Tweet Jam Tarts – Revisited…

(c) dadcando.com

Last Thursday I participated in another exciting ECM Tweetjam (if you don’t know what a Tweetjam is read it here) organised by @bduhon (long suffering editor of AIIM’s publications and curator of @AIIMCommunity). I had missed the announcements, but stumbled upon a tweet message from a friend, just in time, so I jumped in.

The usual suspects participated in the discussion. Virtually all vocal participants were from the vendor community, but that is not surprising given AIIM’s make up as an organisation. Also not surprising, since the people who have opinions to share on ECM tend to be the ones that have been around this industry for a while and have seen the good, the bad and the extremely ugly (I’m talking about ECM projects here, before anyone gets offended!)

Even though you can use any twitter client to participate in a tweetjam, TweetChat was the preferred tool of the day. It just keeps everything focused and flowing but even with the best tool for the job, it’s difficult to keep up. At the peak of the discussion there were between 5-10 tweets in every 5-second refresh cycle. No chance of reading all of them, never mind responding. Bryant did his best to streamline the flow by numbering the questions but, inevitably, the limitation of 140 characters and the multiple threads of conversations/retweets/comments on each question meant that it was fairly chaotic at times. That’s not a bad thing in a tweetjam! It shows that the participants are passionate about the topic and that it’s not scripted. I’ve been in other tweetjams before, where it was obvious that the only participants were marketers with a very specific message to convey. Those tweetjams are boring!

For those interested in stats: In an hour – 977 tweets, 82 twitterers, potentially reaching 42,500 people…

It’s worth remembering though, that for every person active in a tweetjam conversation, there are several others that just listen in, monitoring the hashtag and looking for pearls of wisdom. And there were several in the session.

So, what ECM pearls did we pick up in the Jam? Here are some…

• The never-ending saga of “is ECM the right name for what we do?” continues
• BPM is a fundamental part of ECM, as confirmed again by OpenText acquisition
• ECM is relevant to small organisations as much as it is to large ones
• SharePoint is here and offers basic ECM, if implemented correctly, but there are some ‘evil’ implementations out there.
• Operational efficiency is “sexy”… According to some at least.
• Some of us are too old and have been in ECM for far too long…

You can read Bryant’s more detailed blog about the #ecmjam here, but I must say it was fun!

Law – The fire within…

(Photo by kind permission of Jan Timmons)

I must confess: I am not a legal expert and my closest encounter with a courtroom is through the safety of a television screen.

I realised recently however, that inside my brain I have multiple and conflicting views of “The law”.

I grew up in Athens and, even though my grandfather was a lawyer (or maybe echoing his cynicism), I have grown up with an inherent mistrust of all thing ‘legal’: Legalese language that seeks to confuse and befuddle the average mortal; vulcher lawyers that procrastinate in order to maximise their hourly fees; legal cases that run for years and years because scheduled court hearings get postponed on technicalities; the list goes on…

In another compartment of my brain lives the virtuous, almost glamourous, world of TV courtroom drama with a very diverse portrayal of reality, ranging from Rumpole Of the Bailey and Kavanagh QC to Ally McBeal and Law and Order. Where young and old conscientious lawyers are burning the midnight oil, over endless stacks of case law books, looking for the one nugget that will exonerate their Ill-accused client and where honour, ethics and the omnipotent sage of the presiding Judge, prevail to save the day.

Many many years ago, I was involved in the delivery of early, bespoke Document Management systems to large law firms, such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Cameron Markby Hewitt (as it was then…), and others, which gave me yet a different perspective: One where Law firm partners are considered akin to deity, hordes of hopeful legal students and young lawyers work through endless hours of menial tasks in order to establish themselves on a career ladder, where information is king but information systems are a foe and where laborious, manual processes represent the status quo. Admittedly that experience was over ten years ago, but it was a cut-throat business then and I doubt that much has changed since.

More recently, I have been marginally involved with the world of electronic discovery and reading about legal proceedings on both sides of the Atlantic, often through the excellent commentary of Chris Dale’s insightful blog.  Through this, I have seen a more earthy view of litigation, where monetary considerations, negotiations, common sense (if such a thing exists….), judgments written in plain English, project management, geopolitical variances and the general admission that nobody, not even judges, are immune to the complexities of technological innovation, paint a picture of a legal environment that looks, well… almost business like! Commercial reality (and the associated astronomical costs of litigation) often dictate that cases are assessed, negotiated and settled on the merits of cost and objectives, not just “fairness” and “justice”.

Which of the views in my brain is more realistic? I don’t know. I find all of them fascinating: I am intrigued, watching an industry which is thousands of years old, constantly evolving and seeking to learn new tricks, acknowledging its own shortcomings and fighting to keep up with technological innovation – just like the rest of us!