Digital Landfill: e20

January 21, 2013

C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT (#CoIT)

Sometimes, buzzwords really ARE changing the world.

The phrase “consumerization of IT” refers to the ubiquitous reality that the technology available OUTSIDE the enterprise is perceived as being more sophisticated, more user-friendly, delivered in a quicker time frame, and lower-cost than the technology INSIDE of the enterprise.

Authored by futurist Thornton May in collaboration with AIIM's Executive Leadership Council, this prescriptive work suggests that the consumerization phenomenon should not be micromanaged as an administrative hassle associated with controlling/slowing the explosion of devices emanating from the vast, fast and global consumer electronics industry. Nor is consumerization merely a question of determining policies for allowing/denying access to an exponentially growing SOMOCLO (social, local, mobile, cloud) application set.

Here's the link to the white paper...HERE.

And here's a link to a SlideShare version...

from

Posted at 10:20 AM in 8 things, e20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: AIIM, consumerization, ECM.Social, IT, Local, Mobile

January 02, 2013

December 05, 2012

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

OK. We all swore on Election Day that we didn't want to hear one more word about anything to do with the Presidential election. Living in a swing state (Virgina), we were treated to an endless onslaught of horrendous negative ads from both candidates, plus at least 5-10 robo calls per day. The calls were not lost on kids as young as first graders. A friend of ours who teaches first grade reported that a student came in one morning, very excited, and reported, "Ms. Willis, you won't believe it. We got a personal phone call at home last night from BOTH Mitt Romney and Barack Obama."

There is a story, though, that still needs more coverage. And that story is the role that technology played in the election. More specifically, how social technologies, big data, text analytics, and the integration of all of the above with plain old feet on the ground impacted the election.

One thing is clear regardless of political preference, the Obama folks ("Operation Narwhal") outplayed the Romney folks ("Project Orca"). Per Jed Wylie, couple of data points to consider:

Obama – 33 million Facebook likes and 23 million Twitter followers.
Romney – 12 million Facebook likes and 1.7 million Twitter followers.
Obama ran an email marketing campaign which had a list of 13 million highly targeted people on it. He emailed 20 times more than Romney and his open rate was 10.7% as compared to Romney’s 6.4%.

But the story goes beyond this. The full story includes the marriage of analytics, email marketing, social presence, and execution in the field via mobile technologies. I should also say that this post is NOT intended as a political post, but as a TECHNOLOGY post. Friends that know me know that I have THE most dysfunctional and schizophrenic presidential voting history imaginable. [Hint: I voted for John Anderson in 1980.]

Last week, AIIM's Executive Leadership Council enjoyed presentations focused on Big Data, and more specifically, the intersection between execution and analytics. These presentations (along with a previous set in Europe), will be the basis for a white paper early next year. (Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.)

All this Big Data talk got me interested in finding more about what actually went on in the Presidential election. Here are few of the best stories I have found. Enjoy. If I've missed a good article, post the link in the comments and I'll add it to the original post.

The Narwhal and the Orca - O'Reilly Radar -- 11/26/12

Best line: "If you follow technology, you don’t have to read between the lines much to realize that Narwhal embodied the best of the DevOps movement: rapid iteration, minimal barriers between developers and operations staff, heavy use of “cloud” technology, and constant testing to prove that you can handle outages and heavy load. In contrast, Romney’s Orca was a traditional corporate IT project gone bad."

When the Nerds Go Marching In -- The Atlantic -- 11/16/12

This article by Alexis Madrigal is the most detailed analysis I've seen of the Obama efforts.

Best line: "Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine."

ORCA, meet Narwhal. This is how it's done. | RedState -- 11/9/12

Best line: "The Democrats’ Operation Narwhal had fields offices and volunteers locally in each of the 50 states. While many Republicans laughed at the Obama Event Registry, and “Have dinner with Michelle and Barack,” the Democrats were collecting email addresses and demographic data so that they could target people with specific emails on specific issues. On election day, they turned out the vote. And the Republicans, we got ORCA. Beaten and eaten by a grown-up Flipper."

Obama’s White Whale -- How the campaign’s top-secret project Narwhal could change this race, and many to come -- The Slate -- 2/15/12

Note the date on this post. Sasha Issenberg wins my "pre-cog" (for Phillip Dick fans) award.

