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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 theme for the opening keynote panel: Content Technologies - What's Current & What's Coming? at our Boston conference this week is: change - and what it means for content and information management strategies. Of course there is constant and rapid change in technology, but we are now entering an era of multiple tectonic shifts that will challenge IT and business strategists more than ever. And the changes are not all technological, even if largely caused or influenced by technology. For example, the computer-literate generation entering the workplace, consumer technology changing expectations in the workplace, and a sometimes desperate need to adjust or completely change business models.

Other fundamental changes affecting enterprise information management strategies include the speeding freight trains of mobile computing, cloud computing, enterprise software consolidation, and global e-commerce markets.

We'll also take a look at some specific technologies and ideas that are often over-hyped or not well-understood. Many of these have an important role to play in enterprise information strategies, and the panel's goal will be to help you think through what your expectations of them should be. Examples include technologies that go 'beyond search', social software networks, user-generated content, tagging, enterprise blogs and wikis, and e-books.

This is a lot to cover in an interactive 90 minutes, but our panel will certainly get you thinking, and provide some perspective for your discussions with other attendees, speakers, and exhibitors.

Joining me on the panel are:
Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
David Mendels, Senior Vice President, Enterprise & Developer Solutions Business Unit, Adobe
Andy MacMillan, Vice President, ECM Product Management, Oracle
David Boloker, CTO Emerging Internet Technology, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Software Group

I joined facebook a few days ago to check it out and to get an idea about the approach's relevance to enterprise applications. I need to use it some more before I reach any conclusions, but since I am at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference this week I decided to use the new facebook poll feature to see what the facebook crowd thinks about collaboration as they enter the workplace. The poll feature is limited (1 multiple choice question) but it provides direct access to the tens of millions of facebook users and you can choose from a couple of demographic options. Also, you can get the results very quickly - in my first poll I received 500 responses in about 9 hours!

I will blog about the results more later and will also include all the graphs, but in the meantime, everyone I mentioned the poll to at the conference has wanted the results, so here they are the basics:

Question: Which collaboration technologies will you use the most in your job in two years?

• SMS text messaging 6% (30)
• email will continue to dominate 66% (328)
• instant messaging 16% (53)
• facebook-like social networking tools for business 11% (53)
• blogs and/or wikis 2% (8)

Keep in mind that the 500 responses all came from the 25-34 age group who are presumably mostly in the workforce. I just started the same poll with the 18-24 age group and will provide those results for comparison later tonight. UPDATE: The combined poll results are now available.

Between the two age groups we will have some info direct from the generation that Don Tapscott, Andrew McAfee and others are making predictions about (we refer to some of this here). This is of course a very informal poll, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had the results in time to provide Andrew and Tom Davenport for yesterday's debate!

We have a great keynote panel lined-up for Gilbane San Francisco next month. If you want to know what the largest software suppliers are doing and developing for enterprise content applications, whether content management, search, collaboration, or delivery, you won't want to miss this panel of senior executives who are leading the content technology efforts at these companies. You won't find a line-up like this elsewhere. Here is the keynote panel info with link:

Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update
We open each of our conferences with a panel of content technology and market experts. The panel is chosen to address the most important strategic issues technical and business managers need to consider for both near term and long term success in managing content and content technologies in the context of enterprise applications. The session is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). Before embarking on a content management, search, publishing, collaboration or globalization strategy or project, you need to understand not only the vertical and horizontal solutions from the technology suppliers that address your specific content-oriented business applications, but also what the major platform providers are doing and how their offerings fit into your plans, or not. In San Francisco this year we look at what the largest software suppliers are doing that will affect enterprise content strategies both directly and indirectly. This is a session you won't want to miss.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Paul Taylor, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect, Enterprise Content Management, IBM
Kumar Vora, VP, Product Management, Enterprise & Developer Solutions, Adobe
Rich Buchheim, Senior Director, Enterprise Content Management Strategy, Oracle
TBD, Microsoft

Full program:
http://gilbanesf.com/conference_grid.html

If you can't make the full 3-day conference, remember that the keynote is open to all "exhibit-only" attendees as well.

In case you missed Tuesday's announcement on our main site:

The new blog will publish selected industry news chosen by the Gilbane Group NewsShark team, that has been publishing the news since January 1999. The existing news archives from 1999 through 2006 remain in place, and all links to individual and monthly news items continue to work as before. The almost-weekly NewsShark email newsletter will continue to be published as before. The only readers who need to make any changes to continue to receive uninterrupted news are those who subscribe to our news via RSS or Atom newsfeeds. The new link for newsfeeds is http://gilbane.com/news/atom.xml. (Feeds to the archives continue to work on the archives as before). The new blog offers many new features for readers, including standard blog functions like commenting and trackbacks and organization of news by category, as well as new built-in tagging features that allow for search and subscriptions by tag and one-click integration with popular tagging tools such as del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Google, My Yahoo, and Newsvine. The news blog is at http://gilbane.com/news/. The news archives from 1999-2006 remain at: http://gilbane.com/news.html.

I’m a firm believer in the value of user groups. I think that they are most valuable when the user community has enough energy to manage them independently from the software publisher. This is rare and getting rarer in the composition software industry.

In the absence of an independent user group, and not to be confused with same, many vendors sponsor User Conferences, which are great opportunities to mingle with other users and see presentations on “real life product implementations” albeit under the watchful eye of the vendor.

A number of vendors have their 2006 user conferences coming up in the Autumn:

See updated links for 5/30 and 5/31 below.

Friday was a busy day and I did not see the press release on the Hummingbird acqusition until about 3pm. Curiousity killed that cat and I took some time to listen to the archived conference call(find the number in the "Conference Call" section of the Hummingbird press release.)

