Listen to Your Own Plumbers January 11, 2012
Posted by Lee Dallas in cloud, Consulting, Content Management, Technology.Tags: Business, Business and Economy, Information Technology
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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…)
Writing a Blog and Keeping Our Job April 2, 2011
Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management.Tags: Blogging, Business, Documentum, EMC, EMC Corporation
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One of the highest compliments we get is when people acknowledge the relative degree of neutrality we maintain and still manage to keep our jobs at EMC. It is not an easy thing to do. I have had this conversation so often lately I thought I would share some things about the blog that help us keep on track and the informal guidelines we try to follow. (more…)
When Does a Case Become a Project March 18, 2011
Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management.Tags: Business, Case Management, Content Management, Project management
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I have been struggling with this question lately. What is the real difference between a Case and a Project? I have a certain set of conditioned responses that made me immediately assume they are of course very different but the more I look the more blurry the lines become. I’ll admit it is late and I have been working fourteen hour days but I now hold the opinion that a least from the perspective of the data, there is no difference at all. The project is in the eye of the beholder.
In one conversation on this topic recently I was challenged that projects are single occurrences whereas cases are repetitive. Several hours later someone else made the exact same argument but in reverse. I fully expect the PMI crowd to storm the Bastille and pummel me with Gantt charts but hear me out. What do they have in common?
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Both are really time bound containers having fixed starting points and a linear progression to an end state. (think open to close and start to finish) Cases don’t appear to follow ordered progression but I am referring to STATE of the container not the flow of task execution.
Both contain tasks that can contain predecessors, dependencies, resources and there are common elements like calendar, events and milestones. I know you might say that cases don’t necessarily have these things. My argument is that they do – we just chose not to identify or manage them all the time.
The debate becomes oddly reminiscent to me of the structured vs unstructured data distinction I despise. Both are data but one confines the data to a rigid rectilinear construct while the other does not. Similarly projects might simply be thought of as cases where the entities managed are limited to those required to support the work break down structure and allocation of resources to task. I have a hard time though imagining a case management system where I would not want the option of applying these capabilities to every case.
There has been much conversation around the intersections of BPM, Case and Content Management and how the vendors bleed over into the others spaces. Maybe I just haven’t been asking the question in the right places but I don’t see project management coming up in conversation. The PM software space is comparatively mature but there are clearly basic project management capabilities that would enrich a case management if they were pervasive within the platforms.
Tell me what you think – Cases and Project – is there a difference or not?
COE – Just another word for bottleneck February 8, 2011
Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management.Tags: Business, Center of Excellence, COE, ECM, Management
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Experience in and out of them has taught me that Centers of Excellence are rarely if ever that – excellent. They are the most well intentioned of things at the beginning and often add value. The problem is the concept never really goes away on its own once in place. COE’s are more often than not created because there is a useful skill set, technology or process that has value – but not enough value for any one budgetary unit to fund it alone. (more…)
Open Text Acquires Output Management Vendor StreamServe October 28, 2010
Posted by Lee Dallas in Content Management, ECM, Open Text.Tags: Business, Customer relationship management, Enterprise resource planning, ERP, IBM, OpenText, SAP, SAP AG
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After a bit of a lull during the ECM 2010 marketing hoopla, Open Text announced it is acquiring StreamServe, a document output vendor. Of all OT’s recent acquisitions, this one makes the most sense to me. There is little or no overlap against their current product set and StreamServe’s position in the ERP space in general and with SAP specifically makes it a logical extension. Consistent with previous acquisitions, the pick up of an existing maintenance stream is probably the greatest value. I don’t know that I would expect to see great innovation and integration with the rest of their catalog as a result but as a feature bubble filler it is a reasonable choice.
On a historical note, after the acquisition of DocumentSciences by EMC and Optio by Bottomline Technologies in 2008 I expected to see more acquisition activity sooner but with the market collapse there apparently were better bargains to pick up first. I do wonder now just when and by whom other players in the space like Thunderhead or maybe even the Swiss company ISIS Papyrus will be acquired. IBM is probably the logical choice for Thunderhead but I wouldn’t count out Autonomy who has been rumored to be getting ready for an acquisition sometime in the next few quarters.