Best line: "This year...as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obama’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obama’s views on the issue. From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did...This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizen—the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteer—into a single, unified political profile."

The day a Narwhal killed an Orca -- 11/9/2012

This piece is by a Republican poll watcher and describes the problems experienced in the field by those trying to use Orca.

Best line: "In theory, on Election Day we would be using using tactical nukes against Narwhal's ground troops. They would never know what hit them. In practice - as first tries of technologically complicated systems usually are - Orca was a disaster."

Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics -- ProPublica -- 11/29/12

Good background on the integration of public consumer behavior databases with voting records.

Best line: "To pinpoint voters who might actually change their minds, the Obama campaign conducted randomized experiments, Slaby said. Voters received phone calls in which they were asked to rate their support for the president, and then engaged in a conversation about different policy issues. At the end of the conversation, they were asked to rate their support for the president again. Using the results of these experiments, combined with detailed demographic information about individual voters, the campaign was able to pinpoint both what kinds of voters had been persuaded to support the president, and which issues had persuaded them."

-- 11/12/2012

Article is by Marc A. Thiessen from the American Enterprise Institute

Best line: "How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?...In the coming months, Republicans will spend a lot of time studying why they lost and debating whether they should reposition themselves on issues like immigration. Those are discussions worth having. But they won’t matter one iota if the GOP can’t find a way to join the Democrats in the information age. In 2012, the Republicans were like a bag phone to Obama’s iPhone — when they needed to be a Samsung."

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win -- 11/7/12

Best line: "But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. 'We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,' he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official 'chief scientist' for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions."

Under the Hood of Team Obama's Tech Operation -- Mother Jones -- 11/15/12

Best line: "Using digital analytics, Team Obama was likewise able to squeeze every last cent out of supporters in ways unimaginable only four years ago. In 2008, with the help of a Google alum named Dan Siroker, the campaign had begun using A/B testing—sending variations of an email or a web page to different groups of people to measure the relative effectiveness of each. In the latest election cycle, that ethos extended to pretty much everything the campaign did, from fundraising emails (sent out in 26 varieties and then analyzed for patterns) to the online donation landing page. By turning its donation process into four steps instead of a single long form, the campaign boosted fundraising from its donations page by 15 percent."

Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight blog has a host of data-centric posts on politics. Worth looking at.

-----

Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.

Posted at 12:14 PM in certified information professional, e20 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: elections, Narwhal, Obama, Orca, Romney

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

[Note: We will be doing a webinar on this topic, primarily for NA and SA audiences given the time of day, on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 pm Eastern time. We'll be doing a second webinar, at a time more convenient for European audiences at 2 pm British time on Thursday the 13th.]

As many readers know, about two years ago a Task Force of AIIM members worked with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm, among many titles) to build out a "future history" of the content industry. The intention was to think about how enterprise information technology was changing in the wake of the influx of consumer technologies. (See Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT.)

The core "story" went something like this...

Organizations spent much of the past 3 decades building out "Systems of Record."

Technologies evolved a great deal during this first phase -- from mainframes to minis to PCs to the internet -- as did the core objects being managed -- from financials to department processes to documents to web pages. However, at the core of this migration was a continuing focus on building Systems of Record to document who did what to whom, when, and in what context. The transitions looked something like this:

In this world, IT was at the center of deploying enterprise systems, and innovation tended to flow down from large organizations, eventually reaching consumers.

Using another Geoff Moore diagram from , during this period the Content Management business was very much a "complex systems business," operating on the left "hump" of the diagram below, focused on relatively few customers, dealing with complicated and mission-critical business processes.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) in 2007, and the industry began to change. The left "hump" started to shift to the right. Price points began to change as "content management" became an increasing part of the core infrastructure of the organization. Large vendors from the world of complex content management systems initially dismissed SharePoint as "not really ECM" and then struggled to find their role relative to SharePoint as the SharePoint wave intensified. In addition, a host of new enterprise players emerged, built upon a pay-as-you-go SaaS model, led most notably by Salesforce.com.

Meanwhile, back in the bigger IT market, another revolution was brewing.

