We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex,
It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.
When you bite off more than you can chew you pay the penalty,
Somebody’s got to tell the tale,
I guess it must be up to me.
- UP TO ME

Here we go again. Peter (@pmonks) and Laurence (@piewords) are at it again. The current enormously important discussion topic is whether the ‘E’ makes any sense in the term ECM.

The idea that WCM + ECM = CM is bollocks. I do agree that ECM = WCM + RM + DM + some other things. But what does CM equal? I’m going with Peter here. ECM = CM and the ‘E’ needs to go. If there is a good reason to keep the E, do we also need EDM, ERM and E-EveryThingElse?

In Pie’s blogpost, he lists some important characteristics that form the essense of ECM. However, they all hold true for CM too. They really differentiate between ECM/CM and WCM.

So let’s have a quick look at the word “Enterprise”. Here are some uses:

• An Enterprise is an organisation. When used in a product name, it normally means stuff that happens behind the firewall. For example, Yammer is an Enterprise Twitter. I’m not sure anyone thinks that ECM is for internal stuff (including partners and suppliers) and CM is for stuff you share with the world. Or do they?
• Enterprise License – this usage is similar to the above. It’s an all you can eat for your organisation, that starts expensive and gets worse.
• Enterprise Architect – I’m not sure what this means exactly. It’s not something I’ve ever wanted on my business card. Technical Architect or Solutions Architect work just fine.
• Enterprise Java Beans – Now that was a fuck up, wasn’t it? It really just means bulky and complex – the opposite of lean and simple. Ask any of the guys at Vignette who are trying to make core changes to the product. Newer, simpler technologies have bitch-slapped EJB’s all over the place. It feels to me like the E in ECM and the E in EJB are the same thing. It’s the E that makes me scared.

Interesting aside: CMSWatch have recently renamed the Enterprise Tier product category in their report to “Complex Enterprise Platforms”. The use of the word Complex here is particularly intriguiging. In my simple mind, Complex is always a bad thing in a product, even when the problem domain has complex problems. The product’s aim in life should be to hide that complexity from everyone. I wonder if the fact that all of the platforms classified by CMS Watch as complex (Autonomy Interwoven, EMC/Documentum, IBM, Open Text/Vignette, Oracle) are J2E based means anything (Interwoven has Perl and other stuff thrown in too). While we’re on it, 5 of the 6 Upper Tier products are Java too, except for Tridion which is a .NET/Java/COM mashup.

Here is the truth – you’ll only hear the words “Free” and “Enterprise” in the same sentence from an economist, never a CMS salesman. And Enterprises are by their very nature big and slow. The closest thing to an Agile Enterprise that you’re likely to see is Captain James T. Kirk taking a sharp left while evading those pesky Klingons. These days, Enterprise is a mindset which implies Complex. And Complex is Bad. Please, Lord, help me keep things simple and take away that E.

What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I’ve given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I’ve recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us have understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we’re missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.

I had the privilege to sit on a panel of CMS experts at this year’s DrupalCon conference in San Fancisco. The topic was focused on enterprise trends in both content management as well as social media. Besides myself the panel included Bryan House, Acquia, Joe Bachana, DPCI,  and moderator Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group.  The session was part of the business track of the Drupal conference and I was quite pleased a large number of people in the audience were looking fot not just Drupal solutions but any business solutions they could take back to their company.

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Content Management Software (CMS) provider, pTools, today announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be easily re-distributed to any site anytime in any format on any social network.

A key feature, pTools ‘TwitterDocs’, allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows.

In addition to Twitter, customer content is presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results such as Google & Bing with no pre- or post-publishing tweaking required.

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It is the holiday season where you should be putting more fun in everything. Rex Lee did a nice blog post, Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation. I did a FastFoward post on it but could…

Most high-tech companies have made significant investments in tier 1 business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM) and customer relationship management (CRM). While these systems provide access to structured, transactional information, they do not facilitate the unstructured, ad-hoc collaboration activities where people interact with people and where business decisions are made.

The biggest challenge in 2010 and beyond, therefore, will be to integrate PLM, ERP, supply chain management and other structured, transactional frameworks with tools and processes that facilitate unstructured collaboration. By embedding unstructured collaboration tools such as unified communications, live meetings and online chat within these structured, transactional systems, manufacturers will be able to increase business agility through an array of benefits ranging from improved innovation to more rapid decision making and faster time-to-market.

One of the key tools for unstructured collaboration is social computing…In 2010, we will see the adoption of social collaboration tools increase significantly, as more manufacturers will look to integrate social computing tools and platforms like SharePoint into their business processes, linking internal communities and external communities. These unstructured collaboration tools can help high-tech businesses gain visibility into customer needs and wants; improve customer support and satisfaction; and facilitate knowledge-sharing throughout the enterprise

People like to use email because they feel they can reach exactly the person they have in mind and I think they like the “attachment” functionality that gives them the peace of mind of knowing they’ve handed off their document to exactly the person who should have it. But email’s effectiveness breaks down quickly, in my experience, when you don’t know precisely who you should be talking to.

To me, the necessity and opportunity of social computing as a corporate communication tool is revealed by the strong showing of face-to-face. People want to have productive back-and-forth exchanges with precisely the right people who can help them and a face-to-face conversation does that. But what about when you are not in the same physical location and yet you need to collaboratively exchange expertise with someone else, or a group? That’s when social computing tools can fit the bill because they are web-based approximations of the face-to-face dynamic.

On Friday, I expressed doubt whether Twitter will ever enjoy mainstream adoption like Facebook…the more closed Facebook has continued to thrive because it marries microblogging (or status messages, which are longer and have threaded comments) with other social sharing features in one constant stream without the need for redirection.

For this reason, I believe microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life. Here is why enterprise microblogging will affect more people, and their day-to-day, than Twitter:

1) You Know the People

2) Communication Problem is More Real at Work

3) Privacy Provides Comfort to Share

4) Value Becomes Evident Faster

Globalization will eventually show that it too was driven by technology change but the ramifications are far from being felt. Today, Americans are blaming big business and our government for causing this recession but underpinning this is the transformation where work is getting done faster and cheaper in other places around the world.

With this new global economy questions emerge to who should be in control, who should lead, who is responsible for ensuring our place and many other question emerge. For a country born on democracy, it’s interesting to see so many looking to the government for that lead when in fact it’s us that must lead this next transformation. Unfortunately, our life styles are killing our drive to succeed.