One thing that I have been meaning to do is to dive back into the state of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a useful term and the challenges facing its use. I’ve also been meaning to draw attention to some of the excellent posts in the new AIIM Communities. I am going to try and [...]

The combination of a weak economy – causing many to streamline operations to keep afloat – and increasing regulatory demands made business challenging for many in 2009. Those that emerged from the rubble of crumbling profits, hoping to resurrect their bottom line and succeed in this decade are working harder than ever, often with fewer resources. Although the economy will eventually improve, the regulatory scene is becoming more demanding, placing greater burdens on business. Only those that make wise use of limited resources will survive.

Despite recent unpredictability in government, business, and the economy, one thing is unchanged: compliance, security, and cost-efficient management remain the focus of many businesses. Named in multiple industries as the top three drivers for enterprise content management (ECM), they are more closely intertwined than ever:

• Cost efficiency is only possible in today’s litigious economy with an integrated, efficient compliance management program that mitigates risk and avoids costly penalties. In a paper or mixed media environment, it’s nearly impossible to achieve.
• Compliance is only achievable with stringent internal controls and an overseeing force to manage document security, governing access to information and how it is used. Entrusting oversight to fallible humans alone means there will always be mistakes. Zero tolerance is on the rise; penalties for non-compliance can be financially devastating.
• Security is only manageable in information-intensive businesses when you have the tools to pull all of your information together so it can be controlled, centrally and consistently. Even with a full complement of employees, it’s challenging. In a paper-based environment, it’s impossible.

The solution? ECM.

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So I promised an ECM specific follow-up to my book review on Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.  There is a lot to talk about, so I’m not going to blather on with a long intro (though this sentence seems to be compounding the issue) and get right to it.

Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:

• Going to try and use as much of Chistensen’s terminlogy as possible.  This isn’t to say that he has a perfect model, or even 80% model, of what is happening.  It just helps to keep the terminology consistent during this particular post.
• Every Content Management company is different and the observations will not apply universally.  Every company reacts differently.  That said, if I didn’t think that this applied to a large number of vendors, I would have targeted this post at particular vendors.

NOW we can get started.

Why Disruption Now?

There are several trains of thought out there that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to the Internet age because we are in a constant state of disruption.  This an important observation, so let me address this first.

The initial disruption was the Internet.  Since then, everything has mostly been a continuation of that disruption.  Much of the chaos has been sustaining technology for the original disruption.

Everyone agrees that the web impacted the Content Management industry strongly.  Stellant (now Oracle), Interwoven (now part of Open Text), and Vignette (now consumed by Autonomy)all came from the WCM space.  When you look at it though, it was just a new content problem.  Sustaining innovative technologies.  Unique needs, but no more so than Records Management, Imaging, or Digital Asset Management.

So what is qualifying as disruptive to Content Management these days?  Content Management itself has been disrupting the offsite paper record storage and microfiche industry, but what is actually disrupting the disruptor?  The Internet and the browser didn’t do it directly, but it became a sustaining technology for ECM.  The browser interfaces enhanced adoption over time for the existing vendors.  Definitely not disruptive.

Well, Content Management is being disrupted from a couple of directions:

• SharePoint: It isn’t SharePoint, but what it represents, basic Content Management for the masses.  It may not be the most functional, or scale to handle any situation, but it is easy to buy, install, and integrate into the most used productivity application suite, Office.
• The Cloud: Many SaaS Content Management offering cannot currently compete on functionality with the established ECM bigwigs, but that is just a matter of time.  They are established, have found a starting market, and are adding functionality.  As SharePoint demonstrated, they don’t need to match the established solutions to eat into the market share, they just need to hit the minimum requirement level, document sharing.

Open Source isn’t on the list because that is a model for solving problems, but not truly disruptive.   It is a just a different business model and not a sustaining technology.  For many, it boils down to appealing to people’s inner nature and a different pricing structure.  This is a gross over-generalization, but so is this entire post.

The Cloud could be called just a different pricing structure, but it is also a different delivery model. It is disruptive because no matter what the established vendors say, their software has not been architected for that environment, so it is not plug-and-play.

