TakingAIIM

ECM - We've Come So Far, But Some are Still Stuck at the Gate

Wow – it has been a while since my last blog post (at least on this blog). Being not just a consultant/analyst but practitioner of ECM and KM sure is a full time job. It leaves little time to pontificate on market conditions.

But a few weeks ago, something occurred in my personal life that thrust me into the world of ECM, and I was so surprised by what I witnessed, that I felt compelled to blog about it.

In this case, I was not a consultant or practitioner, but end-user of ECM, (or lack there of.) You see, I refinanced my home.  

As many of you know, over the  last 2 decades I have worked with scores of organizations, designing and implementing integrated ECM systems (search, content management, workflow, etc.)  to change the way business is done.  Yet, last week I felt like it was 1965.

As I said, I refinanced my home. The process started well enough. Applications were completed online. My credit score and initial approval were conducted online and completed in under 30 minutes. (I was a happy consumer, and proud ECMer. But, what came next was shocking.

Almost 2 months later the paper work was “ready”, and I do mean paper work.  The closing session was conducted face-to-face, facing well over 30 paper documents.  There were at least three instances that I recall  in which one document superceded or negated the need for the other. Signatures were required redundantly multiple times. (Clearly somer eenginnering could be used.)

But what was really surprising was the fact that I had to seek out a notary, in the middle of this process, limiting when and where this session could take place. My signature  had to be wet signature, in each instance, in the presence of a notary, who had to affirm I was who I said I was – not just once but on well over half of the documents. I could not help think about the strides that the US Government, for example, has made in using e-signatures and forms, and forms of e-security to migrate processes to streamlined online systems. (How many have filed your taxes online, for example?)

To take part in this closing process was just a bit surprising. To my  brethren in the ECM consulting world, just think about it. Apparently the world is still ripe with opportunity. It brings to mind an earlier post, I wrote nearly 3 years ago. In it I concluded "... despite its age, ECM is an issue that is still growing - perhaps an eternal issue. Old issues linger, while new issues arise.  The talents and competencies  required of an ECMer grow.  But one thing is for sure there is great job security for those that do it well."  When I wrote that, I am not sure I was aware of just how poignant that message was. It still rings true, loud and clear. (You may want to read the earlier post for some great statistics on paper consumption and electronic filing.)

IAM Alert: ECM Blooms Amidst New England Ice Storm

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

Last Thursday, amidst freezing temperatures and a New England ice storm, OpenText held its annual analyst briefing in Boston – and ECM was “In Bloom” – I’ll explain.

The session began with the expected, chest pounding regarding OpenText’s financial strength and impressive string of acquisitions.

Tom Jenkins, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Chairman, gave an overview of the ECM industry, overlaying on it the history and accomplishments of OpenText. He wrapped up his presentation on the point that mobile access was here and now, and ECM needs to be available on the Smart Phone.  OK- preaching to the choir – and more importantly I felt, he missed the issue.  It is not that ECM is available on the Smart Phone, but that ECM tailors and leverages content specifically for the mobile device user.  There is a misnomer here – it isn’t the phone that is smart – it is the content.

And this is where the remainder of the day was spent, focusing on smart content – under the label of Bloom. OpenText uses Bloom to describe its 2.0 initiative.

Under Bloom, ECM is positioned as a resource that needs to be viewed enterprise wide, within a single (albeit perhaps virtual) platform, fully integrated with office and ERP environments, balanced between compliance and access and enabled through content centric processes.  WOW – that is a mouthful, but it fell on my most receptive ears.

