I have been reading the content management blogs lately and I have come across a lot of people who are passionate about the Content Management space, yet seem to focus on the details and forget the bigger picture.

Some of the articles have been about product quality and I waded into the debate on a couple of blogs and tried to bring it back to the bigger picture – I’m a big picture kind of guy (as I tell my team) but it was no use – there was a definite pre-occupation with statements along the lines of…

’in version X, component Y worked much better than in version Z’

Now there is some truth to these claims and I’ve spent more time than I’d like explaining why a feature that was present in a previous release is no longer available. So I’m not trying to debunk these claims but I would ask whether it is a lack of quality programming or is it just a sign of the complex, multi-vendor times that we live in?

Admit it, the IT world has changed – when I entered the IT industry in 1990 (at the age of 5 )
applications were primarily run on mainframes and didn’t change much. I fondly recall the ‘Green Screen’ monitors, ICL Mainframes etc. I’m getting teary-eyed just thinking about it…

I worked in finance at that time and I had one of the only PCs (8086 processor, 640k RAM, 10mb hard disk) with more processing power than any young accountant would ever need… The corporate applications ran on mainframes and were accessed using VT220 emulator software. It was bliss – it never seemed to go wrong…, but then again, expectations were low. We never comprehended changing things or adding new features. The vendor owned the entire stack and things changed infrequently.

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pargon

Fast-forward 20 years….

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ECM · Enterprise Content Management · xCP

Here’s a link to an article that I found interesting. It’s a list compiled by John Mancini, AIIM President, entitled ’8 Major Trends that will Change ECM in the Coming Years’. Now we all love lists – will Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom top the list of world’s most kissable man? Who knows (and who…)

Anyway, something that we care about is ECM and the 8 major trends article is here. There are the usual ‘suspects’ like Cloud, Mobile Content and Social Intelligence that seem to appear in every list.

Then there are the ‘bread and butter’ trends such as Search, Open Platforms and Big Data.

Interestingly the others in the list such as Redefining Content and Collaboration fit very nicely into EMC’s strategy, especially given that traditional ECM is increasingly seen less as a differentiator in business and more as an essential platform for the next big shift in Content Management, Content Enabled Applications (Case Management in Documentum terms)

Anyway, click here to read for yourself.

ECM · Enterprise Content Management

When I convinced the guys in marketing to sponsor the prize for the last survey on Process and Safety, there was a bit of healthy skepticism about what the results would be. But the response has been fantastic and given me some great insights. Based on the results, I’ve decided to run a new survey every couple of months and hopefully each time will focus on a different industry segment and business issue.

My new survey is framed around how your organisation uses it’s process to interact with a new customer. It addresses efficiencies (or lack of efficiencies) around the process, and how by improving your processes it can lead to better customer service and increased revenues. Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to participate in the survey, I really appreciate it.

Case Management · Enterprise Content Management · iPad · Survey · Win

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randa/

I just wanted to start by saying a big thank you to everyone who took the survey – I was really surprised by just how many people completed the survey.

Not surprisingly 91% of respondents thought good internal processes rated either highly or very highly in protecting safety. However, only 21% of respondents feel that most companies understand mission critical risk and how to deal with it. This is worrying statistic and but is only part of the story, as you will soon see.

One of the most telling statistics to come out of the survey is that 72% of respondents felt that bad process has negatively impacted on revenue. Here at EMC this didn’t come as a surprise, as we know how important ECM is to our customers.

Solid process and up-to-date readily accessible documentation can not only save lives, but has a positive impact on an organisation’s bottom line.

I will be running another survey shortly if I can get our marketing dept to stump up with another prize (no – I don’t think appealing in a public forum amounts to pressure), so please subscribe to the RSS feed or check back regularly to keep up to date.

Lawrence Maynard

Enterprise Content Management · iPad · Safety · Survey