Those are the disruptions.  They are fundamental shifts in how Content Management is delivered.  They are shifts towards Content Management becoming more of a commodity (though we aren’t there yet).

Microsoft’s Attack

Okay, you can argue that they are disruptive at all or that they will just become a “sustaining technology” down the road.  If the latter is the case, most of the established vendors will survive. (Acquisitions and consolidation aside, we are talking about the actual software offerings).

When SharePoint arrived in the 2003 timeframe, it was nice, quaint, and not nearly functional enough to really have a significant impact on the Content Management market.  It wasn’t until the advent of the 2007 edition that it became an issue.

The initial response was pretty consistent, “Yeah, it does that, but it will fall apart under any real work.”  Well, the market didn’t care.  A large number of people didn’t, and still don’t, need the complicated solutions offered by the established vendors.

Over time, as SharePoint started to erode sales, the vendor strategy shifted to enhancing SharePoint.  This was fine and it started to drive sales, but SharePoint hasn’t stopped evolving.  In 2010 is has the ability to store content outside of the database, manages data better, scales better, and has better Records Management.  The need for SharePoint additional Content Management style capabilities is shifting towards archiving and governance.

When you look at this even more closely, it isn’t that SharePoint is a disruptive technology as much as it is a disruptive new vendor in the existing landscape.  So while SharePoint is very disruptive in its nature, it isn’t a “disruptive technology” as discussed by Christensen.

Still, ignore at your own risk.

The All-Encompassing Fog of the Cloud

Meanwhile, in the bushes, the cloud-based SaaS offering are lurking, ready to pounce.  They have realized a few important things:

• Not only do many people not need all of the functionality provided by the Content Management vendors, they don’t want to manage the data center either.
• Users are getting used to a rapid pace of innovation from their increased exposure to the ever-evolving Internet.  The three year “big release” has become a detriment  from an user expectation perspective, not to mention the nightmare for the IT and Change Management personnel.  Lots of incremental changes are easier to deal with than huge massive changes.
• The ability to share content outside of an organization is becoming more important, and not easier.  If I still have to email that 10 MB presentation to business partners (copying my colleagues), that really cuts into some of the important selling points of ECM.

The SaaS vendors don’t have all the answers, yet.  They are still working on security and many of the CYA features that your average CIO wants.  The thing is, those requirements are well defined, so it is just a matter of addressing them.  Research is only needed to prioritize, not define.

When those gaps are addressed by the SaaS solutions, who will win the market?  Those that are ready from day one, or those that try and create/market their solution after the questions are answered?  There is more to being a solid cloud offering than fancy marketing and a feature list.  The processes and the business value that they support is different than from a traditional software vendor.  Running a successful, secure, reliable, scalable online service is not the same as writing a COTS software package.

The Reaction

Some of the established vendors may tell you that their clients aren’t asking for the Cloud at this time.  They are asking for better business solutions, like Case Management.  Existing clients are asking for Case Management.  I’ve heard it.  The thing is that people that I talk to who are looking for new Content Management solutions are seriously considering cloud-based solutions.

How consistently are they asking? Well, in 2009 I was helping a large, 50K+ user, organization look at vendors, and they invited a SaaS provider to present their solution.  I knew going in that the vendors didn’t meet all the critical requirements, and I even told the client as much.  Didn’t matter.  They want to move in that direction as part of an overall strategy, so they were going to talk to the vendor about what the vendor offered and tell that vendor what was lacking for them to make a purchase.

Did the lack of a cloud-based solution get mentioned to the other Content Management vendors?  No.  The closest was when someone asked about external hosting and they mentioned that they had partners that can offer that service.  A savvy market research person would be able to see that question that as a potential need for cloud-based solutions, but a sales person, even if they are smart, don’t have the same channels.

But I digress and this post is already pretty long.

So the Content Management vendors, looking for double-digit growth, are pushing Case Management so they can land the multi-million dollar deals required for that growth.  Smaller cloud-based vendors don’t need to close deals of that magnitude to have double-digit growth in a quarter, much less a year.  The ECM vendors are chasing the large deals while the smaller deals get left to SaaS and SharePoint.

Christensen talks about this as companies moving up-market while the new vendors, based upon the disruptive technologies, tackle the lower market.  As the the firms innovate faster than the needs of the average customer, they can move up-market and take revenue from the established vendors.

