TakingAIIM

Pulling a Double-edged Sword Out of Enterprise 2.0

Next Monday, 3/24/08, we release the AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0. The analysis and content development is complete, awaiting the final proofing and layout.  The report is full of unprecedented insights and market statistics regarding Enterprise 2.0, with over 70 charts and 60 pages of commentary. 

There are a handful of findings in the report that I found especially insightful.  Many of these come in the form of conflicting perspectives.  I want to share a just a few of them here, as a preview to the report.

Blind Criticality?

Conflict 1

Most of the organizations we surveyed strongly position Enterprise 2.0 as a technology and practice that is critical to their business goals and objectives.  Yet although Enterprise 2.0 is generally considered strategically important, most organizations (74%) claim to have, at best, only a vague familiarity with it. (41% stated there was no clear understanding.)

Conflict 2

Most survey respondents claimed to have high awareness concerning individual Enterprise 2.0 technologies.   Yet, as I mentioned in an earlier post, there was no clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 among survey respondents. 

Therein may lie the answer to the puzzle posed in conflict 1.
 
Perhaps knowledge of and experience with Enterprise 2.0 technologies (i.e. via simple, ad hoc usage due to their low barrier and transparent nature), is enough to give insight into how fundamental this level of integration and collaboration is to business challenges. Few companies, however, have taken the time or effort to rationalize Enterprise 2.0 holistically and strategically. Thus, there is an appreciation for how it will (tactically) be critical to success, but little understanding of how it fits (strategically) across an organization.

The ease with which Enterprise 2.0 technologies can be deployed is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is a major strength, a component of its value proposition. While collaboration in and of itself is not new, the ability to create online collaborative platforms with little to no effort or technical know-how is driving adoption and familiarity with the technology. On the other hand, this agility and speed of deployment allows many to embark on implementations without fully understanding the more strategic nature of these technologies.  Indeed, most organizations that attempted to justify an investment in Enterprise 2.0 could not do so.

This issue and many others are discussed in greater detail in the upcoming report,  available for download off of the Market Intelligence home page on Monday, 3/24/08, and we will be holding a webinar on the findings on 3/27/08 (register now).

To that end I must thank organizations such as CoreMedia, Day Software, EMC, Open Text, Socialtext,and SpringCM, who have underwritten this market research on Enterprise 2.0.  They too share our excitement and vision for Enterprise 2.0.  Because of their generosity and support we can make this research available to the market at no cost, to help educate and grow that market.

aiimALERT:Teragram Acquired in SASsy Move

SAS announced the acquisition of  Teragram, a  natural language processing (NLP), taxonomy generation and linguistic analysis technology provider. The acquisition will enhance SAS’ text mining and analytical BI offerings, and extend them to enterprise and mobile search. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. (See announcement.)

Typically business intelligence is associated with structured data, data warehousing and statistical models.  Those in the ECM industry who have followed the search and retrieval market know, however,  that search and taxonomy software from vendors such as Teragram, as well as Autonomy, InXight, Vivisimo, Stratify, Clear Forest, Factiva, IBM, Xerox, Mondeca,  FAST, Mondosoft, has been capable of similar intelligence and analysis of unstructured content for several years .

Despite that, all too often, enterprise search initiatives focus exclusively on search and retrieval.  While a most important and fundamental component to any ECM strategy, enterprises can extract a much higher level of value and insight if they appeciate and leverage these search and text management tools beyond search.   

This acquisition by SAS marks a new level of market recognition of the power of natural language processing.  SAS is a notable player in the BI space.  Their recognition that the level of insights possible from properly managing structured content must also be extended to unstructured content is a wake-up call to everyone.  Unstructured content grows exponentially on a daily basis, including resources such as web pages, word processing files, presentations, e-mail, to name a few. Text analytics, mining and management technology, that leverages NLP can mine the intelligence that is contained in these resources, individually, and more powerfully collectively.  The latter ability is a form of emergent technology, a function that is fundamental to Enterprise 2.0, the focus of our upcoming Market IQ (register for webinar now.) In deed, search is identified as a key enabling technology for Enterprise 2.0 in the Market IQ, and in our Enterprise 2.0 training program.

