Industry colleague, consultant, and Content Management Bible author Bob Boiko is teaching an intensive two-day workshop, “Taming the Content Beast: Content Strategy and Modeling for IT Professionals” in Washington DC September 18th and 19th. Bob is an incredible presenter and will keep you engaged while you’re learning. More info.

We have now published tutorial and session descriptions for our Fall conference (November 28-30, 2006 Westin Copley Place, Boston MA) and registration is also now open. Speaker details will be added soon.
Conference track descriptions:

Conference session descriptions:

Pre-conference tutorial descriptions:

Complete conference schedule:

Registration:

We’ve been talking with users lately on what the promise of “technology for the masses” really means for the BPM suite market. And more specifically, how BPM technologies will evolve to compliment ECM strategies and implementations. The flavor of many of these discussions comes down to transitioning “x” amount of design, control and execution from IT into the hands of “process-savvy but less-technical” corporate domains.

In other words, transferring capabilities into the business — thereby creating BPM environments that eliminate throwing applications over the wall and then spending precious resource dollars to manage the inevitable boatload of change requests thrown back. According to Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, authors of Business Process Management: The Third Wave, the challenge for leading corporations is not to bridge the business-IT divide, but rather to obliterate it.

These conversations are familiar to content specialists and information architects who demanded the evolution of content technologies such as WCM from programmer-centric environments to business-driven applications that required little IT maintenance. In fact, “non-IT” buyers became more and more important on the radar screens of WCM vendors during the mid to late 90’s as content management went mainstream. Budgeting, evaluation, and approval teams were a mix of marketing, sales and IT personnel. C-level executives were primary decision-makers and had efficiency, cost reduction, and revenue generation on their checklists. The corporate desire to move from centralized control to decentralized collaboration was paramount. Desktop features, Web-based interfaces, templates, and coaches/wizards were hot.

The content technologies market learned simple but undeniable truths during this period that drive sales and deployments in the ECM suite market to this day. Usability matters. Usability drives adoption. Adoption drives the ROI, whether the desire is efficiency and cost savings or revenue generation and customer satisfaction. Vendors: know your buyers! Buyers: know your users!

As the BPM suite market evolves, it will face technology convergence, vendor consolidation, and the need to decentralize capabilities to achieve the enterprise sale — as did the ECM suite market before it. Complex, hybrid business processes, i.e. those that merge data + content + straight-through processing + human-driven interaction requirements, require collaboration and interactions that “cross the divide” between IT and the business.

How can business managers — the compliance officer, the human resources manager, the account manager, the underwriter — work with technologies for modeling and rules management, business intelligence, performance management, and analytics within familiar environments? Complex, hybrid processes increase the need for the business to create, view, interact with, and optimize the process through its execution and inevitable exceptions.

Debates on whether savvy Excel business users can “do modeling” aside, increased BPMS vendor messaging on providing common, “Visio-like” interfaces for process modeling, “zero-code” BPMS, integrations with Microsoft Office, and collaborative “business user-oriented” dashboard environments point to a market that is evolving to answer one of the more critical business buyer questions: — What does it look like and how easy is it to use?

Putting the business in BPM underscores the “usability matters” mantra. A solution that cannot demonstrate it to the savvy business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection — who envisions an environment where ECM and BPM are seamlessly complimentary — should probably think twice before the demo.

Note: The CTO blog content has been integrated into this blog. This post is only still here because we’re picky about these things, and the old permalink need a place to go.
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What is the CTO Blog?
The content technology CTO Blog is hosted by the Gilbane Group as a service to the content and information technology community. The purpose of the blog is to facilitate ongoing discussion and debate on technologies, approaches and architectures relevant to enterprise content applications. (Note: Obviously the blog is live, but it won’t be officially launched until late August or Early September.)

Why have we created it?
CTOs have a wealth of critical information about technologies that is not always accessible to enterprise customers. When it is, it is often filtered through marketing or PR staff. CTOs also have demanding jobs, and have limited time available to meet with each other with customers, or with other industry influencers. Some CTOs have their own blogs, but in many cases these are not widely read. This blog is intended to encourage communication both between vendor CTOs and between enterprise customer CTOs and vendor CTOs. We have been asked by multiple CTOs to provide this channel.

