We’ve all heard it or thought it: why can’t the search tools we use in the enterprise just do what Google does on the internet? Type in a couple of words and get a ton of results organized into a pretty good ranking of what’s relevant to me…after all, we have way less documents than the internet, so this should be a snap.
I came across a great post by Jeff Carr on CMSWire, “Enterprise Search and Pursuit of the Google Experience” that explains in detail why doing what Google does is so difficult. In a nutshell, it comes down to two things.
Skip the RFP
One of the biggest time wasters and remnants of a bygone era is the corporate Request for Proposal (RFP), used as a means of thinning the herd or even selecting a product to purchase. In the ECM space, the majority of products and product categories are speeding headlong into a mature state (with the obvious exception of some enterprise social collaboration tools). Combine the product maturity with vendor consolidation into vertical stacks of integrated services, and there really isn’t that much mystery to the product analysis.
The RFP process is a bad deal for the corporation issuing it and for the vendors on the receiving end. read more
Well, not really. But it is the “devil’s advocate” position I heard at a client site recently, during a working session to build out the business case for ECM. Here’s how it went down.
We were all busily discussing how the solution packages we were building would allow business users to migrate off of shared drives and onto more manageable repositories, when one of our team members piped up, “Why, exactly, are we migrating folks off of shared drives?”
SharePoint Will Not Own ECM (At Least, Not Anytime Soon)
I beg to differ with you, Professor Shepley. SharePoint is not about to own ECM (cf. Joe Shepley’s post, SharePoint will own ECM). SharePoint is actually a long, long way from becoming, quote, “the main player in the ECM space, ahead of ‘big ECM’ (IBM, EMC, Oracle, Open Text, Alfresco, et al.).” And here’s a list of the reasons why. read more
James Watson recently discussed a few important issues you should think about as you select a discovery vendor. He also provided a diagram showing how we at Doculabs segment the industry. This post explains the diagram and our segmentation.
ECM’s Not Going Anywhere
You hear a lot of talk about how ECM is on its way out, fading as a viable corporate discipline, or coming to an end as an enterprise application category. You see the marketplace in the last year or so beginning even to act as if this is the case: ECM vendors talking about case management and collaboration rather than content management, organizations focusing on social media and external communities rather than managing documents. So is this really the end of ECM as we know it?
For a lot of reasons, I don’t think so, although I agree that the name “ECM” may not be long for this world.
The main reason I think ECM will have a long life is that, no matter what you call it, it has to do with managing content, which is one of the three fundamental activities of an organization. Along with managing physical assets and managing human assets, managing information assets is a core building block of the work organizations do—how could that ever go away?
If you have been following any of the blogs or tweets about Enterprise 2.0 you are probably sick of hearing about how E2.0 is part of a culture shift, a consumer driven phenomenon fueled both by the unprecedented ascent of Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and the Millennial generation which eschews channel controlled communication like e-mail in favor of open communication channels. What isn’t being discussed — and seems to be specifically ignored — is the fact that all of these new tools will be creating new content, content that will need to be managed and either preserved or disposed.
(This post also available on AIIM’s ERM Community blog.)
Preservation: It’s a simple term we often see used throughout the industry. But the activities associated with preservation can and must take place based in different contexts. For example, as part of an on-going, “business-as-usual” process, records and critical reference materials should be preserved to ensure ready access for users. Alternatively, when a legal hold is issued, a firm has an obligation to preserve any relevant materials related to the discovery request.
Wait a minute: If a firm is preserving electronic materials in the normal course of business, why would it have to preserve the electronically stored information (ESI) again as a result of a legal hold? read more
BP’s reaction to the worst oil spill in U.S. history is going to go down in the textbooks as a case study not only in how not to do environmental response, but also in how not to do crisis management. (See the Computerworld article: “BP, in crisis mode, misses social networking target”.) The whole snafu is an object lesson in why an organization should care about defining and implementing a social computing strategy – a strategy that includes both external- and internal-facing components. read more
SharePoint will own ECM
I was sitting in a final presentation for a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 roll-out with a global, Fortune 200 client the other day, and something remarkable happened: there were audible gasps from end users when we demonstrated the proof of concept sites the team had built. Not polite or half-hearted gasps, but real, honest-to-goodness ones…the kind you get the first time you show someone an iPad or Droid. Incredible.
I’ve never seen such a visceral positive reaction to an ECM technology proof of concept (have you?), so it got me thinking: could SharePoint eventually become the main player in the ECM space ahead of “big ECM” (IBM, EMC, Oracle, Open Text, Alfresco, et al.)?
I think the answer is yes, for (at least) three reasons.