I have Twittered about it, as have many others in attendance - but now its time for the "beyond the 140 words-at-a-time" input.
Last week I had the distinct honor of moderating the 2nd Annual Content
Management & Archiving Writers Summit (#ECMWriters), sponsored by EMC Documentum. (I was also the moderator of last year's Summit.)
Over 30 industry analysts, consultants and practitioners assembled in New York City to discuss the current state of:
- Content Management in the Cloud
- Text Analytics
- Web 2.0
- SharePoint
- e-Discovery.
Those in attendance included Ralph Losey, Ron Miller, Bryant Duhon, Dan Woods, Jerome Wendt, Fern Halper, Gabe Acevedo, Virginia Backaitis, Geoffrey Bock, John Webster, Annette Weller-Collison, Theodora Blanchfield, Kemal Carr, Vincent Berdot, Leonid Chernyak, Yuval Dror, Fred Van Der Molen, Philippe Niewbourg, Marta Oldani, Markus Gross, and Daniel Alguacil.
Additionally, the group was rounded out by several EMC strategists and leaders: Mark Lewis, Whitney Tidmarsh, Razmik Abnous, Matt Coblentz, and Marko Sillanpaa. (I apologize for the inevitable omission of others who were there, whose name I fail to recall.)
With such a crowd, you can imagine the activity level. The room never went silent. The day was structured around the 5 topics listed above, each initiated by a formal but short presentation, and followed by open discussion and debate.
There was a subtle difference from last year, with discussion much more focused on business - less on technology, per se. With few exceptions, the discussion focused on real world business applications and case studies. In this regard, the group often concurred that the change in the market has been subtle and more evolutionary of late. Many of the technologies we focused on, from text analytics to SharePoint (soem even argued that the cloud was the latest iteration of time-sharing/ondemand/SaaS), have been available for several years, but the group felt that it was within the last year or so that their application within a business setting was being realized and appreciated beyond IT. We agreed this was a positive sign of market maturity - though there is still a ways to go.
A major exception was Cloud computing, which we agreed is still a technical value proposition, but one whose value can be appealing to the business manager (in terms of greater agility, lower costs, and greener processing)
Razmik Abnous led this part of the discussion, and he continuously brought the conversation back to the business impact Cloud computing could have on ECM. The group concurred that there is an erroneous preponderance of thought in the market that cloud computing is an all-or-nothing situation. Razmik felt it was important to appreciate that in reality ECM can be deployed flexibly in a cloud, supporting many different architectures. The underlying ECM application, for example, could reside in the cloud but the content may not. Ron Miller shared an example of the US Military who is aggressively using cloud computing to enable dynamic creation of collaborative ECM sites around the globe, in an agile AND secure manner. (Miller learned of the program "from the horse's mouth - Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, at the recent MIT CIO Symposium). Perhaps the strongest value statement discussed for ECM in the cloud was its potential as a connector, a means to provide transparent access across repositories and applications.
Connection was a major theme of the day. In fact, Mark Lewis kicked-off the day by stating connection was the single biggest challenge for ECM today. While the issue of content and application silos is not new, Mark proposed that other facets of ECM are fairly stable, and focus for both solution providers and business users needs to turn to connectivity. While the group agreed, the message took on additional meaning (beyond bridging access to content silos), as the day proceeded. As we proceeded through the various topics du jour, the degree to which these technologies need to be connected in order to reach their full potential became apparent. (The most powerful example of this was the role that text analytics can play within e-discovery.)
Fern Halper, who kicked-off the discussion on text analytics had just been at the Text Analytics Summit in Boston a week earlier. Her presentation was peppered with real-world examples, garnered from the summit. Though some in our group started from a perspective that text analytics was still not practical, Fern's anecdotes, as well as those from others in the group, dispelled that sentiment.