Over the past 5 years, consumer technologies have taken center stage relative to innovation and migrated into the enterprise, with far-reaching implications for how organizations use and deploy technology. These new technologies focus on interactions and conversations rather documents and records and on Systems of Engagement rather than Systems of Record.

So after a long period in which there really was no "consumer" play in the document/content space (the right volume operations "hump" in Geoff's business architecture model), suddenly one appeared. The focus was not traditional transactionally focused content management, but rather the provision of previously unavailable information management tools for the individual, built upon social and mobile technologies and optimized for the cloud. These were companies with freemium to premium models like Box, Google, Evernote, DropBox, FilesAnywhere, and Yammer.

These new volume operations players had a very different financial model than those from the complex systems world. Per Michael Moon from gistics.com, complex systems players focus on making their money on capital expenditures and professional services, with most of the money captured in the early stages of a project -- it is not unusual for 70% of the total revenues for a project to the captured before implementation even occurs. On the flip side, Systems of Engagement (and the mobile devices that go with them) are brought into the enterprise by the business rather than IT, and with far simpler pricing and deployment models. The models typically focus on operating expenditures and capturing the majority of revenues after implementation via an annuity stream.

Initially, IT organizations responded to this dichtonomy by either: 1) denying the problem existed (kind of an IT policy re the Dropboxes of the world of "Don't ask, Don't tell); 2) mounting massive resistance and opposition to these tools; 3) allowing adoption, but assuming they would someday get around to the question of integration with existing Systems of Record; and/or 4) some combination of the above.

So the question for this blog post is: What comes next? What are the next chapters in the story of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.

We spent some time at the AIIM Board meeting last week exploring this topic, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts.

The complete story of the next phase in our future isn't written yet, but I would offer that it will center around the "controlled collision" between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement and will include some version of the following 10 elements:

CIOs are beginning to adopt mobile-first and cloud-first strategies for new applications, especially for customer-facing applications, changing the traditional development process.
The key to understanding the future role of social technologies in the enterprise is that they will increasingly: 1) be a feature of Systems of Record, not a separate system; 2) either become integrated into core business processes (i.e., the honeymoon period of "social for social's sake" is over) or decline in importance; and 3) ultimately converge with email into a single system.
Via migrations from the "right hump," core document and collaboration technologies are now becoming available via the cloud to a host of organizations that heretofore relied on a chaotic mess of file shares. The trick will be to avoid simply taking c drive and file share digital landfills and moving them to the cloud.
True document collaboration (vs. either the poor Word "Track Changes" approach or the chaotic, little editorial control Google Docs approach) will become increasingly important.
Effective adoption of social technologies is not just a function of turning them on. Defining use cases, outlining expected behaviors within these use cases, and effectively managing change have just as much to do with success as the technology (check Social in the Flow for details).
The "we will never put important information in the cloud" and "we must choose between the cloud and on-prem" militancy is evolving into an awareness that the future lies in a hybrid environment in which information is managed across a continuum of platforms and devices.
The concept of synching from the early days of email (remember when we needed to actively manage what we did in email when "connected" and when we were not?) will become increasingly important in thinking about the cloud. As organizations think about strategies that integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement, that link Saas enterprise applications like Salesforce.com to behind the firewall information repositories, and that allow for responsible deployment of social and BYOD technologies, the cloud will increasingly become the "place" in which synching occurs, with ultimate control by the System of Record.
In our desire to reassert control, we need to remember than the needs of the business to get things done will always trump our corporate need for control.
The Chief Marketing Officer will own more and more elements of the "controlled collision" and will be increasingly important in the intersection between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.
The SoR and SoE "collision" places an increasing premium on those who have skills to help manage this collision and understand the full picture, namely Information Professionals.

What do you think? What comes next in the "story?" Post a comment and let me know.

-----

Might be of interest...

Posted at 08:01 AM in 8 things, certified information professional, Compliance and records management, e20, Industry statistics and research, information certification | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

March 15, 2012

Big Data and Big Content - just hype or a real opportunity?