So right now, SaaS vendors are doing this in the Content Management space.  They aren’t able to compete on functionality yet, but they are adding it faster than the market is demanding new features.  It is only a matter of time before they hit the minimum level needed for them to be a player.

There is Not Plenty of Time

As I discussed in the review, there are a ton of examples focused on the hard drive industry.  I think a more relevant example is the excavator industry.

In the first half of the 20th century, cable-actuated excavators ruled the construction world.  Each new model could scoop more thanks to larger buckets and deposit it further away.  The market drivers were bucket size and reach.

Then came the hydraulic excavators.  Made by new companies, these had smaller buckets and a smaller reach.  They couldn’t compete against the established cable-actuated vendors, but they worked well for people needing to dig precise trenches and other smaller tasks.

Over time, years and years, the bucket size and reach grew to the point that the larger construction project started to buy them.  While they could not in any way out-perform the cable-actuated excavators, they were more reliable, cost less per unit (though not less per cubic ft. bucket size), and were generally cheaper to operate.

By the end of the transition, which took decades, of the over 40 cable-actuated excavator vendors, only FOUR successfully transitioned to survive in the new market.  That is less than 10%.  Let me repeat a key fact here…

DECADES!!!

The technology was there and it was obvious.  Many established vendors entered the market once it was a viable solution for their clients, but by then it was too late.

Why didn’t they enter sooner?  Like many victims of disruptive technology, the margins were less on the new technology, which led to different processes within the makers of the disruptive tech.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s assume that I have historically made a 20% margin on my products.  I get two proposals.  One is for an innovative enhancement on an existing product that will increase sales 10-20% at the current margin.  The other is for a newly engineered solution that will increase sales around 5% at a 10% margin.  With finite resources hich do I approve?

It doesn’t matter if in 5-10 years that the second option will over-take the market, stockholders want results this year, and CEOs want their job next year.  The new markets for the disruptive tech are always fuzzy and ill defined.

This is why startups are the “source” of truly disruptive technology.  They can start with new business structures, values, and processes, that can take advantage of the different margins.  They also get more excited about that $50K deal.

Do you think EMC, Oracle, IBM, or Open Text get exited about $50K deals?

Where Does that Leave Implementers?

In reality, waiting for another post.  Let’s just say life can be good and move on to the wrap-up…

Is Pie Nuts?

While an in-depth study would be required to answer that question, not to mention my forced participation, I’m really talking about selling out to the concept.

Did I read the book, proclaim it as genius, and then seek to fit the world into the model proposed by Christensen?  Not at all.

I’ve been seeing this for a while.  Then this past Spring, I was talking about my observations about what I was seeing in the industry with some others and I was asked if I had read a couple of books.  One was Christensen’s book.  A month later, we were talking again and the book came up a second time, so I went and bought it to read.

What the book did was make me realize that what was happening was actually normal.  This happens in lots of different industries.  It is just harder to determine what qualifies as a disruptive technology in the IT field.  As computers disrupted microfiche in Content Management, the Internet is giving birth to the cloud, which is beginning to disrupt traditional data-center-based enterprise apps, like Content Management.

The best thing is that I realized that this isn’t happening because there are bad executives or managers at the established Content Management vendors, but because of the opposite.  Back to that hypothetical investment question.  What good manager would pick the investment that will increase sales by double digits?

In many ways, the established vendors are trapped by their own success.  There are ways out, but there is no set formula, I may not have the right answers, and I’ve rambled enough for now.  More later.

Flame on….

SharePoint has the traditional ECM Generation CMS vendors trying to figure out what they can do to maintain their “leadership” in Content Management.  A lot are looking to Case Management, a long-time need, to provide a differentiating factor for growth.

Meanwhile, other, newer CMS vendors are working to build solutions in the cloud.  What they lack in functionality/scalability, they make up for in drive, vision, and price.  They also have a plan to match, and surpass in some cases, the capabilities of SharePoint and the big boys.

