My Twitter and Facebook networks saw me throw a hissy fit this week when I proclaimed a strong negative reaction to a short cartoon marketing video. I’m not reposting a link to it, figuring I’ve probably already driven more traffic to it than they ever expected.

Thanks to the contestmeister Jon Marks (aka @McBoof) over at his Jon on Tech blog. Nothing like some late night wine-fueled giggles amongst some of the sharpest & funniest content management gurus.

A great bunch of people – even the competitors. Who I whomped. Twice.

On Wednesday, I delivered a session at the Office Document Strategy & Solutions Summit – hosted by InfoTrends, a leading worldwide market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry.

A big thanks to InfoTrends Omri Duek and Anne Valaitis who invited me to participate and served as impeccable hosts, introducing me to a great group of like-minded digital content professionals.

Titled “Generation Gap: Implications for the Next Generation Office”, (abbreviated version of the slide deck here on SlideShare), I was asked to design a session to spur some debate and discussion, to get the attendees to think about their own changing business models and the disruptive forces that are compelling their customers to think differently.

The Disruptive Forces on my radar…

• Economic uncertainty and how businesses are questioning traditional assumptions in an effort to stay lean and competitive
• Loss of Corporate Memory – the ultimate irony of the information age… poor record-keeping and content sharing practices means we risk losing decades of intellectual property and mentorship potential as experienced workers leave the organization
• Businesses – even small ones – become global. Use of the web means bigger audience to reach, companies need to create content to be consumed by all the senses in order to get around language barriers
• Greening of the Enterprise – where can costs be cut – both $$ and reduction of carbon footprint
• Gen Y Enters the Management Ranks and brings with them differently wired work habits
• We enter the Era of Peak E-Mail – no longer a productivity enabler but has evolved into a productivity inhibitor
• The Mobile Era Emerges – content is created and consumed on a whole new category of communication devices
• Rise of Open Source, Cloud Computing, SaaS – erosion of traditional IT practices and business models of software companies
• Web 2.0 – Adoption of new collaborative content creation tools becomes mainstream, increasingly recognized as electronically stored information by regulatory and legal authorities

Expect to hear more from me on many of these topics over the next few months… new approaches to Enterprise Content Management demands a recognition of the changed business environment affecting customers and prospects.

My session was followed by a fantastic presentation from Sun’s Gary Lombardo. His content provided a natural continuation and deeper dive into the themes I introduced. Particularly valuable was his practical and proven methodology for how to start, maintain and grow a community initiative for business (internal or external audience).

What did I learn at the event? The most intriguing discussion I had was over lunch, with a couple of very sharp and funny ladies from Taylor Business Equipment (a certified Women’s Business Enterprise) in Chicago. They educated me on the environmental and preservation issues as the printer industry evolves into adoption of solid ink devices. What does that mean for our next generation of physical content artifacts? My nerdy historian spider-sense starting tingling at this one.

Maybe that will be a topic for next year’s event…

The press release makes it official, I’ve joined Nuxeo – the Open Source ECM company as their first ever Chief Marketing Officer. I am absolutely thrilled to take this next step and explore a new angle on content management. Nuxeo is a small company but they are racking up some pretty impressive customer names, showing solid growth, and investing in some strategic hires over the coming months to expand their development, sales and marketing organization.

My path to Nuxeo was fun. Call it Recruiting 2.0 if you must, but it all happened through the online social marketplace of ideas. A few months ago, Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca set out to find an ECM marketing professional who could help take them to the next level as a company and brand. Eric himself is an active blogger and twitter user, so he looked around the ECM community networks and well, he found me. He looked at the companies and individuals who were doing the things that he liked and took the effort to personally reach out and extend an invitation to chat.

