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A colleague of mine pointed me at a New Scientist article recently entitled ‘Biosemiotics: Searching for Meanings in a Meadow’

Now, when I was younger, I loved New Scientist but I haven’t read it for years and it took me a long time to get around to reading this (sorry Geoffrey).

It was heavy going but the gist of it was that there is an emerging ‘science’ that, from what I can gather, is concerned with the link between natural signs and the resultant actions of biological, living systems. It may even go so far as to try to link this as genetic information stored for future generations and manifesting itself as instinct.

Now I’m sure that the Biosemiotic community out there will correct me in my vulgar interpretation (no-one said I was an expert) but it strikes me that there is a parallel between Biosemiotics and Content Management.

Instinct is designed to give us a basic sense of survival. Female mosquitoes need to suck on blood to reproduce. They have a tremendous array of chemical receptors but that doesn’t explain how they know to bite. The receptors sense carbon dioxide (the sign) and they bite, presumably instinctively.

While Biosemiotics may explain why we have the tools to survive in a primitive world, it cannot help us to survive in the corporate world and this is why (you guessed it) we increasingly need to live in the Documentum World….

All organisations we deal with have a need, it may be compliance, it may be collaboration, it may be business decision making/case management but it can also be self preservation.

The ‘law of the jungle’ is best summed up as survival of the fittest. Biosemiotics could explain how some weaker animals are better able to cope with this by recognising danger signs and acting instinctively to survive but the law of the jungle applies in the corporate world also. So how do organisations equip themselves for either self preservation or the ability to be effective predators? (more…)

Case Management · Documentum · ECM · Enterprise Content Management

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Congratulations to Richard Weir who is our second winner on Documentum World and the lucky recipient of a 32gb iPad!  Thanks to everyone who took part, we will be posting some of the findings from the survey shortly, so please check back soon…

iPad · Survey · Win

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“If you come to a fork in the road, take it”

The above quotation is from Yogi Berra, the former baseball player who, I think, is much more famous for his sayings than his baseball (a few included here)!
When considering a Content Management solution, a lot of organisations still come to the fork in the road and take the do-nothing route but increasingly it seems that Content Management is seen as key to an organisation’s success and you just have to do it.
After all “It gets late early out there” and “the other teams could make trouble for us if they win.”

Anyway, here’s a link to an interesting article that was posted on CMS Report.

It presents all of the reasons why now is the right time for any company that doesn’t yet have a Content Management solution to take the leap.
The first tip in the article is especially relevant to many of our Documentum customers, especially in the financial services industry where regulations are constantly changing and the penalties for non-compliance can be huge – after all name one CEO who wants to admit that “I made a wrong mistake.” And once you have a Content Management solution, the opportunities for interacting with the data via Content Enabled Applications (Case Management) are massive.

I’m still considered wet behind the ears when it comes to Content Management but in my time I’ve seen too often Content Management being justified on the basis of compliance and security alone but this article bears out what I’ve known all along – that effectively managing content is also cost efficient.Of course an IM roadmap is essential because “If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”

and you don’t want to be in the situation that Yogi Berra found himself in…

“Hey Yogi, I think we’re lost” – “Yeah, but we’re making great time!”

Case Management · ECM · Enterprise Content Management · legal cost

I was recently reading an interesting article by Joe Shepley entitled ‘Jack of All Trades’ .

The ‘thrust of the gist’ was that everything a business does is content management in a number of guises: BPM, ERP, CRM, email, instant messaging etc.
Well it’s hard to disagree that all of these have an element of content management (some more than others) but isn’t arguing that it is content management ‘drawing a long bow’?

I would argue that all of these encompass a business process (or a number of processes) and that content is a by-product .

Take the example of an ERP; it manages a number of processes such accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, financial recording and reporting etc.

All of these processes have input and output and utilise a high degree of reference data but does this constitute content in the way most of us understand it?

An invoice within an ERP system is merely a number with some data associated with it and the ERP allows that to be matched with the other data in the system (both static and dynamic) to allow something to occur (in this case payment for goods or services)

The content is the ‘physical invoice’ with receipting stamp, signatures etc. combined with the notes and associations held within the ERP. ERP Vendors have attempted a ‘halfway house’ where a scanned image is held as a blob within the database and can be accessed from within application forms but to call that content management plays into the hands of the philistines who think that content management is a glorified network drive.

Where content management applications should fit into an organisation’s information strategy is to take these pockets of content management, consolidate into a single repository and use to make business decisions. Of course the ERPs and CRMs within the organisation would continue to function in the same ways (but with the content held centrally) and the content could be used to enable more streamlined business decision making by pulling together tentatively connected information as cases and routing, reporting and alerting. This is exactly where EMC sees the content management direction moving.

So, maybe the trick here is to clearly position content management as the master of all data instead of a Jack of all Trades….

ECM · Enterprise Content Management · ERP