In case you missed it, we published our latest report, Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen Arnold, early last week, and it is available at a special introductory price through April 25. More details are at: , or you can go right to the store at: .
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 54 of 75)
We host a number of blogs, some more active than others. One of the least active (although it still gets a surprising amount of traffic) has been our CTO blog. However, I am happy to say that Colin Britton started blogging on semantic technologies yesterday. As a co-founder and CTO of Metatomix he led the development of a commercial product based on RDF – a not very well understood W3C semantic web standard. Colin’s first post on the CTO blog starts a series that will help shed a little more light on semantic technologies and their practical applications.
Some of you know that I remain skeptical of the new world “Semantic Web” vision, but I do think semantic technologies are important and have a lot to offer, and Colin will help you see why. Check out his first post and let him know what you think about semantic technologies and what you would like to know about.
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, sometimes 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 Gilbane San Francisco 2008 program is now available, and registration is open. As usual we have had a tough time choosing from among all the possible panelists and presenters. Some speakers have not been notified yet, so we will not publish speaker names for another week or so. We have slightly re-configured the schedule to fit even more sessions in than we had in Boston.
The main conference site is http://gilbanesf.com. Here are the most popular links:
- Conference schedule
- Conference session descriptions
- Workshop descriptions
- Early Sponsors
- Registration
BTW, we will be using gilbanesf08 for tagging purposes.
We’ll be publishing our special report by Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work soon – most likely at the beginning of April, and have set-up a page where you can sign-up to be notified when the report will be available at . There will also be a special price for early orders and we’ll be providing that info shortly.
Steve has also set-up a page describing the report at: , and has a blog where he is providing some supplementary material. Also keep an eye on Lynda’s blog where she might have some comments while she is doing some editing.
As many of you know from our press release at Gilbane Boston, two of the reports we will be publishing in the next few of months have to do with search. Lynda Moulton, who runs our Enterprise Search consulting practice is working on Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, and our colleague Steve Arnold is writing Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work. Lynda’s report covers the “Enterprise Search” market, what organizations are doing with the variety of technologies considered to be enterprise search products, and what their experiences have been. By the way Lynda is collecting experiences about implementations and would love to hear about yours.
Steve’s report is a look at what is coming next, and is largely, but not only, based on an analysis of what Google is doing, what they are planning on doing, and the emerging ecosystem they are creating. This is fascinating stuff. Steve has recently launched a must-read blog, Beyond Search, where you can get a peek at some of what will be in our report. For example, see his thoughts on enterprise search terminology.
Both reports will be important tools for enterprise IT strategists and executives. We’ll keep you posted on their progress.
Congratulations to the new board at CM Pros!
The results were announced last night. The new directors are:
- Joerg Dennis Krueger, Managing Director and vendor-independent consultant and analyst with Cara Europe Ltd in Germany, is committed to expanding the CM Pros community in Europe.
- Tony Pietrocola, President and Co-founder of Tenth Floor Interactive has more than 10 years in the content management industry and will work to market and expand the recognition of CM Pros.
- Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it, New Zealand has worked with content management for the past 12 years and plans to use his practical “make it work” experience to champion CM Pros member benefits.
- Andrew Wilcox, president and founder of Everage Consulting, Canada, has served as Technology Manager for CM Pros and plans to follow through with the technology initiative currently in process.
- Barry Schaeffer, president of X.Systems.Inc, focuses on handling the organizational impacts of information technology changes and is dedicated to developing a body of CM Pros knowledge.
The four new Directors replace two outgoing board members, Mary Laplante and Emma Hamer, whose terms expire this month. Directors Linda Burman and Travis Wissnik remain on the Board until January 2009. Barry Schaeffer joined the board in late 2007, filling the remainder of resigning Director Joan Lasselle’s term.
It’s great to see the association continue to grow, and to have generated enough board nominees for a competitve election.
By the way, I believe the Executive Director position is still open.
Decades of experience with XML technologies and content strategies provide unique ability to help organizations make appropriate technology choices and leverage industry best practices. New blog at https://gilbane.com/xml
Cambridge MA, January 29, 2008. Gilbane Group Inc. today announced the launch of a new practice area dedicated to helping organizations of all types utilize XML technologies and best practices. Well-known industry expert and long-time Gilbane associate Bill Trippe will be the practice’s Lead Analyst. Trippe is joined by industry veterans and Gilbane senior analysts Leonor Ciarlone and Mary Laplante.
Gilbane’s XML Technologies and Content Strategies Practice is designed for IT and business managers who need to gain control of critical content, increase collaboration across enterprise applications, improve efficiencies through faster and more flexible information distribution between business partners and customers, and implement new business models that can keep pace with today’s internet-speed competitive requirements. The amount of XML content being generated today is staggering, as large infrastructure providers like Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle, and others offer tools and technologies that generate and manage XML information, While many organizations are taking advantage of XML within departmental applications, most companies are not even close to taking advantage of the XML information being created and utilized by popular applications including office software and database repositories. Significantly, many executives are unaware of the XML content and data that are untapped assets within their organizations.
“As most of our customers know, XML (and before that SGML) technologies and applications have always been core to our content and information technology consulting and coverage.” said Frank Gilbane, Gilbane Group CEO. “Our team has deep expertise that comes from roles in enterprise IT organizations, software development, standards bodies and industry associations involved in development and adoption of markup language technologies for key business and government applications. While XML cuts across all our analyst and consulting activity, today’s proliferation of XML content means that many businesses need to consider XML as strategic to their information infrastructure. Our group’s experience and market knowledge uniquely qualify Gilbane to provide that expertise. I am thrilled that Bill Trippe, who is always in demand, will be the lead analyst and consultant for the Group.”
“Project leaders, IT managers, and business executives have always depended on Gilbane Group to help them understand the value of applying standards and technologies to their businesses,” said Bill Trippe, Lead Analyst, XML Technologies and Content Strategies Practice. “With this new practice, we are bringing together research, best practices, and advice and guidance on XML implementation and technology acquisition that they cannot get from any other single source.”
To learn more about Gilbane Group’s XML Consulting and Advisory Practice, visit the group’s new blog launched today at https://gilbane.com/xml/ or send an email to xml@gilbane.com.