These two new challengers to the CMS throne are making basic Content Management available to the masses.  The traditional vendors don’t see profit in the commodity game.  We’ll explain why this is a problem for them in a bit…

Scaling Beyond Your Data Center

Right now, I work on a project that has well over 50 Terabytes of content.  It is growing at a fair clip, 2TB/month, and the rate of increase is scheduled to increase by 50% in the next six months with further increases down the road.  Another little requirement, every action that the 10,000+ users perform in the system, including searches, has to be tracked and reportable for a period of seven years.

Did I mention that they want to double the users and then open the system up to other organizations for access?  Have I mentioned that the current growth is mostly just trying to keep up with new content and that there is a backlog that scales well beyond the current planned capacity?

SharePoint can’t handle this system.  To be fair, for a traditional vendor, this isn’t necessarily an easy system to design.  Every aspect needs to be well architected.  If there is a weak link, the system will have issues.  Improve one link and then the attention switches to a new one.

Here is the thing.  You can architect it well, balance the load, buy all the right devices, and design a streamlined content model, but in the end, you are still at the mercy of a data center.  It isn’t just people (who may or may not be capable), is it space and power.  Lots of storage takes physical space, requires cooling, and consumes power.

Now take that setup and setup a disaster recovery site.  Include a reliable backup plan and be sure that everything meets the High Availability standards.  Before you know it, you are spending a lot of money just to keep things going, much less adding new capabilities.

Ready for the kicker?  This is just one of the many systems that are needed to manage electronic content for this single organization.  We are creating more everyday and less of it is going to be stored as paper.  The scalability question needs to answered without Ed Bueche stepping-in to fine-tune everything.

This is just one “small” piece of the pie.  It is estimated that in 10 years, there will be over 30ZB of content out there in the big bad world.  To put a zettabyte into perspective, the difference between a terabyte and a zettabyte is the same as the difference between a kilobyte and a terabyte.  It is over 1,000,000,000 times the size.

Where Do You Put It?

That is a lot of content.  That is a lot of processing and metadata.  Now let me ask you this question, what is the core purpose of your organization?  Is it to run a data center?  It may need to be at the current rate of growth.  Get ready to learn about deduplification, IOPS, backup strategies, and the fine are of disaster planning (Tip: If you have a backup diesel generator, make sure you have back-up roads for the diesel truck to get to your data center to keep the fuel tank topped off.)

If you do have a data center, you have likely hired someone to run it for you.  My experience has been mixed on this front and I find you still do a lot of the planning work.  Even so, this approach has been used for a couple of decades, but the answer moving forward seems to be the cloud.

Now, before you accuse me of jumping on the cloud bandwagon, think back to the numbers above.  Remember that with all the hype, the cloud is merely the act of turning over your Software, Platform, or Infrastructure to a really big data center provider to share resources with other organizations and thus share the costs.  That is an extreme over-simplification, but when you think on it, it is just the next-generation of outsourced data centers.

Now let me add this.  I’ve been managing content systems for a long time.  They have been growing in size and complexity.  This isn’t just because I’ve moved up the ranks.  It is because the average system tackled by the ECM vendors seems to be getting larger.  In that process, I’ve had to be more and more involved in the details in the data center.  This isn’t  a good thing.

Look, I come from a software/database background.  I know content. I know how people use it. I know how to convince people that Content Management is a good thing.  I know how to design a content model and application optimized for performance. I can even convince a business owner that the latest system crash was not my fault and that it will actually be good for the program.

Okay, maybe not that last one, which would be pretty cool, but I am not a data center guy. My understanding of storage is high level.  That is all it should be in my position as a content guy.  The odds are that if you are reading this, you shouldn’t have to worry about it either.  We are trying to solve problems that involve content, be it collaboration or case management.

Moving the software/platform/infrastructure to the cloud takes us out of that business and throws me back into solving business problems and writing overly long blog posts.  We can now stop worrying about scale and just worry about defining scope and matching it to costs.  No thoughts about implementing the needed scale or expanding capacity.  More importantly, no lost hardware costs when I decide that I don’t need capacity as much as I first thought.

The systems of the future will be in the cloud because that is the future of the data center.

Show Me the Money!