I've been thinking about the question of the relationship of content and unstructured information to the seemingly never-ending parade of articles about Big Data. There is a certain element to this thinking that frankly is opportunistic, finding me thinking, "Hey, if EVERYONE is going to talk about Big Data, I want a piece of that." But there is also the stubborn reality that unstructured information is the red-headed stepchild of the Big Data equation - and the source of so much untapped value and intelligence in organizations. And our community - users, solution providers and consultants - knows something about this whole messy question of unstructured information.

I think understanding our role begins with some of the work we have done relative to Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement. Yuchon Lee, a VP with IBM, described the relationship this way...

For the past decade, companies have been accumulating data in what we call a system of record. Those who survive going forward will also have systems of engagement, which start with evaluating how you can have a relevant conversation with each individual customer across all channels. And insuring you have the analytical capability and the data to support that analysis. That is where the linkage is between the system of record data to system of engagement. On the technology side, we believe the future of handling this volume lies in leveraging the capability of the cloud. A lot of the analysis is done behind a firewall, but the analysis, platform and architecture is really a hybrid. That is how you solve the problem and get the most value out of the data.

This leads then to the kinds of business applications that are dramatically changed - or even made feasible - by tapping into the power of aggregating and interpreting large volumes of information. I like this list, which comes in part from Cloudera. All of these are applications with a fairly high connection to the land of Systems of Engagement - but are improved by tapping into the information - especially unstrutured - hidden away in the land of Systems of Record.

Modeling risk and failure prediction
Analyzing customer churn
Web recommendations (ala Amazon)
Web ad targeting
Point of sale transaction analysis
Threat analysis
Compliance and search effectiveness

So, I decided to try and get my thinking about the connections between Big Content and Big Data onto one slide. Here it is...

Here's how to walk through my little chart by the numbers...

1 -- We have spent the past few decades focused on bringing information with a high “value-density” under management. I saw this notion of high-value information first in some good work done by Freeform Dynamics. Translating this concept into my Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement framework, the systems that we have deployed until know have largely centered around trying to identify, store, preserve, and act upon information that has intrinsic value, usually directly in the context of business process.

2-We have done a better job of managing this high-value Systems of Record information on the structured side than on the unstructured side. This is not only in terms of the % of information under some sort of governance (think of our usual lament that 80% of the information in an organization is unstructured, and most of this in unmanaged), but also in terms of the lack of tools to actively interpret and mine all of this unstructured information in any meaningful way.

3-Systems of Engagement are generating massive volumes of new structured and unstructured information. Per Fortune, by 2020, Internet connected devices will grow from 400 million today to 50 billion. These devices will be talking to each other and to the Internet. By 2020, it is also predicted that our smart phones will have the capability of storing and accessing as much information as IBM’s Watson and super-computers can. The core difference between this "low-value-density" information and all of the high-value information in Systems of Record is that this new information tends to have value in the aggregate or as it is interpreted rather than intrinsinctly. In other words, it is easy to see the value in storing a document or a piece of data that documents a specific transaction or process. It is more difficult - and it has been too expensive in the past - to do so with vast quantities of digital flotsam and jetsam that has value only as it is aggregated and analyzed.

4-Cloud technologies such as HADOOP and NoSQL have dramatically changed the cost of analyzing large volumes of information, making analysis of large amounts this information affordable for first time.

5-Advances in semantics, search, content and text analytics, and print stream analytics are now making analysis of large amounts of information practical for first time - especially all of that unstructured information hidden away in digital landfills. In addition, for the first time, natural language processing and visualization techologies are moving the analysis of all of this data and information from technical back rooms and into the executive suite (to help solve the vexing business problems listed above).

6-Lastly, the opportunity that exists now - as reflected in the opening IBM quote - is the marriage of the cloud technologies that are making large scale information analysis affordable for the first time with new analytic and reporting technologies that are making all of this information comprehensible for the first time. A marriage with rich opportunities to move the management of large aggregations from a pure cost calculus (whether hard dollars or risk-based) to one that is balanced by the potential value hidden away in digital landfills.

We're going to spend a bit of time this year exploring this calculus. Here are a few of the programs we have planned. If any of them have interest to you - whether on the user side or as a potential sponsor - send me an email or a direct tweet (jmancini77) and we'll talk.

AIIM Industry Watch -- Big Data and Big Content

Late May publish; survey to go live the first week of April.
Those who commit to sponsoring by the end of March can see the draft questions and weigh in.

