Digital Landfill

I spent Monday and Tuesday at IBM's IOD event.  The sheer scale of this event -- 7,000+ attendees -- is hard to convey -- as is the coherence of the marketing visuals.  The event brings together all facets of IBM's business software offerings.  The IOD branding first appeared two years ago in Anaheim and has proven to be remarkably resilient over 3 annual events.

Two primary foci were evident on my two days here -- 1) a focus on what IBM is calling "Information Agendas" -- essentially vertical and application roadmaps; and 2) a new "Agile ECM" initiative. 

Last month, IBM announced industry-specific technologies and services to help customers develop an Information Agenda. In less than two months, IBM notes that more than 100 IBM customers have actively engaged in Information Agenda workshops, deploying new software tools and working with IBM consultants to develop a strategy to better use their business information.

According to IBM, Agile ECM provides improved flexibility to help organizations respond faster to changing business requirements to optimize content, process and compliance solutions. The Agile ECM products include IBM FileNet Content Manager 4.5, IBM FileNet Business Process Manager 4.5, IBM Content Manager 8.4.1 and IBM Content Manager OnDemand 8.4.1.

For a full update of all the releases from the event, go to THIS LINK.

It was fun to see three slides in former AIIM chair Martyn Christian's ECM keynote highlight AIIM research.  I still come across end users who aren't aware of our efforts to quantify the end user experience.  This research is for the most part FREE and can be found at THIS LINK.  Did I mention the research was FREE?

One fun thing coming out of IBM's massive Information on Demand (IOD) conference is this video.

I've wondered before in this blog about why this industry has to be so booorrrrrriiiiinnnnnggg in its marketing. 

Well here's something different...

John’s 10 Commandments for Effective Document Management

I was thinking at last week's AIIM road show about the ingredients that enter into an effective document strategy.  Here are my 10 Commandments. They are in no particular order, except the first one is intentionally first (kind of like the real 10 Commandments).

What do you think?  Why not post a comment?

#1 -- BUILD A STRATEGY.  It sounds obvious, but I am amazed at how many organizations set out to manage their most important resource – their information assets – without a plan.  The ingredients of such a plan are basic, but are not simple.  Inventory your existing assets.  Define your business requirements.  Map them to necessary technical requirements and systems.  Identify the key integration points between systems.  Do not neglect a governance or policy structure.  Rinse.  Repeat.

#2 -- NOT ALL CONTENT IS ALIKE.  As time goes on, I am increasingly drawn to the Connie Moore diagram of a couple of years ago describing 3 main content classes.  I don’t remember if I have them exactly right, but they were something like this -- 1) Office/business content (primarily growing out of desktops); 2) Transactional or process content (stemming from document-intensive mission critical processes); and 3) Persuasive or creative content (i.e., the intellectual assets that you need to protect). I think this description goes a long way toward describing the role that SharePoint plays in the future marketplace and the role that will be played by everyone else.

#3 -- THE NEED TO CONTROL IS NOT GOING AWAY – IT WILL GET WORSE.  We’ve all had our fill of Sar-Box, and industry and country specific business documentation regulations, and new rules of federal civil procedure.  But given the mess of the last few months, there is a new wave coming.  A new wave of litigation as the blame game goes around and a new wave of regulatory mandates as Members of Congress find someone to point fingers at other than themselves.

#4 -- PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD.  Given the elegance and complexity of many full blown ECM suites, I think we forget that for many organizations, just doing SOMETHING is a step in the right direction.  Pam Doyle’s presentation at the AIIM road show reminded me that for many organizations, the “basics” are still not a reality.  These organizations still spend on average $20 to file a document.  $120 to find a lost document.  $220 to replace a lost document.  These are organizations that lose 7.5% of their documents and misfile another 3%.  For these organizations, just getting started (hence the attractiveness of SharePoint and open source solutions like Alfresco and SaaS solutions like Spring CM) is a major accomplishment.

#5 – RIPPING OUT AND REPLACING IS NOT A VERY ATTRACTIVE STRATEGY.  Early adaptors of document technologies typically have 5, 6, 7, or more major content repositories from different vendors in their organization.  For those in the banking, finance, and insurance industries, the complexity will increase exponentially as the survivors assume ownership of the victims.  Managing information separately from the repository in which it resides -- through a framework of vendor agnostic policies and services – will become critical.  As nice as it would be to start over in a single infrastructure, for most organizations this is just a pipe dream.

#6 – IT WILL BE A HYBRID WORLD FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE – See #5, but think in terms of all the efforts to digitize “everything” in those paper archives. Most of the stuff in box storage will not go away.  Get over it and look first toward minimizing what is being ADDED to this mess.  And for the necessary backfile conversion you DO need and want to do, for heaven’s sake don’t do it yourself.  There are more productive uses for your people.  Hire a service company that specializes in this.