Honestly, I had no plans to leave my last job. 10 years with an ECM powerhouse and I was pretty happy and busy. But the personal outreach by Eric compelled me to return the call, even after years of ignoring head hunters and recruiters. I called because HE reached out personally – a respected veteran of ECM in a very senior role in a small but growing company. I’ve been in this biz long enough to know that relationships matter. During our first meeting I mentioned this to him. Had a third party recruiter contacted me instead, I never would have returned the call. He said “I know”.

So why Nuxeo, why now? The Open Source angle fascinated me. Could something really be Free? And Good? And have a nice UI? Maybe I really have drunk the Kool-Aid on the concepts of transparency, openness, flatness, simplification. Over the last 18 months I’ve been living and breathing the world of Enterprise 2.0 and what it means to be ‘Social’ inside business and strive for collaboration with customers and partners. It just all makes more sense now.

I started to imagine a world where companies could just get on with it. Get ECM tools that meet their needs. Implement on their terms. Stop playing sales-cycle theatre. Ignore the middle men. No more shameful ROI spreadsheet gymnastics pleading for permission to do the right thing.

Nuxeo has created a gift to the community of people and companies who care about our digital legacy. It is a gift that they’ve offered freely and openly to companies who are ready to just get on with it. My job – the way I see it – is to be Chief Educator. Tell as many people as we can about possibilities, potential and new ways of working. Companies who survive the uncertainties of today’s business environment will do so because they’ve been creative, they’ve innovated and they’ve paid attention to the bottom line.

Still have lots to learn, and weeks ahead will be busy. Check out the Nuxeo site, follow us on Twitter… more to come.

Was great fun to see Laurence Hart of Word of Pie blog fame recounting our thoroughly enjoyable evening of doc-man nostalgia. Always such a treat to find another closet ERD nerd. Pretty shocking to think that we worked for the same Director at PC DOCS/Fulcrum for a few months in 1999-2000 — yet we never met in person until this year, despite an incredibly tangled and overlapping professional social graph.

So in response to his query to the ECM community, “What made you commit to the content space”, here’s mine:

Spring 1990 and I had just finished my first year of History MA classes at Carleton U in Ottawa. The previous fall I had purchased a one-way Greyhound bus ticket, packed up my worldly possessions and left my hometown, despite not knowing a soul in Ottawa or having more than a month’s rent in my pocket.

Scraped through that first year working as a Teaching Assistant and evening/weekend coffee pourer (the term ‘barista’ did not exist in those days). As spring neared, I blitzed the temp staffing agencies with a resume that had pretty solid secretarial & bookkeeping experience, since I’d worked all the way through my undergrad degree.

Lucked into a short-term gig being Girl Friday for a small software/hardware integrator – answered phones, helped coordinate training courses, filed, stapled, licked envelopes. Fast forward 6 months: the office manager had quit, I took the full time job, finished my classes at night.

But along the way, started to hang around the technicians, trainers, consultants. I built a PC with my own hands, mastered DOS 3.3 and WordPerfect 5.1 and learned enough AutoCAD to draw smiley faces with digitizer boards.

But what rocked my world? First exposure to text retrieval technology. The integrator was an Inmagic dealer working with a few Federal departments. I was hooked. The historian in me saw the potential of categorizing, querying, sorting and indexing all of the stacks of paper records, books, manuals, even my own copious research notes. I volunteered to learn the system to help with a time-sensitive project and made extra money working long evenings & weekends cataloging, designing reports, sorting & searching.

After the integrator shut down, I incorporated, picked up that government contract myself, and it funded me as I finished my MA research.

There was no turning back. My academic ambitions went on back-burner, and I let myself get wholly and completely sucked into the world of information management.

It dawned on me one night, waking up in a cold sweat, that if I retired at the age of 60, and decided to go back into the archives and write a history book on the 1980s or 1990s, there would probably be nothing to work with. Those dusty archive boxes would be empty. PCs were showing up every government worker’s desk, all the admin clerks were being fired, and no one remembered record-keeping basic principles.

So I knew what I needed to do.