Under Bloom OpenText positions ECM initiatives as “journeys” – on-ramps if you will, or initial projects undertaken that centrally involve ECM. These journeys are:

1. Establishment of a centralized (potentially) virtual enterprise library (typically associated with explicit knowledge capture and or e-discovery)
2. Enhancing the desktop user experience (e.g. portals, Office integration, enhanced findability)
3. Expanding the ERP and CRM ecosystem (Using a taxonomy and metatags to bridge the world of transactional structured content and related unstructured content)
4. To establish social collaboration (leveraging Web 2.0 in the Enterprise – See Market IQ for more detail)

Under Bloom, OpenText works with the client on a journey – to broaden their horizons and embark on related pathways with the ultimate goal of establishing a Social Workplace and a Social Marketplace.

What was a bit confusing is that Bloom is NOT a product or a methodology.  In fact Bloom does not stand for anything.  It is not an acronym. It is strictly a vision.  While I am not sure I like or get the idea of labeling a vision with no more structure around it – giving it a name that means little (and yes I get the obvious – "Bloom to your full potential") – I nonetheless was drawn to the concept.

With Bloom, OpenText is introducing a line of service, but again that service is not called Bloom (?). OpenText provides Content Architects equipped with methodology and a maturity model that can help identify an organization’s  current ECM journey and develop it further with a strategy for evolving the ECM investment to a full fledged Social Workplace and a Social Marketplace.  Where I think there is a gap in this is the lack of focus on readiness assessment and cultural implications and forces.  Additionally, they are (rightfully so) focused on OpenText customers.  I am not sure if a FileNet or Documentum "journeyman", would be told if their strategy required a migration to OpenText. That said, I applaud Opentext for developing this vision, putting advisory resources behind it and having a suite of functionality to substantially support it.

Overall I am enamored by the concept, but clearly I was an easy target in the aduience. This is the vision of ECM I have been touting for years, the advent of a Content Resources Department (CR) – my phrase not theirs - a centralized enterprise resource much like the Human Resources Department.

What HR does for the single greatest corporate asset, personnel, CR does for the second greatest corporate asset, content.  The CR department does not own the content or interact with it on a daily basis, but provides the means to

• on-ramp or capture it,
• manage it from an administrative perspective,
• increase its value (place it on a growth strategy and put deliver it at the right place at the right time),
• and off-ramp

Through a centralized model, it ensures consistency,  leverages best practices and provides cost and process efficiency all while maintaining compliance.

CR is not about technology. It is an enterprise centralized resource, a core competency and a strategy for maximizing the value derived from content individually and collectively (from tacit to explicit), while minimizing associated risk.  Of course in the end, that strategy needs to be supported with an infrastructure, and here OpenText did demonstrate technical competency as well.  I witnessed OpenText-powered applications that made the smart phone "smarter" through the intelligent integration of smart content.

I’ll end this post by sharing a somewhat comical yet poignant view of this perspective on ECM.  This video was shared with me by an OpenText employee in response to my explanation of a "Content Resources Department."

Information Architected for Smart Distribution - Survey Says NOT YET

Those of you who know a bit about my background may know about the ECM epiphany I had when doing research on the history of the motion picture industry. When I learned that critics predicted a short-lived market fascination with motion pictures because they were no substitute for live theater, I realized the value of imaging lied not in its being a replacement for paper, but in its being a whole new form of content distribution that complemented paper.  (This is a much abbreviated version of the story - in its long version it is really quite fascinating and eye-opening, in my opinion of course. Ask me about it sometime).

Anyway, interestingly enough, as I was contemplating my blog post on the the findings from the latest Market IQ  on Content On-ramps and Off-Ramps, (see previous blog on On-ramps/capture), Hollywood provided me with another ECM  metaphor, though this time not an epiphany.

