I started to give live conference Twitter-ing a try yesterday from the AIIM Expo in Boston. This worked fine for two key-notes; however, after that my wireless connectivity became unreliable. Here are a some notes that I might have otherwise shared via tweets…
John Mancini, AIIM president. State of the ECM Industry (presentation and extensive notes available here):
For 12 years saying enterprise content management (ECM) industry is going to take off. Survey of end-user identify two biggest obstacles are:
- Nobody owns the document problem in the company (my note: sounds same as for “knowledge management” overall)
- Too expensive to get started
Name recognition lacking. From survey of companies only 26% had every heard of the term “ECM” and this was after giving hint that it had something to do with information management. In most companies, ECM has not yet reached peer status with ERP (e.g. financial and HR systems) [this last comment from later panels, described below]
Four tensions (see above link for details)… a couple of particularly memorable points for me:
- 1GB of storage costs 20 cents for the physical medium, but costs $3500 to review in eDiscovery for litigation (reminds me of a Deloitte Technology Predictions quote from Bob DuCharme: “People learned several years ago that data is more valuable than applications or hardware…”)
- Survey answer to “Do you have a formal plan for ECM implementation?”…only 15% have a plan and are using it.
Following the key-notes I attended the three AIIM Center Stage panels hosted by Doculabs. Practitioner panelists were from Insurance and Financial Services industries. Again, the particularly memorable points across all three panels:
- A trend to (back to?) “Centers of Excellence“
- Baseline taxonomy, that then individual business lines add to, with limitations as to how much allowed to add. Taxonomy is in transformation. Top-down rigor is not keeping up with business changes. Use top- down as a base. Put frequently used across applications portions into into web services (e.g. geographies for sales). Blend with user defined tagging.
- “Biggest challenge is to get the business to understand ECM” (echo to above)
- Many using SharePoint for project management work in progress but then storing finished deliverables in their enterprise content management system (e.g. Documentum) where their other Records are.
- For transactional portion of the business, all custom user interface. Users don’t even know that one or more content management systems are operating in the back-end. No branding for these systems is exposed.
- Back and forth with how centralized or distributed IT organization was. Lost some ground in the distributed days. Now with more centralized, and getting to more a ‘utility’ approach for ECM.
- In recent years, ECM technology has gotten more open, with better integration. Getting away from a particular vendor trying to have it all. Use web services to be as open as possible.
- Started project with defining following guiding principles: Performance (speed as perceived by users), Keep it Simple, Sharing, and Records Management. Kept going back to these throughout the project and during follow-on projects.
- We have defined industry too much by acronyms, not enough “what is the business problem?”
- “Ring the cash” (e.g. via improved customer experience) versus “stay out of jail” (e.g. eDiscovery) — both put pressure on ECM, but are very different problem sets
- Trend towards Federated approach to tie together filesystem, MS Exchange, SharePoint, etc. Using master library that can use discover tools against, while front-end is still e.g. SharePoint.
- Law firms pioneers (lead users) in document management
- Regarding Records Management…Don’t want to save it all. Make consistent and comprehensive decisions on what to keep and what to discard.
- What do you declare a Record? Legal input, business decision. Reasonable need of needing it in the future. For improved Records Management, going after the obvious content first (e.g. invoice), next tier are things like email and other content in workflow, next all the rest on file-system (the ‘slop’, the ‘dumping ground’).
- Records Management should be built-in, not added on to the end of process
- Process to get to retention rules: first cast wide net, get big list with two buckets: kinds of things (categories) and retention periods. Will have way too many in both buckets. Go after consolidation in both. Put in a controlled process for further combination and creating any new categories or retention periods.