Thanks Laurence, fun to remember where it started.

(originally published @ GTEC blog: http://blog.gtec.ca/?p=489)

The hot topic this week in the social media world is all about content management. Yes, enterprise content management.

If you haven’t been following the latest news, popular social network/communication company Twitter was the target of some malicious activity this week, with some sensitive corporate documents stolen and circulated to several bloggers. ( Click here for a real-time news round-up) Individual Twitter employees were targeted and the early explanation is that some passwords were compromised. Some bloggers chose to publish the stolen/leaked information, others did not. The sources of the documents were apparently varied: online ‘cloud’ document authoring and storage platforms, mobile accounts, email addresses, and others.

This post isn’t directed at Twitter specifically, nor the individual online/mobile applications that were compromised. But I do question how an organization – whether public or private sector – could risk their sensitive corporate information on any platform not equipped with at least the basics of what we call ECM – document management, records management, retention rules, access controls and audit trails.

What Were They Thinking?

Financial projections, business plans, human resource information and resumes, customer communication: these are the content types now surfacing for public and competitor scrutiny. Organizations who view such information as competitive advantage, as strategic to growth, as evidence of trust with their staff or customers need to walk the talk and make the efforts to protect it appropriately. Access control lists to restrict sensitive data to only certain employees or groups; disposal schedules to safely destroy content that is no longer serving a specific business or regulatory purpose but could only embarrass; audit trails and activity history to know when/where/how content was accessed and by whom: this is content management “101”.

The day we get too caught up in the hip and cool world of web 2.0 and cloud applications that neglect and ignore the basics, is the day the utterly preventable backlash begins, and the progress we’ve made over the last few years towards a more open knowledge sharing culture evaporates.

My advice? Use Twitter, but don’t be like Twitter. Use social media and collaborative tools to share information that is appropriate to share and where sharing benefits your organization, your team and you.

But content that needs protection? That is only your business? That is subject to privacy laws or regulatory scrutiny? That can only harm your organization, your team and you if wrongly shared? Invest in the extra effort to put on the security blanket. The culture of sharing, of knowledge exchange, of openness has its place, but it needs to be balanced with an overall information governance strategy; one that protects organizational interests , intellectual property, and the privacy of its staff, customers, shareholders and partners.

Your Content Is a Social Object.

But hardly anyone treats it like one.

I use this slide when educating customers, partners, prospects and colleagues on the Open Text Enterprise 2.0 direction. How does our ECM Suite help individual knowledge workers and virtual teams bloom into a new world of the Social Workplace? or Social Marketplace? That’s what keeps me busy these days.

So with all due apologies to the artist, cartoonist, blogger, marketer, wine huckster, genius, occasionally “not safe for work” Hugh MacLeod @ www.gapingvoid.com, here it goes…

The watercooler. The coffeepot. The cafeteria. The sheltered overhang in the parking lot that’s known as ’smokers corner’. This is what a Social Workplace looks like. That common location that we flock to for some shared purpose. To drink, to eat, to smoke. Not in solitude but with people we can bump into along the way. And subconsciously we know that there’s more to that trip down the hallway than the obvious objective. We know that while we’re pouring the sugar, or rinsing the glass or passing around the only working lighter in the rain… we’ll talk.

We’ll catch up on weekend activities, communally moan over the new cubicle layout, whisper overheard rumours and get the gossip from those guys upstairs. You know the ones – not sure what division they’re in or who they report to, but always seem to have the goods on what’s going on….

So what brings this diverse group of people together? What inspires conversation among people who normally wouldn’t interact in the workplace? …because they’re in different branches, or sit too many levels of hierarchy apart to talk via regular business channels.

It is a Social Object. As is the water, the coffee, the dry wind-free shelter. My last blog post explored the concept of valuing information that is used – of directing effort and energy into what is meaningful to one’s audience. That information – content – is what brings people into an application or repository. Content that does not lure eyeballs to it, content that is not findable, content that is too hard to retrieve or understand, content that is locked away from its audience: does it have value? If a tree falls in the forest….

