ECM with a purpose?

It's been a long time but for some reason I just wanted to distill some rambling thoughts here on the state of ECM what it might all mean.

IBM, Oracle, EMC, Microsoft & OpenText define the bulk of the market - collectively between them they account for the vast majority of revenue in this space. They have all been at it a long time, and I have spent a career watching and advising them. At various times all of these players have seem lost and without a clear purpose, defaulting into a world of cash cow status. With the exception of Microsoft all of them in the past year seem to have rediscovered their real purpose in life and are trying to get out of comfortable ruts. Documentum seems reinvigorated and has returned quite rightly IMHO to its roots and is making a real fist of sorting out its usability history. IBM is really meshing together the worlds of structured and unstructured, Oracle is truly excited about web experience and the promise of related big data, and OpenText seems to really want to move on from holding company to innovator again. All of these are gargantuan tasks and only time will tell how successful each is - but its good for all of us surely?

This turnaround in the past year reminded me why I got hooked on this industry in the first place. I fell from a burgeoning career in TV (researching/writing) into document management/control to pay the bills, and then found I was fascinated at the beauty and complexity of information management. Over time I grew more and more attached to this unloved discipline, and passionate about its value to society. Over the years I have personally been involved and seen it deliver incredible returns in joined up justice (police through prisons to probation), averting oil spills in the North Sea, saving lives in healthcare, targeting the right bad guys and gals in intelligence and defense etc. I have also seen sloppy information management do the opposite with disastrous results. In a world of spectacular waste and irrelevance, a world of economic and humanitarian crisis, a world driven by technology, data & content - doing IT and information management badly has real world consequences. This belief is what gives purpose to my work.

But the same thing applies to large organizations - they are no different really to individuals. Without a purpose they drift or expend their energies in pointless and ever more lackluster directions. With a common purpose they are energized, focused and make a difference. I don't care about ECM firms making money (that's for them to worry about) but I do care about them driving innovation and providing the right tools to manage information efficiently and accurately at such a critical juncture in our history.

ECM In India - Again

I am recently back from a pretty remarkable week working out of our Delhi office with my colleagues Apoorv and Sanjeev. Remarkable in that though I have been to India many times before, there is clearly a groundswell of change underway, and its major change at that. Hence I am excited that we are investing in our business there, and am looking forward to working more directly with buyers of technology in the future.

So what is this change? Well it comes in a number of different ways, firstly India is in and of itself an emerging market for content technologies, and one that in some regards is jumping ahead of western countries, by passing the PC and Laptop world and leaping straight to the mobile handset. The mobile consumer market is frankly years ahead of anything one sees in the US. In the enterprise the change is equally revolutionary but maybe less sexy and obvious. India is, if nothing else a huge bureaucracy on a scale and complexity that would have stumped Kafka. It's not just Government and the public sector, but it spreads to corporate organizations and is in large part a result of both embedded cultural and historical factors, important to note is that much if not most of this huge bureaucracy is paper based.

Yet a strengthening middle class, and an influx of former ex-pats from the UK and US are driving change. You can see it in the US style shopping malls that seem to be popping up on every corner, and the impatience of folk of doing things the 'traditional' way. To highlight all this, during the past week I was privileged to watch and experience the Anna Hazare led protest against corruption, a protest that though focused on rampant and often blatant corruption, goes deeper. It is not for me to take sides (though hopefully we are all against corruption) but I can be a casual observer. It goes to the heart of the problem in India, that old institutions and ways of working, simply don't work any longer, and people are impatient for change.

In my own remit of research (Document Management) it was confirmed to me that imaging and capture along with associated business process management (including Case Management) are hot topics and look certain to grow substantially. This is a trend that is not limited to India, but the potential for growth is more likely more extreme there. Furthermore I have little doubt that in such a rich media savvy nation that the demand for DAM (Digital Asset Management) will also grow substantially there over the next couple of years.

However, tied to all this potential is the very real problem of immature and overly burdensome procurement practices for IT. Though India is surging ahead in some areas of technology and there is surely an appetite to do so more in future. Plus there is the dominance of Indian system integrators such as TCS, Sapient, and Infosys in the world of IT,there can be no doubt that India has a surfeit of tech skills and knowledge. But in terms of thorough product selection and buyer driven procurement processes I don't think India is there yet, nor it should be said in many cases are firms in the US or Europe. Yet my hope is that Real Story Group can in some small way help contribute to this situation in the coming years.

To the visitor India seems to change slowly, you see visuals from the car and street that look unchanged in millennia, yet at the same time India seldom does things by halves and I think buyers there are going to take content technologies in some new, dramatic and exciting directions over the next few years, going from laggard to cutting edge in the blink of an eye.

Sybase acquired by SAP

Another blast from my past as SAP announced that it is acquiring Sybase. I remember Sybase as much for their lavish AR (Analyst Relations) than anything else. I attended quite a few of their events, most memorable of which was held at the NYSE - with lunch in the Boardroom, and this not that long after 9/11. How they pulled it off I have no idea, but it was an amazing and quite surreal experience.

