Recently in Enterprise Content Management - ECM Category

As many of you know, we will be publishing a new report by Stephen Arnold in the next few weeks. The title, Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, begs the question of whether there is such a thing as "enterprise search". The title of Lynda's consulting practice blog "Enterprise Search Practice Blog", begs the same question. In the case of content management, a similar question is begged by AIIM - "The Enterprise Content Management Association" (ECM) and the recent AIIM conference.

The debate about whether "enterprise fill-in-your-favorite-software-application" makes any sense at all is not new. The terms "Enterprise Document Management" (EDM) and "Enterprise Resource Planning" (ERP) were first used in the 80s, and, at least in the case of EDM, were just as controversial. We have Documentum to thank for both EDM and ECM. Documentum's original mission was to be the Oracle of documents, so EDM probably seemed like an appropriate term to use. Quickly however, the term was appropriated by marketing pros from many vendors, as well as analysts looking for a new category of reports and research to sell, and conference organizers keeping current with the latest buzzwords (I don't exclude us from this kind of activity!). It was also naively misused by many enterprise IT (as opposed to "personal IT" I suppose) professionals, and business managers who were excited by such a possibility.

ECM evolved when the competition between the established EDM vendors and the fast growing web content management vendors reached a point where both saw they couldn't avoid each other (for market cap as well as user requirement reasons). Soon, any vendor with a product to manage any kind of information that existed outside of (or even sometimes even in) a relational database, was an "ECM" vendor. This was what led AIIM to adopt and try to define and lay claim to the term - it would cover all of the records management and scanner vendors who were their existing constituents, and allow them to appeal to the newer web content management vendors and practitioners as well.

We used to cover the question "Is there any such thing as ECM?" in our analyst panels at our conferences, and usually there would be some disagreement among the analysts participating, but our mainly enterprise IT audience largely became savvy enough to realize it was a non-issue.

Why is it a non-issue?
Mainly because the term has almost no useful meaning. Nobody puts all their enterprise content in a single ECM repository. It doesn't even make sense to use the same vendors' products across all departments even in small organizations. - that is why there is such a large variety of vendors with wildly different functionality at ECM events such as AIIM. The most that you can assume when you hear "ECM vendor" is that they probably support more than one type of content management application, and that they might scale to some degree.

There are many who think it not unreasonable to have a single "enterprise search" application for all enterprise content. If you are new to search technology this is understandable, since you may think simple word or phrase search should be able to work across repositories. But, of course, it is not at all that simple, and if you want to know why see Stephen's blog or Lynda's blog, among others. Both Steve and Lynda are uncomfortable with "enterprise search". Steve prefers the term "behind the firewall search". Lynda sticks with the term but with a slightly different definition, although I don't think they disagree at all on how the term is misused and misinterpreted.

Why use "Enterprise ... Whatever" terms at all?
There is only one reason, and that is that buyers and users of technology use these terms as a shortcut, sometime naively, but also sometimes with full understanding. There is just no getting around the barrier of actual language use. Clearly, using the shortcut is only the first step in communicating - more dialog is required for meaningful understanding.

The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.

Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.

If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.

Note: You can now view a recording of the Webinar on SharePoint and ECM.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the growth of SharePoint licensing and the impressive footprint it has in terms of end user licenses. One of the other intriguing things about SharePoint is how it has evolved in functionality. True to form, Microsoft first launched SharePoint as a sturdy but not overwhelming offering. Since then, they have built more and more functionality into the product, all the while bringing partners and developers into the mix to create a formidable ecosystem for the product.

Microsoft SharePoint is a force in the content management market. For the year ending June 2007, Microsoft reported $800 million in revenue for SharePoint, a figure that dwarfs most stand-alone ECM vendors and is nearly twice as large as Filenet’s annual revenue before it was acquired by IBM. Consider also that the other ECM vendor revenue includes substantial support dollars, and the SharePoint revenue is for licensing only. Even more impressive is the number of licenses—more than 17,000 companies have purchased 85 million licenses. That is one impressive foothold.

There's no doubt that Microsoft understands the value and opportunity in the ECM/BPM intersection. It is also clear that the roads MOSS will use to get there are not confined to small neighborhoods, hence the reference to the U.S.' most famous highway.

