Earlier this year Lee Dallas from Big Men On Content posted a great article entitled “2010 Content Management Predictions from Lee Dallas” and now that we are half way through the year I was discussing with my colleagues over a cup of tea (yes there are some tea drinkers still around) and we thought this was a good opportunity to take a closer look at how many nails got hit on the head vs. Fat Thumb predictions (you know, the kind that were just a big miss…) So here’s my review of the crystal ball gazing from Lee:

Prediction #1: Open Text Will Acquire Another ECM Vendor.

He was half right. Certainly it’s no secret that Open Text remained on the acquisition trail, just a different kind of business. The $11m snap buy of BurntSand (announced April and confirmed in May) had a few industry punters scratching their heads. I haven’t noticed a lot of activity or communication coming from those quarters and for many, it seems a strange alliance. A few comments have been noted regarding the way in which BurntSand appeared to be rallying its project troops along the Canadian borders before the sale but no obvious link to that activity and the acquisition seem to have emerged.

Lee made one specific observation regarding the potential pitfalls of acquiring a business that has more service expertise than it does product depth that caught my eye. Anyone else think he was channeling SAS’s Jim Goodnight when he noted ‘every night a consulting company’s assets go home, every morning you hope they come back.’ If Open Text take a tip from Dr. Jim’s playbook and manage their people right, they too could have a 2.31 BILLION dollar business…

Prediction #2: SharePoint Will Force Specialization in the ECM Market

I disagreed with this when it was mooted and stand fast on the view that SharePoint is a basic content services tool. It delivers and will continue to deliver generalised content management, which many organisations still do not have. My personal gaze into the crystal ball on this front tells me that specialisation will come in the next 1-2 years when SharePoint users realise that SharePoint is not delivering the value or competitive edge they need but as yet, there is no evidence to support the call Lee’s making. That said, I do wonder about the level of SharePoint expertise that Open Text roped in with the BurntSand acquisition.

Prediction #3: Major ECM Vendors Will Stop Positioning Themselves as ECM Vendors.

Well from my personal experience this rings true. At the time when Documentum was leading the market with ECM it was new and shiny, now it is starting to move down the commodity path. EMC is pioneering the move toward case management and others are jumping on the bandwagon already – this is exactly what happened with ECM – in the words of Yogi Berra “it’s déjà vu all over again”.

Consider what Andy Wang, Director of ECM Strategy for Laserfiche said last month in an interview with IDM when asked if demand for ECM is down. “I sure would have loved to say that the SharePoint hype and confusion slowed down ECM purchasing habits because then Laserfiche’s 10% 2009 revenue growth would seem that much more powerful, but the reality is informed customers know that solving actual business problems such as case management and customer on-boarding is a more definable success measure and the return on investment is equal or more important to exploring SharePoint…”

Prediction #4: SharePoint Archiving Will Be THE BIG Topic in Q4 ’10

This I doubt. The real issue is about control of the SharePoint environment, not archiving. Put simply, if you have no idea what is going on in your SharePoint environment, you are exposed to risk and compliance issues and this is exactly what’s happening for many organisations. No doubt the drive to MS2010 will drive a need to archive data but first you need to know what’s in there before you can migrate. Control and visibility will continue to be the defining issues.

Prediction #5 Cloud ECM Business Models Will Dampen The Hype

The cloud is certainly the next wave in IT. Organisations will are being driven to adopt cloud models in order to service customers with more flexibility and at a lower cost. Within Australia and New Zealand it is especially relevant to mid-sized organisations that have neither resource, nor budgets nor a desire to bring IT in house and manage infrastructure and/or information. I completely agree that security is going to be a particular concern – it’s challenging enough for many businesses to keep their own perimeters under control, let alone needing to ratify the security provisions of a new ‘cloud service provider’.

Given that fact that ECM is all about managing the content…. Issues around security and privacy will most certainly slow down the adoption of EMC cloud offerings. It will be interesting to see if RSA’s new Archer acquisition has applications in this space. It is a very recent addition to the RSA fold and much is yet to be learned about it.

#6 WCM Will Remain A Boring Topic

Hard not to agree! It’s more about personalised and relevant communications through multi channels to the end user/customer including social media. WCM is almost old school and everyone does it (like a tick in the box)

ECM · Enterprise Content Management

The idea of this survey actually started around the water cooler believe it or not – ok, it was actually the kettle but you get the idea. A group of us were talking about the Beaconsfield disaster and someone commented that mining was one of the most critical industries that needed up-to-date process documentation. I started wondering if we could actually gauge the attitude of senior mangers around process and safety.

So I happened on the idea of doing a survey and approached the marketing team at work proposing that they sponsor the prize for me. A deal was struck – EMC marketing get to use the data (anonymously) if it’s of sufficient size and quality, and I get to ask the hard questions for my blog.

Click HERE to take the survey

iPad · Safety · Survey · Win

My name is Lawrence Maynard; I’m married with two boys and work for the Information Intelligence Group (IIG) of EMC as the Regional Services Director for Australia and New Zealand.
Regarding my professional background, it’s probably easier to link to my Linkedin profile rather than doing a detailed intro.

Anyway, I decided to start writing this blog because many of the Content Management blogs are very feature / function centric. Whilst I’m not a Documentum expert (I work for EMC and manage the Services practice for Australia and New Zealand), I know enough to be dangerous…so I’m told.

I’m hoping that by being inside EMC I can give you some inside insight into the more business related aspects of the Documentum World and also learn something from the very talented people that are out there (you) and hopefully feed this back into the wider EMC organisation.

As this is my first blog entry I thought I’d start with a subject that is a little bit different, although I do intend to get back to the IIG Strategy in future posts.

The Digital Genome Project, Pentecost and Enterprise Content Management

A couple of things happened towards the end of May 2010, both seemingly unrelated to each other and one of them only partially related to Documentum.