According to the article, Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks,  was recently in Boston "showing off" scenes from his company's upcoming movies.  Why "showing off"?  These were 3-D movies.  This was  not your father's 3-D which required you to wear those silly glasses so that occassionally some image would project from the screen.  According to the article, "...soldiers come running up from behind you. When they pass, they kick up dust that flies off the screen  ...". Katzenberg believes that 3-D will be the third greatest technology leap in motion pictures, behind the advent of sound and color.  Katzenber's commentary, a short history of how technology has continued to add value to motion pictures, making them more entertaining and engaging, is really worth a read, for those that are fascinated by the motion picture sciences. And for you ECMers - maybe not worth a read, but consider the metaphor, the example Hollywood sets. Motion pictures started most humbly with the capture of analog data (live theater) in a medium that allowed for it to be captured and played back "asynchronously".  The motion picture industry has continued to refine the medium, exploit its unique capabilities to provide value that will never rival live entertainment in one sense, but surpass it in others.

The potential is there for the ECM industry to make similar impacts. To grow and provide value from e-documents that we could never imagine in paper documents, not as a replacement to paper, but a complement. The aforementioned advent of workflow was a step in this direction. But, based on observations from the Market IQ  survey data regarding content delivery, the ECM industry has stagnated. Technology has progressed, but the "directors", we business users of online content are moving forward at a very slow rate, using little imagination.

In my last post I provided evidence that from a capture standpoint we are moving forward. There is momentum building in viewing "content" not just as words and pictures, but also sound, video, and albeit much further in the future, smell, touch and taste. But what "special effects" are we adding to the content upon publishing?  Technology from vendors such as Mark Logic and Thunderhead, who partially underwrote the research, enables organizations to virtually customize content each time it is used, evaluating the current reason for access and the person accessing it.  Leveraging content "chunking" approaches such as XML, and a series of rules and processes, content can "self-assemble" to provide the highest level of personalization and effectiveness.  

Nearly 2 decades ago I was consulting with a New York City commodities brokerage.  We developed just such a system.  Perhaps not as dramatic as some, but effective and cost saving nonetheless.  This system was triggered by the data entry of a "sale".  Based on the data entered (a transaction to buy a commodity at a particular point in time) a contract would be auto-generated.  Not a generic contract, but a highly personalized contract, built from a variety of "chunks" of content, prices, policies, etc.

That was nearly 20 years ago. Technology has progressed tremendously since then.  So imagine what you could do now?  But, I am sad to report most of you aren't. Market adoption and exploitation of content delivery functionality is pitiful.

According to the survey data, nearly half, 45% are minimally or not using such techniques. Only 13% felt they were using such techniques extensively.

Q: To What Extent is Content Re-purposed.Recombined to Create New Forms (Customized or Personalized) Forms of Output?

  

Source:  AIIM Market IQ on The On-Ramps and Off-ramps of ECM

Even more saddening is the fact that according to the survey, among those that are using such techniques, the great majority reported using simple mail-merge (you know the form letters no longer say "Dear Occupant" - but have your name so cleverly inserted instead.) YAWN.

Self authoring contracts, highly customized manuals and brochures, targeted patient records, customer profiles, web pages dynamically generated to actually deliberately communicate one-on-one with each individual ... the list goes on, the list of potential publishing alternatives that are sadly NOT being used by most. Only 3% of the organizations polled are using any form of 3-D modeling.

For more detail see the Market IQ.  More importantly - DO SOMETHING.  If you have an interesting content publishing/distribution application - share it here, post a comment as inspiration.  Those of you who do not, experiment - have a little fun with ECM. Put some "special effects" in your content. It can be rewarding in more ways than one.

Digital Content - Just a Whiff of Change in the Air

This week, AIIM  released the most recent Market IQ I have authored, this one on the On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM - or put more directly:  Capturing electronic content and publishing/distributing electronic content.

As readers of this blog know, these are subjects at the core of my passion for ECM.  Capture is foundational to the value of ECM. The scope and domain of any ECM system is defined by its input.  If garbage is put into the system, only garbage will come out (GIGO).  More importantly, if only "imaged contracts" for example, are put into teh ECM system, only images of contracts will come out.  So, in the report I sought to establish a benchmark of the types of content that organizations are capturing in their ECM systems.

