CMS: Houston, We Have a Problem!
March 7, 2008
The 2008 AIIM show is history.
I spent several days in Boston (March 3, 4, 5, 2008), wondering why the city built a massive concrete shoe box, probably designed by a Harvard or MIT graduate inspired by Franz Kafka and post-Stalinist architecture. It’s obvious no one had the moxie to tell our budding Leonid Savelyev that people expect mass transit, doors to the hotel across the street, and an easy-to-navigate interior. Spend a few hours wandering around this monstrosity, and you may resonate with my perceptions of this facility.
There’s another disaster brewing under the AIIM umbrella. That’s what the in-crowd calls content management. Synonyms in play at this show included CMS, ECMS (enterprise or extreme content management systems), and eDocuments, among others.
These synonyms are a radio beacon that says to me, loud and clear: “We have a way to help you deal with electronic information.” These assurances wrapped in buzzwords make it clear that organizations are: [a] unable to deal with basic storage and findability tasks; [b] confused about how business processes can and should intersect; [c] staggered like a punch drunk fighter with the brutally punishing costs of these eDoc solutions; and [e] scared because a mistake can send them to court or, even worse, jail. No one I met fancied doing a perp walk in an orange suit due to a failure to comply with regulatory mandates, legal discovery, and basic, common sense record keeping.
Folks were pretty thrilled to get a Google mouse pad from the Googlers or a rubber ball with flashing lights in it from Open Text. But amidst the bonhomie, there was a soupçon of desperation.
To me CMS and its step children attempt to make a run-of-the-mill operation into a high-end publishing company. The problem with attempting to embed an intellectual process dependent on information into software is that most people aren’t very good informationists. Using a BlackBerry or an automatic teller machine is not the same as creating useful, accurate, on-point information. CMS has now morphed from managing a static Web site’s content into a giant, Rube Goldberg machine that ingests everything and outputs anything, at least according to the marketers I met.
Electronic information is now a major problem for most employees, senior managers, and vendors. Building a solution that is affordable and satisfies the needs of the Securities & Exchange Commission from Tinker Toys is a tough job. I saw lots of Tinker Toy solutions on offer. I’m genuinely concerned about the problems these systems are exacerbating. “Trouble,” as one cowboy said to his side kick, “is coming down the line.”
This essay highlights the three of my take-aways from this conference and exhibition. According to the chatter, there were more than 2,000 paying attendees who sat through lectures on subjects ranging from “Architecture Considerations in Electronic Records Management Software Selection: to “Pragmatic to Value Add: Will Anyone Really Pay for It?”. There were product reviews disguised as substantive lectures. I suffered some thin gruel that passing as a solid intellectual feast. I heard that another 20,000 people fascinated with copiers, high-speed imaging, and digital information wandered through the charming aircraft hanger of an exhibit hall.
Most of the presenters “follow the game plan”. The talks are in the average to below average grade range. A few are interesting, but finding one is a hit-and-miss affair. This conference housed a Drupal conference, something called On Demand, and the AIIM conference. For my purposes, there’s one conference, and the unifying theme was lots of people talking about electronic information.
What I Learned
Let me compress 18 hours of AIIM experiences into these points:
- Digital content is a major problem for most organizations. CMS is the band aid, but none of the vendors has a cure for information obesity. None of the customers with whom I spoke using vendors’ solutions are in shape for a digital triathlon. Systems are expensive and flaky. Budgets are tight, and the problems of storing, finding, and repurposing information are getting worse fast.
- Vendors with hardware solutions that scan paper, print paper, and manipulate digital counterparts of paper are spouting digital babble and double talk. Vendors of quasi – copy machines talk about hardware as if it were bits in a cloud. AIIM has its roots in scanning, micrographics, microfilm, and printing. Hardware — even when it is the size of an SUV — is positioned as software, a system, and a platform. Obviously hardware lacks sizzle. Vendors with software solutions talk about the pot of gold at the end of the dieters’ rainbow. It just ain’t true, folks. It’s a Nike running shoe commercial applied to information. No go. Sorry.
- Marketing messages are not just muddled; the messages are almost incomprehensible. Listening to earnest 30 – year olds tell me about “enterprise repositories with integrated content transformation and repurposing functionality” and “e – presentment” left me 100 percent convinced that the information crisis has arrived, and the vendors will say anything to get a deal and the buyers will buy whatever assuages their fears. Rationality was not a surplus in these sales pitches.
My stomach rebels at baloney.
The “Real” Problem
Organizations right now are fighting a three – front war against digital information. I know that the AIIM attendees are having a tough time expressing their challenges clearly. The people with whom I spoke can only describe the problem from an individual point of view. Vendors want to be all things to all people. The dialogs among the customers and the vendors are fascinating and disturbing to me. I think the market is in a state of turmoil.
Digital information is a different type of challenge for an organization. On one hand, it eliminates the hassles of recycling some information. Cut and paste is a wonderful function. But if your work processes are screwed up, digital information only creates more problems. If your employees aren’t good informationists, you will produce more dross than ever. You will, of course, do it more quickly which adds to the problem. Furthermore, finding something remains tough. Automated systems are expensive, complex, and fully capable of going off the rails with no warning.
