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I was at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco last week, where I answered questions as a panelist, moderated another panel, heard many excellent presentations, and joined in many engaging discussions. On the plane ride home, I took some time to piece together the individual bits of information and opinion that I had absorbed during the two-day event. This reflection led to the following observations regarding the state of enterprise content management practices and technologies.

Up With People

Many content software vendors are now focusing on people first, content second. This is a huge shift in perspective, especially when voiced at a content management conference! Kumar Vora, Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise at Adobe was the first person to proclaim this philosophical change during his opening keynote presentation at Gilbane San Francisco. He reported that Adobe has shifted its business philosophy to focus on serving people and their needs, as opposed to thinking about content first. Many other vendor representatives and attendees from end user organizations echoed Kumar's emphasis on people during the event. It is too early to say definitively what this radical change in perspective means, but we should see more user friendly enterprise content management tools as a result.

Keyword Fail

Keyword search has largely failed end users and incremental improvements haven't been able to keep up with the explosion in newly created content. Jeff Fried, VP Product Management for Microsoft's FAST search engine actually proclaimed that "keyword search is dead!" The business world is at a point where alternatives, including machine-generated and social search techniques, must be explored. The latter method was on many attendees minds and lips, which should not surprise, given the shift to people-centric thinking identified above. Social search will be an increasingly hot topic in 2009 and 2010.

SharePoint Upheaval

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has the potential to completely shake up the information management market. The next version of SharePoint will likely include a raft of (as of yet unconfirmed) Web Content Management features that have been missing or rudimentary. In her keynote address, Tricia Bush, Group Product Manager for SharePoint said that the promise of content management has not yet been realized and that her team is focusing diligently on the opportunity. This increased emphasis on content management is contrary to the first trend that I described above, and the negative perceptions many hold of SharePoint may increase unless Microsoft also better enables people in SharePoint 2010 (it is rumored that the product will also see substantial additions to its currently limited social collaboration functionality.) Those placing bets should do so knowing that Microsoft intends to, and probably will, be a major force in enterprise information management.

Simplicity Trumps Complexity

Enterprise applications and systems managed by IT departments continue to grow in complexity. As this happens, end users turn to simpler alternatives, including consumer oriented Web 2.0 applications, in order to get work done. The "problem" is that these consumer applications aren't approved or controlled by the IT function. The opportunity is a potentially large market for software vendors that can create enterprise ready versions of Web 2.0 applications by adding security, reliability, and other attributes demanded by CIOs. For those vendors to succeed, however, they must retain the simplicity (intuitiveness and ease of use) that are the hallmark of consumer Web 2.0 applications.

Communication Beats Publishing

Communication applications are increasingly being used by end users to collaborate, because enterprise content management applications have become too complex (see the trend immediately above). Additionally, communication tools are favored by end users because they can use them to simultaneously create and distribute content. This increased speed of content publication also accelerates general business process execution, allowing users of communication tools to be more productive than users of formal enterprise content systems. Communication tools will continue to become an important and growing back channel that employees use to share content when overly complex publishing tools impede or fail them.

Having one's ideas validated by a reputable peer is always rewarding. John Mancini, President of AIIM, published a blog post in the time between when I first formulated these thoughts on the flight home from San Francisco last week and when I published this post today. Reading John's post should encourage you to believe that the trends I (and he) have described are for real. The question for all of us now is how will we respond to these emerging realities.

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The 10th annual Buying and Selling eContent conference took place under sunny skies in Scottsdale, AZ, this week. The event brings together buyers and sellers of business information that drives decision-making within enterprises and supports research within institutions. There’s no doubt that the economic climate is putting pressure on the industry. But although budget cuts are certainly shaping 2009 packaging tactics, the industry faces far bigger challenges that will still exist when the economic pendulum swings back the other way. We spent much of the conference wondering when – and if – participants will make the commitment to innovation, roll up their sleeves, and begin the difficult work of transforming their businesses.

The tools to innovate are readily available. The know-how exists in other industries and content-centric business practices. The necessity to transform the industry is apparent. We’ll be watching to see who steps up to embrace the change and experiment with the business models that can drive a transformed industry.

Bill http://twitter.com/billtrippe has set up tweet poll:

What eBook device are you using today? http://twtpoll.com/31yn5r

#twtpoll

The first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created 14 years ago today, by Ward Cunningham. Since then, the wiki has become one of the most widely deployed collaboration tools available. One might even call the wiki the catalyst of the Social Software movement.

Why is the wiki so popular? There are several reasons, including ease of use, structured navigation, and the ability to track changes to wiki pages and roll back to previous versions. The democratic nature of the format, in which anyone who has access can edit the wiki, is undoubtedly a major contributor to its success as well.