Similarly, if publishing models are strictly WYSIWYG, the the dynamics and communication effectiveness of the ECM system is limited to the exact look and feel of what is capture. There is no value add in the delivery process. To ignore either one of these "ends" (capture the front-end and publishing the back-end) of ECM, or simply allow business as usual to occur is not only negligent but quite frankly in my opinion BORING. 

The scope of online content was significantly expanded with the advent of imaging and word processing. Once the exclusive domain of data (i.e., structured fields of numbers and characters), word processing and imaging systems introduced unstructured files containing free-flowing text, graphics and pictures.  This was the impetus for electronic document management systems, which evolved into today’s more advanced ECM systems. Once the foundation to storing unstructured content in digital form was introduced, the doors were open to the challenge and realization of capturing virtually any form of information.

On the Internet today, we witness a plethora of rich content types: animated graphics, audio and video. As I have mentioned before, statistics from YouTube show that as of late 2008, 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute.  But, while content capture has advanced significantly on the Internet, survey responses indicate a very different story inside the firewall – albeit one with some surprises and signs of progress.

According to survey data, paper is still universally used across all  organizations - OK no surprises there. PDF is also a popular way to capture content, used in 90% of the organizations polled - YAWN.
Though a relatively new file format, PDF can be thought of as an “image file,” and therefore does not represent a radical departure from scanning/imaging technology. Legacy formats persist -- microfilm/fiche is still used in 43% of the organizations polled.

With all of that said, there is indication of change, albeit nascent. Survey respondents indicated that digital video and audio are used by 34% and 30%, respectively.

but, more surprising and telling is the fact that 1% of the organizations surveyed indicated that digital smell (i.e. olfactory content) and digital touch technology, both technologies I have blogged about before, are used within their organization. From a purely statistical perspective, a 1% response is not significant.  Who cares - right? Well, for one - I do.  Maybe statistically this is no big deal, but the fact that any organizations are using these forms of digital content, forms that are on the bleeding edge of content capture, shows that the business world is morphing -- slowly, perhaps -- but morphing nonetheless.

Source:  AIIM Market IQ on the On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM

Indeed, when asked what content formats they believed their organizations will be using in the next five years, there was evidence of planned migration to more rich media types. Survey respondents foresee enterprises in the next five years still predominately using more traditional forms of content (including film and fiche) but building momentum for and adoption of newer forms of content. Multimedia formats, such as photos, audio and video, are expected to make modest gains, as well as the next-generation digital smell and touch formats. (See the AIIM Market IQ for that detail.)

Personally, I am very encouraged by these statistics.  Expansion beyond image and text files is the future of ECM, and represents great new potential. 

I know there are naysayers out there. Those who will say this is just a dream.  That it is irrelevant.  A 1% response rate is insignificant.  Who cares? These new media types will never take hold in a business setting.  Well, I have been around ECM long enough to know that these old fogies (hey I may be old but I am no fogy), just don't get it, and may be surprised by the adoption of rich media within organizations. 

Yeah, I have been around awhile.  I can recall the early days of Imaging technology.  Scanners being demoed to audiences that ooohed and ahhhed, circa the1980s. "Wow a copy machine that makes the copy appear on the desktop.  Cool - how do you do that?".  But I also remember these comments: "Yeah that is cool, but what are we really going to do with that?  Are they legal copies?  What if the system crashes you lose your documents."  Some of you may recall a popular argument  used back then as to why organizations should NOT migrate to images: Digital representation of original documents is risky, too dependent on technology.  We were often reminded that even if there were a total power failure, film and fiche could still be read using a candle and a magnifying glass.  But what of images? 

Well that argument may still be true, but the value derived from images outweighed the risk, and the  rest as they say is history.

So what of audio, video and those crazies on the fringe that are experimenting with digital scent,  touch and "lickable inks"?  Oh, there may be just a whiff of change in the air, but change is coming. And, I for one am excited.

And what of distributing - well, I will save the survey findings on that topic for another post.