Let’s think about this issue.  If content is going to be in the cloud, it will still need to be managed.  It will still need full-text search that is link, Google approach, independent.  I will still have records to be retained and purged.  I will still want Rights Management, Digital Asset Management, workflow, APIs, and standards compliance (token CMIS reference). I’m going to need a great collaborative interface so users have a place to work together.

That, plus all that storage, is going to cost money.  If you have only a few customers, you will lose money.  If you can scale and have the proper processes, you can scale to support thousands of organizations.  They will pay money to not only solve their data center issues, but the Content Management component as well.

How much money do you think a five nine’s (99.999% uptime) CMS system will cost for 100,000 users who are randomly accessing the records of millions of Federal constituents?  How about ALL the content for a global bank, providing access to all of their clients and employees?

That is a lot of money.  Even if you look at 20-25% of the current CMS expenditures from a TCO perspective, that is a lot of money.  Managing zettabytes of content will not be cheap and there will be some companies that will make a killing providing that service.

Once everyone starts moving to the cloud, how many case management solutions will be run on internal systems?  There won’t be a reason to do it as cloud-based Content Management will be cheap for the small to mid-range solutions.  Why? Because they won’t add that much overhead to the cloud provider, so they can offer a good deal.  Those solutions will be almost pure margin for them.

You want money??? It will be everywhere.  If you want to be a leader in 5-1010 years, you need to be getting there quickly to be a thought leader and start building the references.  When the world is comfortable with cloud security, those that will lead will need to be waiting for them with fully functional solutions.  As with any market, the companies that get there early have the advantage.

Personally, I can’t wait.  Getting to design/implement solutions that hit against that cloud-based CMS will be wonderful.  Why?  Because I’ll be back to spending more of my time doing what I was doing in the 90s when I got into this crazy business….Solving business problems.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe always has a way of getting me thinking. His latest post, ECM Coexistence and the Vuvuzela,   remarks how vendors and customers alike are looking to integrate new content systems with legacy content systems rather than replacing them. Connectors and API’s and standards are all the rage. What I wonder though is why the change and [...]

Next in my occasional series where I refer to a different to letter to the one in a TLA (after discussing the R in ECM) – I wondering if it’s time we took the W out of CMS and thought about management and delivery as separate disciplines. I am not the first to think like this, obviously, but it’s something I wanted to explore in this blog.

To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?

I was in a briefing call today by a large software vendor, it wasn’t a one to one briefing there were a few of us on the call – I am not going to say who they were and if you know I’d rather you didn’t either.
I am sure the point I am going to make can be applied to lots of briefings and is no way a reflection of quality of their product, services or makes them evil people. I just saw a slide, that for the good of product marketing, analysts relations and mankind – must be shared and well, I guess shamed.
Here are the bullet points, in verbatim:

• Moving ECM from “Point” to “Platform”
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Unified ECM
• High Return on Investment
• Leveraging Fastest Growing Middleware Stack
• Effective Standardization
• Content Platform for the Enterprise
• Improved Business Responsiveness
• Content Management for Enterprise Applications and Portal
• Risk Mitigation

I don’t think I am breaking any NDA by sharing that, as this says absolutely nothing.

Also, you may say – “but Truscott, you hilarious young man, you’ve taken it out of context” – but trust me. I didn’t.

The rest of the slides said it was big, enterprise, billions, DOD compliant and leading – with lots of architectures and TLA’s….

I can see the value in big, but being big doesn’t absolve your responsibility to be valuable and being able to put that in a form I understand – or more importantly in a form a business user, the guy that writes the cheques, a visitor to your website or shareholder understands.

I spent 30 minutes thinking – Yes, but what is it for? What does it do? How does it help?

What do you think?

Image of robot by KB35 reproduced under creative commons license.

I’ve been talking about a lack of leadership and vision in the ECM industry.  This is evident when you attend keynotes at various conferences.  Most keynotes at industry conferences are focused on what has been happening and what is happening now.  John Mancini’s keynote at the AIIM conference was as close as it gets these days.

Of course, AIIM can’t deliver the future, they can only point to it, so what do we do? We wait. What are we waiting for? Well, I’m not waiting right now.  For your consideration, I present to you a keynote on the future of ECM…..

Once There was a Vision of ECM

[Imagine some basic banter and a joke that only 20% of the audience will get, and only half of them will think it was actually funny.]

