedding SharePoint into their core Office suite but was clear that most organizations still needed a traditional ECM system for the higher ECM functions. For more on this, see my blog post outlining some of the functional gaps between SharePoint and traditional ECM. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has changed their focus from partnering with traditional ECM to trying to out-compete them (of course they won't say this officially but their all-out marketing push at the 2010 AIIM show is a clear indicator).

I hope this short series has been useful. I'm sure there are other reasons why SharePoint may or may not dominate the ECM space and I am keen to hear your perspective. 

Please leave your comments below and I will reply as best I can.

After death and taxes, there are two other things in this world that seem to be a certainty;

1. If you want to start a debate in the enterprise content management (ECM) community mention SharePoint, and;
2. I’m really bad at predictions.

Evidence for point #1 is all over ECM blogs, countless conversations at conferences like AIIM and ARMA, and countless sleepless nights for traditional ECM vendors as they try to think of ways to fend off Microsoft. As for the second point, let’s just say that after I picked my Calgary Flames to win the Stanley Cup they missed the playoffs entirely. Nice call on that one.

The purpose of this post is to list some of the reasons why traditional ECM tools might survive (or even thrive) in the face of Microsoft’s full-court-press into the ECM space. I will leave it up to you, my colleagues in the Electronic Records Management (ERM) community, to expand on this list, tell me where you disagree and have a good discussion about the future of Enterprise Content Management. Next week I will make the case why SharePoint might be the future of ECM.

So, here goes.

1. Records Management is not optional. Many organizations wish it was, but it isn’t. Although SharePoint 2007 introduced some records management capabilities and SharePoint 2010 seems to take this to the next level, the critical role records management plays within an organization means it is not something that can or should be done half way. Traditional ECM tools like EMC Documentum, Open Text Content Server (formerly Livelink), Open Text eDocs (formerly Hummingbird), IBM FileNet and open source tools like Alfresco have a several-year head start on Microsoft. This means there is a significant body of best practice built up within the vendor and partner channels associated with each tool. There is a very good chance the issue your organization is dealing with has been seen somewhere else and that you can call on these resources to help get you where you need to go. Can you say that about SharePoint RM? The tool and best practices may eventually develop, but do you want to go first?
2. The vertical is steeper than you think. Whenever a client or colleague would ask whether I thought SharePoint 2007 was a viable replacement for their existing ECM system, it was relatively straightforward to explain why most organizations needed to continue leveraging their existing investments in traditional ECM suites. I summarized some the shortcomings of SharePoint 2007 last year, and have found these points to be a very useful “elevator pitch” when discussing the differences between SharePoint 2007 and traditional ECM suites. Admittedly, this discussion gets as lot more muddled with SharePoint 2010. Many if not all of these points have been addressed in one form or another, except for one very important area; solid, mature solutions in industry verticals. ECM vendors have spent the better part of the past two decades developing, deploying, supporting and improving their solutions for specific industries. Will the life sciences industry trust their complex regulatory approval process to SharePoint any time soon? Will the architecture, engineering and construction industry be able to manage multi-billion dollar projects that generate millions of AutoCAD files and tens of millions of facility tags in SharePoint? Speaking in strictly technical terms it is possible that SharePoint can handle the volumes, but for these use cases and others like them, ECM suites offer mature tools that support complex business processes and as above, the vendor professional services and partner networks have extensive experience in implementing these tools in a variety of industry verticals. Although there is a perception that ECM should primarily focus on replacing shared drives, my suspicion is that most ECM is targeted at solving business problems in core operating areas, and it is in these areas that traditional ECM players hold a significant advantage.
3. A suite of tools from one vendor increases accountability. Whenever someone questions the ability of SharePoint to meet a particular business need using the product as-is out of the box (as is often the case when discussing the vertical business requirements noted above), the response is usually that a Microsoft partner either has or will provide a module that meets this need. While that may be true in many cases, most organizations end up with many different modules from many different vendors. There are a couple of downsides to this; the testing required each time you need to upgrade goes up exponentially and, if and when things do go wrong you will not be able to hold a single vendor to account. This is often referred to as the “one throat to choke” argument (although my friends in the vendor community prefer to call it the “one back to pat” argument). Although the “suite” approach taken by traditional ECM vendors usually means that some of the individual components are not best of breed, the ability to hold a single vendor to account for their product is a significant benefit, and one that SharePoint cannot offer.
4. If Microsoft CRM didn’t kill SAP, why would SharePoint kill traditional ECM? Although there has been a lot of talk about SharePoint overtaking traditional ECM players, why has Microsoft not overtaken SAP in the CRM space? Is there is a case to be made that SharePoint is akin to Microsoft’s CRM offering; a tool targeted at the mid-market, mass-market space but not really suitable for true enterprise deployment?

I hope these questions provide a good starting point for a good discussion about the future of ECM. Next Thursday I will make the case for SharePoint to live up to the hype and change the ECM landscape as we know it.

Until then look forward to your comments.

Cross-posted from my blog on the AIIM ERM Expert User Community.