Microsoft's significant investments in workflow and business intelligence have been widely reported. I'll leave the work of dissecting components such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Excel Services, and MOSS BI web parts to resources such as Ziff Davis' Microsoft Watch and Russ Stalters' BetterECM blogs as well as Microsoft resources from the SharePoint Product Group and Customer Experience Team (although this one does not show much action since the summer's LOBi (line-of-business interoperability) announcement.

Blogging over at BPMEnterprise.com, Stalters also has an excellent 3-part series called BPM and Steak: A Great Combo, the latest of which pinpoints MOSS capabilities designed for BPM practitioners. Microsoft's strategy for full-scale ECM/BPM however, requires somewhat of a "detour" from MOSS and Office 2007 suburbs. The roadmap is evident via multiple, alliance-driven crossroads. Avenues include "Gold Certified" partners such as Bluespring Software, Global 360, Lombardi Software, and Ultimus as well as "Certified" or "Registered" partners such as Savvion and Appian.

Implementing integrations with some of these products does not appear to be fraught with "Exit here" or "In Construction" signposts. (And given all in the "Gold Certified" group are private, one can't help wondering if there's an acquisition strategy in the works. I digress...) Rather many are direct and well-embedded crossroads between MOSS and Office 2007, targeted directly at business users.

Case in point: Bluespring's BPM Suite 4.5, the result of a decidedly Microsoft-centric BPM play that began in 2003. Most interesting to me is the 4.5 focus on "document manipulation," highlighted multiple times during my briefing with the company. Capabilities include rules-driven analysis, extraction, and dynamic assembly of content from Word, Excel and InfoPath -- with PDF thrown in for good measure. Although many ECM players have been doing "ETL for content" for years, this is not common expertise in the BPM market. In a content-centric BPM application such as compliance, this certainly provides some interesting opportunities for aggregated, context-specific reporting.

As I noted in my last ECM-BPM checkpoint, there are multiple road signs (quickly becoming billboards...) that signal technology convergence and deeper integrations between two blurring market segments. Microsoft's Route 66 strategy is surely one of them.

In December 2006, I conducted a mini survey of content management professionals to find out what they have experienced as the biggest challenges when implementing a CMS. I found the results to be pretty interesting and worthwhile sharing with the CM community at large.

To view the survey results, you can download the PDF from my site at www.ziacontent.com/cmfocus.htm. Also checkout my related article on the CMS-Wire site titled "Things that Go Bump in Your CMS Project."

Here are 3 of my top predictions:

1. Web 2.0 will continue to be big, but by the end of the year won't be called that anymore, and much of the hoopla will be over.
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (with it's unfortunate nickname MOSS) will be much more widely implemented than expected, but not always for the right reasons.
3. The era of "Customer-Centric Content Management' as introduced by The Rockley Group will start to gain significant momentum. (As I've felt it should have a while ago, as alluded to in my Gilbane blog entry from Aug '06 about CMS and CRM.)

2006 convergence and consolidation in the ECM market undoubtedly validated "the infrastructure players are moving in" expectations -- in a big way. Press and analysis on IBM's FileNet acquisition as well as Oracle's Stellent acquisition is still ongoing. Not to be discounted, OpenText's summer coup over Symphony in winning Hummingbird validates that pure-play ECM suite vendors will not simply fade away anytime soon. IMO, neither will many of the pure-play WCM, RM or DAM vendors, several of which are shrewdly riding the crest of SaaS.

And never to be discounted is Microsoft, whose vision for MOSS 2007 is to be "as pervasive as the Office suite." The company is certainly turning up the volume in terms of positioning business intelligence/process management, content management and collaboration as synonymous.

So, is this "technology trio" 100% new and innovative? Well...not for customers of FileNet, whose BPM capabilities were more than likely the crown jewel for IBM's successful pursuit. And not for customers of Adobe's LiveCycle products, who benefited from a major product line upgrade in September along with the release of Acrobat 8. And not for customers of EMC's Documentum Process Suite, who take advantage of "the automation of high-volume transactional processes and complex collaborative processes" according to product descriptions. And certainly not if you have been following our ECM-BPM intersection discussions.

Will ECM convergence and consolidation raise the market awareness and visibility of content-centric BPM?

More than likely. However, the ECM market certainly can't take all the credit. Let's not forget the achievements of BPM suite vendors in 2006, who continue in their efforts to bridge the divide between data-driven versus content-driven business process management. This is a tall order, given the need to overcome the holy grail of all "divides" -- IT versus the business -- especially given "do not cross" domains for skill sets such as process modeling.

