ECM - How much Information?

Note that table above is from the Berkley report. See the end of the article for the URL link.

Well how much information is out there. Berkeley have done some research in 2000 and 2003 to estimate how much information is created each year. Consider just a small sample of the overall facts.

• 1 Gigabyte is a truckload of books. Now think of that little USB stick that you carry around.

The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Wow, talk about the new Gutenberg Press and personal print.

The overall estimate is that we generate 800MB of data / information per person. But hey, I have more disk space than than sitting on my desk right now, in fact 1225MB in total running about 70% used ! So the spread is obviously lumped up in those that have technology access.

The report estimates that in 2003 a total of 2-3 exabytes of information were generated and 5 exabytes were all the words spoken by human beings. Maybe we get to a point of cross over. I hope not because if we stop talking to one another we will lose relevance in meaning and connections.

For the full picture of the research link to the full report and findings below, and finally remember there are some good stats here for your next ECM analysis phase.

http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

ECM Alfresco a customer story

Great to see a customer reference to the implementation of Alfresco for records and document management. I have been following Alfresco for some time now and I came across a set of slides from Islington Council in the UK.

Great to see that Open Source is starting to enter into the traditional ECM Market space, especially around records management. The Jeremy Tuck, Islinton's CIO has a slide deck presentation give a good overview of where they were and where they have got including a high level of the process that they went through. Sure it is high level and you need some solid information management background to fill in the gaps, but he has put in his e-mail address for you to contact him if necessary.

CMS Watch have also put Alfresco into their ECM Suite reports and I find that next to Nuxeo it is one of two potentials if you are looking at Open Source for the technology piece of your ECM solution at a reasonable cost.

But there is a warning here folks, while the community edition is free, if you are looking for scalability or DR facilities then you will need to sign up for a per annum support fee for Alfresco. However this is not a bad option when you consider that the annual maintenance cost of any ECM technology runs at 20% per annum.

HP Enters the ECM Race?

Found an article from Forrester on HP entering the ECM Race (thanks Tower). Click on the link for the full article available form the Tower Software Site.

Forrester states that HP are now confronting the "Four Horsemen" of Enterprise Content Management, guess they mean, EMC, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle ? Just to make sure I did a little googling and found the Forrester ECM 2007 report (thanks Oracle) that indicates this is so, as well as the report noted at the beginning.

But getting back to the overall thought of HP entering the race, what concerns me is how HP are going to compete in the ECM space race? The investment strategy seems to strengthen HP's compliance, archiving and discovery stack, but there is more to the total ECM feature space.

Will HP invest and develop in the other key ECM feature areas? Will they provide a set of "infostructure services" (as opposed to infastructure) to an ECM programme, or are they looking to get out there as an ECM Suite player in their own right. Only time will tell, I would hate to see the Tower Software purchase bury the TRIM engine into the overall HP stack for the sake of just ticking the box on a records management piece.

Guess we are all to stay tuned for the next unfolding in the ECM space race !

ECM - MOSS Architecture.

I deal a lot with MOSS 2007 these days. I guess with $800M in sales and the massive massive marketing machine that Microsoft brings to bear you can avoid it. I believe that even Microsoft themselves have been surprised at the adoption of MOSS 2007 as a platform.

But putting that all aside what fascinates me, and drives me mad is the way that the MOSS 2007 information architecture hangs together. Why? well because I have dealt with other ECM systems before, you tend to come with some well ingrained expectations when you begin to look at MOSS. Expectations such as:

• A single repository for information that is single source, create once and find and edit anywhere


• The ability to set retention and disposal at a system level and configure for the information in context


• The ability to leverage information outside of organisational boundaries eg. have a policy document spread across all departments

So give some of these expectations I found that I had to do a mind bend when starting to dig under the covers of the MOSS platform. Microsoft has an architecture for MOSS that goes like this.