AIIM Webinars

Archiving & Governance in the Big Data Era, April 11
Big Data/Big Content (based on survey), June 20

Executive Leadership Council -- Understanding Big Data and its Impact on Buyer Behavior

London, Sept 6 - 7 for the European Council
Dallas, Nov 29 - 30 for the American Council
White paper and all deliverables extensively distributed

View more presentations from

-----

A couple of posts you may have missed...

Our inspiration for the CIP videos - The Khan Academy

For a Friday afternoon - 24 Cool Things I Read or Heard this week...

The future of work in a time of radical technology disruption

The 6 imperatives facing information professionals

Posted at 09:02 PM in certified information professional, e20, Industry statistics and research, information certification | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

March 09, 2012

For a Friday afternoon - 24 Cool Things I Read or Heard this week...

Just because it's a Friday...

The . It's easy to be cynical about this, but I think it's great.
Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than all the Macs sold it in 28 years
The Social Workplace (http://www.thesocialworkplace.com/) is a really good source of stats on employee engagement.
The Digital Brand Marketing website is good source for social engagement stats.
There are lots of good stats at StatSpotting.com (http://statspotting.com/) - per Einstein, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
Why We Use Social Media in Our Personal Lives — But Not for Work
Tablet Adoption at Work
In the "no wonder the telecom guys are trying to find new ways to extract money from us" category, new estimates from Ovum indicate that consumers’ increasing use of IP-based social messaging services on their smartphones cost telecom operators $8.7bn in lost SMS revenues in 2010, and $13.9bn in 2011. That's billion with a b.
From Race Against the Machine (by Erik Brynjolfsson () and Andrew McAfee ()) - http://raceagainstthemachine.com/ - and worth pondering by our knucklehead politicians of both stripes - "There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress."
Heard from an executive from TekStream Solutions at an AIIM/Oracle lunch seminar on social technologies…After 10 years of ECM, this is pretty succinct: Content should have... 1) a purpose - 2) a home - 3) a defined life span - 4) an audience - 5) a vhttp://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/1454932131001enue - 6) a target
From Abraham Lincoln on innovation (the only US President, BTW, to hold a patent, for a device for lifting boats over shoals) -- it struck a chord with me as we think about the consumerization of enterprise technologies and the impact of consumer assumptions (toys) on enterprise systems (machinery): ".…as much as two thousand years ago the power of steam was not only observed, but an ingenious toy was actually made and put in motion by it, at Alexandria in Egypt. What appears strange is, that neither the inventor of the toy, nor any one else, for so long a time afterwards, should perceive that steam would move useful machinery as well as a toy."
MIT has launched its first free course (Circuits and Electronics, based on the campus-based course of the same name) that can be studied and assessed completely on-line - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17012968.
Here’s Where the Word Luddite Really Comes From
The new iPad has CIOs quaking in their cubicles
Big data budgets on the rise
Cool McKinsey infographic on impact of big data in different industries.
Interesting web site in David Weinberger's cool new book, Too Big to Know - Hunch.com
The Vocre translation app -- spotted by my colleague Atle
Heard Jim Freeland from Medtronic talk about what they've done with iPads. This is not intended as an Oracle commercial, but it's a sweet application.
52% of young professionals believe that they are not responsible for securing their work devices and data -- service providers and IT are. 15% of young professionals have had their mobile phone, laptop or other devices stolen in the past 12 months. 30% have experienced identity theft at least once. OK, this is from my own blog post on the future of work, but I'm still shaking my head over this data point.
Speaking of that post, the original Cisco report from which some of the data comes is terrific for anyone who cares about mobile and social in the workplace. Ditto the Gallup report I mentioned if you care about employee engagement.
We sold out the brand spanking new AIIM Conference in San Francisco. Sorry we didn't make it bigger for those who are boxed out (we risk bumping against the Fire Marshall if we push things much further), but wait till next year...announcement to come soon...
We just published a new white paper on The Rise of The Information Professional. Get it and pass the link around. And congrats to the brand new crop of Certified Information Professionals from this week. I'd post your names, but I don't know if I'm allowed and don't want to get myself in trouble with the Data Protection authorities. Claim credit in the comments.
The most popular expert blog posts Triple Crown from February - #1) Dave Martin's (from OpenText) Welcome to the Club SharePoint (Club ECM), #2) Carrying Out A Records Inventory from AIIM's own Carl Weise (and on ERM to boot!), and #3) from Mark Owen, EDM Specialist/Business Analyst at A major Pharmaceutical company (must be a secret), How Should a Perfect Search Project Be Run?