I got more than I bargained for on a Friday afternoon. Not surprised to find an audience of financial analysts, I was more than a bit surprised to hear comments such as "stunned," "ridiculous," and "questionable as to fiduciary responsibility." Cetainly, many of the financial analysts asked (redundant) questions in the manner that reporters would use, i.e. slow, steady, and determined to get an answer. Others however, were quite more emotional than I've ever experienced from an acquisition- or earnings-type call -- or from financial analysts for that matter. Some analysts advised shareholders to "vote against this" with vigor. It got so interesting that I realized I had listened to the entire call without intending to.

I must say I too was "stunned" at the announcement because the acquisition was not a technology to technology play. I have followed Hummingbird for years and think they have done a great job educating the market on ECM as well as expanding a very tangible beachhead in the legal vertical. So *my* stunned was that I thought it would be... well, just someone else! Just who is Symphony Technology Group? According to their Web site, it is a strategic holding company. According to Hummingbird, it was the only *serious* bidder they spoke to about an acquisition and talks began in February.

The "open door or not" title describes the crux of the emotion on the part of the financial analysts. In essence, Hummingbird described a process in which Symphony approached Hummingbird. Hummingbird did not solicit other bids from other financial or technology vendors. At the same time however, Hummingbird was repeatedly adament at stating that Symphony was the only serious bidder. Clearly there was at least one more.

In response to repeated analysts' opinions that the valuation was extremely low, that the company was worth far more, and that the bidding process should have been more open, the Hummingbird response was: "The door is now open, other bidders can come to the table; we were not shopping - we did not put ourselves on the block." The "or not" part of the "is the door open?" question is that simultaneously, Hummingbird stated that the process will move swiftly and the company is confident that Sympony has no other technology company holdings that overlap Hummingbird's expertise in ECM. Also according to Hummingbird, "nothing has changed in our company" and there are no management contracts in place with Symphony for the deal.

The documents on full disclosure on the details will be available tomorrow, Tues 5/30, according to Hummingbird. I am sure more blog entries will add to my report. I'll update this entry with links I find tomorrow.

Reuters has weighed in...

Tony Byrne from CMSWatch has weighed in...

Tuesday 5/30 Update:

Computer Business Review Online has weighed in...

Wednesday 5/31 Update:

Canada.com's National Post has weighed in... Note the quote "Fred Sorkin and Barry Litwin, Hummingbird's chairman and chief executive, respectively, own about 12% of the outstanding shares and don't want the company bought by another technology firm. The company might cut [our] products," said Mr. Sorkin, although all offers will be entertained. This leads to distraction and lack of value creation."

Arrangement Agreement Papers Available... The site is www.sedar.com, "the official site that provides access to most public securities documents and information filed by public companies and investment funds with the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) in the SEDAR filing system." Search for Public Companies = Hummingbird + Date Filed = May 26,2006 if you are interested. Curiously, the Document Type is listed as "Other".

Information Week has published some research on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) spending, and the numbers are impressive indeed. 186 business-technology professionals were asked to comment on spending trends in ECM, and 45% said ECM-related spending will increase over 2004 and 24% said it would be equal to 2004. Only 16% said spending would be lower than 2004, with the remaining 15% saying they did not know.

Moreover, nearly one-third of surveyed companies said they will spend more than $500,000 on content management technology and services this year.

Not surprisingly, compliance seems to be the driving factor.

More than half (52%) of respondents say that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has led them to adopt enterprise content management. The law, which requires companies to document and test internal controls over financial reporting, has challenged companies to move beyond spreadsheets toward building dedicated repositories for collecting information on internal processes... Electronic-records-retention laws also were cited by 52% of respondents as driving adoption of enterprise-content-management systems, followed by intellectual-property and copyright protection (48%), customer privacy (36%), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (32%).

While we don't do market research, these numbers certainly reflect what we have been hearing and seeing in the marketplace. Organizations are actively looking at and buying ECM solutions, and the focus is often on document management, records management, and compliance. At the same time, we see a lot of activity outside of compliance-driven applications, such as in product support applications where globalization and enhanced customer experiences seem to be driving the work.

Can tags lie? Of course they can. But this is usually not a problem because incorrect or misleading tagging typically causes trouble for the very same people who are doing the tagging. This gives them an incentive to get the tags right. And, if the tags aren't right, there is an incentive to fix them.

Consider an XML-based publishing application. I want to get the tags right so that the presentation comes out right.  Or, in a syndication application, I want my tags to be semantically, not just syntactically correct, because I want someone else to use and link back to my information. Even in an XML-based commercial transaction, where there might in fact be more incentive for me to have the tags tell lies -- increasing the quantity of goods shipped, for example -- the external controls already built into the transaction (counting the quantity of goods received, for example) create an incentive to ensure that the tags tell the truth, reducing overall processing costs and ensuring repeat business.

All of this changes when we use XBRL to communicate financial information to analysts and investors. The incentives to misrepresent information or, in some cases, to hide it altogether, are substantial. This makes XBRL different from many other XML applications and requires a different approach to validation. This is not just a detail. The shift from intrinsic incentives that help get the tagging right to a need for external controls changes the way XBRL is used. It also adds to the list of capabilities that must be in place to build an XBRL market. 

Although not officially announced, a number of trade publications have reported on Oracle's acquisition of Content Media, and Tony Byrne succinctly captures what is of immediate interest to followers of the content management market.
What we started calling EII (Enterprise Information Integration) a few years ago, and what many vendors called ECI (Enterprise Content Integration) remains one of the biggest challenges organizations face - too big to be served by a small niche market, as evidenced by Oracle's move, as well as by the earlier IBM and EMC acquisitions. For a more in-depth look at the problem, players and the market see our article on What is Enterprise Information Integration (EII)?