(Click the image to get an enlarged view)

From the diagram you can see that the Site Collection is the logical grouping bucket for information. Now most large organisations that deploy MOSS will have multiple site collections. But here is where the mind bend on my expectations start.


The following features of MOSS 2007 DO NOT work across Site Collections (SC's)

• Content Types - You will need to deploy content types across all other SC's
  
• Content by Query Web Part - aggregates across site(s) but not SC's
  
• Workflow - Only available to the site collection it is deployed to !!!
  
• Information Management and Retention Policies - Only set at the SC level
  
• Search - Certain features so not work across SC's
  
• Quotas - Want to control the space people use, this must be deployed across SC's as well
  

So this starts to create some interesting exercise.

Firstly for the Information Architect / records management experts as they try to make sense of how to construct a classification / metadata / security and access controls.

Secondly for the MOSS Administrators as they try to keep track of the deployment and changes to the information support features that need to be managed as well. This is a ripe area for the 3rd party developers to help and some have already identified the gap.

So the moral is, prior planning prevents a poor deployment !

Greg the Architect. Is there an ECM link here?

Here is a YouTube link to Greg the Architect. While it deals with SOA (that's Service Orientated Architecture) you could swap out SOA for ECM and still have a great laugh, especially with the blue, red and grey team members.


Great piece of marketing by Tibco and I can identify with the Fisher Price Greg, as a look alike is in my daughters toy box. Don't worry Greg they love you. I find this hilarious viewing and was rolling around on the floor. BTW I am off to get that ECM systems migrated into the hardware software and services, and hardware!!

Where do I start?

I was called on the other day to run a briefing session to talk about SharePoint licencing, Hmm! This type of request generally gets me thinking, do they know what they want? and what they are doing?

Well it was evident that there was from the outset of the meeting that there was a bit of confusion as to roles and responsibilities of the people in the room. Not a good sign if this is the way you feel about your own structure, or organisation.

Fortunately I had already prepared my deck as a game of two halves. The first half was talking about their licensing request, as expected, and the second half was all about getting them to focus on, why? and what? of the wider content issues that they would have to face up to.,

I started the second half by asking some questions:

* How does the organisation view information?
* How do senior executives view information?
* Is there an information strategy?
* What understand do we have of how information flows?
* Do you understand the relationship of information to business processes?
* Is there a view that there is a problem?

These are generic questions that if you fail to get a solid answer up front indicate that there is some serious thinking, planning and alignment that needs to go on before you buy software. Then from this opening I gave an outline of five steps to help get started. These steps are as follows:

1. Conduct an Information Assessment (where are you today?)
2. Align content (you need a definition of content first) to People and Process
3. Identifying problems (with the content alignment) and solutions (how can we make it better)
4. Sell the solution (to identified sponsor(s) ) and gaining executive Air Cover
5. Break the overall delivery into manageable steps (build a road map of projects)

And with these steps, always ensure alignment to business objectives and outcomes of the organisation.

Compliance and Mouth Wash

Just read a great Post by Alan P-S (Apologies to Alan Pelz-Sharpe for the name abbreviation) on the CMSWatch site around Compliance being a dirty word, follow the link for the full noise.

I agree with the points that Alan raises, and see alignment of the the topic of his conversation to my local patch, being New Zealand. Here we have a thing called the Public Records Act that has been published by Archives NZ, a great piece of work by the way.

It is a broad umbrella Act that outlines the requirements that organisations need to achieve to obtain a suitable level of records compliance. The act is further supported with a whole framework of guidelines and standards so yo are not left hanging in space, even further great work.

But here is a secret, you can if you want to meet all the requirements without technology! Sure it would take a huge effort and lot of management and people, but you can do it. Yes, technology can make the job easier, but technology is only the supporting act to the process and people involved that combine to make it all happen and help an organisation meet its records management obligations. I fully support the comments that Alan makes around organisation going back to good old retention and disposition tools, rather than having a fancy "out of the box" compliance product.