Long dismissed as has beens Sybase (though I never truly understood their business), recognized that they had lost the database battle long back, and very smartly and quietly consolidated their business in high finance, and in Asia - whilst making serious investments in the mobile world. From a skunkworks set up in Canada its the mobile infrastructure piece of the pie that has added to their spectacular price paid by SAP - $5.8 Billion - a lot of money for a company written off by most everyone.

I chose the image above, as I still have sitting on my desk a rather lovely brass Kaleidoscope given to me as a gift by Sybase AR in 2002 - that has Mardi Gras (AR event clashed with the start of Lent) beads in it.....

Best Practices

Every consulting client asks if I can provide them with best practices as part of the advisory engagement. I don't object to these requests, in fact I can fully understand why they ask, but my advice to any one out there looking for such things, is beware of the person who offers them to you.

Best practices scare me a bit, they remind me of the nonsense of the late 90's when everyone was benchmarking, trying to mimic best practices and getting enthusiastic about Business Process Re-Engineering. What we learned, or at least should have learned from all that is that what works well in one place does not necessarily work well anywhere else. For sure there are wrong ways to work, there are inefficient ways to work and there are downright stupid ways to work - but once you eliminate the plain bad options, there are a multitude of possibilities left.

You need to match your needs, goals, organizational psychology (culture/dynamics) and resources with elements of what has worked well elsewhere and make up your own patchwork quilt of what works best for you, from what has worked for others....

Server sales rise dramatically in 2010

This morning whilst reading the FT and sipping my coffee I started reading about the dramatic increase in server sales that the market is currently experiencing. Everyone from IBM and HP through to AMD and Intel have seen sales rise dramatically.

It is as they say "a perfect storm", as budgets are loosened after a year of belt tightening, old hardware and software is reaching a point where it has to be upgraded, and the new server technologies pretty much guarantee they pay for themselves in a matter of months. They pay for themselves due the spectacular rise in computing power they deliver over previous generations, and simultaneously a spectacular drop in power consumption.

This all took me back to project I was involved in whilst at Wipro. To this day I have no idea why but I somehow became the link man between Wipro and Sun Microsystems, to partner on a Solaris 10 initiative. It was slam dunk financially, as Solaris 10 was open source, as even if one only got service revenue and ran Solaris 10 on non Sun hardware (HP for example) the cost savings were so huge compared to say Solaris 8 or pretty much any other flavor of Unix, we were doing well.

The problem was we did not do well - the Sun brand at that time was so tarnished, so connected with failure that it was like climbing a mountain even to get a meeting with some clients to discuss the potential. Sun had great people, and some awesome technology, we had a clear cut business case - but no means to spark a conversation, due to perceptions around the brand and the potential future of Sun.

It's likely (or at least it should be) that Oracle is now reaping the benefits of all Suns hard work and expertise. Not just because of an improved economy, but because people feel secure with Oracle. Its the same with IBM and Microsoft and that is to some extent why they dominate the IT world, sentiment and perception carrying more weight in buying decisions than we realize.

Something of a ramble as always, but that's the point of a personal blog - but reading the FT really did bring back some memories.

ECM does not equal Green IT

There are two things that instantly get my back up these days. ROI/ Pseudo scientific IT calculations and the claims of the Green IT movement. To be clear upfront, I am the resident Tree Hugger at The Real Story Group and take the environment and our stewardship of it seriously, I also believe that information management initiatives can and do deliver clear and measurable results. But maths that only tackle one side of the equation, and Green claims based on hot air really do not resonate with me.

So imagine my apoplexy when I read an article today that claimed that you could radically reduce your carbon footprint by utilizing ECM software. Again, to be clear - my blood pressure is not rising because I don't believe its possible, rather it is because of the wacky math that is used to support such a claim. In this article (including graphs) the measure of success was the fact that this University 'saved' 347,000 paper pages in the admissions process this year. Instead of the paper documents, they used electronic documents. The carbon footprint reduction came through saving lots of trees (43 trees to be precise based on their calculation of 16 reams of paper from a single tree). This all seems like laudable stuff until one stops think about what is missing in this lopsided calculation.

First, and fairly obvious is that the University has not apparently heard of recycled paper, secondly and probably more importantly there seems to be an assumption here that electronic documents do not have a carbon footprint. No apparently, the toxic time bomb that constitutes a computer these days counts for nothing, nor does the power to run the computers, servers, data centers etc. No discussion either at the ease of proliferating multiple and redundant copies electronic documents. I have no idea what the actual carbon footprint tally for running a document management system is, but I know its not zero.

Nonsensical calculations, and spurious eco-claims are totally unnecessary in the world of information management - just a look around at the information chaos we call normality is enough to tell us there is business value in doing the job properly. You can build real business cases, and use real numbers - you can measure information management success properly and accurately, there is no need to wander into fantasy.