SharePoint’s radical disruption of ECM
I recently kicked off a series of posts on my other blog, The Intentional Leader, that looks at the leadership challenges presented by the health care crisis facing the U.S. As part of this effort, I’m reading Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Prescription, an in-depth analysis of the U.S. health care system. And while this isn’t the place to undertake a full review of his work (that’ll be coming shortly as part of that series), I did find some of his thoughts on disruptive innovation applicable to recent developments in the ECM marketplace, especially around the success SharePoint has enjoyed since the release of MOSS.
Chickens and eggs
The recent excitement over the Adobe Day acquisition has been infectious in the ECM community. And although it shouldn’t have been too surprising to folks who’ve been watching the industry over the last few years, it does open up some suggestive possibilities in the ECM space (see Lee Dallas’ quick overview of the Adobe Day acquisition as well as the comment thread for a good example).
As usual, I’ll leave a sustained consideration of all this to the experts, but all the buzz has gotten me thinking about the relationship between supply and demand in the ECM marketplace, that is, do vendors create demand by bringing innovative solutions to the market, or do market demands drive vendors to produce solutions for existing problems?
Win-lose ECM
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to lead teams through win-lose situations, that is, those situations where the outcome won’t benefit everyone equally…and in fact may have negative outcomes for one or more stakeholders. And I had an experience with a client recently that illustrated just how important navigating win-lose situations can be for an ECM program.
ABC – Always blame consultants
I was working side-by-side with an executive sponsor at a client once, and we were discussing a technology implementation that had been a disaster for them: took years (not months) to get in place, did less than what they expected, had less of an impact than promised–the usual stuff implementation horror stories are made of.
I said that it was a shame, because in my experience the software was a solid offering and should have provided real value to their organization. He smiled and replied that in his experience at the organization, when there’s been a problem with a vendor, it’s usually been the organization’s fault.
We laughed about it–after all, haven’t we all worked at that kind of place at one time or another? But later it got me to thinking, can a professional services vendor ever be “off the hook” for a project failure? Structuring and executing engagements is what we do, and adverse (or at least less than ideal) project conditions are the norm (or at least to be expected). Isn’t that why organizations shell out big bucks to bring in consultants in the first place, to accomplish difficult, challenging projects that the organization otherwise couldn’t?
Lowering the bar on ECM
One of the hardest things for project teams to understand is that successful ECM programs don’t owe their success to best practices, technical content management expertise, or selecting cutting-edge tools. The secret to ECM success, in my experience, is first to establish goals that (if met) will deliver recognizable value to the organization and then to set a realistic, actionable timeline for achieving them.
Overweight ECM
I work day in and day out with clients on ECM, and over the years I’ve come to view ECM as a fairly straightfoward discipline. But despite that, I still find some things pretty puzzling about ECM. I think it’s particularly interesting that you have a business domain that is:
- Essential to what any organization does
- Almost universally broken
- Painful for everyone, from the CEO to a new hire administrative assistant
- Not difficult to solve conceptually, i.e., we all know what the problem is
- Very difficult to get funded, and
- Almost impossible to get anyone to view as a strategic capability
ECM and the status quo
Working with clients, I spend a lot of time trying to get them to understand the value of improving their content management practices and finding ways to get their organizations to support those efforts. And as we’ve seen in other posts here, there are tremendous gains to be had by improving how you do ECM, even incrementally.
But in the interest of devil’s advocacy, I’ll ask the obvious question: what would happen if we just maintained the status quo around ECM and simply allowed folks to do what they do now with their content?
ECM head games
We’ve been looking at the ROI of ECM from a number of different perspectives over the last two months in these posts, but one aspect we haven’t really focused on is the psychology of an ECM business case.
What I’ve found in my work with clients over the last few years (and in my time on the other side of the table in IT) is that folks often have a hard time viewing the costs and benefits of their project realistically. They tend to care deeply about the domain of the project; they attach great importance to the benefits of the project and feel that any costs are certainly worth the effort; and in the end, they are unable to look at the project from an enterprise, C-level point of view.
However, unless they can do so, their chances of getting the project approved are slim to none–and if it does get approved, it will be in spite of, rather than because of, their efforts.
ECM – nothing can do it better (part 2)
In the last post, I suggested that ECM is in a distinctive position to help organizations reduce costs while also improving how they do business. Let’s pick up where we left off: considering some specific ways ECM could help health payers address marketing and communication (MarCom), customer service, and the sales proposal process as they prepare for 2014.
ECM – nothing can do it better (part 1)
Over the past few months, I’ve looked at the ROI associated with ECM from a number of perspectives in my posts. And for the most part, my goal has been to get IT, RM, and legal folks to be able to pitch ECM in the same terms as other corporate initiatives so that it can compete at the C level with more LOB-focused projects.
In this post I want to change gears a bit, however, and talk about a critical way that ECM differs from most other corporate initiatives, a way that allows ECM to play a distinctive role in corporate strategy today: ECM allows an organization to cut costs while at the same time improving core capabilities – something FTE cuts or reductions in service alone cannot accomplish.
To do so, let’s take an example from an industry in the throes of the pressure not only to cut costs but also to radically transform itself in the face of massive regulatory, marketplace, and cultural changes: health payers.
agile ramblings 