#7 – GET TOUGHER ABOUT ROI.  This is a mainstream set of technologies.  This sizzle is no longer in the technology but in the applications.  Most organizations don’t have an IT bench strong enough and deep enough to buy technology.  Buy applications.  This means find integrators and resellers with domain and application specific experience.  This will become even more important in the tight times we are entering.

#8 – CONSIDER ALTERNATIVE CONTENT DELIVERY MODELS.  See #4 and #7.  There are so many more choices out there than there have ever been.  Check them out.

#9 – STANDARDIZE WHAT’S COMING IN.  The velocity of your business – no matter what it is – is increasing like never before.  You need to speed up to keep that business.  That means take a hard look at what you’re sending out.  How much of the paper that must be ingested is in response to the paper that YOU send out?  Nip it in the bud.  That means push capture as close as possible to the point of document creation – distributed capture is one of the easiest ROIs to demonstrate.  It means thinking beyond static scanning and archiving and thinking and the capture process and extracting information from paper.  Whenever we do a capture survey, I am usually surprised at two things:  1) how high the perceived ROI is for those who push information extraction and automation technologies like OCR and ICR and OMR and barcoding; and 2) how few organizations that are ALREADY doing scanning take advantage of these technologies.

#10 – KEEP DIGITAL WHAT IS ALREADY DIGITAL.  There is interesting research by IBM that focuses on the tendency of organizations to convert information that is ALREADY IN AN ECM SYSTEM to paper and then weave the paper back into their processes.  And then push the paper back into file cabinets.  And then – you guessed it – ship it off to box storage.  Don’t do this.  In even simpler terms, think about the signature component of your documents – is this automated an inherent to the digital document, or do you print something out in order to sign it.  Don’t do this, either.

So these are just my ten.  I will try to resist the Moses-like impulse to throw the these commandments down on the floor and smash them to smithereens when I get off this airplane and go back to AIIM HQ tomorrow and find that we are still manually processing expense reports.

And don't forget...

• 10 Fast Facts About Document Management
• 8 things to watch for in the coming recession
• SharePoint Déjà Vu – 4 Observations

How does your organization stack up?

Do you have an ECM solution in place? Is it working at peak performance? How would you know? Perhaps you have an imaging system in place and are thinking about expanding it to the broader ECM environment and you would like to know what others have done as a benchmark, before you move forward. Until now, it might have been a challenge to get this information. Information that is vital to your ongoing success in the use of ECM and continuous effort to make it better.

This coming Wednesday, October 29, 2008 from 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM, AIIM in partnership with Doculabs is hosting a webinar entitled "Improving the use of ECM via Peer-group Benchmarking" with a focus on ECM Application Delivery, Compliance and E-Discovery Readiness, Capture Capabilities and Unit costs enhanced by discussions about Best Practices from Wachovia, Conseco and Fidelity.

In addition, Doculabs and AIIM will provide an overview of a new industry peer group benchmarking assessment service they are launching this fall to assist organizations with improving their ECM operations.

10 Fast Facts About Document Management

Pam Doyle’s (Pam is from Fujitsu’s scanner group and a long-time AIIM ECM and ERM trainer) presentation at the AIIM road show in Chicago contained some “fast facts” about document management that I thought worth repeating.  I thought these reminders of DM value were particularly relevant given the coming tightening of IT resources:

1. Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
2. 7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
3. Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.
4. The average document photocopied 19 times.
5. There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
6. Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.
7. Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).
8. A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.
9. The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.
10. The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).

8 things to watch for in the coming recession

Like many of you, I am right now trying to figure out the impact of the mess of the past month on my budget plans for AIIM for next year. 

I’ve spoken to a number of executives in the industry and we’ve also done a quick survey of some end users and suppliers, and I thought I would share my observations from these.

Alert readers should be cautioned that I am known among our friends as one of the worst stock market prognosticators ever.  I very seldom change my 401-k allocations, but on the rare opportunities that I do, I have been encouraged by friends to send out an alert so that they may immediately do exactly the opposite.
So here are my 8 things to watch for in the coming recession relative to our industry. 

What are you seeing?  Why not post a comment?  Data below refers to a "spot" survey I did last week of ECM users and vendors.  To get a copy, .

#1 – Process automation (especially designed to replace lost workers) sells well during a recession.  Our industry has the tools to help end users do more with less.  Even with this, 25% of end users (N=108) see their spending on document, content, records, and business process technologies decreasing next year.  New initiatives are particularly at risk.  Suppliers still seem optimistic, with 65% (N=60) still forecasting increased revenues for 2009.  Gartner has cut back forecast for 2009 IT spending growth from 5.8% to 2.3%.