Dan Woods provided a review of the success of Web 2.0 and how it is ushering in Enterprise 2.0. It was interesting for me to observe how some in the room (a room of ECM industry analysts and consultants), were still somewhat unclear on the role and value of Enterprise 2.0, separate and distinct from Web 2.0. Dan's main message, which many, including myself concurred with is that although Web 2.0 has been somewhat successful in accelerating adoption of Enterprise 2.0, there is often a tendency for enterprise adopters to adopt not only the underlying technologies, but also metaphors, models, techniques and strategies. This often leads to failure. The subtle differences between communities, goals and objectives inside the firewall require a targeted fresh look at how technologies such as wikis, blogs and mashups should most effectively be used, and what it takes to foster user adoption.
There was much agreement among the participants concerning the state of SharePoint. Bryant Duhon shared with the group a wealth of data regarding current SharePoint market trends. Most users leverage SharePoint as a front-end to a larger ECM deployments. Nonetheless, given the extent of penetration across organizations, SharePoint is viewed as a near ubiquitous component of ECM platforms within organizations. While we agreed that SharePoint still lacked much functionality that keeps it from being an all encompassing ECM system, we also agreed that Microsoft is likely to continue adding functionality, both through acquisition and development. There was much speculation regarding how far it might go, and how quickly. Some felt current utilization of FAST search indicated a poor understanding of search within Microsoft. Others felt that Microsoft's roots and strengths are in consumer-oriented, small scale applications, and as such, SharePoint would remain a "good enough for the masses", "not good enough for the enterprise" player in the market. (This attitude of "good enough" is supported by the findings of a study I did on SharePoint on behalf of Oracle earlier this year.) It was interesting to watch the body language and listen to the comments from the EMC Documentum folk in the room. There were moments of defensiveness and squirming, but there were also moments of confidence and a clear strategy for how to complement SharePoint, and leverage the fact that it is raising the business community's awareness of ECM - albeit at a elementary level. Perhaps it was Ralph Losey (an attorney and our e-Discovery discussion leader) who exhibited the greatest frustration with SharePoint providing a "good enough" approach to ECM.
Though SharePoint is not fully to blame, Losey felt that far too many organizations under estimate what good content management is really all about, and that lack of adequate management leads to impractical, and perhaps unnecessary challenges for e-discovery. Ralph quipped that when it comes to ECM - most organizations have the "E" and "C" (there are Enterprises and they certainly know how to create Content), but there is little "M" (too few have solid management practices.) Losey challenged records management proponents in the room, stating that a good records practice is simply no longer enough. In the electronic world - everything is potentially discoverable - record or not, and thus good management must apply to all content. Ralph boldly proposed that the rising costs associated with e-Discovery are killing the American judicial system, but that this can change if technology (and practices) were properly leveraged. Here, he challenged not the business users, however, but the technology providers. In his opinion, solution providers do a terrible job in educating legal and management executives on the benefits of ECM, and as a result technology goes much under utilized.
The discussion that ensued on e-Discovery was a great culmination of the day. E-discovery most obviously related to all the other topics of the day. E-discovery is most certainly more about business than IT. Tools such as SharePoint and Web/Enterprise 2.0 are accelerating user command and speed of content creation, but offer little to nothing in the way of management. The virtualization of ECM in the cloud is also an issue that needs careful scrutiny from a discovery standpoint before adoption. The power of text analytics within a e-Discovery system was recognized by everyone, but again some felt that there was more promise than results. Most concurred that the big ECM solution providers do a poor job of incorporating text analytics techniques into their systems.
Someone (I forget who) shared how the field of ECM has become more exciting. Following discussion on text analytics in particular, it was observed "Library services and document management is boring, but this, this is sexy." Yeah baby.
On a final note, it is highly likely that next year's ECM Writers Summit will focus much more on Documentum's upcoming CentreStage. Both EMC and non-EMC participants several times alluded to CentreStage as a product that will have a significant impact on redefining state-of-the-industry, and will likely incorporate much of the technologies discussed throughout the day. So stay tuned - we'll see.
