In his AIIM 2010 Keynote presentation, John Mancini talks about a variety of "disruptive forces" that will transform the CM industry. Among many other factors, he cites the following:
• A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
• Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
• A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
• A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems
What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:
1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.
Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their 'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.
Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.
Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.
• A demographic-driven shift in expectations of information management
• Volumes of data rising faster than available storage
• A "transfer of experiences... with consumer technologies into expectations for enterprise IT"
• A pervasive feeling among enterprise users that information is easier to find on the web than in their internal systems
What this effectively means is that the realities of enterprise content management are continually diverging from the idealistic "everything you'll ever need" contention of traditional ECM suites. In chasing the carrot of single-point accountability, organizations have perpetuated an over-reliance on their content management systems, spurring vendors into building generic functionality - which may only crudely represent a customer's specific needs - or super-customized modules which can not adapt to changing business needs. In order for a CM implementation - like any system - to be effective in the modern enterprise, it must recognize two things:
1. It must address the specific needs of its users.
2. Those needs are going to change over time.
Organizations that have historically stemmed the rising tide of user requirements by tacking changes on to their 'all-in-one' systems will find this method inadequate to shore up the coming "data deluge". Mancini believes businesses will then stop investing in legacy systems that do not support the future and will look to the kinds of solutions which comply with the two tenets above: namely, solutions which are cheap, standards-based, and open.
Mancini contrasts applications with platforms, and specifically calls out SharePoint 2010 as a technology which, perhaps non-intuitively, falls into the latter category. Unlike traditional applications, these platforms will not ship with everything you'll ever need, and Mancini predicts a renaissance of process-specific solutions to fill this gap. This largely resonates with the practices of social and new media companies like Twitter and The Onion, who have created utterly unique experiences by bending open-source web frameworks to their will. In a similar vein, Vamosa's Expert Services organization has rolled out innovative solutions in the past two months by combining open-source frameworks like Sinatra and Django with SaaS offerings from Zoho and Heroku.
Taking this a bit further, I would propose that the concept of the platform is one piece of a larger framework (which Vamosa calls Enterprise Content Governance - ECoG) needed to effectively manage enterprise content. Successful CM architectures will incorporate a constellation of loosely coupled technologies, services, and processes. The businesses that succeed in this environment will be the ones who abandon the pursuit of the CMS holy grail and find a way to command a hybrid of proprietary and open-source platforms, point solutions, and services to achieve their precise objectives.
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