When ROI isn’t enough
As a strategy consultant, you quickly learn to accept the fact that your work is not an end in itself…nor should it be. Your value to the client is measured by whether the execution of your strategy produced the predicted results. Delivering a smart, polished strategy to the client is necessary but not sufficient–what they are able to do with the strategy ultimately determines whether it was successful or not.
One of the most important ways to make sure your strategy has legs at an organization is to find solid ROI associated with it, i.e., if we do what the strategy says, what benefits will the organization realize? I’ve written elsewhere about techniques for ferreting out the ROI associated with ECM strategy, so you might want to start with these posts if you’re not clear on the kinds of ROI ECM can realize.
In this post, however, I wanted to take the discussion of ROI a bit further, because the reality is that ROI in and of itself is no guarantee of funding or support–it’s simply the first step, the cost of entry into the arena of corporate budget decisions. After you get through the door with a plausible ROI, there’s lots more work to do to cross the finish line…so let’s dig in.
In God we trust – all others pay cash (part 3)
In a previous post, I kicked off a series that’s going to consider the impact social media (SM) might be having on society and culture by way of comparison to an earlier phenomenon: the shift to a monetary economy (sometimes referred to as the profit economy) in Europe during the Medieval period. In the last post, I looked briefly at the elements of this shift that I think are relevant to the shift to SM going on today: transparency, immediate vs. extended impact, and the jump from one area of activity to others.
In this post, I’ll finish the series by looking at how these three elements are at play in the emergence of SM.
Enterprise 2010?
In a previous post, I predicted that SharePoint would “own” ECM by becoming the dominant player in that space in the not too distant future. Shortly after the post, Ariel Roberge asked me whether I thought SharePoint might be poised to “own” Enterprise 2.0 as well. It’s a great question, because I think that the current E20 space is very similar to where ECM was a few years back: lots of vendors, an emerging push for consolidation, with some vendors growing towards domination and others remaining niche, best-in-breed players (to maybe get gobbled up), a domain evolving amid/despite/because of tremendous amounts of corporate fear, uncertainty, and doubt–it all sounds familiar, right?
SharePoint will own ECM
I was sitting in a final presentation for a SharePoint 2010 roll-out with a global, Fortune 200 client the other day, and something remarkable happened: there were audible gasps from end users when we demonstrated the proof of concept sites the team had built. Not polite or half-hearted gasps, but real, honest-to-goodness ones…the kind you get the first time you show someone an iPad or Droid Incredible.
I’ve never seen such a visceral positive reaction to an ECM technology proof of concept (have you?), so it got me thinking: could SharePoint eventually become the main player in the ECM space ahead of “big ECM” (IBM, EMC, Oracle, Open Text, Alfresco, et al.)?
I think the answer is yes, for (at least) three reasons.
In God we trust – all others pay cash (part 2)
In a previous post, I kicked off a series that’s going to consider the impact social media might be having on society and culture by way of comparison to an earlier phenomenon: the shift to a monetary economy (sometimes referred to as the profit economy) in Europe during the Medieval period.
In God we trust – all others pay cash
So go figure: I’ve been writing this blog for about three months now, and I’ve gotten more feedback and comments on my posts on early Christianity and ECM than on all of my other posts—which were up the middle ECM/business topic posts—combined. That and a quarter will get my wife on the bus every month when she cuts a check to Salle Mae, but I love hearing what folks think and having great conversations around the ideas.
Brass balls and midgets
One of my favorite stories of cultural disconnect (found on page four of the text this links to) is about the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. I first heard it in a grad school lecture and I think about it often in my business and personal life. The story goes like this:
This post and the last are dedicated to my wife, Emily, who married me and my loans nine years ago and who has patiently watched me transition from professor to consultant—all the while carrying two mortgages…one on a house and the other on a house of knowledge.
In this series of posts, we’re taking a look at some critical content management challenges we face today and see how they’re not solely a product of the rapid pace of technological innovation over the last twenty years. Rather, they’ve been a part of enterprise content management (ECM) for as long as we’ve been able to write.
Here’s a quick list of them all before we dive into the last two:
- Mobility
- Searchability
- Knowledge sharing
- Data migration
For those of you playing along at home, you’ll notice I’ve gotten rid of a category since the first post: Archiving and Disposition. Most of what I had to say overlapped with Data Migration, so I decided to go with the “sexier” topic.
These next two posts are dedicated to my wife, Emily, who married me and my loans nine years ago and who has patiently watched me transition from professor to consultant—all the while carrying two mortgages…one on a house and the other on a house of knowledge.
In my day-to-day work, I help organizations find more effective ways to manage their content to meet business goals—increased revenues, higher margins, improved efficiency, more consistent compliance, more effective risk management, and so on. In a previous life, however, I was a professor of religious studies.
In my day-to-day work back then, I wrote and taught about how ancient Christians and Jews interpreted their sacred books in response to contemporary problems. Along the way, in the eight years it took to get my doctorate, I spent a lot of time studying the significant technological transitions from scrolls to books, from papyrus to parchment pages, and from hand-written manuscripts to printed volumes.
In this series of posts, we’ll take a look at some important content management challenges we face today and see how they’re not solely a product of the rapid pace of technological innovation over the last twenty years. Rather, they’ve been a part of enterprise content management (ECM) for almost as long as we’ve been able to write.
agile ramblings 