What was crystal clear to me is that most business processes have not been “informationized”, to use a weird verb form I heard at the show. Work flows are based on human actions. Humans are just not very good at “being digital”.
Wrap Up
An inability to handle digital information is a problem of great import. Regulators expect companies to manage digital information. Organizations aren’t set up to deal effectively with the data volume and its challenges — format, versions, volatility, non-textual components, etc. The problem is not getting better. The problem is getting bigger.
One well-fed, sleek senior manager smirked with pride about the huge prices paid by certain firms to acquire enterprise content management companies (ECM or enterprise CMS in the jargon of AIIM). He pointed to two firms — EMC and Hewlett Packard — as particularly adept practitioners of snapping up “hot” companies in order to get “high margin upsides”. “There’s a big market for this high-end solution,” he asserted.
I think this weird MBA speak means that EMC and HP want to buy into a sector with fat margins and semi-desperate customers. This can work, but I am not sure that these two firms’ “solutions” are going to solve the information challenges most organizations now face. EMC wants to move hardware. HP wants to sell printers and ink.
I’m probably wrong. I usually stray into the swamp anyway.
I think information mis-management will bring the direct downfall of some organizations in the next few months. Tactical fixes will not be enough. When an information-centric collapse occurs, perhaps buzzwords will give way to new thinking about digital information in organizations. More meat, fewer empty calories, please!
Stephen Arnold, March 7, 2008
Comments
3 Responses to “CMS: Houston, We Have a Problem!”
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Arnold,
It was interesting meeting with you at the AIIM show. It is probably the only meeting that ignited something very strong inside of my mind. I had to leave for a meeting soon, but it would be good to hear more about what exactly you were trying to say to me.
I read your comment in your blog, and for the most part you seem to have your finger on the pulse, but I’m not sure if your concerns spring from real problems that you saw, or just that maybe you think you know about things you don’t but need to speak with an authoritative tone in order to continue to run your business of writing books and attempting to influence people with your brand of thinking.
All the same, the comments you made to me during our short conversation are duly noted.
Arnold,
Your session in the AIIM was an eye-opening one for me.
I can’t agree anymore on your views of the current ECM markets. People are still playing those “Feature Checklist” games when they seeks for solutions without even understanding the problems are they trying to address.
Buzzwords are poisoning the market and seems that most of the players are overdosed
My brief visit to AIIM was a disappointment. Of course, I can’t speak for the presentations, because I was on an exhibits only/general sessions pass, and I didn’t even see any of the general presentations. I had planned to spend most of Wednesday and Thursday there, but I left after about 4 hours.
I’ve pointed members of the Center for Semanitc Excellence (www.semanticexcellence.org) to your blog entry for more comprehensive perspective. I suspect that Lynda Moulton of the Gilbane Group will write about it, too.
I share some of your reactions, but I’m not sure you’ve put your finger on the core problem.
The new convention center is a huge place, but I wouldn’t call it Kafkaesque. And it’s way too bright to be called Stalinesque. It’s gotta be big to attract the kind of conventions Boston is seeking. (The Hines isn’t big enough for some shows.) Even so, AIIM, as big as it was, kinda rattled around in that space. My guess is that attendance was disappointing, too.
The waterfront location can be pretty. Walk along the windows on Level 1 (The second floor; they’re going all European on us, I guess.), and you get a nice view of the harbor and downtown Boston. The location, however, comes with inconvenience. Driving and parking there is painful. You’re right about getting there by public transportation. They need to do something about that.
What bothered me was the lack of excitement and interaction. Lots of tired technologies with minor new twists. For these folks, it’s still all about paper. They’re not solving business problems in interesting ways; they’re treating businesses as publishers. Yeah, most businesses are publishers, but if you solve the publishing problems you still aren’t solving the business problems. Sometimes you’re making them worse. Not enough exhibitors in my domain (the “semantic” space), either. Can’t blame them for that, though.
I also think that the general doom-and-gloom about the state of the economy dampened spirits.
The sheer size of the show and its very traditional presentations + exhibits format left me feeling that I just wasn’t getting anything new out of the experience.
Same for the Boston KM Forum meeting on Friday morning. (See http://www.kmforum.org.) It looks like I really got Lynda Moulton’s dander up. Many of the recent Friday meetings have been terrific (thanks to the tireless efforts of Lynda and Larry Chait), but the March 7 meeting was a rehash of KM adoption problems — stuff I’ve been hearing for 15 years. So after listening to the group for 90 minutes, I said so. It isn’t about the information. Businesses are not libraries. We need to redesign work itself, because the world has changed. And we are seeing strong evidence that focusing on information is not a cure. It’s becoming part of the problem.
In any case, well said! Ignore the snarky comment in the first response. I’ve been associated with “publishing” for 30 years. Your observations are thoughtful.
Phil
———————
Phil Murray, Chief Knowledge Architect
The Semantic Advantage
“Turning Information into Assets”
phil.murray@semanticadvantage.com
401-247-7899
Blog: http://semanticadvantage.wordpress.com
Web site: http://www.semanticadvantage.com
Founding member of the Center for Semantic Excellence
http://www.semanticexcellence.org
http://www.semanticexcellence.org