jump to navigation

One Note Musicians January 30, 2012

Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management, ECM.
2 comments

The problem with being a one note musician is that eventually the key is going to change.

My current pet peeve is that some people refuse to entertain the possibility that their product is not good at doing everything. It is like they are a musician that only knows one note so they keep playing it. It is expected in the ECM world to have an affinity to a product but too often there are conversations where this or that vendor pitches their product as the answer touting their unique ability to do everything.

ECM capability is a very mature market place so I challenge anyone who claims uniqueness in this space. Unique is a meaningless term for the majority of features. There are just so many ways you can differentiate checkout. Answering “we can do that with product x” to every question tacitly assuming a 3 or 4x services or support effort to bridge those gaps is not only disingenuous but in today’s world with highly informed technical buyers is taken less seriously every day.

Your product – no matter what it is or where it is from – is one of a range of choices. Arrogant or dismissive marketing and sales will not work for the long term. You need to learn more riffs because “our size fits all” doesn’t work in the new key.

Differentiation in business model, delivery and feature mix without dependance on superhuman integration efforts by services are where the market is going and sellers need to get in the groove or get off the stage. Don’t take this as a wholesale endorsement of all things open source either. That is certainly a part of it but OpenSourcers are just as susceltiple to this trap as others when they assume every customer wants to spend 16 hours a day in Eclipse or their weekends resolving path and dependency errors.

Like so many other areas in life – playing a good solo is as more about listening than making noise. Listen to what is going on around you. Listen intently to what the other players are doing. Follow the changes. You might learn something and the customers might actually enjoy the performance instead of just enduring it.

Employees Are Not Consumers – They are Comrades January 13, 2012

Posted by Lee Dallas in cloud, Content Management, Social Media, Technology.
add a comment

Thought leaders (hate that term) are all abuzz with the consumerisation of IT. What they mean is that the modern workforce now has the expectation that their technology will be as good as the stuff they use at home. At this point that fact is fairly obvious. We must be careful though not to fall into the trap of thinking of employees as consumers in the general sense that economics defines the term.

Employees may consume things and may have some other traits in common with market consumers but their behavior is not governed by capitalistic motives. They are in fact much more communist in nature. Basically – employees may consume goods and services required to execute their responsibilities at work. They may demand the choice over what those services are. They will however never believe they should have to pay for it in the long run.

Corporations may be active participants in capitalism but in their day to day internal activities they execute more or less like a collective oligarchy. The larger the organization, the more pronounced this behavior becomes. I don’t pretend to be a political theorist but I do know that the basic difference between socialism and communism in the economic sense is the control over the means of production.

Socialism is not necessarily in conflict with capitalism. It allows for private ownership but with centralized regulation. Communism demands that all control be centralized.  IT organizations have long acted as if it was their responsibility to quash independent technology “for the good of the state”  with security or compliance used as justification.  As such it becomes ever more difficult to deliver even the most basic changes as more and more effort is required to maintain the bureaucracy.

In many authoritarian regimes, shortages develop as the organization is disincented to expand services and a black market  develops. In this scenario operational business units seek to circumvent the centralized control and satisfy their technology desires on their own. Once frowned on, it is these shadow IT departments that are dragging companies into using external cloud services one department at a time.

I mentioned earlier this week when I challenged you to listen to your own plumbers, there is a realignment of IT skill sets and job classifications coming. The opening up of the internal IT marketplace to free enterprise IT brought about by mobility and cloud offerings is exciting. It is also very scary to those highly invested in the status quo.

Technology intraprenuers outside of traditional IT organizations will rise and fall creating risk and reward alike.  Like the nouveau riche of the former Eastern Block, there will be individuals, departments and corporations who figure out early how to leverage the unprecedented access to technology and create competitive advantage over others mired in the bureaucratic past. The truly successful companies will be those best able to manage rather than restrict the change.

There is tremendous opportunity for us to benefit financially and organizationally in these new business models but be warned there will be failures. You should be prepared for those and not allow the old guard to use the cliche “I told you this would never work.” Every slip by one of these off-book initiatives will be used as ammunition to slow down the change.

There is a battle over budgets being fought all over and IT has to work harder than ever to justify maintaining their aging war machine. Yet it is a system doomed to crumble under its own weight. The realignment of skill sets in individuals is enormous but it is the budget battles that will change the character of the enterprise. A rougue may be able to establish a beach head with a managed service paid for with a credit card but eventually the attitude that they shouldn’t have to pay for technology themselves will return and they will look for the state to step in and pick up the check (and all the headaches that go along with dealing with the vendor.)

This new state run relationship though will be different. IT will no longer own the means of production – only the power to regulate. Time will tell where the balance of power settles and whether or not managing the mosaic of external providers delivering cloud services will be as dysfunctional as the system we have today.

Listen to Your Own Plumbers January 11, 2012

Posted by Lee Dallas in cloud, Consulting, Content Management, Technology.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

Ron Miller’s piece on Changing the IT Plumber’s Image yesterday was excellent. Most businesses do not see the business value their own IT organizations can and SHOULD be providing. Instead of being seen as the experts who can expand the business through new technology, IT is just somebody you call when your virtual toilet backs up. The analogy of the IT as a plumber has one flaw though. Usually when a plumber leaves things are better than when he got there. (more…)

2012 Predictions and Presuppositions December 14, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in Acquisitions, box.net, Content Management, ECM.
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
1 comment so far

I have decided to take a slightly different approach to my predictions post this year. Rather than write a well thought out and reasoned positions I’ll spew out the list of ideas I have been collecting. My goal for this post is less about proving myself right next year than to do a list that gives everybody something to think about. Hopefully we will expand on the themes as the year progresses.

