C3 Associates Inc.

In honour of Canada Day today (and yes, "honour" is spelled with a "u"), I thought I would share the significant contribution Canadians have made to the information and records management industry.   I'm not sure why it is that Canada seems to have had a disproportionate impact on our industry; I'm tempted to say that we don't have much to do in the winter except fret about records, but that would further the unfortunate stereotype of Canada as a winter wasteland.  The truth is, Canada is a vibrant, diverse and well-educated country that has given the world a lot of great things; from the first radio broadcast to the BlackBerry, from basketball to birch bark canoes and from the instant replay to insulin, Canadians have done a lot.

So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that we can add records management systems to that list.  My Twitter pal and content management all-rounder Cheryl McKinnon (more on her later) provided me with some guidance on the short history of records management systems in Canada.

It is a little-known fact that three of the core records management components in the major ECM suites were originally conceived of in Ottawa.  PS Software Solutions became the core of the Livelink RM module after PS was acquired by Open Text in 1999, Tarian Software was acquired by FileNet (now part of IBM) in 2002 and Provenance Systems became Documentum Records Manager (now part of EMC), also in 2002.

But Canada's glories in the records and information management space are not all past tense.  The following is a very brief overview of a few prominent Canadians in ECM.  And I say brief because it is impossible to capture the contributions of every Canadian who has had an impact on the records and information management industry. The big risk with listing names is overlooking someone and I am certain I have done so, so my apologies in advance. If you think there is someone who deserves to be recognized as a leader in the Canadian ECM space, please let me know in the comments section below.

Tom Jenkins is the Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at Open Text, the company that helped define the ECM industry and make it what it is today. He joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in 1994 and quickly became CEO then Chairman.  He is one of the true champions of ECM and has helped Open Text become the largest independent ECM vendor in the world. Tom literally wrote the book on ECM and continues to actively promote the future of information through Open Text's support of the Canada 3.0 initiative and the University of Waterloo's Stratford Institute, a think-tank devoted to collaboration between digital media, international commerce and culture.

Cheryl McKinnon has been the Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, an up and coming open source ECM vendor since 2009, but got her start in ECM 16 years ago following a graduate degree in Canadian History.  Cheryl has extensive public sector experience with Hummingbird/PC DOCS and following Open Text's acquisition of Hummingbird she managed the Livelink Collaborative Content Management line of business. It was in this capacity that she launched the Open Text Enterprise 2.0 strategy in 2008. Cheryl is one of my favourite Tweeters (or is that Twitterers?) for her insightful and relevant commentary on all aspects of ECM from records management to social media. She is a true thought leader in our industry and if you don't already follow her Tweets I encourage you to do so. 

Barclay Blair is an information governance guru who has written extensively on the topic. He is the author (along with Randy Kahn) of the Information Nation books, speaks and consults all around the world to Fortune 500 companies, governments and others.  Just in case you were worried Barclay would coast on past success, he was recently named a "SharePoint Guru" at SharePointGovernance.org, a peer exchange site sponsored by AIIM. Barclay is currently president at ViaLumina.

Ann Rockley is the founder of the Rockley Group, a globally-recognized content management consultancy.  Ann has written two books on the intricacies of content management, including DITA 101 and Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy,  which is regarded as one of the seminal books in our industry. Ann is also active in the content management  community; she is the OASIS co-chair DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee and is a founding member of the CM Pros group.

Like I said earlier, this list is intended to highlight the contribution Canadians have made to records and information management. If you can think of anyone else who deserves recognition, please list them in the comments section below.

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.

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.

I want to make the world safe for records management.

Scratch that. I want to make the world safe for records managers. Why? Because they don’t seem to get the respect they deserve and in most cases, neither does the information they help manage.

Based on the fact that you’re reading this blog I’m sure you agree organizations should work hard to manage information well. Certainly most have taken a crack at it with varying degrees of success but regardless of their efforts we can usually predict which parts of our organizations will succeed or fail based on their organizational mission in life. For example:

• If I’m in accounting I can usually dig up an invoice from a few years back if I really need to
• If I’m in legal I can usually find a contract (or at least sheepishly call the company we contracted with to get a copy)
• If I’m in marketing I usually wonder where the he*l that file went

I’m generalizing to make the point that many organizations have failed to realize the full benefits of their enterprise information management programs because their efforts to date haven’t been truly enterprise. Information management within many (if not most) organizations has emerged from a series of point solutions deployed to individual departments, often on different platforms.

So what are successful organizations doing right? How do they manage the ever-present tug of war between efficiency and process? How do they get buy-in from senior executives and how do they sustain the momentum of ECM initiatives to ensure they stay relevant?

The answer is deceptively simple; they evolve. They move beyond managing records as valuable in their own right to governing information as a true asset of their organization. Easy to say, hard to do. Organizations that successfully navigate this transition usually do so because they establish strong information governance practices.

What’s the difference between records management and information governance? In my opinion:

• Records management is static where information governance is dynamic
• Records management is reactive where information governance is proactive
• Records management is focused on the retention schedule where information governance is focused on enabling the business to get their work done

I am most definitely not saying that records management is not important (some of my best friends are records managers…). Organizations that successfully manage information across the enterprise (and this information includes records) realize that information is only valuable if it helps advance the cause of your organization. In the case of highly regulated industries or those with a high litigation risk there will be a strong focus on creating hard-and-fast rules for information retention and disposition. The challenge that most organizations face is that this is where enterprise information management begins and ends.

Organizations with a focus on information governance realize the importance of creating a living model that puts appropriate structures in place to enable users to manage information appropriately. This means a risk-based approach to records retention, but frankly there’s nothing especially new or unique about that. What is unique are those organizations that establish mechanisms to efficiently support the changing information management needs of their users. According to IDC individuals (rather than transactional systems) create 70% of the information in organizations; this means organizations that provide simple, intuitive and, most importantly, flexible information management structures will be the ones that succeed.

Information management structures (a folder hierarchy, metadata model, line-of-business integration, or custom interface) must make sense to the end users and fit easily into the flow of their work. This is no easy task and is only made more difficult when there is an overemphasis on command-and-control governance structures.

My advice to records managers and information management practitioners everywhere is to focus on a thin layer of standardization, then provide “guidelines” and “principles” for managing information rather than hard and fast “must do” policies. Users are much more likely to follow good practices for managing information if they feel they have some flexibility to do it on their own terms. Yes, there is still a need for certain information to be managed with more rigour, but my challenge to the records managers of the world is to find ways to empower your users to manage information rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. A little freedom might just be what your information, and your users, need.

Apologies for the time gap between blog posts. Not only do I have a good excuse but also some exciting news. Starting later this month, I will join several of the brightest lights in the ECM world as an AIIM ERM expert blogger. I’m obviously excited about this opportunity but at the same time a bit daunted to be included in the same group as ECM heavyweights Mike Alsup, Mimi Dionne, Jesse Wilkins, Susan Goodman, James Watson and others.

I have been testing my search skills and trying to stay current with industry blogs and Twitter feeds but by far the best source of material has been from conversations with colleagues and clients. The AIIM ERM expert blog initiative is about presenting a “real world” perspective on ECM and what better way to do that than by talking with those who help make ECM happen in organizations throughout the world. My hope is that I can share their success stories and lessons learned to help you improve ECM within your organization.

If there is a topic you would like me to tackle or if you have a success story to share, feel free to get in touch at greg.clark@c3associates.com. I will be cross-posting my AIIM blogs here as well and will provide the blog address when it goes live later this month.