ECM and the FLATNESSES model

So, a while ago I decided to assess current generation (ECM 1.0) Enteprise Content Management against Dion Hinchcliffes SLATES model of Enterprise 2.0, and Chris McGath of ThoughtFarmer seemed a bit shocked that ended up rating the current state of play quite highly :-)

So Chris decided to assess his product agains Dion's MK II model, with the acronym FLATNESSES; so I have to take up the challenge and look at the additional elements of this new Entperprise 2.0 model and how ECM systems fit in. This is Chris version of Dion's diagram, showing the additional elements which we want to examine:

I have added some comments on some of the elements originally assessed against SLATES too.

• Freeform: Well in the biggest sense of the word, an ECM 'platform' such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet or OpenText Livelink can be considered free form, as you can build whatever ECM enabled application you like on top of said platform, with the components and interfaces it supplies. However in the Enterprise 2.0 context 'freeform' appears to speak to Dion's idea of an egalitarian experience for users. In order for ECM 2.0 to be freeform in this context, it needs to support applications like blogs and wiki's where the content of pages is hosted in the ECM repository, manged by its WCM sub-system or provided with the benefits of federated services, such as records management etc. Personally I would also like to interpret 'freeform' as the ability to utilise AJAX, FLASH, Silverlight, PHP or whatever we want to quickly build simple, contextual interfaces that offer true browser based, user centric design.

• Links: dealt with under the SLATES posting, however moving forward the ability to link to any piece of content anywhere in the repository via URL / URI mechanisms needs to be linked to the increaslingly popular use of RDF / RSS technology for linking to other enterprise systems.

• Authorship: dealt with under the SLATES posting, but since then IBM have release their free 'Lotus Symphony' toolset, based on OpenOffice.Org components creating Open Documentum Format (ISO) standard XML files. So why not build in such tools to replace the simple inline text editor offered for quick content creation in many current ECMS' - well because it might damage relationships with MS by reducing licensing of their cash cow ? Well no one said you can't do the above and still provide Office connectors !

• Tagging: dealt with under the SLATES posting, it should be easy to such 'consumer web' oriented aspects such as 'tag clouds' if users find them an easy way to browse the metadata held in your ECMS

• Network Oriented: "Application content must be fully web oriented, addressable and reusable". Well we have already mentioned that many ECMS' have moved away from 'fat client' or even 'thin client' type software integration with the desktop towards web browser based interfaces, giving URL access to content objects. This move should continue, but care and attention needs to be applied to these interfaces, especially as they can be quite slow compared to MS Windows Explorer integrations provided by the old client install technology. Dion's diagram also mentions "small pieces" - I am presuming this means pieces which are easily consumable over the network. Well that depends on your business context and what content your producing, but actually we are looping back to authoring and XML; if you can do a good job of managing small 'chunks' of XML content as a core competence, then it should be easy to push that to a web browser, or transform it into a paginated PDF for third party printing, or to a talking eBook for your visually impaired customers etc.

• Social: so where does this fit into the ECM universe. It might be via links to other systems, for example if you leverage a seperate Directory Service to provide authentication for your ECMS, then it may be a case of surfacing useful information from your directory alongside the content in a particular context. It may be a case of leveraging audit trail info, i.e. these people have read this document, other people who read this document also accessed this document... etc. However social aspects are very definately contextual to every different organisation, so the lowest common denominator might be linking people to content by surfacing metadata already held, and doing it in a way thats useful to your users.

• Emergence: using Prof. J. Goldstein's definition of "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems." we might argue that ECMS technology could support emergence, but that acually ECM is usually (or should be) part of wider Information Management strategies, and as such should include well worked out structures such as metadata schema's, taxonomies, business classification schema's and folder structures. This suggests ECM strategies and emergence are to each other as matter and anti-matter. However it might not be that simple. For well structured information stores, the marriage of ECM and BI to spawn 'Content Intelligence' might find patterns in content creation or use. An interesting topic for further thought.

However might bottom line on this is the same as always, 'ECM' is a strategy not a product or suite of products - its about information management not about shiny new software :-)

I'm an IOA Practioner.....

Well, just spent an excellent two days in the classroom with 14 colleagues under the tutorship of Hanns Kohler-Kluner of AIIM, doing the first classroom based presentation of the Information Organisation and Access Practioner course outside of the U.S. Check out the info on the AIIM site, but its a very interesting course, and the whole range of subject matter from metadata, through taxonomies and ontologies to search engine technology is of course highly integrated with ECM.

My colleagues included many 'information management' professionals, responsible for developing our metadata schema's, business classification schema's, content models etc, but also two of our ECM training specialists, our Intranet manager and 3 people from the section that 'sys admins' our search engine. I think everyone enjoyed the experience as much as I did, and hopefully everyone has a better appreciation of the others viewpoint on IOA. So, ECM Practioner, and IOA Practioner down, BPM Specialist to go......