For this reason, and others, the subject of text management, search and analytics will be covered in great detail in the AIIM Q2 Market IQ on Findability.  This report will expound on the fact that there is much more to search and taxonomy than locating content, typically the focus of enterprise search.  Search and retrieval are just the tip of the iceberg.  Findability leverages the full power of NLP. The technologies that enable intelligent responses to user generated queries can also be the basis of emergent wisdom from content collections, sentiment detection, trends analysis and predictive analysis.  These applications quickly extend NLP from the enterprise search market squarely into BI, risk management and knowledge management.

aiimALERT: Open Source Players Join to Close Functional Gap

Yesterday Intalio, Inc. an Open Source BPMS company, announced a partnership with Alfresco Software, an Open Source  Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company. The integrated offering allows users to manage  document-centric workflow processes and support the collaborative development of business processes. (See details.)

Despite its age the ECM market is ripe with new beginnings.  As readers of the blog know, I am wrapping up the Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 (register for 3/27 webinar).  Major themes of this topic include collaboration, low-barrier application development and open business models.  Part of the report looks at the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and ECM.   Although with a slightly different perspective, this announcement by Inatlio and Alfresco does the same thing.

Alfreso provides an Open Source approach to ECM.  With the integration of Intalio, an Open Source workflow offering the ECM platform is far more complete.   But, even more fascinating to me is the fact that the integration effort was undertaken by  the Demand Driven Development (D3) model introduced by Intalio in 2006, an Enterprise 2.0 approach to development in and of itself.

There is great synergy in this simple announcement on many plateaus.  Open Source and SaaS represent new models to implementing ECM in an enterprise.  Enterprise 2.0 offers new ways to support and facilitate collaboration in an enterprise, as part of an ECM strategy.  And here the twain doth meet.  These are all industry trends that AIIM must, and will continue to monitor. 

The ECM market is anything but dull.

PDF/A - Final Resting Ground for ECM?

Nearly twenty years ago I gave my first ECM seminar.  Cutting edge topics included imaging and optical storage.  Much has changed since then.  Imaging, then a standalone, typically proprietary siloed technology has evolved into a function or feature of an ECM.  Optical storage is no longer viewed as "different and confusing", and has evolved into a mainstream component of a hierarchical storage management strategy (HSM).  Some things haven't changed however.  One of the more frequent questions back then, is still often asked - "If I migrate business content to electronic format, how to I guarantee that the content will still be accessible and readable 20 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now."

The question often caused me, and other presenters to go into the consultant song and dance routine.  There was no one sure fire way to do it.    The industry has made a major step forward in addressing that concern.  The AIIM standards group has developed a electronic archiving file format standard known as PDF/Archival, or PDF/A.   

PDF/A, is the first PDF standard developed in a collaborative manner by AIIM and NPES (The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing, and Converting Technologies). It was developed to define a file format based on top of the Adobe PDF standard, that provides a mechanism for representing electronic documents in a manner that preserves their visual appearance over time, independent of the tools and systems used for creating, storing, or tending the files.  In other words, PDF/A provides a file format for long-term preservation of electronic documents.

In order to raise  market's awareness of the standard, AIIM has developed a new training course on PDF/A.

Beginning in April, this two day training focused on PDF/A (ISO 19005-1) and its use as a file format for archiving and preserving electronic data will be available as either web-based, public or private class offerings. This course will enable the person attending to speak more knowledgeably about PDF/A as well as know how and when to apply the use of PDF/A.

AIIM is responsible for the majority of the PDF family of standards which includes PDF, PDF/E, PDF/UA, PDF Healthcare and PDF/A.

Those who are interested in the training should contact Betsy Fanning (bfanning@aiim.org or 301-755-2682).

ECM Fundamentally Still a Challenge

                   

I was recently commissioned by EMC  to conduct a market survey assessing the state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM)  industry. 

The survey polled more than 200 IT business professionals.  It provided many insights into the current realities of ECM deployments - some expected - some surprising.   

Despite the tenure of ECM technologies, organizations continue to struggle with management of unstructured business content. The issue is a very real one.  Virtually all of the respondents (99%), stated that unstructured content is fundamental to all of their core business processes.  Most respondents identified major challenges if unstructured information was not readily available as part of those processes.

The inability to effectively manage content was linked to problematic issues such as inconsistent communications between functions, duplication of effort, poor decision-making, higher costs, and non-compliance with internal best practices.

Respondents also agreed that ECM deployment still require more effort than desired.  The biggest challenge to deployment was sited as integration. Nearly half of respondents (47%) reported that content management offerings require too much effort to implement, with integration of disparate technology components (37%) and integration with legacy systems (34%) accounting for the biggest delays in developing business solutions on top of ECM platforms. Because of these integration challenges, half of respondents indicated that they wanted solutions built on top of an ECM platform.

Publication of the full findings is forthcoming.  In the interim, I discussed the survey findings with Steve Robins of EMC.   Listen to a podcast of the discussion.             

