Collaboration: November 2005 Archives

The Gilbane Conference in Boston is well underway and already a raging success in my mind. Besides facilitating the "Enterprise Content Management: Myth or Reality" roundtable at the CMPros Summit, I have also moderated a session in the CM track titled "Avoiding the Big Mistakes in a CMS Project." Both experiences were exactly the kind I hoped for -- interactive, participant-driven, and enlightening. Summarizing my thoughts will likely take several blog entries -- this one focuses on "the glue people" as related to the concept and in turn, the organizational reality of an enterprise content management strategy. Not software, not tools, not "which capabilities are applicable," -- just the strategy.

The glue people may very well be the answer to whether ECM strategy makes it to reality in an organization. What and who are they? The folks who manage to bridge the gap between the isolated goals and pressures of IT, business units with key content owners, and the C-level tier. As a former Business Analyst in the IT organization of a global insurance company, I know the pain of the glue people. Part psychotherapist, part geek, and part business person, glue people are often a rare breed. They must educate, facilitate, coordinate, smooth egos, see the bigger picture -- the greater good, and make it home by 7PM if at all possible. They are often un-named, under-appreciated, and caught in the gaps themselves -- resulting in the need to find their own psychotherapist.

BUT -- the glue people can make an incredible amount of progress toward the organizational design, implementation, and evolution of an enterprise content management strategy. And -- for those caught in the chaos of outsourcing, downsizing, re-organization, and downright unemployment -- there's likely never been a better time to become a glue person. (Read: technical writer, taxonomist, business analyst, etc.) If you peruse the professional services and consulting market for ECM and all its acronym children, what will you find? A lot of glue people.

Are you a glue person? What's your title? What have your experiences been? How have you been able to gill the gaps with glue? Please step up and respond with comments! The opportunity to turn glue people into a formal, empowered, and acknowledged profession is now.

A user wrote the following question to the CMPros list, but didn't get much response, so I offer it here, with some initial thoughts. I would love to hear more ideas about this kind of thing, as I get queries like this at least a couple of times a year.

I write and manage content for a small non-profit (80+ employees). We’re just now implementing a CMS that’s basically a set of templates with no functionality for managing and scheduling content to ‘go into’ the templates.

I’ve tried doing all that with Outlook and Sharepoint, and they kinda work, but I’m hoping there’s something a lot better out there.

I suggested the server version of Microsoft Project. The Project server can interact with Outlook clients via Exchange Server, and it can also generate Web clients. For example, you could have a server version of Project running a very high level schedule, which could then provide prompts to the user community. These prompts could be emails, they could be emails with URLs, or they could be tasks sent to the user’s email account which then appear as either tasks or calendar events in the user’s outlook. I did this for a Web development team a couple of years ago, and another client has implemented something like this recently.

Of course, this doesn't address interaction of the Project server with the CMS, which in this case happens to be Enginuity from Pandora Systems.

Other thoughts and ideas? Feel free to email me as well as posting your comments here.

In our informal survey of enterprise use of blogs and wikis, the most popular application that organizations are using blogs and wikis for was "knowledge management". While our survey is a far cry from what a rigorous market research effort would be, the results are in sync with what we and others are hearing from companies. I recently heard from Rod Boothby, who is leading an effort with Ernst & Young to build an internal enterprise blogging system to support knowledge sharing, and has written an essay based on his findings while building the business case for the project. I have just read the 37 page essay, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, and it is a great tool for describing the benefits of enterprise blogging to senior management. Rod is publishing sections of the essay on his blog at www.innovationcreators.com.