The primary reason for the wiki's success is its flexibility. Wikis have been used for everything from collaboratively authoring a document, to managing a project, to establishing a corporate knowledge base. We are seeing the same phenomenon today in Twitter, which is being used in ways that its creators never imagined.

So, at age 14, what has the wiki taught us? That collaboration tools should be designed for flexible, yet intuitive, use. Complexity is kryptonite to collaboration. Let's remember that before we build and deploy enterprise collaboration software.

Please join me on a webinar sponsored by Mark Logic on Wednesday 2/18/09 at 2pm EST. I'll be covering my five top predictions for 2009 (and beyond). The predictions come largely from a forthcoming research study "Digital Platforms and Technologies for Book Publishers: Implementations Beyond eBook," that Bill Trippe and I are writing. Here are the predictions:

1. The Domain Strikes Back - Traditional publishers leverage their domain expertise to create premium, authoritative digital products that trump free and informed internet content.
2. Discoverability Overcomes Paranoia - Publishers realize the value in being discovered online, as research shows that readers do buy whole books and subscriptions based on excerpts and previews.
3. Custom, Custom, Custom - XML technology enables publishers to cost-effectively create custom products, a trend that has rapidly accelerated in the last six to nine months, especially in the educational textbook segment.
4. Communities Count - and will exert greater influence on digital publishing strategies, as providers engage readers to help build not only their brands but also their products.
5. Print on Demand - increases in production quality and cost-effectiveness, leading to larger runs, more short-run custom products and deeper backlists.

I look forward to your questions and comments! Register today at http://bit.ly/WApEW

I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you're writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something -- but it's out of the way, a distraction to the point you're trying to make.

Some documents don't need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, "the meat [is] in the footnotes."

The web doesn't make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.

But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?

In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you're trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we're building an information taxonomy bottom up -- with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.

To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don't have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML's linking mechanism, the '<a href="over_there">' construct is fundamentally broken. Google's founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn't have been.

And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn't have been.

But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.

By David Lipsey, Managing Director, Entertainment & Media, FTI

Can anyone deliver customized content to its customers - in print, on the Web in rich applications, in social networking or to wireless media? To make matters more challenging, what if your customers are two-to-five year olds? Well, Sesame Workshop recently had to address this test to keep its brand relevant to precocious preschoolers. In fact, this non-profit organization behind Sesame Street took the bold view that multi-channel publishing is the future of the Workshop, and recognized that online will become its primary channel of distribution down the line. At the upcoming Gilbane Boston Conference (link to information on session), I will moderate a panel of multi-channel publishing experts, including the VP charged with Sesame Workshop's internet initiative. We will provide you with the latest in content delivery, opportunities to serve more users and more applications, and insights to show that yes, almost anyone can do it. Please join me, Joe Bachana from DPCI (an industry leader in his own right) and the ever-innovative O'Reilly Press for a didactic and enlightening discussion that will get you mulling over ideas for enhancing your brand experience for customers.

The design brief is simple: integrate the outgoing supply chain that takes corporate product or service documentation out to users with the social media that may arise to address those same products or services. The benefits are also clear: leverage user experience, interest, and advice to everyone's advantage.

After that, it gets confusing.

Corporate structures are brand-directed and very controlled, while social media is uncontrollable, individualistic (if not anti-brand), and hyperbolic. That's why we love it, but how could a corporation trust it with their babies?

What does integration mean in this context? If you hire someone to help with social media, you may lose the integrity of independence. If the social media is independent and you endorse it, do you taint it? It's likely to change rapidly, so how can you keep your position up to date? If you just react to it, how is that different than focus groups? I'll argue that integration means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.

The scariest scenario is bringing independent outsiders to your breast and having them blast your new release. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so the question is how quickly you'll respond, and how? Who said "Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?"

But let's draw a distinction between unaffiliated commentators and those who are working in companies that are your customers. The former are always going to be less controllable, while the latter will likely cooperate with a cross-company integration. Just as an enlightened company will look to incorporate social media into its communications strategy, its customers will be exploring social media for its user-centric focus as a means of improving its own business practices.

Let's assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation's goals. When it works because all of the stars have aligned, as has happened at moments for Apple, Google, and even IBM and Microsoft, then it can be great. At other times, it may be ugly. Perhaps it's just too early to draw those people too close.

But when the audience is composed of social media practitioners at client companies, then the field is open to all forms of social media: blog, wiki, twitter, IM, and other practices. For example, it's easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release...

These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?

Why didn't I think of this? Of course, among other things, I don't have the stomach to deal with the legal challenges.