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!