Mr. Autonomy you may kiss the bride

Well the negotiations are over and Autonomy has completed the acquisition of Interwoven. Now the fun begins!

If I go to the Autonomy website it looks a little like an advert for "Big love". Mr Autonomy and the many wives. So how are all these products going to live together? Which product is used and when?

Apart from the sales teams being confused, what is going to happen internally? Naturally when there are multiple people (read products) involved there is going to be tensions and power struggles as to who get the love and attention of the master.

Let's just look at records management. On the site through digging around the following are referenced

Autonomy ControlPoint for SharePoint, could be related to the Meridio suite
Autonomy records management relates to Meridio when linked is clicked
iManage records management from the front page product drop down. Where is meridio?

The marriage has been sealed, now it's time to take the bride home to meet the rest of the family and see how the pecking order pans out. Looking out for some big love.

Information lifecycle management?

Sounds relatively straight forward, doesn't it ? But if I Google this three letter acronym (TLA) today the top hits are rightly, Industrial Light & Magic. Down the search result list is a wikipedia entry for ILM, then an article from Computerworld on ILM vendors. But where are the vendor entries?

A year or so ago I was awash in ILM white papers, articles and other items from the vendor marketing sausage machines that were telling me why I needed to buy all this fancy hardware to manage my information. We are now told that this is storage 2.0, But where is all this ILM marketing now ? It looks like it has gone the way of most hype cycles, disappeared like a good fireworks display.

Sure storage is important, but it is not the beginning or the end of the the lifecycle of information. We would all agree that storage is not going away but it is increasing because information is increasing and in most cases is still not managed. Organisations are still struggling with the basics of getting the people and process parts of the lifecycle sorted, but unfortunately it is still easier for many to just throw some technology at the problem.

ECM - No single product?

Russ Stalters in a post Dec 2008 (For Most Enterprises;"A ECM Solution from a single vendor is a Myth!") outlined that most Enterprises ECM Solution tends to include a mixture of technologies from various vendors, rather than that from a single vendor.

Out of the 150 executives that attended a presentation that Russ gave none disagreed with the statement.

Well the same is true here in NZ, especially within some of the larger organisations that I get to eal with. There seems to be a range of technologies that have been deployed over a period of time, either by virtue of no strategy, or because the functions of Web Content and Document Content have been driven by different departmental budget lines and therefore different visions have emerged.

In some cases a strategic view has emerged from a product selection, but very seldom have I seen a full on ECM proposal come to market, or any ECM strategic planning preceed technology implmentation.

A key area that seem to be missing time and time again is an appropriate Information Infrastructure, or as I like to call it Infostructure. Infostructure provides to the information a set of capabilities that enables information to be understood and flow in and out of core business processes.

The building of an infrostructure is independent of the technology to be used. The infostructure is a set of policies and supporting tools to make the technology work for people and processes. Tools that enable the technology to work are things like the business taxonomy, classification systems and associated metadata models and relationship entities.

These tools are part of the information structure not the technology itself and if designed and developed correctly will allow for an organisation to build and implement an ECM system from multiple products.

Blogging the new Web?

Interesting title given that I am blogging about blogging?

Well here is the thought. If you do a search for a topic or question that you may have what percentage of hit results are blog pages vs. a static web page.

My quantitative results tend to trend toward getting a blog page.

Why is this? Well, blogs provide an easy framework or scratchpad for subject matter experts to easily get the information out there in a timely manner. No waiting for technology, or getting content into an HTML format, that may take weeks.

Given that you can spin up a blog site with a few clicks, you have a useful separation of information (content) and presentation. This is what Content Management is all about. The ability to get content out there in a managed way. The only problem is that we now have silos of blogs in the blogsphere, enter the search engine again !

A Maturity Model - The truth is out there

Feel like an X-Files re run.

Well in most cases a lot of organisation can't find the File let alone the "X" one. The level of ECM Maturity in New Zealand is quite low in many areas. I know that I am being general, but I have to because in this forum it is not convenient to name names, projects or the lack of strategy that seems to be around managing content. This is simply a lack of maturity around ECM.

One good thing however is that Alan Pelz-Sharpe from CMS Watch along with other authors from Wipro and Hartman Communicatie have released a maturity model into the Creative Commons, known as the (ECM3) ECM Maturity Model v1.0.

I suggest that some organisations, not just in NZ, may want to have a look atthis model to at least to work out where they are today and how they could start to move forward towards real maturity.

The truth is out there and you can start the investigation here http://www.ecm3.org/

My disclaimer is that I have reviewed the model and provided feedback, as you will see on the website. I applaude that the authors have released this mode into the wild "with caveats" and that they have opened it up for community development.