If there is one thing that I am tired of hearing around the traps in NZ is this:

"Our <name technology here> is PRA compliant !!!

Compliant to what? Firstly there is not testing against any standard and secondly there are no magic solutions with a flick of setup.exe that will take the place of the necessary elements of:

• Business alignment,
• Judicious planning & business case justification
• Competent change management, and
• Solid IM, IT and Project management disciplines

Technology by itself will not do it, and at best can only provide some support to the overall programme of work. Guess we need to break out the soap bar to wash out the dirty words !

Quadrants, consolidation and sausages !

As a point of interest I dug out ye Old Magic Quadrants (here after referred to as"the map") from Gartner covering the ECM vendor landscape over the period 2004 - 2007. Why? well with the recent pre-agreement from HP I was interested to see what I thought the vendor landscape was going to look like and to review what had already come before.

It was an interesting exercise and the following observations are simple snapshots of stacking the quadrants next to each other, far from scientific I know, but makes for some good, quick observations.

2004 There were 22 vendors on the map. Some of these looking back we would arguably question today, such as RedDot? Maybe this was a time where the Web Content Management (WCM) area was still moving along and there was some confusion as to where it stood in the the whole ECM space. Well that quickly got sorted in the 2005 map.

2005 the map is down 4 players to 18 and quickly taking on the shape of a sausage with the spread of vendors from the lower left to the top right. Meridio drops out as well as RedDot due to the lack of spread of functions that are being delivered to classify as a full ECM player. Objective enters into the lower right, obviously they had cash to spare this year; The big change of course was the acquisition of Hummingbird by OpenText. The top right were certainly looking to acquire, or get big enough to stop being acquired by some one else.

2006 held the total number of players as 18, however consolidation was very evident in that IBM went for the big bite on FileNet and the top right has dropped from 8 to 4 players. Looking at the map in the top right IBM and EMC were going neck and neck in the race for the anointed leaders position.

2007 sees the total number of vendors reduced to 17. Stellent has acquired by Oracle; IBM move to the leader position, slightly above and ahead of EMC. Interesting to note that Microsoft have steadily moved to the right and are firmly placed in the visionary quadrant. The sausage is starting also to look a little stretched in the middle as the gap widens between the top and bottom players. Hyland Software have for the last 4 years been steadily moved toward the very centre of the map, not a bad position to be in for expanding out of the US only market.

2008 the prediction is that the number will stay at 17, as HP will enter and Tower Software will be no more. But the big question will be where will HP appear on the Map? Will they be in the compete area of the top right. Guess there are some fast and furious analyst lunches, oops I meant briefings, happening right now !

Tower Software, gobble, gobble, munch, munch by HP

Well it is always interesting in the Vendor landscape for ECM lower left quadrant members. News today on the wires that HP are to and I quote from the RTTNews article:

"3/31/2008 6:26:26 PM Personal computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Tower Software, a document and records management software company based in Canberra, Australia, on Monday said they have signed a pre-bid agreement for the former to acquire Tower. The acquisition will be conducted by means of an off-market takeover bid for all of the outstanding shares of Tower. The takeover is expected to close in the second quarter of calendar year 2008."

Full article link here.

So consolidation is still on the move and the Gartner magic sponge as it seems from the vendor shapes on the quadrant is tightening up even further.

I am not surprised at this move as the relationship between Tower Software and HP has been developing for some time, especially around what was previously know as the HP RISS solution. Tower needed to expand and needed capital to do so, but seemed to be a little behind the mark on road map and where the buying market seemed to be moving. Microsoft is on the march and there is was VC in Tower with 50+% looking to get the cash and move on. Also the available dance partners willing to take the Tower brand home for a bit of pampering were starting to dwindle with the acquisitions that had happened last year.

Smart move Martin and Brand, good luck for the future, and I am off for a Strategic review session!