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!

OMG! ECM is OCD for LOB!

We are obsessed! It dawned on me the other day, when I was trying to write up a requirements questionnaire for a client who is implementing an archiving system.

When I say “we”, I mean the ECM professionals. You need to have a good deal of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) to be in the ECM business. Whether we are records managers, archivists, consultants, document managers or process designers.

We love things being neat. We love organising information. We obsess about making sure that everything is captured and has a place to go. We love our folders and hierarchies and fileplans. We put labels on everything: We tag and categorise, and add metadata. And then we make lists, and lists of lists, to be able to find stuff. We need rules to abide by, and ideally we like to make the rules ourselves. And we like things that repeat and work the same way every time. We want to know who is who and we are paranoid about security, in case someone sees something they shouldn’t. We need things to be predictable and under control and we don’t like exceptions.

Doesn’t that sound like OCD to you? Come on, admit it. I dare you to try and convince me otherwise…

Now, is that a bad thing? No, not necessarily. The business and to a certain degree the law, needs this kind of rigour and precision. Vast amounts of information would be forever lost at the bottom of the sock drawer, if we didn’t organise things properly. Decisions would take a lot longer and any kind of auditability and transparency would be questionable. The get-on-your-bike-and-see-where-it-takes-you approach does not work in business. Correct? Well, maybe…

ECM is on a collision course. The world of tight controls and neat labels fundamentally contradicts the free Enterprise 2.0 spirit of collaboration and social media. Blogs, wikis, Twitter and Googlewave are there to allow everyone to jump in and do their bit. In real-time. There are very few imposed rules. The blending of personal opinion and work interaction is encouraged. Traditional barriers and organisational structures (from the department to the whole corporation or even across industries) are torn down in favour of exchanging ideas and learning from each other. We don’t have to preserve everything. It’s OK for information to end up in a heap, where analytics can find insights that traditional ECM discipline couldn’t. It’s OK for large communities of common interest – very much like Open Source software – to contribute, correct, expand and share knowledge for the benefit of the common good. It’s OK to have ad-hoc processes that define themselves reactively, based on contextual priorities instead of prescribed recipe.

All of this seemingly anarchic chaos, is revolutionising information management and knowledge sharing. But it has also created a lot of anxiety for most of us OCD types, who still think in terms of folders and hierarchies, and metadata and labels and disposition dates. Will there be a new generation of “free-style” ECM to cater for this? Will we end up with two Information management disciplines – “tightly managed” and “freeflow”? Will the legal and regulatory systems move with the times or shut their eyes pretending the change is not happening? Only time will tell…

But next time you are thinking of architecting an ECM environment, don’t assume that your neat little boxes and clearly labelled compartments will be there forever. They will not!

BPM and ECM: The war that never was!

Today I read a very well written and entertaining post from Adam Deane, titled “BPM and ECM – The War Begins”

Unfortunately it’s the “Dad’s Army” (aka the vendors…) view of the war. In the real world (Line-of-business) ECM and BPM have made peace years ago and for the last 20 years there have been very few ECM implementations without process elements, and vice-verse, very few BPM implementations that don’t involve documents, forms, images, or other forms of interaction with the knowledge workers and the customers. The only “pure-play” BPM solutions that don’t involve elements of ECM are straight-through-processing and application integration projects.

The “war” Adam is describing is a SuperMarket war:  Inevitably you need to eat both protein and fruit… Will you buy your ECM and BPM rations from IBM, Oracle, EMC, Microsoft, your local FairTrade Co-op (is that Alfresco?) Or will you support the local economy by shopping at the smaller local pure-play traders buying separately from the butcher’s, the baker’s and the greengrocer’s?

As a consumer, it’s always good to have a choice!

George