#2 – Quick and hard-edged ROI is king.  For 42% of end users, hard dollar savings are “more important” or “much more important” than 12 months ago. In this environment, massive implementations won’t get done.  Nimbleness and quick implementations will be the order of the day.

#3 – Customer loyalty trumps customer satisfaction. Most everyone measures some form of customer satisfaction.  In the coming environment, that won’t be enough to get projects through.  The suppliers that will come through these challenging times intact will be those whose customers are zealots for them.

#4 – Industries are not homogenous.  Even within an industry as troubled as banking and financial services, there will be a lot of variation when it comes to IT spending.  Consider a credit union that may have come through the past month relatively intact.  Their approach to new IT spending in 2009 is likely to be very different from a “government-owned” bank that has acquired a variety on unstable properties with disparate IT systems that must now be rationalized.

#5 – Good news/bad news for the channel.  First the good news.  In the environment described in #2, applications and vertical domain expertise are also king.  Read this as good news for system integrators and VARs who have their act together and have used the last few years of good time to finely hone their focus.  There is also potential good news for service bureaus and outsourcers in the coming tight times.  Tight times mean staff is scarce which spells outsourcing opportunities.

#6 – Good news/bad news for the channel.  Now the bad news. Go to almost any partner conference in our industry and you will hear that 20% of their channel delivers 80% of their sales for just about any supplier.  Recessions are when marginal resellers and integrators are squeezed, and this one will be no exception.  What will be different this time is that marginal companies will not only be squeezed on the top line – revenues – they will also be squeezed by their creditors.  All that fine print in loan and contractual terms will become bold print and actionable.

#7 – High ticket items likely to be postponed.  Among end users with 100 or more employees, there does seem to be a tightening in anticipated spending for high ticket items relative to last year.  While the samples are not exactly the same (the sample for my “spot” 2009 vs. 2008 survey was drawn from those who responded to the previous 2008 vs. 2007 survey), the demographics are very similar.

#8 – Marketing funds will tighten.  This always happens in recessions.  It doesn’t seem to make sense – why cut marketing funds when business is slow? – but it happens anyway.  There is already a long-term movement underway to focus more resource on a company’s OWN activities (if you haven’t gotten a copy of our 2008 marketing benchmark survey, email me ), and this will accelerate.  Among those spending money on a particular marketing activity, here are the percentages of suppliers who say they will DECREASE their spending in 2009 in response to conditions this year:

• Yellow page advertising = 35% will decrease spending
• Large horizontal trade shows (other than AIIM On Demand) = 32%
• Print advertising = 30%
• Local IT events = 28%
• Vertical events = 28%
• AIIM On Demand Show = 20%
• Market research = 16%
• Blogs = 12%
• Staff training = 12%
• Industry web sites = 10%
• Podcasts = 9%

The winners in this mix?  Blogs (39% will INCREASE spending), Staff training (35%), industry web sites (31%) and vertical events (30%).

SharePoint Déjà Vu – 4 Observations

At last week's AIIM Road Show in Chicago (focused on the theme – Automating Document-Centric Processes: Is SharePoint Enough), I found myself listening to the presentations and reflecting on how the perception of the elephant in the room has changed from about a year ago. 

Observation number 1.  SharePoint DOES represent something unprecedented in this marketplace.  Any product that sells over $1B in a year must be thought of differently than what went before.  Some suppliers love that we have been trying to educate people on how to keep their viral SharePoint deployments from becoming the next decade’s on steroids.  Some hate it.  Last year, the traditional ECM guys were talking about SharePoint vs. ECM and how “they [SharePoint]” aren’t “us” [ECM].  Now the predominant approach is acknowledgment and coexistence and leverage of SharePoint.

Observation number 2.  Listening to SharePoint presentations a year ago one got the impression that it could do ANYTHING.  It could slice -- it could dice -- it could shred – it was the “Magic Bullet” of content management. Most SharePoint presentations talking about the traditional ECM players seemed to carry the underlying impression that “we” [SharePoint] aren’t “them” [ECM].  A lot of the tone has changed, even from Microsoft. There is an acknowledgment that life (and user needs) are perhaps a bit more complicated than initially presented.

Observation number 3.  I think a key thing transforming this marketplace is the perception by IT people that no one will get fired for recommending SharePoint.  I have heard this observation a number of times.  Like most generalizations, it is not completely true, but there IS a strong element of truth to it.  In a time where IT investment resources are rapidly drying up, SharePoint is the low risk decision for many organizations wanting to do SOMETHING about their documents.  It does not matter whether it is the OPTIMAL choice.  Risk minimization is a pretty strong driver in the current climate.