Enterprise 2.0 - Thanks for Noticing

Readers of this blog know that this week we spent a fair amount of time at the AIIM show.  You also realize that AIIM Market Intelligence has been spending much effort lately on the subject of Enterprise 2.0 (blogging, a recent webinar, training program, market survey, upcoming Market IQ, and associated Market IQ webinar.) At the show I delivered a one hour presentation on the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and ECM (download slides used).  Dan Keldsen and I also rolled out the just completed Enterprise 2.0 practitioner training. 

Things went real well.  But don't take my word for it.  An attendee, Ron Miller, recently posted a commentary on the AIIM show.  To paraphrase Ron, ECM is relevant (again), and one reason is the focus on Enterprise 2.0 this year.  I agree Ron.  Thanks for noticing. 

As I stated in my inaugural post, I joined AIIM in order to broaden the direction of ECM, quote: "Please join me in TakingAIIM, in placing different technologies, applications, solution providers and industry trends into the cross hairs of TakingAIIM."

It is most rewarding to see that individuals, such as Ron also share this exciting new horizon for ECM.  To that end I must thank organizations such as SpringCM, Socialtext and EMC who have underwritten our market research on Enterprise 2.0.  They too share our excitement and vision for Enterprise 2.0.  Because of their generosity we can make this research available to the market at no cost.

The upcoming report, available for download on the AIIM site on March 24th, promises to be a groundbreaking educational resource to the market.  It contains the results of months of research, including the results of an 80+ question survey, completed by 414 users and evaluators of Enterprise 2.0.  I encourage those who are excited by the recent coverage of ECM and Enterprise 2.0 to be sure and join us for the March 27th webinar in which we discuss the survey findings.

But this is just the beginning.  Is ECM still relevant?  Well as long as there are enterprises and they have content, ECM is relevant, and AIIM Market Intelligence will chronicle the latest points of relevancy.  Over the course of the next year, in addition to the Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, we will be developing other Market IQs on topics such as ECM and managing business processes, the criticality of findability, the state of the art in content creation and content distribution and ECM and innovation management.

If there are other compelling business areas that you think are impacted by ECM, let me know, by commenting here.

The ECM Market - Its Not Easy Being Green - or is it?

At last night's annual AIIM awards dinner, Bob Zagami, Vice Chair AIIM, quipped how the ECM industry is green – "just compare it to the OnDemand (Printing) show next door."  Funny as the comment was (you had to witness the consumption of paper at the OnDemand show to appreciate the humor in this statement), Bob was right.  ECM does indeed have a green aspect to it.   

In fact, I am not sure if Bob realized how timely his remark was.  Its been a long time coming.  For the 20 years that I have been attending the AIIM show,  we have been touting the advantages of online content.   Perhaps not always with a focus on the ecology side of green, but the financial side.  The market has not responded to either "green light" (cost savings/new business models or reduction in paper consumption) with the speed one would have liked,  but there is evidence that we are finally reaching a critical mass, not just in business but in the general population.

In a recent article in the New York Times,  it was reported that, for the first time, paper consumption in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Canada and Finland actually went down, between 2000 and 2005.  (Less developed countries such as China, India, Russia and Mexico continue to increase their paper consumption.) For years, despite the prevalence of computers and electronic content, we watched paper consumption rise globally, as the more content we created (online) the more we printed (on paper).  Apparently, in the world's more developed countries, that tide is turning and people are "Doing the AIIM thing", and not only creating electronically, but using, managing, sharing and accessing online.  The article points to several business and personal life scenarios in which paper is playing a lesser role in developed countries. 

At around the same time, NPR ran a story (listen to it)  entitled Digitizing Libraries.  This audio article focused on a recent move by several libraries and educational institutions to digitize their collections, for a variety of reasons. While this article also provided evidence for the movement by society as a whole to embrace online content, it also pointed out some of the challenges we face.

Apparently, Harvard teamed with Google to digitize its collections.  The Boston Public Library declined to work with Google however.  Why? Google wanted to place controls on access to the collection. (Ben Franklin would roll over in his grave).  In this regard, Google acted similarly to Amazon with its Kindle e-book appliance (see earlier post). So the library had to go a different route.   

Migration to online content at home and in the office is, and will continue to be fraught with challenges and challengers.  But, nonetheless the migration has started, in earnest.  Whether the migration is motivated by a desire to be green, or make green (cutting costs, new business models, better means to share and collaborate), is somewhat irrelevant.  Either way, the end is the same.  Digital content (and vicarioulsy the ECM industry) is no longer seen as fringe, and it should not be long before it is the norm, not the exception.