So check out AIIM's training provision, its highly recommended.

What , no broadband ..... !

So, this is what it feels like :-(

For the first time in two years, since having it fitted, I am without completely pervasive wireless internet access in my house, and its a tad wierd !

Actually had to read a book last night..........

Seriously though, my Orange 'Livebox' appears to have shuffled off its mortal coil, however Orange want to send me a new power block first to try that. How often does a solid state powerpack fail compared to the relatively fragile components of a circuit board... ?

Oh, well, I have two days of AIIM Information Organisation and Access training here on site at my employer, so that will be interesting enough to perk me up :-)

Another assessment of Web 2.0 goodness

So, back in this posting I tried to do an assessment of generic ECM systems against Andrew MacAffee's SLATES criteria. Now Chris, one of the founders of ThoughtFarmer has done a similar posting, assessing his product against these Web 2.o criteria.

I have been talking to Chris as part of investigating ThoughtFarmer, it looks like a 'really useful' product as the Fat Controller would say (thats a 'Thomas the Tank Engine reference) :-)

Business Process Management stuff

Had an interesting day yesterday, with an EMC UK Ltd 'Business Process Management' specialist, who provided an excellent two hour overview of their Business Process Suite. It was interesting in the way that the pitch is now at a higher, strategic level since EMC acquired ProActivity and its tools. Interesting because we are know looking at 'BPM' on mulitiple levels.

We will shortly be advertising for a Business Process Analyst who will work alongside our 'Information Management Advisors" when introducing the ECMS into a business unit. This is most definately 'tactical' process management, identifying processes that can benefit from automation with the ECMS' workflow, subscription and notifications facililities.

The other side of the coin is the higher level strategic stuff you can do with the business process analysis, simulation and monitoring tools. Indeed we discussed the 'one ring to rule them all' scenario, with an enterprise scale process under the management of the 'Business Process Suite' but firing off workflow tasks and receiving output from the tools built into CRM, Call Center and other software.

Of course your 'Entperprise BPM' suite need not be from the same supplier as your ECMS, as long as your systems leverage BPEL and other standards, but the main point is, if your process deal with, contain, move about information in any form then the marriage of the two can only be a good thing.

Spotted this topical presentation on SlideShare:

Business Process Management - From Market Consolidation to Process Innovation

From: mzurmuehlen, 4 days ago

| View | Upload your own

Keynote held at JAX 2007 Conference, November 8th, 2007 - Munich, Germany.

SlideShare Link

If you want to improve your knowledge of Business Process Management check out the AIIM training courses, I am studying the online version of the BPM Practioner progamme at the moment, and its good, well presented and interesting.

Probably the best conference in the world....

CMF 2007 gets my vote ! Danish hospitality, excellent top notch speakers such as Bob Boiko, BJ Fogg, Lisa Welchman, James Robertston, Jim Hobart, Seth Gottlieb et al. Plus the chance to discuss various subjects with the completely indpendent analysts of CMS Watch, and with Dan Keldsen attending even AIIM were present. So a big thank you to Janus Boye, Flemming and Peter and all the crew who setup and ran a very efficient operation.

Looks like next years conference has out grown its original roots due the breadth of discussion, so its no longer Content Management Forum, but simply 'jboye08' !

To give an idea of the breadth of topics covered and discussed, these were the topics discussed in our final 'town hall' debate session; with Bob Boiko in charge, and myself and Christoph Schacher arguing for or against:.

1. Portals will replace CMS (resolution not passed
2. MOSS will rule them all (resolution not passed
3. This is the year when we finally figure out what enterprise CM is and start doing it (not passed)
4. Blogs and wiki's will dominate CM in large enterprises (resolution not passed)
5. Facebook is your next intranet (resolution not passed)
6. Google is the new Microsoft (resolution passed !)
7. Controlled vocabulary will be replaced by social tagging (resolution not argued - out of time)
8. Personalization and Workflow are now at the bottom of the feature list (not argued)

This really a fun debating session, but with plenty of well reasoned arguements, and Janus managing to get the word 'portal' into nearly every sentence he uttered...........

Bob gives the thumbs down as another town hall resolution bites the dust........

CMF social networking session

I am sat in an excellent hands on session, led by Emme, Finnur and Andreas, where we have created Wordpress blogs, Wetpaint wiki's and Del.icio.us links. Nothing new for me actually, but a great session and I bet lots of the other candidates are getting a lot out of this.

