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Contented Management

Contented Management

More enterprise myths

It’s true to say that enterprise is a loaded word: it means a lot more to some than to others. We have enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise search, enterprise portals, enterprise resource planning… People like Nicholas Carr have been railing against these all-encompassing applications for years now, questioning how applications that cost so much to install and configure can deliver tangible business benefit, particularly compared to smaller, more targeted systems. The Gilbane Group on the other hand dislike the term enterprise because they believe it’s pure marketing spiel, particularly in the case of content management where few vendors offer the full range of content management products.

It is of course possible to go to a single supplier and get the full WCM, DM, RM, DAM, JCR and IDM gamut of acronyms. The leaders are IBM and Oracle, but Day, Vignette and Open Text all have products covering the main functionality. You have to take care of course that just because the products are owned by the same company and are labelled as a single product family, this does not mean that they can actually talk to each other. Many is the client persuaded to implement a product portfolio from off the shelf, only to spend months and hundreds of thousands on systems integration.

Leaving aside the truth that vendors relate and the more palpable realities their clients are faced with, ask yourself this: why would you need an enterprise application for content management anyway?

Enterprise means not simply across your whole organisation but unique to your organisation. Your ECM will be different to someone else’s, with different security privileges, workflow, storage and retrieval requirements.

Except it’s not.

What you’re trying to do in your organisation is being attempted in every other organisation of a similar scale or vertical. All your competitors, all your partners, all your suppliers and clients will need to control their information and distribute it to the right people. And they want to do it in similar ways, which is why all these vendors are able to sell their content management technologies to so many clients. The thing is, if your requirements aren’t unique, do you need a system that’s unique?

Of course you don’t.

People like Andrew McAfee and JP Rangaswami have been using and writing about disruptive technologies for years. Technologies like wikis, blogs and tagging are disruptive because they upset standard business models and processes where you procure a single technology and then tell everyone how to use it. Under the disruptive model, you let people use a set of tools the way they find most productive. You can add anything to a wiki without it going through workflow, you use blogs instead of email, you use tags instead of a taxonomy. Depending on where you look, these technologies have been more or less successful.

But for me the issue is that it’s not blogs and wikis that are disruptive, it’s the enterprise technologies themselves. Why do organisations feel the need to procure these tools that few people know how to implement and even fewer know how to use? Why not just pick a few technologies that are out there already? The procurement and implementation of these systems actually disrupts the things your organisation is good at, often having a greater negative impact than the business benefits the system will eventually entail. Yes, an enterprise system gives you one butt to kick, but you still have to do some butt-kicking.
For example, why set up a massive LDAP directory that a bunch of systems administrators need to maintain, when you can use OpenID? If you used this to authenticate people, they can use the same username and password for their social life as their daily business. Isn’t this simpler for everyone? Why set up project team servers? Just let each project team set up a blogger account with a new blog for each project and restrict who can view it. They can use the same email address for their email, calendar, and even documents. And those documents could be shared as a wiki. Some of these technologies will work better than others, and there are of course security implications.

Your organisation does not need to control technology, it needs to exploit it. So before you procure a new CMS ask yourself:

  • Am I trying to do something that is already being done by some of my staff using existing tools?
  • Why can’t I extend those tools to support my business?
  • Do I really want to manage a new supplier, a new project and on-going support?

Isn’t it easier to view web technologies as a facility your enterprise makes use of, like roads or a rail system? Let your employees make their own way to work, don’t go out and buy a bus to round them all up in.

Philippe Parker on , , , , | 20 March 2008 | Tweet this |

Contented Management

Oracle’s challenge: know your product

Last week I attended the Oracle User Group UK conference, with warm enthusiasm and a heavy cold. User groups can be a great way for clients to share implementation experiences, as well as an opportunity to collar suppliers and get a less sanitised view on product roadmaps. I have heard that the Stellent user community wasn’t particularly active, but Oracle are well used to running user groups for the rest of their product range, so this was part of a very large event.

One speaker (I’ll preserve his anonymity) who seemed to strike a chord with delegates raised the point that his organisation’s implementation partner seemed relatively uninformed about Stellent, and that poor decisions around customisation and bespoke development had led to a poor reputation for the product. We’ve already discussed the product vs. implementation issue in a previous post, but the fact that lots of Stellent clients seemed to have the same problem suggests two things to me.

Firstly, the product may be difficult to implement well. Customisations tend to be required for content entry, so perhaps Stellent didn’t know its audience as well as it should have done. This view is perhaps corroborated by the latest release of version 10gR3 which is now bundled with the Ephox rich text editor (already supplied with IBM content manager and Vignette). This attempts to address some of Site Studio’s issues with cross-platform compatibility and accessibility.

Secondly, there’s a problem with product understanding, not just among implementation partners but within Oracle itself. The Stellent partner base in the UK has traditionally been relatively small. Small systems integrators have focussed on the product’s document management capabilities, with web publishing seen as something of a bonus feature rather than an end in itself. The partners are not web specialists, while the real web specialists — design and build media agencies — haven’t really invested in the product because they see it as more than just web, potentially stretching their capabilities. This is exacerbated by the need to train developers in a proprietary scripting language, IDOC.

Now the limited numbers of the core Stellent team are being swelled by Oracle’s professional services arm. But these aren’t content management specialists, and that’s obvious to many clients who may balk at paying Oracle’s day rates in return for staff on a steep learning curve.

So the user group is turning out to be a really useful forum for all involved. Clients can avoid repeating each other’s implementation errors, while the supplier gets to grips with the common business challenges their client base is trying to address. It’s a bit of role reversal, but hopefully this form of social networking will lead to ECM 2.0.

Philippe Parker on , , | 10 December 2007 | Tweet this |