----

A note - If you live near Atlanta, Silver Spring (MD), or San Francisco, we have some upcoming in person Electronic Records Management courses coming to your area.

Posted at 03:20 PM in certified information professional, Compliance and records management, e20 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

November 21, 2011

Geoff Moore () and the #ECM coolness factor

I recently blogged on the theme The Cool is Back in ECM, reflecting on my attendance at two widely varying industry events, the Box.Net BoxWorks conference, and IBM's Information on Demand. My conclusion, based on my data point of whether my kids had heard of the entertainment (ECM passed the test this year!) is that the Cool is Back in ECM.

I did find myself after writing that post wondering, "How could both statements -- 'BoxWorks was Cool, IBM IOD was Cool' -- be true within the same content management space?"

I came across this diagram by Geoff Moore in his new book that started me thinking, as Geoff's stuff often does. Good book; get it. (Some of you may remember that Geoff did some work for AIIM last year on Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT.)

Here's the diagram...

So per this diagram, there are two flavors of content solutions, one focused on a sweet spot that is rich in complexity and depth and focused on a finite customer set with enough scale to take advantage of information complexity and deep analytics (e.g., IBM, Oracle, Open Text, EMC). The second is a set of solutions that have been built from the assumption of simplicity and scale and focus on a very broad customer set (e.g., Box, DropBox, SkyDox, Yammer, Google Docs).

And yet even within the dichotomy of this model, there seems to be some nuances and complexities to think about relative to our industry.

The kind of scale represented by volume operations and often introduced via a freemium to premium deployment model offers all sorts of value to small and mid-sized organizations that used to be shut out of the content management solutions space. SharePoint started here, working its way into the enterprise initially as a freebie through IT types. Google Docs did as well, starting with individual consumers. Companies like Box and Yammer started here as well, often with customers in organizations frustrated by the limits of their own IT departments.
But at the same time, the longer term dynamic has gotten progressively more complex. The volume game initially plays out through the prism of the number of customers, and that lends itself well to the freemium-premium model. But the game in our industry ultimately plays out through the number of seats that someone is willing to actually pay for, and the place for that volume to ultimately be found is among the companies who are often customers on the complex systems side of the house. Thus it creates a need for the volume players to connect themselves to the complex systems game.
And if that wasn't complicated enough, the expectations for simplicity and ease of use and ease of implemention in the volume game ultimately carry over into the complex systems game. Driving prices down for users and creating a demand for simplicity.

Gets me a bit dizzy. I guess I should take some comfort in the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." [Note: My wife would likely question both the intelligence part and the ability to function part.]

Posted at 05:23 PM in e20, ecm, Industry statistics and research, social business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 20, 2011

Check out these expert blog posts on #ECM, #ERM, #socbiz, and #SharePoint

Cloudy with a Chance of Success by Chris Walker, Senior Principal Consultant for Oracle Consulting

ERM ECM

This post was inspired by this article on CMSWire by and by the Cloud themed tweet jam hosted by CMSWire on November 17, 2011. As usual this is just my opinion. I’m not an expert... read more

Best Practices for SharePoint Cultural Change Management - From the SharePoint Consulting Trenches by Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO for EPC Group.net

Social Business ERM ECM SharePoint

Introduction I wanted to share with the AIIM Community the overview of a White Paper that myself and my team at EPC Group.net have been working on by studying approximately 35 enterpri... read more

Virtual Chaos by Bob Larrivee, Director/Industry Advisor for AIIM Professional Development Center

Social Business SharePoint ECM

As I attend more virtual events, I have come to the realization that not all organizations and not every individual is meant to do this, or, they need more and better training on how to do it pr... read more

Too Much Too Soon: Incremental Release Of SharePoint Functionality by Nick Inglis SharePoint Program Manager for AIIM

