by Bill Ives
April 23, 2007 at 2:38 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Ron Miller provides some interesting comments on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) in reaction to his visit to a poorly attended Boston trade show on the subject. He reported on a talk by John Newton, one of the creators of Documentum, “while ECM is a $4B a year business, it still has only single digit penetration. One of the issues, he says, that it is too big, too expensive and too complex, and increasingly the current generation of ECM packages is failing to take new content into account.” However, in the short run it is interesting to see that EMC (not to be confused with ECM), the parent company of Documentum, reported earnings up 35% in the most recent quarter driven in part by share buyback. Even before buybacks, earnings were up 11% and on target. But fortunately for them they do much more than content management.
The fact that ECM was “too big, too expensive and too complex: made it a darling of the big consulting companies and the knowledge management solution of choice. They needed this type of implementation to support the pyramid scheme business of large implementation teams with many high margins workers at the bottom. The opportunities provided by blogs and wikis to provide a low cost knowledge management alternative was one of the reasons that first attracted me to these web 2.0 tools several years ago.
Newton also made a comment similar to what Joe McKendrick reported in personal outsourcing. Enterprise IT people want to control information, sitting inside a protected data bubble, but outside the bubble, users are increasingly looking beyond the enterprise for information in Google, RSS feeds, blogs and other Web 2.0 sites. He adds that the current ECM systems do not take into account this information outside the enterprise.
Newton is now the CTO of a new Open Source content management firm, Alfresco, that is trying to acknowledge and serve content inside and outside the enterprise. While there are many issues to address, any content management system needs to crack this to remain relevant in Enterprise 2.0. Other wise they will be, as Ron wrote, “among a sea of dinosaurs unable to offer anything new or compelling or interesting.”
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Hey Bill,
I recently had a conversation about the role of Enterprise 2.0 and ECM with some colleagues (I work for a global consulting firm). I’m a big proponent of Enterprise 2.0 and for a while was wrecklessly advocating the insignifiance of ECM in light of Enterprise 2.0. One of my colleagues, however, had a very good point.
Enterprise 2.0 is great for harnessing knowledge and ideas, but converting these into corporate tactics and strategy requires a refined (or at least loosly refined) process. As innovative ideas move from the Enterprise 2.0 cloud toward actual business practice they will be modified and guarded to suite corporate needs, and this is where ECM and Enterprise 2.0 are complimentary. To over-exaggerate it would be unrealistic to have the corporate mission statement in a wiki for anybody to edit. One would expect the mission statement would sit behind some sort of controlled ECM system where few can modify it.
Jeremy
You raise good points and I was trying to more provactive than iconclastic. There are times when control is required. I think one of the main points I tried to raise was that ECM needs to accommodate the new content emerging through increased use of web 2.0. Just as a tagging system can help suppliment an enteprise search tool (as IBM does), there still needs to be integration with old and new tools. On the other hand you could use a wiki for a select team to create the mission statement. then you could put it in a blog for others to comment on it without changing it. Bill
Actually, a couple of content management practitioners (known and respected) have done a better job of talking about Web 2.0 than most other references, and do so within the context of Content Management in a 4-part series, “What is Web 2.0 Content Management?” [http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/what-is-web-20-content-management-part-1-001187.php]
Indeed, a good portion of the ‘internal’ corporate design work I’ve done over the past several years was specifically focused on either ‘tweaking’ or trying to make less problematic interacting with Content Management monoliths. You’d think such companies would figure out the value of redesigning their tools — particularly when so many companies are paying good money to find ways to work around them.
The good news is that there are plenty of good well-designed options on the market right now that will, with the help of 2.0 thinking, unseat these major architectural nightmares. I have no qualms about losing income from such work. The sooner I can never look at one of those interfaces again, the better.
Another thing to consider is the improving ability corporations have to manage unstructured as well as structured content. Not only is it a challenge to incorporate hierarchy-challenging “web 2.0″ relationship networking features into the mix of tools employees have, it is also a challenge to figure out how to take advantage of more powerful and comprehensive content management functionality.
Is it true, as Paula suggests, that the day of “monolithic” ECM applications is over?
I’m not so sure about that. Just because an application is “monolithic” does not automatically mean that its user features must necessarily be suspect. A more important question is how management views the need to impose standards, security measures, and quality control oversight over increasingly decentralized content management.
Does an application necessarily have to be “monolithic” in order to implement such measures? In the old days the answer was usually “yes.” Nowadays, as Jeremy suggests, it might be more important to have processes in place that don’t assume a monolithic system infrastructure. This requires a fairly sophisticated view of content management that doesn’t just focus on the technology, which is fine with me.
I’ve touched on some of these issues in blog posts such as these:
http://www.ddmcd.com/ecm_index.html
Are there others in the Washington DC area who would be interested in getting together for a beer or two to discuss issues like these that relate to ECM and Web 2.0 strategies? Let me know via my blog (http://www.ddmcd.com).
Then of course there is Microsoft SharePoint! I think this has offered businesses a compromise between the kind of user driven sharing of information, with the structured approach businesses need to maintain control. SharePoint is now a billion dollar product, and can only grow larger as it is implemented more and more.
Sharepoint has provided a decent low cost ECM for some firms, especially smaller ones. It is also increasign its support for enterprise 2.0 functions. Thanks. Stphen. Have you seen successful implementations of the newest Sharepoint?
You can certainly start by reviewing the level of effort Microsoft’s internal group put into implementing SharePoint from a 2.0 perspective inside of their own organization (in this case the focus is more from a ’search’ perspective):
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032334379&CountryCode=US
And references to others: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102066081033.aspx?pid=CL100796281033
Paula – Thanks for thses examples. They will be very useful. Bill
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