So how do I make my content precious? How do I get people who need it to read it? It’s up to us to think about how to get this information in front of the eyes that need it. Make it social, make it accessible, let it be found and consumed.

When companies fret that deployments of ECM systems or online collaboration workspaces are failing, it is often because usage rates are unexpectedly low. No buzz, no compelling reason to contribute, no sense of pressure to participate because none of the cool kids are there. Death by meh.

My challenge: make your content a social object. Make it interesting and compelling enough that people want it, can find it, and will appreciate it.

And to content authors I throw out a call to action: put some skin in the game to promote it to the colleagues you think should need it. Send out links to your slide decks. Publicize your research summaries. Evangelize your business plan, engage the people counting on you to draft the meeting agenda. And not by endless emails. But by taking an interest into what your peers are worried about, what they’re tasked with, and finding the places where you can lend a hand with what you know.

If we’re so bored or indifferent to our own work that we save it and ignore, why should others act differently?

But what’s the business case? Nodding intently and listening to the question for the million trillionth time, suddenly it hits me. “Well, maybe your people can stop doing things that nobody cares about and reinvest that time in something useful”.

D’oh. Inside Voice! Inside Voice! Inside Voice!

User engagement. Adoption rates. Participation. Content ingestion. To get a business case for an ECM deployment (never mind Enterprise 2.0….) companies need to kneel at the altar of the Pivot Table to get an ROI justification. Achieving said benefit means systems need to be used and stuff needs to be put into them.

People put the content into content management systems. When they don’t do that, content management projects don’t deliver that magical ROI. Luring typical information workers into a system perceived as onerous, complex, corporately mandated that ultimately seems not relevant to day to day tasks is tough.

But maybe there’s an angle we’ve missed…

“Personal Productivity for ME… but the Community benefits”… this is how I’ve been describing emerging 2.0 tools as they enter mainstream business.

Social Bookmarks – are MY favorite items… but like-minded colleagues get the info and share their own… Blog – dead easy simple self publishing for ME, but my readers only need to find me in one place… Social Networks – let me tell you about MY expertise and experience and maybe we’ll find some common interests and exchange information of mutual benefit.

When I started blogging personally a few years ago, like most bloggers, I became obsessed with my hit rates. Playing around with Sitemeter.. Google Analytics.. other cool tools du jour trying to understand: Who was reading me? How did they find me? Who linked to me? Does anybody bother coming back?

Seriously – name a blogger who isn’t consumed with their traffic patterns and referrals. Yeah, thought so.

But… hang on. Where have I seen this before?

Haven’t good old document management tools been providing metrics and tracking on content for umm… almost 2 decades? Who edited, who printed, who emailed, who viewed, who copied….kind of old skool, actually.

So here’s my question: Why not apply the blogger self-absorption mentality to corporate ECM contributors? Bloggers who are motivated by traffic hits write content of interest to their audience. More hits = more on the topic. I often joke (not…) about Productivity Driven By Ego. In the enterprise space, why don’t I pay attention to the content people read and well, quit producing the content they don’t. Why do smart expensive educated knowledge workers invest time in things that no one bothers to look at?

Audit trails, activity lists, document history is the measurement of usefulness. One of my favourite analysts at Gartner – Debra Logan – uses the phrase “content valuation”. But you can’t know what’s used and whether it’s valued if you don’t measure the consumption of specific content artifacts.

Why do I personally invest the time in tagging my Harlequin dive bar concert videos on YouTube? Because I want them to be found and be more popular than the ones my sister posted… Meaningful metadata lets them be found in the sea of millions upon millions of cheesy music clips. Why can’t my colleagues find my whitepapers that easily….