Ten years ago, the term Enterprise Content Management was created.  There was no magic pill or working product.  It was just a vision of one repository for all of the content in the organization.  One place for web pages, documents, images, and records to reside and be managed together.

It was a solid vision. The industry seized upon the vision and charged forth.  Over the next few years, through acquisition, development, and combinations of both, several companies built “complete” ECM platforms and proceeded to sell them to anyone and everyone.

As the vision was “realized”, vendors competed among themselves to see who could have the biggest and most complete platform.  New needs would arise and they would all rush to “check-the-box”. There was, and is, a continuous race to be “more” complete than any other vendor.

The platforms grew and became more complex.

Not all ECM implementation succeeded, but lessons were learned and best practices were gathered. Everyone in the industry continued to move forward from pure momentum, thinking that the goal had been achieved and that all that was required was to get better at implementations.

Meanwhile, the world changed.

Enter the Changing Reality

When ECM was first conceived, people created content, it was published, and then nothing else happened until it was time to update the content.  Then came the 2.0 world.  The world at large went from consuming content to interacting with content.

This was a new mindset for the Content Management world.  Instead of one author, or a few authors working together, content now evolves over the course of years through the input of any number of people.  Discussions about content has become information worth managing.  The line between structured and unstructured information is fuzzy and no longer back and white.

As the nature of content changed, it has grown at an exponential rate.  This isn’t a new phenomenon, but the sheer volume of increasing digital information is starting to push the boundaries of what is possible with existing ECM architectures.

The need to share this information has also increased dramatically.  CMIS was created to solve the information silo problem.  The problem is now changing scope.  The question isn’t how do I have my 3 content systems interoperate, but how do I share my content with my business partners and vice versa?  CMIS is great, but how do we manage security?  Access and control of content is a problem when you don’t manage the identities of the people directly.

The ECM community hasn’t been unaware of these changes, but in the quest to do everything, we lost the one quality that is most necessary in the 2.0 world.

Agility.

The Ideal Use Case

Let’s take a step back, or to be more precise, a step forward.

Imagine, if you will, preparing for a meeting as a follow-up to a conversation that you just had with a prospect.  You are working with your colleagues to create an agenda.  You are doing this from the subway from your favorite tablet computer connected via your wireless, favorite or not, provider.

Once completed, the agenda is automatically shared with all meeting attendees.  Attendees can comment on the agenda, but only you, your colleagues, and others that you designate  have access to make updates.  All of this is automatically determined by the relationship between the agenda, meeting invitation, and the meeting attendees.

The very act of creating the presentation with your colleagues will involve collaboration around the world on phones, laptops, tablets, and devices yet to come.  Access to the content will be from any device, anywhere.  The theme here is universal access.  This doesn’t just apply to the applications and devices consuming the content.  The content needs to be located in a place that can be accessed from any location.  That place is in the cloud.

Content will no longer be centered around, and managed for, the Enterprise.  Content Management will be everywhere and part of everything.

Omnipresent Content Management, that is the future.

Security will be key.  Everything needs to be secured and in such a way as to not hinder users.  Historically, there has been a direct correlation between security and complexity.  Can you even imagine using a VPN on your cell phone?

Simplicity for the users will be important.  That will take the industry, working together, to achieve.  That means me, you, and everyone reading this keynote.

Where Can Everyone Reach It?

There is a fear in moving to the cloud. You may look at the companies providing cloud-based Content Management, and you think commodity. That is a superficial analysis.  Even so, if you are managing Zettabytes of content, there stands to reason that there is a lot of money to be made providing a “commodity”.

Look deeper. By having all that content in a location where people can readily access it, the benefits grow.  All the gains that are always pitched for Content Management still apply, but now those benefits apply to all content, not just the content siloed in my organization.

With the cloud comes processing power.  The phrase Intelligent Content Management is starting to evolve as a component of Information Management.  Imagine the power that can be applied in the cloud to analyze trends within the content itself. Add to it the benefits of looking at the scope content that can be accessed.

No longer are you just looking at the trends within your organization.  Trends can be analyzed across trusted partners.