The first was the feast of Pentecost – this is one of the most important days in the Christian calendar and the events are best summed up as:-

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”
The Apostles began ‘speaking in tongues’ and were understood, by everyone present, in their own language.

The second was the ‘Digital Genome’ that was secured in a bunker deep under the Swiss Alps:-
This project is the culmination of four years of work by European researchers who deposited a ‘Digital Genome’ that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.

The sealed box contains the key to unpicking defunct digital formats. This box will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3 ½ tonne door strong enough to resist nuclear attack at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.

So what have these two events in common?
Simply that both events are a response to a problem – the problem being how to best ensure that data reaches the intended recipients in the correct format (information).
In the case of the Apostles, their message, delivered in an unrecognisable format, was meaningless. However, with ‘divine intervention’ their data was transformed into information.

The divine intervention enjoyed by the Apostles is probably not coming our way with regards to saving our archaic data formats so the response of the Digital Genome project is a sensible one ensuring that with the ever decreasing lifespan of our data formats (both hardware and software) information is not lost forever.

Why do we care?

Written information has traditionally been created in an encrypted manner – a language. This language can be analysed by future generations and de-coded. In this way all of the accumulated and stored wisdom of a civilisation can be unlocked with the correct key, such as the Rosetta Stone.
The Digital Genome project is an attempt to proactively produce a Rosetta Stone for future generations and as such should be viewed as a noble project but what is the impact of doing nothing?

We capture much more information than ever before. The Digital Genome project researchers estimate that there is 100 GB of data for every person on the planet – this is equivalent to 24 tonnes of books per person.

IDC estimate that the amount of electronically stored data will exceed 1.2 ZB in 2010, this is actually almost 200 GB per person, much of which is unstructured (95%) unmanaged (85%) and becoming more regulated. In addition 85% of this data is ‘managed’ by organisations.

Some may argue that we have already lost an unmeasurable amount of content such as conversations and physical documentation that will never be recovered. Much of the digital content we capture these days, it could be argued, is unnecessary, with obsolete data formats being just a logical progression of the information loss that has been happening for millennia

Others argue that we are in danger of a ‘Digital Dark Age’ where this loss of valuable information to future generations could be likened to the low volume of written records from the middle ages and this is certainly the motivation being the Digital Genome.

There is a third school of thought; that is that the ‘Digital Dark Age’ is being overstated and that most examples of lost information are really examples of where information has been recovered, albeit at great expense and that for Digital Archiving to be taken seriously we need real evidence of the costs of ‘do nothing’. http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/position/Ross_Harvey_black_hole_PPP.pdf

All of the above may be valid view points but one fact is undeniable;
Information has traditionally been available to users even after a generation or more (when arguably much of its relevance is lost) because it was stored in a universally readable, low-tech format (assuming we have the ability to translate).

Digital information, however, is stored in a proprietary, high-tech format that, due to the rate of technological change, may be disappearing at an ever-increasing rate, well within its useful life.

This problem is highlighted by the Digital Genome project which estimated that the European Union loses data valued at three billion Euros every year. This is likely to increase as the lifespan of digital formats reduce. Current estimated lifespan is less than 20 years for hardware technology such as optical drives and 5-7 years for data formats – well within the retention policy timeframes of many organisations.

So evidently we have to care but the question I am asking myself is, what should be the response of the Content Management industry to this problem?

By way of one example, here is a link to an EMC press release regarding the Kennedy Presidential Library http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2006/20060609-4439.htm

This project was to build a digital library consisting of the entire collection of papers, documents, photographs and audio recordings of President John F. Kennedy, with the aim of eventually making them accessible to citizens throughout the world via the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s website — www.jfklibrary.org.

This solution addresses the problem of storing and retaining a specific set of historical records using EMC hardware and software and as such the content becomes managed and structured content. To a certain extent this safeguards this content for future generations as long as the solution is maintained (the hardware and software is managed, maintained and current)
Of course this won’t protect against a complete breakdown in civilisation but I suspect if that happened we may not care too much about lost content!

A potentially bigger issue is to ensure that data formats continue to be supported, many content management platforms integrate with universal viewers such as Brava that allows organisations to view multiple document formats without the need to have the native software on every client.

So, as long as content is managed, structured and the format is recognised and continues to be supported by the viewer then there’s no problem, right?
A very simplistic view but given that 85% of all content is unmanaged (over 1 ZB) then we really are in danger of losing a lot of data….

So why are we in this position?
A very good question, you would think that an organisation would value its information as this represents its accumulated intellectual property. Unfortunately the industry has done a poor job, in my opinion, of selling the value of traditional content management and implementations are viewed as being complicated and potentially prone to failure.

This is not necessarily due to the products themselves but content management does require a considerable amount of planning and change management – I worked with ERP for many years and content management is much more of a change for organisations.

These projects are not a technology drop and if treated as such they are likely to fail but if they are approached correctly then the results can be superb.
The benefits are not only that valuable IP will be available ‘in perpetuity’ but once that information is captured it can be used for business decision making purposes – content is no longer just created, distributed, maintained and disposed of – now information is increasingly being interacted with.

The logical progression of traditional content management is what is called Composite Content Applications – EMC have taken a step towards this evolution with the xCP Case Management suite (I’m sure someone will jump on this and tell me that CCA and Case Management aren’t the same but it’s easier to articulate Case Management than CCA) and many other players are jumping on the case management bandwagon so expect to see the major ECM developments being in this area (a lot more on this in future blogs I’m sure).

Anyway, I digress, information preservation is a serious problem for us all and if the content management industry has many of the answers, why is there still so much unmanaged data?

Maybe we’re all praying for divine intervention?

Documentum · ECM · Enterprise Content Management