There has a been a lot of discussion of 'enterprise 2.0' here, and the use of social networking, especially since BJ Fogg's keynote had a lot of interesting stuff around Facebook. Janus has asked me to be on the final 'Town Hall' session this afternoon, a session where contentious issues are put up for voting on by the 'crowd' - so, I can't say what the list will be yet, as Bob Boiko is pulling together the final list right now, but you can bet that something along the lines of: "social networking will become key for business" will be included. More later......

Quick report from CMF2007

Just a quick hello from Aarhus. Crap laptop battery life is preventing me from 'live blogging' and to be honest, they keep us busy at this conference ! When you have an hour between the end of the last session to get back to your hotel, do email, get changed and go find the venue for the social event, its not long...... I know, its such a hard life.

So, yesterday took two excellent tutorials, the one given by James Robertson of Step Two was particularily beneficial seeing as we are currently working on redeveloping our intranet. Todays keynotes were also first rate, with Bob Boiko on the subject of information professionals as organisational leaders, and this afternoon Dr BJ Foxx on persuasive technology - and some interesting observations on facebook in particular.

Lots of interesting chats with other attendee's including Tony Bryne of CMS Watch, James Robertson, BJ Fogg, Line from Nycomed and many others - learning all the time, which is great !

Currently hearing about Eumetsats radical rebuild of their intranet all based around one big wiki open for all staff to add whatever content they like ..... Its only been going for a few weeks to no great insights on how its working for them yet.

More, and more depth, when I get the chance

Immediate response and a call to action

Too many people weekend blogging ? Well me 'ol mate Pie has a new baby, so he has to fit it in where he can :-) He says I misinterpreted him, he was not painting me as cynical, but actually as being quite optimistic ! Its nice to get conversations going....

Laurence also picked up on my comments in the previous posting about EMC's eRoom. I am a big fan of eRoom, its a great product, which we use in its 'Entperise' version which means it can be linked to its big brother, Documentum Content Server. Hoever the linking is not all that one would wish, and as Laurence states, you can fake both blogs and wiki's in eRoom, buts its not really what you would call 'web 2.0'.......

So he goes on to issue a call to action to EMC to push eRoom development, and give it the full web / enterprise 2.0 makeover. The D6 version of eRoom is actually less of a stand alone product, its based on the Content Server as its underlying repository, or put another way, its now an MS .Net based interface to Content Server. In the first release this complete re-working has actually seen some of the standard feature set disappear (e.g. recycle bin), these features being slated for return in later releases. I have heard some customers who don't run Content Server are a bit worried about the loss of eRoom as a stand alone product, but this could be where the cut down OEM version of Content Server comes in useful. Anyway, Laurence is calling for EMC not to deprecate eRoom in favour of their new connectors to Sharepoint, 'here here' says I !

If eRoom does not continue to develop it will cede the workgroup collaboration (with deep links to an ECMS) to the IBM Lotus Workplace set of tools. So lets see lots or RSS, blogs (simply 'notes' objects in blog style chronological order), wiki (based on the database ?) etc so me and Pie can remain solid eRoom fans :-)

So, its EMC's European Momentum conference in Monaco next week, and some of my colleagues are attending and hopefully when they come back with the latest news on eRoom etc, I will be able to pass it on.

Interesting times

So it all started with a quick session of blog reading last night, and a comment by my friend Laurence over on Word of Pie; he quite rightly, and very gently takes me to task for being a tad cynical in a previous posting. However, although I am very interested in most of the phenomena that currently have a 'two point oh tag' added to them, I truly hate the trend / fashion to make everything a ' 2.0 ' - so in many respects Laurence is absolutley right, the definition of ECM 2.0 is whatever we want it to be, and it can be delivered whenever the vendors and more importantly the customers, decide they are ready for it.

But... (and there is always a 'but' somewhere eh ?) its not quite that simple is it ? Nah, it never is......

So, I am attending CMF2007 in Aarhus next week to present a case study on the work we have undertaken so far on redeveloping our Intranet. Our CIO has always said that he see's the Intranet to be completely wound up with ECM, and I agree, its all simply different facets of 'information management', and as I always say in presentations on ECM, collaboration or whatever, its absolutely not about the 'tech' its about policy and procedures and most of all people, i.e having a policy on what works best presented on a static web page, a wiki, or as an MS Office 'document' in the ECMS.

So, notwithstanding the fact that the whole " Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 " bubble could burst at any moment (follow the link to Steve Rubels take on this), lets examine what is out there, that we can add to our ECMS to make it ECM 2.0 - and I mean stuff available now, not in even the near future.

For a start John McKendrick over at FASTforward asks if 'web 2.0' is the business persons revenge for SOA ? Because SOA projects have become so large and complex, is the emergent goodness of Web 2.0 tools the only way business people can actually get their hands on useful collaborative tools ?

