This morning I inadvertently recently conducted an experiment in ECM industry terminology. [Note: Many of you know that this has been an issue on my mind of late (see Would an ECM Rose by Any Other Name Still Be This Confusing?)]
I use Tweetdeck.
I have one column that utilizes this search string -- #ECM OR #ERM OR #WCM OR #E20 OR #KM. I have a second column that uses this search string -- #sharepoint.
This morning I discovered that Tweetdeck allows you to mark everything in a column as "read" and has another button that allows you to only show "unread" tweets. Before discovering this, everything in both columns was just a long listing of the 200 (I think) most recent tweets.
[Note: I know many of you undoubtedly discovered this ages ago, but I am one of those people who never reads manuals or instructions or readme files and just stumbles upon things. My wife will confirm this in a variety of contexts.]
So, the net/net is I didn't realize it, but I had set up a bit of a horse race. My race began at 11:14 a.m. eastern time as I set everything to "read" and clicked "show me only unread" and then went off to do that "manage by walking around" thing. I came back a few minutes ago (about an hour) and here is what was in my columns.
4 total tweets = #ECM OR #ERM OR #WCM OR #E20 OR #KM
34 total tweets = #sharepoint
Hmmmmm.
Now I know this is a totally frivolous test. And I know that a lot of tweets under #sharepoint are developers and those under the industry hash-tags tend to be company marketing types and consultants and analysts.
But that doesn't diminish the fact that there sure are some interesting vectors at work in our industry these days and they are about to get more intense with the May release of SharePoint 2010. There are fundamental forces at work changing the way organizations use, consume, control and share information, and these are reflected in the changing alignment of the players who deliver solutions.
At the core of this transformation is a broadening of the primary organizing principle of the content space -- from a focus on mission-critical document-centric processes (mostly in larger organizations) to a broader focus on knowledge worker productivity.
The content management "sweet spot" has shifted to knowledge worker productivity. Social and technology forces are driving this focus, but so too is simple economics in an economy that will be tight for the foreseeable future. There are far more knowledge workers in organizations than what we have typically thought of as "document or records practitioners." Hence modest knowledge worker productivity gains are highly leveraged in most organizations.
Like it or not, SharePoint has tapped this vein.
With the release SharePoint 2010 (the 3rd major release in this series, due May 12), the already significant adoption rates initiated with MOSS will escalate. Pressure will rise in organizations to define SharePoint as the default ECM platform. There are a lot of powerful forces in play right now on that issue and the stakes are significant. As Seth Godin noted in a recent post, "When the platform changes, the leaders change."
So what will be the impact of all of this? A few things come to mind...
- The pool of solution providers building applications upon SharePoint will expand dramatically and awareness of content and document management solutions will increase.
- The other ECM platform vendors will both resist and support the SharePoint onslaught. They will simultaneously offer solutions to manage the ever-increasing volumes of SharePoint content and focus on capabilities that are perceived as soft spots in SharePoint.
- SharePoint "reactions" in organizations will intensify as awareness of its complexity and actual cost grows.
- Business users will realize that SharePoint is a platform upon which applications must be built rather than an out of the box application. They will begin to understand that automating business processes is a more complicated undertaking than replacing fileshares.
- Concerns will grow in large organizations about the long-term implications of reliance on single technology stacks (anybody's stack). They will seek to hedge the infrastructure bets they have made and are making.
What do you think? Post a comment and join the conversation.
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In case you missed it...
I recently gathered some of the guest posts on this blog (people far smarter than me) on SharePoint into an uber e-book -- 8 Things You Always Wanted to Know About SharePoint -- But Were Afraid to Ask. Check it out. Free.
You also might be interested in a new course we are developing related to the role of SharePoint in an overall information ecosystem.
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