The list in no particular order:

  • We will all change careers – if you are doing the same thing today you were three years ago you are doing it wrong. If technology hasn’t changed what you thought your career was by now the economy has. Get ready because next year will be just as unsettling.
  • Election year technology brings more annoying augmented reality – I thought Wolf Blitzer standing in front of virtual graphics was cool for about ten minutes but now it just gets on my nerves and the presidential election cycle will take this annoyance to a new level.
  • App markets collapse under their own weight – we passed the million app mark and it will now become the focus of the market to get noticed. Sadly two guys in a garage will fade as marketing budgets begin to overwhelm the clever.
  • Cloud content data loss litigation – This has probably already happened but now that everyone has at least heard the term cloud in a technology context we are due a high profile data loss story in the media that involves multimillion dollar consequences.
  • Angry Birds Mayan Apocalypse 2012 – do I really need to explain this?
  • Open Text market cap will surpass Research In Motion making it Waterloo’s biggest tech resident – who would have ever dreamed that as I write this RIM is worth several billion less than what Autonomy sold for. If RIM doesn’t make a dramatic turn around soon I will have reverse the names in my RIM Should Buy Open Text post from earlier this year.
  • The Jive IPO initiates acquisition frenzy in social platforms – Up until now enterprise software players have been dabbling at creating their own social platforms but the Jive IPO will convince some they need to go faster and kick off acquisitions. Look for products like Broadvision‘s Clearvale to be early targets.
  • Dropbox goes shopping – We have already seen Dropbox reacting to Box with their team product. Clearly they see the smaller contender encroaching on their value proposition and will want to expand their feature set, possibly through acquisition. If they don’t then it Box may well beat them to the IPO party.
  • Someone who prefers Bing meets someone that prefers Google+ and time ends.

I will add more thoughts as they come to mind and I promise before January to evaluate my 2011 Predictions.

What the Cloud Means to Real People November 8, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in cloud, Content Management.
Tags: , , , ,
9 comments

I hate Microsoft’s “To The Cloud” ad campaign. Mainly because it is stupid but also because my kids now run around yelling it just to annoy me. I equally dislike just about every other attempt to explain to real people what cloud computing means. (more…)

Thoughts on the Ethics of Retention Policies October 10, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management, ECM, Records Management.
Tags: , ,
12 comments

Several weeks ago Ron Miller wrote a piece about a potential smoking gun email in the Google/Oracle Java patent suit where he cites Cyrus Mistry’s 2010 AIIM keynote. As Ron recalls, Mistry declared “Everyone gets access to all data and keep it forever.”  I was at the same event and my reaction at the time was similar to Miller’s. I found the position quaint and condescendingly naive. While I don’t recall a specific conversation I am sure that at some point I said – “eventually this will come back to bite them” and it appears that is  what has happened.

There are several ordinary reasons why we implement records management and retention policies. Compliance with global privacy regulations for example. But in all cases we are trained in ECM that every piece of electronic data is potentially electronic evidence and you should purge it at the earliest opportunity. This is how I have advised customers for years and in the industry we build whole programs around it. The problem is this approach ignores one simple thing that is lost in the process. The truth. (more…)

No words October 8, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management.
1 comment so far

GooglePlus and the Diet Coke Rocket Car September 17, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in Collaboration, Content Management, ECM, Technology.
Tags: , , , , ,
3 comments

I am ashamed that this is my first and probably only post on GooglePlus.  Not since the Diet Coke and Mentos thing or Google Wave (hint hint)  have so many people wanted to try something they saw on the internet. Yet last week I took an informal completely unscientific poll on Twitter and though the sample was small the verdict was unanimous. Nobody cared about G+ anymore. All of the thrill was gone. I took the poll because I found myself looking for a reason to keep at it and couldn’t think of one. Despite my personal bandwagonning it does not look like G+will supplant my comfortable social triumvirate of Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn(more…)

Losing My Revisions September 3, 2011

Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

This is odd even for me, but its Friday night and the Twitter meme was #ecmband so I started writing lyrics.  (my sincere apololgies )   (more…)

When Was Your Last Technology “Refresher” August 30, 2011

Posted by Marko Sillanpää in Consulting, Content Management, Technology.
add a comment

An assumption that one can make from our blog title is that I’m a big guy.  And one big assumption I made is that I learned everything we need to about exercise when I got out of high school.  No I’m not talking about how the latest elliptical machine works but the most basics of human exercise, running.  As I would try out a new diet program, I would get to a point where I needed to add exercise into the mix.  That would then lead me to walking and then ultimately running.  And after a few times of trying to run I’d usually hit ”the wall” at 5 minutes.  Ultimately I’d give up.  Where’s that “Runner’s High”?  But this time around I did something weird, I re-learned how to run.

I found a “new program” for running, called Couch to 5k.  And now after my third weekly run of week six, I ran for 25 minutes straight.  Only three weeks before I thought I was going to die trying to run for 3 minutes.  Now I’m running longer than I ran in high school.

Technology evolves much faster than the human body.  Too often many of us get into a rut thinking we know everything about our chosen technology.  But maybe we need to remember the words of Socrates.

(more…)

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 821 other followers