Groundswell technology comes to consumers first. At home, we get social, mobile, video, and cloud services pitched to us 24×7. Facebook, Android, iPad, Foursquare, Google, YouTube, Office Web Apps, Twitter. The list is endless and growing every single day. Empowering technologies like these will always come to consumers first. Why? Because it's a wide-open market. A single developer can build an application that changes the world from their broadband-connected bedroom.

All this technology puts tremendous power directly into the hands of your customers. Your customers often have more information than your sales team — or medical staff — does. They can also whack your brand from their smartphone, with video even, while waiting impatiently in line. They can get a recommendation from someone in their business network while listening to your pitch. Customers are empowered by information and connections. You'd better make sure you give customers better information than they can get elsewhere.

The only way to do that is to empower your employees to directly engage the needs and expectations of empowered customers. Only empowered employees can solve the problems of empowered customers.

Fortunately, your employees are not standing still. People are problem solvers. Left alone, your innovative employees (we call them HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives) are building new solutions using these same groundswell technologies — and many others besides — to solve customer problems.

In fact, 37% of US information workers — employees that use computers for work — use do-it-yourself technology to get work done. Personal mobile devices. Unsanctioned Web sites like Skype or Google Docs or LinkedIn or Smartsheet.com. Unsanctioned software downloaded to a work computer.

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This is the third and final post in the Problem With “E” in ECM Series. In the first I outlined why “E” representing enterprise has lost its meaning and usefulness when discussing content management in all its flavors.  In the second installment I discussed how SharePoint has captured the ECM market as we knew it. In the [...]

The Register: “The place to start is to consider IT’s role in the grand scheme of things. If we sidestep the idea that everything is going to the cloud, and consider a more realistic scenario whereby a business may own and operate a certain set of core services (processes with a degree of privacy / IP, customer data, etc) and look to outsource their services (certain software apps, server/storage capacity etc), it’s relatively easy to see an emerging role for IT as an orchestrator, rather than sole custodian.”

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Recently I’m sure you’ve noticed a lot of conversations about clouds around the water cooler.  They go a little something like this:
“The cloud allows computers to share resources to run applications.”
“Oh, like mainframe computing?”
“No, it takes advantage of several computers to run the application.”
“Oh, like network computing?”
“No, it uses those computers on the internet.”
“Oh, like [...]

Mimosa Systems acquisition by Iron Mountain was an interesting surprise.  Interesting in that it brings the oldest records management company into the forefront of the latest in eDiscovery.  Iron Mountain was started in 1950 when an abandoned iron mine in Kentucky was used to store bank records and is now located in over 39 countries.  [...]

Last week, Acquia launched Drupal Gardens in beta. Speculation might have been more feverish had this not been on the same day as some company in Cupertino launched a new gadget. Nevertheless, Acquia’s offering is worth a second look.

Gardens is effectively Drupal 7 as a service: WCM hosted on the Amazon content delivery network. It includes a number of modules and is aimed very squarely at microsites and perishable campaign sites. It promises rapid deployment without needing a Drupal superhero to set up your site. You don’t need SQL, you don’t need PHP. You pick your URL, your templates, tools and styles, enter your content and you’re live.

And that represents what many people really understand by WCM.

You can create repeatable information architecture and consistent design elements from a library of themes and templates. You can use the Theme Builder to create custome content types. And it’s way friendlier than WordPress.com. Slicker too. People with very limited web knowledge can create websites even more easily than they used to in the days of Frontpage or Dreamweaver and go live with them, since Acquia take care of the hosting.

But this is very much WCM for websites that have content only. There’s nothing transactional and no sign yet of secure hosting that establishes private networking to your other online applications. It’s a great template editing tool to give to your design team or for small businesses to play around with, but not necessarily the tool that allows you to devolve complex editorial tasks to distributed authors. While the cloud-based aspect should allow you to scale your website delivery, it’s not clear whether it scales on the authoring side for people wanting to contribute content from around the world (which probably isn’t a central use case). It’s also worth noting what’s on the road map, because these are things that Gardens can’t yet do; such as multi-site search, multi-site configuration, and analytics.

Where Garens is a great fit is for clients who want a rapid time to deploy with minimal fuss. Why should clients concern themselves with APIs and hosting SLAs? Why should they have to engage with geeks just to change a template? Gardens resolves those issues by giving you a website builder and at a great price: it’s free throughout 2010 and only $20 to $40 per month per site after that, with flexibility over multi-site licences. But if you’re hoping that your website should be more than just vanity-ware, that it will increase revenues or reduce pressure on other streams by bringing transactions online, you’ll have to look at a content-driven application that has better integration points with other systems, or wait for this to be developed by Acquia.

I think Acquia’s move has implications for the wider WCM industry. Firstly, that the SaaS model has a valid use case which will permeate higher-end WCM; for example, Alterian CME is sort of available as a service through Verizon. Secondly, because many clients still understand (and want) WCM to be a tool for managing look and feel as well as content. Drupal Gardens achieves both those things. Can other vendors say the same?

Recently, I got an e-mail newsletter (from: company name redacted) – one of those that goes almost immediately to trash following a quick scan. What made me ROFL was this line: Blogging is easy, usually free, and most importantly, fun! Now, I am not perfect (well, am nearly ) and could use more self-blogging discipline, [...]

As the year comes to an end it’s time to look at the future.  While many are looking to major predictions for next year, I thought I’d focus on the most obvious ones.  These are the top five ECM assumptions that loom ahead in are day-to-day work lives 2010

#1 SharePoint and Traditional ECM Won’t Get [...]

Many in the content management industry (and beyond) seem to be slightly obsessed with the buzz that the “cloud” is. The opinions can be quite polar, but for now we’ll concentrate on those embracing virtualization. In today’s interview, Emmanuel Garcin, VP and GM in North America for open source CMS provider Jahia, shared his thoughts about cloud [...]