The ECM platforms as we know it will be living in the cloud.  There will still be some industries that utilize private cloud structures, but the platforms will be globally accessible.  Platforms will interoperate via CMIS, and applications will be developed independent of the platforms.

This independent development of applications will give us back something that is missing from the industry.

Agility.

That is the key to having a shot at surviving in the future.  Without it, we may as well step aside.  I don’t know about you, but I for one am not going to step aside.

Stop the New Silos Before They Begin

We are at a turning point in the Content Management industry.  The last turning point came with the advent of ECM ten years ago.  We decided to end the content and organizational silos that were springing-up everywhere.  While there are still separate systems, we now have the tools to have coordinated management of content within our organizations.

Now we have silos between organizations.  Sometimes that organization is your family.  The lines between work and people’s personal lives has been blurring for a long time.  The line is almost imperceptible.  To succeed in this world, we need to have the pieces meet so they can be accessed by everyone, anywhere.

So my question to you is a simple one.  Are you going to just keep moving in the same direction, trusting that you will get to where you want to be, or will you step back, survey the landscape, and realize that the future is in a different direction?

Three years ago, I started this blog to rant about how the merger of EMC World and Momentum hadn’t really worked out.  Well, after three years of improvements, there is currently a good chance that next year the conferences will be co-located and separate.

Two years ago, I reflected on my first year and shared numbers. By that time I was pushing for an ECM standard for the SOA world.  I had just learned that there was an effort underway that we would later learn was called CMIS.  This month, that journey ended and it became a standard.

One year ago I was more goal focused as I looked back.  I worked on two of the three goals, failed in the Design Patterns, but I think it was a heck of a year.

I cannot take credit for what has transpired in the last three years, well maybe a little for the improved Momentum, but not for most of it.  A lot of it would have happened anyway.  At most, I have helped push alongside the rest of you.  That said, goals have been achieved and it is time for new ones.

Which leaves the real question, What next?

Where Do We Go?

Blogging is work. Anyone who says otherwise is either nuts or uninformed.  It is easy to start a blog, but to continue it, one needs a passion, a mission, or inspiration to keep it going.

For three years, CMIS has been my passion.  I have shared many other topics, but the underlying desire has been the improvement of the Content Management profession.  CMIS is a powerful mechanism for solving the challenges that we face in the industry.

To be honest, the ECM vendors, all of the “leaders”, have been moving under the momentum they built-up a decade ago when ECM was a new term.  They hit their “goal” and are trying to find new ways to sell the same software.

Many challengers to the leadership have been very good at mimicking the leaders in order to look like the leaders.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us.

We need a new vision.  We need new leaders.  Why new?  Because we don’t have either now in the industry.

That is my goal now. We need a vision and a vendor that can lead the way and deliver.  Being an outsider, I can’t just walk down the hall and make it happen.  I’m looking for it and pushing people to be bold and to share their vision with us.

I am going to spread the word and get people to start asking their existing vendors, and potential vendors, the difficult questions.

I’m pretty sure I will upset some people this next year, though I started that process when I called out EMC.  Other vendors are guilty as well, and many aren’t going to like me after the coming year.

In the end, I don’t care because in a few years, if all goes well, we’ll have a few vendors that we can believe in, both from a technical foundation and a vision for the industry.

2010 is going to be a busy year.  People may look back on May 2010 as when it all started (and not because of this post), but it will you to make the change happen.

Numbers, Why Count?

And now for the anti-climatic moment where I spew the obligatory stats or tidbits of information that I feel will show that I matter.  This year is all about percentages.  Raw numbers are tricky things, so let’s count growth…

• Two weeks ago I had my best week ever, by about 25%.  Last week is just shy of the previous record.  It was the highest non-EMC World week by a mile or three.
• The odds are that by the time you read this, I’ll have already set my record for best month, with a week to go.  Given the last two weeks, no shocker.

What does this mean?  Nothing.  To be honest, it doesn’t matter.  Like any blogger, I obsess, but my goal is to reach the people that make a difference.

If you read this far, you are one of those people.

Alan and I recently wrote this piece (requires free registration) for CFO Connect, a thought-leadership magazine for CFOs and other senior finance professionals operating in India. The idea was to introduce people to Compliance and how an ECM technolog…