ECM at the Crossroads of History

Today the USA will make history.  We will either elect the first African American president, female vice-president, or independent candidate.  I am very excited, and have already cast my vote.  As I went into the voting booth, I could not help but take pride in my profession.  Why you ask?  What does ECM have to do with this  historic election?  Well, at least in my precinct of Massachusetts, very much.  We vote on a paper form which we then feed into an electronic intelligent forms processing system.  That's right, my vote is processed using document capture technology.  (No hanging chits for us.) While I took some pride in this, I also got a bit nervous.  We all know that intelligent forms processing can make errors.  Just who set up this system, and what type of quality control is in place? My mind immediately began racing with ideas of a  technology audit and process re-engineering project.  Yeah, thats the ECMer in me.

Anyway - DON'T FORGET TO VOTE TODAY.

The Beginning of the End

The Christian Science Monitor announced today that in 2009, they will become the first nationally circulated newspaper that will replace its daily  edition with  a web-based publication - EXCLUSIVELY. 

In an earlier post, I commented a New York Times report that indicated 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.) In the same post I commented on how many major university libraries were digitizing their collections.

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).  But a trend is clearly emerging.  We are not just eliminating paper for the sake of creating a paperless world (as nobly green as that.)  We are also embracing e-content for  business reasons as well.  Monitor management  plans on updating the news continuously throughout the day, better address a  web-based readership that continues to grow (1.5 million visits/month) while paper-based subscribers diminish and - lowering publication costs - ah the bottom line.

According to Mr. Wells, The Monitors Managing Publisher, "Changes in the industry - changes in the concept of news and the economics underlying the industry - hit the Monitor first," given its relatively small size and the complex logistics required for national distribution, Mr. Wells said. "We are sometimes forced to be an early change agent."

Yes a trend is clearly emerging that clearly places greater and greater emphasis on ECM.  Between changing user expectations and comfort levels for online content (recall the impact of internet-based search on user expectations for enterprise search, as reported in our Market IQ), availability of universal e-content readers such as Kindle, and pressures for lowering costs and  greener processes, ECM  is poised for critical positioning and growth.   

IAM ALERT: BancTec Captures the Moment

BancTec, provider of  document capture and payment
processing services recently introduced CenterVision, its next generation platform for capturing and managing in-bound information, delivered as either an in-house implementation or as an outsourced service. (See press release for details.)

What I find most interesting about this announcement is its foreshadowing of the future (the future is here) of capture technology and vendors.  As I have posted before, the 2008 Q4 Market IQ will focus on the on-ramps and off-ramps of ECM.  What BancTec provides is obviously an on-ramp. To a certain degree the IQ will cover scanning technology and imaging, we have to.  While scanning and imaging technology may be passé, the volume of paper that remains in most businesses makes the issue and technology nonetheless relevant. That said vendors such as BancTec need not slowly fade into history, as the scanning technology becomes commodity.

There are two interesting points to this product announcement.  First, BancTec offers CenterVision  in a SaaS model. This is an interesting value proposition.  Customers do not necessarily have to incur the overhead, training etc.involved with content capture.  As capture technology becomes commodity, value add can be provided by offering it as a service, thus fitting it into a corporation outsourcing strategy, one that drives down costs and complexity, and allows the corporation to focus on its core competencies, rather than peripheral tasks such as content capture.

Second, the BancTec technology is content type agnostic. Incoming content will continue to be the impetus to business process/transactions, whether as paper to be scanned, e-mails to be processed and managed, or web-based content to be identified and processed.  Capture technology and vendors remain relevant when they migrate the fundamental capture process expertise to new/all forms of incoming content. in this case the functionality is positioned as a single point of capture.

