An ECM state of mind
I was reading Word of Pie recently and, as usual, I came across a thought-provoking quote.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy for the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to find and use content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.
There is no such thing as ECM software or an ECM solution. There are ECM platforms, but they are just platforms. They enable a centralized ECM strategy. In fact, taking the risk of upsetting the boat further, I would just call them Content Management platforms. They have purposes that go beyond supporting an ECM strategy, which itself can be implemented without a platform. Should is a completely different question for another day.
Pie (again, as usual) hits the nail on the head here: ECM in the broadest sense of the term is not primarily a tool (or technology or platform); it is a set of enterprise-level activities organized around how an enterprise manages content throughout its lifecycle across all corporate functions.
A tale of two cities
In the past year I had the opportunity to work with two clients, both almost identical on paper, but on the ground and up close almost 180 degrees away from each other.
They were both located in the same region, in the same industry, with roughly the same number of employees and size of customer base, the same general technology profile; and on top of all this, both shared very similar organizational cultures.
Both had made their first foray into ECM five years ago by hiring us to do an assessment of their current state capabilities and recommending a go forward plan. Both had thanked us, and we moved on, not working with them again until recently, when both asked us to help them assess their progress, revisit their plans, and adjust accordingly.
As I worked closely with each of these organizations, helping them assess and build out their enterprise content management (ECM) programs, I was shocked to find just how different these two almost identical organizations could be.
The customer communication value chain
In the last post, I suggested that customer communication management (CCM) might be the area where we see the next wave of ECM activity. What I want to do here is to go into a little more detail on the tangible ways I see ECM supporting CCM at an organization.
Second wave ECM
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you know that selling ECM to the business is a recurring theme here. In my day-to-day work with clients, this is hands down the most important challenge I have to help them face–otherwise, all the strategy and planning in the world gets you nowhere.
During a trip with James Watson recently, we were having a conversation about this very topic that took a decidedly philosophical turn. Many of you may know James (or may have at least have run across him in your ECM travels) because he’s been in the business for about 25 years now–this is a guy who has seen and done it all in terms of ECM technology and strategy.
So when we started talking about THE FUTURE…OF ECM (em em em em em), I was excited to find out what his thoughts were on the changes going on in the industry.
Future state CIO (part 2)
In the last post, I gave a quick overview of Hugh Scott’s presentation from the recent Oklahoma IT Symposium on the future state CIO framework. A good bit of that framework is based on the pioneering research on CIO capabilities done by Egon Zehnder International. And while you can find lots of information about it on their site, I wanted to present a quick overview of their comparative capabilities infographics, because I think they’re great communication devices that also have some important implications for how IT gets funding and support for the work it does.
Future state CIO
I was at the Oklahoma IT Symposium two weeks ago and had the pleasure of hearing Hugh Scott, VP of IS at Direct Energy, give the keynote address, Journey to the Future-State CIO: The Path to Greater Value & Sustained Relevance.
The presentation was based on two bodies of research: the work of the CIO Executive Council and of Egon Zehnder International, both of which provide a framework for how to think about the work CIOs are expected to do to make their organizations successful.
Third prize is you’re fired
I spent the greater part of this Monday meeting with sales executives at ECM and social media software vendors, and the experience was enlightening, to say the least.
We talked about the usual issues, of course: the economy being in the toilet, how dried up client spend is lately, the constantly shifting corporate sales goals and methodologies at their organizations, the cutthroat competition and infighting among vendors in the space, and so on. In general, these are the kind of ritual complaints you expect to hear from vendor sales guys, so I didn’t put much stock in them—the economy, funding, corporate BS, competitors…the more things change, the more they stay the same…
But we also talked at length about something that went beyond the typical sales griping you come to expect, and it caught my attention: my team can’t seem to sell to the business.
Jack of all trades
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, writing, and consulting lately about the use of social media tools and techniques in a business context. And there’s a lot out there on the subject, from work on the nuts and bolts of the technologies available, to their wider business implications, to existential considerations of whether social media as a category identifies something new or simply refers to things that we’ve been doing for years now under other names.
Although my interest amid all this writing is primarily in the business value of the use of social media tools and techniques for businesses, I don’t want to address that here. Rather, I want to speak to something more provocative that’s been nagging at me lately: isn’t social media, collaboration, E2.0, social business software–or whatever you choose to call it–just really content management under another name?
Service is our business
I was having a conversation recently with a good friend and fellow consultant, and we were discussing just how important client service was for running a successful consulting shop. If you hang around consultants for any length of time, you’ll hear a lot of talk about pre-sales, i.e., the time spent building a relationship with a potential client before you have a contract in place. You’ll hear heated debates about how much “free” consulting to provide, how much of your IP to share, how much time to spend face-to-face, and when to “cut the cord” because they’re not going to sign a contract.
We both agreed that this mindset is fundamentally flawed–it turns consultants into something like the beleaguered salesmen in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (coffee is for closers, etc.). But in reality, the mindset of a true consultant should be much closer to that of a physician than any kind of salesman.
I’ve got those ECM blues
I was talking with an old friend recently and lamenting the fact that ECM never seems to get the push from organizations that big-ticket initiatives like ERP do. And this despite the fact that organizations have only three things they manage: human assets, physical assets, and information assets. So you would think that ECM, as the domain concerned with one-third of what all organizations do, would be well-funded at any successful organization.
Although we didn’t solve the ECM problem that night, we did come up with some reasons why ECM typically gets such low traction at organizations.
agile ramblings 