Digital Landfill

Howdy! Your friendly Infonomics Editor-in-Chief checking back in today, as promised, from the AIIM International Expo + Conference.

 

I must say I was thrilled—and floored—that my boss of bosses, one John Mancini, focused a good deal of his State of the Industry Address this morning (to a standing-room-only crowd) on the cover story of  the March/April issue of Infonomics  magazine (www.infonomicsmag.com).

 

I say that not to brag (well, okay, just a smidge : > ) but to make the case for why you MUST read this magazine if you’re serious at your organization about moving into Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking, Content Management, and all the many things that AIIM is all about.

 

The 6,000 word leviathan is entitled “Barak Obama: How Content Management and Web 2.0 helped Win the White House.” Read it and you’ll come to the inevitable conclusion that yes—without question—it was the Obama campaign’s Web and content management savvy that pushed Obama firmly over the edge on election day.

 

John went over the article in great detail with many specifics culled directly from it. Why am I telling you this? Because here’s the punchline: EVERYTHING that Obama did is available to any enterprise—public or private--today. It’s off the shelf. It’s routine. It’s affordable.

 

That’s the good news.

 

The bad news is that it establishes a new baseline—and it must become be YOUR baseline if your business plans on staying competitive!  Get your people trained now, do the things you know you need to do, and make it happen. “Change before you have to,” in the words of Jack Welch.

 

But there is more good news:  Although the cover story is clearly an article on the nuts and bolts of a political campaign (and politically agnostic, I should point out), it is, oddly enough, a perfect primer for the why and how of the new baseline—for any and all enterprises.

 

Read it and you’ll learn, with great specificity, what the new baseline paradigm is, no matter what line of work you’re in, and you’ll come to understand what you need to do to get there. And it’s not just about technology; you’ll learn new ways of motivating constituents (read: customers) online, as well as clever ways of getting them  to volunteer—cheerfully—their cellphone numbers—so you can text away!

 

There are 5 key takeaways from John’s observations on the Obama campaign:

 

1.     E 2.0 is NOT going away!

 

2.     E 2.0 is  a tool, not a  strategy.

 

3.     It’s STILL marketing!

 

4.     It’s about organizing, not networking.

 

5.     Unconventional content will become an increasingly large part of content management.

 

  That’s it for now. To be continued…

 

Ben Herring, your Infonomics editor-in-chief here, checking out the brain trust and diversity at the AIIM Pre-conference workshops!

 

In the posthumously published memoir of his early years in Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway said he launched his profound career in English literature simply by trying to write “the one truest sentence” that he could.

 

I’ll tell you the one truest statement I can say right now, banging this out in here on my laptop at The City of Brotherly Love, amid paradoxes aplenty. The big paradox: Enterprise 2.0, content management and other information technologies are all about things that you do electronically, collaborating virtually with people and information. So:  Why do we need an in-person meeting? Right? I’ll tell you why -- paraphrasing Papa (although I’m sure this will send him spinning in his grave)—because…and here is my one truest statement …You can’t email a Philly Cheesesteak!

 

And if there were ever a time and a place to say to say to hell with cholesterol and C reactive protein… this is it! And Philly Cheesesteak was indeed the choice of the many folk from around the world who have traveled here to take preconference workshops to achieve Practitioner status in the six core AIIM ECM classes.

 

Lunch was at Philly’s famed open-air Reading Terminal Market, in biz since 1893, which has the ambiance of Washington, D.C.’s Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, or the famed French Market in New Orleans. I opted for the somewhat healthier Chicken Gyro at Kamal’s Middle Eastern Specialty, one of dozens of vendors, but finished it off with fries and a coke in to ensure a sense of immoral parity.    

 

Meanwhile, back at the convention hall ... “Man needs tall buildings that he might grow,” a wise man once said, and that sets the scene here pretty well. It’s a truly gorgeous spring day in Philly, and the massive Pennsylvania Convention Center, with its soaring, multistoried windows and sunsplashed hallways, resembles nothing so much as a 21^st century cathedral.

 

Despite the recession, there is a palpably buoyant spirit in the air, as I meet friendly students like Steve Durham of San Diego County’s Dept. of Env. Health; Chris Petersen of Unisys; Lewis Eisen, an attorney with the Canadian government’s Fisheries and Oceans office; Karl Mayrhofer of Fabasoft in Austria, Dianne Betzinger of ConAgra Foods, or Janne Turunen,  a management consultant from Helsinki, Finland.

 

 I think this takes us to the second whack on the paradox wheel: Neither can you email a handshake-- and people are eager to network, make new friends, and, more than anything, learn. In person.

 

“I’ve got a job that’s made me deal with an e-portal site that had content management problems,” said one student, Lynnette Maldonado of Defense Finance and Account Service in Indianapolis.

 

“Customers couldn’t find data that was posted on the Intranet, and where do you go to get information on how to deal with this? Where else do you go to get all of this in one place? The content management information that AIIM puts out there is really helpful in helping non- technical people like me understand what the issues are and how to attack them. We are just now moving into email records management, and this is giving me the ammunition to bring it up through the management chain to get a decision on policy.“

 

TO BE CONTINUED. . . --Ben