Indeed, one of the most compelling capabilities of CenterVision is the added functionality of not only handling capture of all types of content, but in modularizing the capability as a component to process workflow.  CenterVision includes an executive dashboard and processing engine that enables managers to compile information on not only the number of documents they are processing, but also how efficiently the operation is running. The management dashboard allows organizations to quickly identify operational
issues and to acquire information helpful in improving the efficiency of the workflow.

And this brings me to the need to mention that the next, (Q3 2008) AIIM Market Intelligence report is on BPM and workflow.  My colleague, Dan Keldsen has posted on his blog, more detail on this IQ, and is soliciting your input on vendors, products, issues and functionality that should be included in our research.  So please, if you are at all interested in the topic, and want to have some control on the direction of our research, go to his blog and weigh in on topics/direction and/or products/vendors.

OK, back to the alert and Banctec - CenterVision represents the future of the capture market, going way beyond scanning, into content agnostic capture with integrated single point of capture process and intelligence, delivered as a service.  This is the future of content capture.

Q4 Market IQ - Somewhere Over the Rainbow?

Yesterday Dan Keldsen and I held a webinar in which we introduced the findings of our research for the upcoming Market IQ on Findability.  (Slides available).  As always, I promised to answer all outstanding questions (and we did have some OUTSTANDING questions - great audience) in this blog.  I will keep that promise, but not today.

This morning an article caught my eye and brought to mind our Market IQ planned for Q4 2008.  So I wanted to take the opportunity to get discussion going on this topic.  First - the article. Headline read - "Judy Garland In Concert - Coming to Boston" .  Huh?  I know I haven't had my coffee yet - but did't she die quite a few years ago?

Apparently the Boston Pop's have assembled hours of film footage of her performances, and will be projecting these on stages across America, while simultaneously accompanying Ms. Garland live.  Ah - so the Pops are live, Ms. Garland still rests in peace.  OK - but what does this have to do with the Q4 Market IQ. Quite a bit actually.

Q4 AIIM Market Intelligence will cover what we are calling the on-ramps and  off-ramps of ECM.  In the report we will explore the state-of-the-industry and the cutting edge concerning content creation/capture and content delivery.  So while we will explore the state of authoring tools, scanning technology, XML-based publishing, e-publishing and the like, we will also explore the cutting edge.  Migration of content to the digital world has given rise to new ways to capture, create, purpose and re-purpose many forms of content. Text and pictures sure, but what is happening with audio, video and other forms of multimedia. Witness the popularity of YouTube.  What impact will this form of content capture and distribution have on business? But wait - what does this have to do with Judy Garland and the Pops.  Well, through the orchestrated delivery of film (which could be digitized, though in this case it is not), and live music, the Pops will create the illusion that Judy Garland is with us again.  This made me think of something I uncovered years ago doing research into Knowledge Management.  Some of the National Labs have been videotaping interviews with senior scientists, before they retired.  This was a somewhat novel approach to knowledge capture.  But what was more interesting was their hopeful future plans to someday leverage AI technology, semantic and linguistic analysis to create  the illusion that these great thinkers are with us again, much like the Garland concert experience.  Only their plans are a bit more aggressive.  An interface will allow interaction with the video (or perhaps one day the holographic projection of the individual.)  Thus, speculation over "What would Expert John Doe have done" - may no longer be speculation - you can ask the retired  colleague.  Aggressive idea - sure - but hey if the Boston Pops can get this far, imagine what our nation's top scientists will be able to accomplish.

So while the Q4 Market IQ will examine issue such as scanning, imaging, PDF/A, XML and the like, it will also examine where we are going with new forms of content as well. In previous posts I have discussed the digitization and delivery of audio and olfactory (smell). This is a very promising aspect of ECM, and is the type of stuff that keeps this subject so darn fascinating.

So - stay tuned - BUT also - if you have or know of a novel application of multimedia content in a business application please share it with me.  I would very much enjoy learning more abut it and possibly including it in the Q4 IQ.  So leave a comment here, or e-mail me at cfrappaolo@aiim.org.

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).

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.