Well, to progress, let me give you three links to postings from Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet on Enterprise 2.0, in order:

• The State of Entperprise 2.0
  

• SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0
  

• Significant workplace inroads for Entperise 2.0
  

The first posting gives a good review of Andrew McAfee's SLATES acronym. Lets see where ECM systems fit in 'SLATES' shall we ?

S = Search; one of the main arguements often given in the business case for ECM is the improvements in findability brought by having your content in a system which can manage metadata and provide metadata and full text indexing search - so 1 for ECM ?

L = Links; the deep linking between information using URI's - well a lot, of not most (or even all) ECMS now use persistent URI / URL to link to all content items - so thats 2 for ECM.

A = Authoring; ensuring all users have access to easy authoring tools - well not necessarily a good score for ECMS' on this one, even with built in MS Office connectors etc, or the ability to write small pieces of content using inline editing tools in the browser, when you add the burden of user created metadata etc then we might be slightly failing on this one - so ECM score now at 2.5 ?

T = Tags; or Metadata in other words. The more users get used to web 2.0 consumer systems, or even tagging their MP3 collections, the easier it is for them to understand the use of metadata in the enterprise. So, ease of use might not be overwhelmingly great, but ECMS have been doing 'tagging' for a long time, so ECM 3.5 for 4 ?

E = Extensions; extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity. Well in my opinion any good ECMS should let you mine user activity data and report on whats going on in the system, even provide hooks for MI reporting or BI tools. So, 4.5 ?

S = Signals; make info consumption efficient by 'push', RSS feeds etc Well some ECMS are better at this than others, but even if they revert to the 'old fashioned' technology of email for their notifications and alerts, again a standard feature of ECMS' is the ability to subscribe to content and be informed if the content is changed updated etc, so final score could be 5.5 out of 6 ?

So what do you think ? Do current generation ECMS at meet the SLATES test of Web 2.0 goodness, within the context of enterprise information management ?

If you want, go to the second of Dion's postings, and do a your own checklist against the longer acronym of FLATNESSES - there is overlap with SLATES, but where the ECMS probably falls over is on F for 'Free form' and E for 'Emergent' and the S for 'Social' but then that all depends on how strident you are at applying Prof. McAfee's criteria. For example Documentum's eRooms is a collaborative system which part of EMC's ECMS (I could not resist that concatenation of our favourite 4 letters), and you can absolutely build social networking and social interactions in an eRoom, even if its not exactly Facebook.

The final of the 3 posting's in examining the take up of tools in the enterprise addresses the cultural element, and this should not be underestimated. The majority of the core 4,500 staff of my employer would probably be characterised as 'knowledge workers' under most definitions of the term, and yet I.T literacy is (IMHO) quite low. So getting alerts and notifications from the ECMS via email may add even more crud to your inbox, but are your staff ready for a mass migration to RSS feeds and feed readers ?

Back to a tenous link between this and my attendance at CMF2007 to talk about our intranet. We have been examining portal software technology, and have seen's demo's from big players like IBM and BEA. Over at the BEA en.terpri.se blog there is a posting on "why enterprise 2.0 matters, its about how people interact" and to me this brings us back round, full circle. It does not matter if your talking about an enterprise portal, an eRoom for a discrete group, the blogs used as 'news' sites by project teams, a wiki used by developers to document their software, in the end it should all be easy for the average end user to get to grips with, and should facilitate content centric collaboration and improved findability, and that call is taken up by Dan keldsen with this posting, where he asks the question 'who puts the C in ECM'.

So, to complete this long posting, and go round full circle, even if my cynism (or British pessimism) is sometimes misplaced, to truly get all of what is discussed above into a truly 'enteprise' wide content management, probably requires the SOA / standards based approach as espoused by Laurence. But even if the technology was perfect, your people might not be, so stop to consider how you get them to use this stuff ! (see comments on this at the Tower Software blog).

Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management

Quite a mouthful eh ? Which is why the British Computer Society special interest group of that name generally sticks to its acronym of KIDMM :-)

Its been a bit remiss of me as a member of the group, to not previously draw attention to the groups 17th October workshop, or more to the point, to its outputs. I missed the day, being in Canada, but follow this link to the groups web site to find audio recordings and a fully written up transcript of the day, there is a lot of stuff here which maybe of great interest to many of you.

Search goes 2.0

Interesting announcement from Vivisimo on their next product version, very 2.0-y, social network and tagging search, I will be interested to see the meat on these bones once the details are released.

New pages added to Pageflakes site

I have added new pages on Knowledge Management and Records Management to my ECM (and related topics) resources site at www.pageflakes.com/ecm

Both the new pages are tad empty compared with the ECM page, so if you know any good KM or RM blogs let me know and I will add them to the Pageflakes aggregator.