Measure, track, compare, assess, weigh… Spend time on things that are useful to people, and stop doing things that aren’t. Sounds like ROI to me.

I think it was our Exec VP of Corporate Marketing – Bill Forquer – who first uttered the words that made me laugh. A dozen or so of us at Open Text were doing some wrap up brainstorming after a great day with a few industry analysts up in our Waterloo HQ.

We were talking about wicked product innovations we had in the lab and what we could do to better enhance our user experience. Everyone agreed we were the leaders when it came to records management, archiving, security, compliance solutions, but what about all of the cool usability stuff we had but maybe we just didn’t talk about enough – Web Content Management, collaboration/communities, digital asset management…

How could we work better to balance the product portfolio, and our especially the marketing message around it?

“It’s Candy and Aspirin”, Bill said. “It’s that balance of the attractive things that people want, with the necessary risk reducers that they need“.

Back then I was leading the team responsible for our Livelink ECM collaboration product team, but working very closely with the VP looking after the RM and compliance solutions team.

Well, “I’m a candy girl”, I exclaimed! And my colleague looked across the table and said, “so I guess that makes me aspirin….” We all laughed uproariously.

Maybe you had to be there…

But it stuck. Candy and Aspirin became a shorthand for an internal joke – but also a serious rallying point to remind us to seek balance – how did products and solutions meet top line efficiency and productivity “wants” of business users as well as the cost savings, regulatory compliance, risk mitigation pressures that legal and records officers “need”… And so over the last year the internal joke has been leaked (consciously and subversively) outside the meeting room walls too. Because it makes sense. Especially in the world of figuring out where 2.0 & social forms of collaboration fits in the business world.

Yin/Yang, Fun/Serious, Work/Play, Personal/Professional, Want/Need

Balance is difficult to find, but ultimately what we all seek. Not just in product marketing or technology portfolios, but in our lives.

My unabashed adoration for social networking tools, platforms and media types is because they help bring balance to my life. When work encroaches into evening and weekend hours.. I know I have the escape hatch to do the same – in the right balance – letting personal connections seep into the edges of my work hours. I live in a city away from most of my family and trusted social circle – and technology helps render geography null & void and bring balance to my world.

Candy & Aspirin KM World paper here

Yes, yes I did.

Was honoured to be invited to represent Open Text on the annual AIIM Vendor Panel Showdown this week. Moderated by the energetic and thought-provoking Dan Elam, the audience had the opportunity to hear first hand from senior management from the big guys: Open Text, IBM and EMC.

Why the odd blog title today? On Tuesday I strolled through Reading Terminal Market on my lunch break from the show. Lo and behold just around the corner from the most excellent Hershel’s East Side deli was a floral shop with buckets and buckets of lovely daisies and gerbera. Our Bloom team at Open Text has adopted the white daisy as our personal commitment to the Enterprise 2.0 program we launched last year. It’s a symbol of spring, flourishing, unleashing potential, of hope and renewal. I twittered jokingly about whether I should stick one in my hair for the vendor panel.

So I bought some. And I stuck one in an empty water glass and brought it up to the panel podium with me. It was my personal reminder to speak the language of the customers in the room. To tone down the buzzword bingo jargon speak, to do my best to be authentic, honest and represent my company credibly.

It reminded me to talk about what’s important in the ECM world. That compliance is a natural outcome of doing good business. That the human voice is important. That getting users engaged with the system and USING IT is the best metric of success. And I was really glad to read some of the backchannel tweetstream comment favorably on my approach.

And it reminded me to look at the positive. I didn’t want to bait the competition by answering the very last question about why I would discount a competitor and not worry about them. The other two companies are forces to be reckoned with in the ECM world, and have successful customer deployments just as Open Text does. I have too much respect for my former colleagues who now work with those companies, and for many of my recent new colleagues who have come from those organizations.

A strong, educated diverse vendor community demonstrates health of the industry. I wasn’t in the mood for a pot shot.