From the beginning IT strategists, architects and designers have tried to be user-focused and Apple has proven hugely successful at it: is every service we can think of really necessary? As architects, even Joe User ones, to get what we want in today’s cloud and SaaS world we all ask, where are the best services available for me? A few free apps later and the iPad is incredibly powerful for many of us in business.

However, while I agree with your death knell, and I’ll add the qualifier, for desktop-Office, let’s see how cloud-based Office evolves. Microsoft will not stand still. But overall, it just underscores, as designers of solutions, we have to be asking ourselves, if, how and where to build these services; how to expose them; and, critical to business, with respect for policy and security. Architecture has never been more critical. People joke about us going back to the mainframe days when things were centrally located and we didn’t have desktop (local) processing. But today’s designers have infinitely greater challenges and much deeper holes to fall into than we did in the mainframe days. But lucky for us, as users, we have infinitely greater possibilities.

Glad you found the post relevant to what’s going on in HR at your organization. I definitely agree with your assessment that HR as a practice area will quickly reach the end state I sketch here–it’s an exciting time to be involved in HR.

Thanks for jumping in and getting the conversation started (and for your kind words)–I appreciate it!

Cheers,

Joe

I think you are spot on and have a fun ride ahead in your HR consulting engagements. HR lags in many cases of technology adoption but I think in the E2.0 space you will find HR quickly adopting or being forced in to the mix to someday resemble your big picture. We are getting there.

Thx for sharing your insights,
Dave

John O’Melia at the helm is seeing us go in a different direction and I’m more positive about IIG than I’ve been for a while – there are a lot of exciting initiatives on the horizon..

http://www.documentumworld.com

You quote Lee Dallas ref ‘true believers’ – well in that case I am a true believer, there is no reason a business cannot have a strategy for managing all types of content. Is executing on that strategy often difficult – for sure it is; but then as the philosophers say, if it’s hard, its worth doing.

You also say that ECM has refused to become “particular” – and therein lays the issue, the semantics argument. An ECM strategy absolutely should be particular and specific to each different organization, to the point that you can prioritize right down to the level that you realize you cannot actually afford the time or cash to implement your strategy as broadly as you wished; so your going to concentrate on content associated with key business processes or content that helps solve key business problems. So now you have an ‘enterprise” wide CM strategy, but your not actually executing on a truly enterprise wide basis. Does this mean Peter Monks is right and ECM is dead – of course not, it’s just semantics……..