BrilliantLeap: Blog tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1 2008-07-17T18:43:22Z Movable Type 3.33 No matter how you parse it- It's a free agent nation tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.103 2008-07-17T18:35:44Z 2008-07-17T18:43:22Z the changing landscape in Life Sciences.

There are mergers and acquisitions to consider as well; when they occur, layoffs are nearly a given. Why? Because not only does 1+1 need to become greater than 2 when it comes to revenues; 1+1 needs to be less than 2 when it comes to costs. Efficiencies get developed and jobs get lost. Companies don't need two "A" players in the same slot; and, not only that, but politics play a huge role in deciding who stays and who goes.

Now, I don't mean to sound pessimistic about the employer/employee relationship because I am not. Employers add a great deal of value to their employees and employees return that value and then some. It's just that workers need to understand is the nature of At-will employment which in simple English says this: (I'm quoting myself from an article that ran in the NY Post in 2006):

"I (the company) use you (as long as I need you); and you (the employee) use me (as long as I pay you well, help you upgrade your portfolio of skills, and/or support your lifestyle choices). Either one of us can bail on the other, at any time, for any reason; and because we've stated it upfront there shouldn't be any hard feelings."

How is this different from being a contractor? In a client/contractor relationship it's presumed that ALL your customer cares about is what you can deliver, that it's a slam-bam-thank you ma'am sort of deal. That's why I think Pie called contracting a job. (But in my experience, this is rarely the case. The reason many companies hire contractors Vs. employees is budgeting. They'd like to hire an employee to do the job but the balance sheet won't allow for it; consultants/contractors are usually counted as expenses; employees are usually considered overhead.) 

That being said, maybe it's time to ask :What is a career anyway? Do employees have careers and contractors have jobs? I think not. I like Wikipedia's definition of career:

"A career is traditionally seen as a course of successive situations that make up a person's worklife."

In shorthand, a career is a series of jobs. Its building blocks can be a series of employee situations, contractor situations, or a combination of the two. There's no right or wrong way. The important thing is that you understand that the management of you career belongs to you and that it shouldn't be DEPENDENT on any specific employer OR technology.

If you'd like to know more about the topic, you can check out my article To Leave or Not to Leave in the NY Post; Cliff Hakim's book We Are All Self Employed, or Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself.

]]> CIA uses enterprise 2.0 to get the scoop tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.102 2008-07-07T06:23:28Z 2008-07-07T06:29:17Z

It seems that the agency has built a wiki ,called Intellipedia, for its DIN (director of national intelligence). It's purpose is to  improve communications within the CIA and disparate intelligence organizations. Intellipedia's components include aggregation; interlink blogs, Tag|Connect (similar to del.icio.us); Inteldocs (a document management system for file sharing community-wide); Gallery (similar to flickr); iVideo (similar to YouTube); Intelink Instant Messaging (IIM); and Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Intellipedia's creators have posted a briefing here.

What might be most interesting to Document and Content Management pros is that Intellipedia as a Wiki is available on three networks -- a top secret network, a secret network and a sensitive but unclassified network available to the intelligence community. That seems like a neat, and smart way of collaborating. If you'd like to watch an interview with its Intellipedia's evangelists, it's here.

]]> Those who don't ask, don't wait tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.100 2008-06-23T01:20:48Z 2008-06-23T01:23:32Z
  • Bring their own equipment to work (primarily laptops and smartphones)
  • Select their own applications and tools
  • Be mobile and telecommute at least part-time

    • In their workplaces:

    • IT won't have as much centralized control of resources (unless you're in a high-security environment)
    • Data security, privacy, and confidentiality will be even more complex to manage

    And Hiner isn't alone in his thinking. A Symantec study reveals that 69% of millennials feel entitled to use whatever application/technology/device/ they want, regardless of company policy. Only 45% of the millennials surveyed indicated that they stick to company-issued devices and applications right now.

    Maybe that's why it was sort of anti-climactic when Mark Lewis announced that Documentum will be integrated with Web 2.0 technologies and that the price to current license holders would be FREE.

    "It was like saying that I do not have to pay for the air that I breathe," said an EMC World attendee who asked not to be named. "I (my company) wasn't planning to pay anyway. I would have found another way to get the job done."