Who can contribute?
Any CTO is welcome, and anyone who has an equivalent role. If you are not sure whether it makes sense for you, ask us at: ctoblog@gilbane.com. We understand that small companies might have a founding CEO who acts as the CTO (me, for example), and large companies may have multiple senior technology strategists that in effect act as CTOs for divisions. We invite all vendors, enterprise customers, system integrators, and analyst and consulting firms to participate. Anyone may comment on blog postings.

What topics will be covered?
Any topics relevant to enterprise applications and content technologies are welcome. We have set up a starter list of categories at https://gilbane.com/ctoblog/ that suggests the range. Our contributors will help us expand this list. This is a business/technical blog and not intended for personal, political or other types of content.

How can you become an author?
Send an email to ctoblog@gilbane.com if you would like to contribute to the blog, or if you have questions about doing so. If you meet our CTO or equivalent criteria you will be set-up as an author and listed as such on the blog. Each author has full posting and commenting permissions, and also will have a direct link to all their own posts (of the form “https://gilbane.com/ctoblog/firstname_lastname.html). If you don’t have a blog, this might be all you need.

What if I already have a blog?
Chances are there will be content that makes sense for your own blog that might not make sense here, and possibly vice versa. In any case, relevant cross-posting is OK.

Are there minimum contribution requirements?
No. Nor are there maximum limits. You can post just once or every day.

• What other rules are there?
  Submissions by anyone “representing” approved contributors (for example, PR folks) are not allowed. Anyone is able to comment.
• There will be very little moderating. However no personal attacks, “flaming”, or uncivilized posting will be allowed.
• No pure marketing or sales content is allowed, but it is fine to talk about products and their existing and planned functionality, and even to argue for a particular approach, strategy, or philosophy.
• The CTO Blog has a creative Commons license associated with it that only restricts commercial use, so, for example, re-posting to or from your own or other blogs is fine.

Is this a Gilbane Group platform?
Only physically, in that we host it and moderate it. Our own opinions may be found in comments or on our analyst blog at https://gilbane.com/blog/.

The conference schedule for our Fall Content Management Technologies event, November 28-30 at the Westin Copley in Boston, is available at: . Topics to be covered in-depth include:
* Web Content Management (WCM)
* Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
* Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs
* Enterprise Search & Search-based Applications
* Enterprise Digital Rights Management (eDRM)
* Automated Publishing
* Enterprise User Case Studies
Conference track descriptions are available at:
Speakers and complete session descriptions coming soon.

Update 7/24: Let the talks begin… With the review of the Symphony bid now officially postponed, the door widens for what could be an interesting bidding war in the ECM market. Asking for at least 10 cents more per share than OpenText has offered, Hummingbird has rescheduled the Symphony bid review for August 18th while negotiations take place. Considering both suitors are shareholders, (OpenText’s 22.3% versus Symphony’s 18%) it is unlikely that either will back out without some amount of drama.
Update 7/13: According to a press release, the Hummingbird Board of Directors will not issue a recommendation on the OpenText bid before July 25. Until that time, it is advising Hummingbird shareholders to “take no action,” and support the Symphony acquisition. Interestingly, the review of the Symphony deal will take place July 21. We’ll keep you posted.
Clearly the door was open. Altough I called myself “stunned” that the bid for Hummingbird was not a technology to technology play, I remain so given that OpenText was not the player I thought “most likely to acquire.” In fact, it was no secret that OpenText was one of the players “most likely to be acquired!” I’m thinking the final yearbook for the class of 2006 may have more surprises.
The OpenText bid is a “lock-up” agreement, which according to Information World Review, means that Hummingbird shareholders agree to a deposit from OpenText and not to withdraw from the deal. (Subject to timing and regulatory compliance issues.)
Aside from the many debates to be had on the consolidation effect of this deal, Hummingbird shareholders and financial analysts must certainly be gratified at the 20% increase in the OpenText versus Symphony bids. More at Image and Data Manager Online, CMS Watch, and Bloomberg.
Whether this deal happens is still up for grabs. OpenText’s bid is due by the end of the week. We’ll keep you posted.