Still, vendors such as Appian, Savvion, Intalio, and others tout ease of use and graphical process modelers targeted to business users. Vendors such as BEA (via the Fuego acquisition,) Lombardi, Ultimus, and Pegasystems stress support for interactive workflows, business-driven usability, and provide direct integration with selected ECM solutions (including Sharepoint.) Vendors such as Global360 provide baseline document and records management capabilities, but shy away from describing them as ECM capabilities. And most if not all BPM suite vendors provide case management support such as attaching and keeping track of documents for vertical-specific processes that require it.

Consider these examples as a sign of deeper capabilities and integrations to come or even more interesting -- markets that merge in 2007.

Side note: examples are simply that, and not an exhaustive list. Feel free to comment or even better, we invite CTOs from any type of organization to weigh in on this and other subjects on our CTO Blog. Send an email to ctoblog@gilbane.com if you'd like to start contributing!

I had the pleasure of moderating the Content Globalization Workflows session at last week's Gilbane Boston conference. Although we were the last session on the last day, the room was filled with interactive participants with very specific issues and questions. The underlying theme? The act of translation is not the "stress-buster" for globalization projects. It's the process. Managing it, understanding it, aligning it, integrating it -- you name it. Globalization has process-centric red flags from the get-go.

The good news is that globalization as a recognized enterprise business practice continues to gain traction. In fact, our audience cited "global, simultaneous product shipments" as one of the most distinct and well-understood business drivers at the executive and cross-departmental levels. Even better, there are achievable, significant cost savings to be had. The description of a first-year, $2.4 million savings realized by GE Healthcare was impressive, to say the least. Many thanks to Jeanette Eichholz, a Leader in the Global Ultrasound User Documentation group, for sharing her story.

The Gilbane Group is working to keep the subject of globalization in the spotlight as a key issue for 2007 to help organizations understand that cost savings is actually only the cusp of the benefits. Rapid market reach, consistent brand management, and increased customer satisfaction are equally viable, and more importantly, quantifiable.

To that end, join us for our December 13th webinar, "How Sun Takes Brands and Solutions to the Global Marketplace." Sponsored by Interwoven and SDL International, understanding Sun's success factors will be a valuable learning experience for any organization with globalization on the agenda.

Date: 13th December, 2006
Time: 8:30 Pacific, 11:30 Eastern, 16:30 GMT, 17:30 Central Europe
Duration: 1 hour
Register here.

I'm not at the conference this week (we do have several people from our shop there), but to answer a question posed by Frank Gilbane:

What is the future of software as a service, and is it appropriate for enterprise content applications like content management, authoring, etc.?

The SaaS model seems to have been proven to the point where it's hard to imagine that it won't keep growing. We recently posted a whitepaper on SaaS myths, which debunks most of the common arguments against SaaS. In addition to that discussion, I'd offer the following four points:

1) SaaS is a proven technology. It arguably extends to the early days of the web with software ASPs. I guess you could even argue the lineage goes all the way back to mainframe apps! :-) Certainly, though, the existing SaaS companies have been working successfully with this business model for more than six years now.

2) Web technologies have reached a point where SaaS is an out of the box solution. You can now count on fast network connections for users both in the office and home. Security systems are complete from SSL with web browsers up through terminal services like Citrix which allow even HIPAA compliance. For web apps, browser technologies like IFRAMES and AJAX allow apps to be easily integrated on a page (mashups).

3) SaaS provides much more robust server management and security, especially for small and medium sized businesses. As web applications grow more complex, SaaS allows much more convenient, rigorous and cost-effective control over hosting. By centralizing and focusing, the best resources can be brought to bear on fewer hosting environments.

4) This one is a bit of a prediction, and is specific to web sites. Currently, you have a couple options when adding components like blogs, rss, ecommerce, polls, surveys, and search to web sites. You can install apps for those services, which allows you to control ad placement and design. The alternative is to use free hosted apps where the ad revenue goes to the SaaS company. So, the logical next step is for high quality hosted apps where the ad revenue is shared with the web site. This is already appearing with sites like MetaCafe. For an advanced CMS, though, I am not sure this will happen since the CMS tends to be the hub for all the other web apps, but it is certainly possible for a basic CMS.