Well gosh, 15 years sure goes by fast.
It occurs to me that after the last "AIIM" show -- see my previous post -- I had crossed the 15 year mark at AIIM.
Many thanks to all those members, staff, and Board members who made this possible and have been so forgiving of my many mistakes along the way. Given the somewhat tempestuous start -- and a big thank you to Barry Lurie, David Silver, John O'Connell and Peggy Linaugh for the many life preservers to survive those early days -- I never would have thought it possible to make it to 15.
[Note: Warning to newcomers to this industry -- this is a strange and oddly compelling industry from whose orbit it is hard to escape.]
When I came here, Joey and Will were 11 and 8, and Erin was almost 4. Jackie had not even been identified as a future daughter-in-law. I had hair. MG looked the same. Oh my.
As we embark on some exciting new work -- I just got back from a task force meeting headed by Andy McAfee and featuring 17 companies (ABBYY Software USA, Alfresco, Box.net, EvoApp, EMC, Open Text, Hyland Software, IBM, Iron Mountain, Jive Software, Moxie Software, Newsgator, Oracle, PFU Systems, Socialtext, Yammer) -- I can't help but wonder what the future will bring. The Task Force will probe the connections between social technologies and future business processes. It will be fun.
On the other hand, predicting is pretty difficult, especially when it's about the future. As a service to future historians, you will find attached the May 1996 INFORM magazine announcing my appointment.
And offering this prediction (thankfully not from me!) about the industry…
"Despite the euphoria of Internet enthusiasts and the hyped-up selling palaver of some web services providers, we remain uncertain as to the long-run substantive benefits the Internet will bring to businesses and to individual users.…until the webmeisters persuade us otherwise, we'll hang on to our CDs and floppies, along with the aperture cards and other imaging artifacts that have served our corporate and personal purposes so cost-effectively in the past."
As Jerry Garcia might say, what a long, strange trip it's been.
What were you doing in content management 15 years ago? Why not post a comment? Have fun!
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