SharePoint

I’ve had a lot of offhand conversation about user adoption of SharePoint lately and what I’ve found is that when companies give all of the functionality of SharePoint at launch they struggle mor... read more

You Can’t Start with SharePoint by Daniel Antion, Vice President Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers

SharePoint ECM

I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of people at the University of Connecticut about ECM and SharePoint. One of the things people tell me that they like about my presentations, an... read more

#CMSAnthems -- A Musical Interlude for Your Day by Bryant Duhon, Editor for AIIM International

ECM

ECM/CMS/WCM/WEM/DM/EDRM/insert favorite acronym here project got you down? Take a break and recharge. Here's the tweet the started it all. Rest are in reverse order. Enjoy pmonks2:09... read more

The Value of Social in the Enterprise by Christian Buckley, Director, Product Evangelism for Axceler

Social Business SharePoint

It's easy to get caught up in the movement toward social applications for the enterprise. End users are driving it. They expect it. So much about the way that we connect, the way we interact wit... read more

Factors that drive solid records management by Johannes Scholtes, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for ZyLAB

ERM Social Business SharePoint

Legal obligation Records retention always carries with it some type of legal obligation, regardless of the type or size of an organization. The de facto standard for how records-retention re... read more

Planning Syndication in SharePoint by Chris Riley, ECMp, IOAp, Product Manager / Product Evangalist for cloudshare

Capture SharePoint ECM

Of all the cool new features in SharePoint, as it relates to Enterprise Content Management, probably the best is the new Content Type Hub feature. In the past managing content types was pain... read more

Posted at 10:16 PM in Compliance and records management, e20, ecm | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

November 17, 2011

Some #social, #local, #mobile presentations you may have missed...

OK, here they are. Check 'em out.

For those whose email servers screen out embedded content, the presentations are first listed as links...(I'll be posting more from my colleagues next week)...As usual, feel free to borrow with attribution...

September 30, 2011

Q3 results are in - Top AIIM expert blog posts and Digital Landfill posts

It's time for the glamour competition among the AIIM expert bloggers and Digital Landill bloggers.

The top 10 posts in the third quarter!

A comment before I trigger a slew of Twitter comments both pro and con about SharePoint.

We (AIIM) don't select the topics.
We (AIIM staff) don't click like maniacs on SharePoint topics while at home at night to try and drive up the traffic.
Yes, I know that the time boundaries do create a bit of a bias for those posts at the beginning of the quarter vs. the end of the quarter.

With those caveats, here are the results...

Here are the top 10 posts for the AIIM Expert bloggers:

And on the Digital Landfill site...

What the hell is Google+? - Here's an answer
8 reasons SharePoint 2010 looks like a true ECM system
5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint
5 myths about records management
5 myths about the paperless office that hinder document management software adoption
5 myths about SharePoint
37 really cool statistics about social media
5 myths about the CMIS standard
6 presentations you should look at if you don't believe that mobile changes everything
8 steps of the ISO/TR 15489 records management methodology

-----

Have you signed up for the new AIIM Conference March 2012 in San Francisco? For solution providers, almost all the premium slots are sold - get moving! For attendees, mark your calendars!

Posted at 04:31 PM in Compliance and records management, e20, ecm, Industry statistics and research, sharepoint, social business | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Digital Landfill

Latest data, trends, and statistics on content management and social business, scanning, BPM, SharePoint and ECM from AIIM President John Mancini -- home of "8 things" and #OccupyIT

Twitter

Become a Fan

Twitter Updates

Recent Comments

About

Archives

Tracking

January 21, 2013

C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT (#CoIT)

January 02, 2013

Top 20 AIIM Expert Blog Posts for 2012

December 05, 2012

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

March 15, 2012

Big Data and Big Content - just hype or a real opportunity?

March 09, 2012

For a Friday afternoon - 24 Cool Things I Read or Heard this week...

November 21, 2011

Geoff Moore () and the #ECM coolness factor

November 20, 2011

Check out these expert blog posts on #ECM, #ERM, #socbiz, and #SharePoint

November 17, 2011

Some #social, #local, #mobile presentations you may have missed...

September 30, 2011

Q3 results are in - Top AIIM expert blog posts and Digital Landfill posts