Getting to the point of change

One of the key things I have observed over a couple of decades in the IT world is that even though change in organizations if often imperative, it seldom happens. Deliberate planned change, no matter how essential seldom occurs.  I have seen countless major IT projects involving information and processes undertaken, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on software, hardware and services - and yet the status quo remains at the end. Take a typical SharePoint project that was all the rage 5 years ago, these projects were going to transform the way organizations managed and shared information - making companies more efficient and collaborative.  Few of these projects delivered on that promise.... It wasn't Microsoft fault, in fact the same is true of most projects.  Though there are many reasons projects fall short of expectations, poor project management, poorly set expectations, the over reliance on technology to fix business problems etc - I think the number one reason is. People don't like change.

A firm I have worked with needs to change. It is profitable (sort of), it has grown like many in this sector over the past 10 years or so from start up to employing a few hundred people. It's established, it works and its unlikely to fail anytime soon. It has a window of opportunity that will close soon to make a step change to the next level. It's competitors are not doing so well, customers like the firm, it has a good reputation and good products. But for the last several years its business has stagnated, and when this window of opportunity closes the firm will likely move to a slow and ultimately terminal decline. It needs to change now to secure its future and to grow.  The firm has brought in new management, it has a new and ambitious strategy - in fact the firm knows EXACTLY what it needs to do to transform itself into a bigger stronger and better company. But despite all the talk, all the meetings, all the planning, all the spend - its not changing.

Like many firms it is run by a charismatic and very smart CEO who knows where the company needs to go. But the staff of the firm, see things differently. The staff are comfortable, life is good enough for them, the company is good enough for them, the way they work has worked well enough to this point, so why they say, do we need to change? Or rather they don't openly question the need to change. In fact they openly and volubly support the change, but they never seem to do anything about it. Their day to day concerns always seem to take priority. Risk is scary, risk means things might go wrong and change means changing, and they don't want to change. Even senior hires who enter the firm full of enthusiasm and passion for change are fairly quickly reigned in by their subordinates, pulled into the nitty gritty of today's work - and not the future shaping work they need to do.

The challenge for any leader or advisor is to communicate a NEED to change to a willingness and PASSION for change. Folks who are complacent need to be re-energized, reminded of the the enthusiasm and passion they first had, excited about the next chapter, and eager to turn the page and close this chapter out.  In tech projects this sort of thing is usually poorly understood, dismissed as 'arm waving' or 'management theory' - but without it nothing ever changes.

I would love to see and maybe even be a small part of changing this mindset - or at least developing new tools and processes to better enable it. Enterprise technology today (and anyone who has heard me speak or read my research over the years will know my position on this one!) is way ahead of the folk that buy it - its potential is incredible, but failed or disappointing IT projects remain the norm. Surely its time for the industry as a whole to re-examine where its at and maybe look again at the success and failures of the 90's era of Change Management & Re-Engineering. Much was wrong then, but not all - many lessons were briefly learned but then all too quickly forgotten. I believe its time we need to start this discussion again, pick up the pieces and stop accepting mediocrity, stop tinkering with the system and move again to mindset (to quote Tony Robbins) of massive determined action. Tech for tech's sake is of very limited value, the Silicon Valley bubble that is disconnected from the real world is once again a bubble full of hot air ready to pop. If ever there was at time to change, it is now. 

Emergence of intelligent content platforms

I have been researching, writing and advising on the topic of ECM for well over 20 years, I have been called a cynic on many occasions (sometimes even to my face) and it is true that I am often dismissive of hot new trends in the marketplace. In my defense though most hot new trends are rehashed old trends under a different banner. They didn't work first time round and have no more chance this time. But over the past year or so a couple of overlapping trends have started to make a really deep and lasting impression on me. The first of these is the importance of Social technologies. On the one hand it is fair to argue that the hype surrounding enterprise Social is ridiculously overblown. There are very few firms that can really build a measurable or worthwhile business case to implement Social technologies. The reason for this is that the terms social and collaboration have become conflated, and are often used interchangeably. They are very different things, for collaboration by definition means that you work together to reach a common goal (writing a report, building a house, settling a legal matter). Whereas social is an activity without a defined end goal, the hope is that something unexpected (yet of value) will emerge from social interactions. What this means in practical terms is that some businesses are interested in investing in collaboration tools that support team and project based working. Why wouldn't they be, after all it helps them become more efficient and fulfill the perennial aim of doing more with less. Social though is a much tougher sell as few people really see the benefits here, how many really want to see a twitter like stream that relates to our colleagues activities?  In fact social technologies generate an awful lot of noise (awful being the operative word), but ironically it is here that the value lies. All that noise/data can be analyzed, processed and ultimately utilized to automate decisions and recommendations. It's early days, but that is where this is all heading. Marry this with sudden arrival of cloud based file sharing and sync services, and we have the emergence of a new and important computing/working environment. Don't be too quick to dismiss the "consumerization" of IT, or systems such as Box, Skydox, Accellion or Citrix ShareFile, in my opinion what they represent now is only the start. For combine what they do today, with the analytical capabilities they will possess in the future (and they all will), and we have the ability to easily build powerful content centric applications, that in turn leverage the promise of intelligent analytics and big data. That's game changing by any standards.

I am back....

Just a quick note to say I will begin posting again here soon.  I am in the process of writing a book on the topic of "Why enterprise IT projects so often fail". Will be sharing thoughts and updates as I research and write. The chapter structure has been built, the publishing proposal drafted and a sample chapter written.  All I need to do is get a publisher, and I am working actively on that right now...

Seven years ago I started this blog as an outlet to pull thoughts together for this book - but life and other writing commitments got in the way in the intervening years. That may happen again, but fingers crossed this time round I will finally get the job done!

Will the CMO really outspend the CIO?

The mantra in the digital marketing world is that in the future the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will become more important in terms of technology spend than the CIO. Yet try as I might I just struggle to fathom the logic here.  Marketing is a vital function in any company but its structure and role is morphing at a rapid pace. 

Marketing has become a strategic and co-ordination function. Strategic in that the Marketing Director has to manage and execute on campaigns and a consistent vision - co-ordination in that most marketing today is actually done by external agencies and contractors. The other major shift in marketing is that Marketers are ever more being explicitly tasked with generating leads, and broader marketing concerns such as visibility and brand trust have been relegated. Pushing marketing back to its original home as a subset of Sales.

In my experience, CMO's are not technologists, nor do they want to be, as they have better things to do with their time. So though much more money will of course be spent on digital marketing efforts in the future trusted external agencies that will become key stakeholders in any technology decision making process.

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.