Observation number 4.   I am convinced that in the end analysis, “the elephant” is not really SharePoint.  I think “the elephant” is really the “mainstreaming” of this industry -- the drive of content, document and records management to the desktop and the drive of these technologies into the mid-sized market.  SharePoint is a big part of this drive, but it is not the only part.  The drive of the IT infrastructure players to either enter or expand their presence in this market (and the resulting consolidation) is reflective of this movement of ECM technologies into the mainstream.  The greater attention being paid to ECM by the big consulting guns and the services arms of the infrastructure players is reflective of this.  So too is the emergence of credible open source players like Alfresco. 

A company that I think does great work is Xplane. 

Xplane's speciality is taking complex topics and turning them into comprehensible stories.

Their latest example is on this whole financial mess.

Check it out HERE.  I'm not enough of a financial expert to know if it is 100% correct, but it sure is comprehensible.

 

I just got off the phone with a company that I pay about $4,000 per year to.  It is my fabulous cell phone service provider.  I will keep their identify secret, but it does have a three letter name.

Here's my issue.   I am going to the UK.  The last time I went to Europe with my iPhone I discovered that after following their instructions about turning data roaming off when traveling overseas, I was nonetheless billed $800.  I called to complain and tell them I wasn't paying and they said I should have gotten an "international" data plan.  I said I never needed that before when traveling extensively overseas and they said you do now but they didn't know why.  They said the next time I travel internationally to make sure I switch to an international data plan before I leave.

So I went to the web site tonight to do so and of course that can't be transacted over the web.

They made me wait for 20 minutes during the "high volume" time of 8:00 pm to 8:20 pm.  I received many pitches for additional services.

Someone finally answered.  I told them of my previous interactions.  They said they needed to call me back on a regular phone so that we could adjust the settings on my iPhone.  When they called back, they said I needed to turn off the data roaming while overseas.  I said I already know that, I need some sot of international data plan. 

You guessed it, "Could you hold while I connect you to someone who can help you with this?"

My international "data plan specialist" told me that yes I needed an international data plan.  My options were $24.99 for 20MB, tiering up to $199.99 for a plan that I think was for a gazillion MB.  She asked me which one I wanted.  I said, I have no idea, how much data do people usually use?

We settled on the 20MB plan for no discernible reason.

Did I mention that I pay this company over $4,000 per year?  Did I mention that I won't say their name, but it has three letters?

I will admit that I am in a very bad mood due to the stock market situation.

On the other hand, the Washington Redskins are 4-1 and playing the Rams this weekend.

As I hear from end users and vendors in the aftermath of the past week, one thing seems clear as we look to next year -- more than ever before the "business" decision-maker (vs. the "IT" decision-maker) is going to be of increasing importance.

IT is so ingrained in so many core processes that it is going to be difficult for companies to simply cut it across the board as they might have during previous contractions.  A recent McKinsey report (Managing IT in a Downturn:  Beyond Cost Cutting) captures this well I think...

IT has come a long way over the past decade. Budgets grew rapidly during the dot-com boom and the run-up to Y2K, then declined drastically when the bubble burst. Over the following years, CIOs, working with business unit leaders, improved the performance of IT departments by streamlining application portfolios, reducing infrastructure costs, improving governance, consolidating vendors, and outsourcing many activities.

Much has changed across the business landscape as well. Technology now meshes tightly with operations in ways that weren’t possible a decade ago; the apparel maker Li & Fung, for instance, uses IT to manage supply chains with a network of over 7,500 different suppliers. At the same time, e-business, once a buzzword, now forms a part of the corporate status quo. IT capabilities have fostered new sales channels, defined new customer segments, and even helped create new business models.

These factors make reductions in IT spending more complicated than ever. Simplistic cuts, applied across the board, may endanger critical business priorities from sales support to customer service. That potent message should resonate even among corporate officers anxious to find quick savings.

What do you see on the horizon for the content, document, and records management industry next year?

In the short-term, there will certainly be pressure on suppliers who have focused on the insurance, banking, and financial services industries (i.e., most everybody).  Not only will there be less IT spending, but there will simply be fewer customers to go around.  In this environment, customer loyalty to particular vendors (as opposed to mere customer satisfaction) will be increasingly important in getting new or enhanced projects approved.

Downstream, no matter who wins the presidential election (and if I may be forgiven an editorial comment, were either of the candidates in the same universe last night as we all are living in?  The least they both could do is stop using year-old talking points in a world that has been turned on its head since last year... OK, I've vented...) I think there will undoubtedly be another round of calls for regulation and process control and transparency and documentation similar to what we saw in the aftermath of the Enron debacle (i.e., SarBox and its descendants).  But similar to the SarBox wave, I think it will take a while for this to move through organizations, and will likely be at least until 2010 before it manifests itself in IT spending to achieve these objectives.

What do you see out there?  How do you see the events of the last few weeks affecting your company's IT investment priorities?  Why not post a comment?