    Now I don't know how easy or hard that would be and how well-schooled in compliance that particular individual was. Bottom line- it may not matter. Though Larry Dignan of ZD Net makes great points when arguing that Millennials:

    "will run into a brick wall and realize that it makes sense to centralize some IT functions. They'll realize Web 2.0 is insecure. They'll realize you can't share intellectual property on Twitter. They'll realize that remote data wiping is pretty cool when you lose your phone. Bottom line: If there's any touchy feeling collision course between Millennials and business, the latter will win."

    I wonder. Dignan seems certain that companies like Johnson and Johnson and General Electric will reign these folks in. Yet management gurus like Jack Welch of GE fame may not agree. He champions millennials for being entrepreneurial  ("High performers won't wait") and challenges leaders to gather and sift through the wealth of data that is suddenly available.

    ]]>     TCM Part 3: Document Sciences tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.99 2008-06-12T18:59:20Z 2008-06-12T19:34:49Z When I ask customers what impressed them at EMC World, the most common answer I get, from non-developer types, is Transactional Content Management (TCM). Though I've defined TCM in previous posts, my notes from Mark Lewis's press briefing say that it's: "a solution platform uniquely optimized for business agility that enables organizations to deliver highly adaptive and proactive customer-centric, content-centric applications." It's a mouthful, I know, AND it's important to note that TCM is a solution NOT an application. What's the difference? EMC's TCM is a customizable, configurable workflow that encompasses document input and capture (Captiva); monitoring and optimization (Documentum) and output (Document Sciences). It is not specifically designed for motor vehicle accident insurance claims, health insurance claims, mortgage processing etc..these are applications which can be built using EMC's TCM solution. And what makes TCM the solution of choice for building the aforementioned applications?

    So what is Document Sciences? EMC says that they're "a market-leading global provider of customer communications management solutions." Or in simpler terms, the technology that produces highly personalized documents that say things like:

    Dear Mr. X

    In reference to your claim of DATE concerning the automobile accident that occurred on DATE at ADDRESS and the damage that occurred to your YEAR OF MANUFACTURE AND BRAND OF VEHICLE

    What's special about the technology, and the TCM solution in general, is that it grabs all the right information, processes it and delivers it into exactly the right place. There's less human intervention necessary, less room for error, and no one has to waste time in the time-consuming and frustrating quest (manually or via query) for the right information.

    xPression is Document Sciences' leading product. It's SOA-based framework looks like this:

    xPression_3_architecture

    If you're a professional who works with EMC technologies, welcome two new acronyms into your life. DOM (Document Output Management) and CCM (Customer Communications Management).

    When EMC purchased Document Sciences late last year, Industry Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe called the latter a "a long established and well regarded firm that had a longstanding presence in the document output world, delivering software to manage highly complex, high volume publishing scenarios."

    And interestingly, if you wanted to make a case for blogger Apoorv Durga prompting Joe Tucci to go shopping for a Document Sciences type product (and I'm having fun with the idea, NOT trying to make the case), you could. Here's what he wrote more than a year before EMC's purchase of Document Sciences:

    I think document composition should be part Content Management systems. However, the integration with ECM products is still not very common. Based on the trends that I have seen, I think this is a feature that more and more clients would want to implement. Hence, the ECM vendors will certainly need to offer this feature to differentiate from others. They will either need to build this capability or buy niche products and integrate them.

    If they haven't already, there's no question that companies like IBM/FileNet and OpenText will respond by upgrading their own TCM solutions. I doubt that this worries Tucci very much. Though I don't have an exact quote, he seems rather relaxed about head-on competition; I imagine him saying something like this: "We got there first, so we have some time to get better at integrating the technology and optimizing it to market needs. Our competition will be playing catch up for a while."

     

    ]]>     Transactional Content Management Part 2: Documentum tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.98 2008-06-06T18:28:07Z 2008-06-12T19:37:02Z I interrupted my three-part post on EMC's Transactional Content Management solution (TCM) because I wanted to make readers aware of EMC's vision for Friction-less computing BEFORE I wrote about the Documentum-portion of TCM. Why? Because it looks like a solution that's approaching friction-lessness. (It may be important to note that I think about "friction-less" primarily from the software side. Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President of Technology Alliances, defines it more broadly in his blog; he describes it as "a self-service, few-questions-asked environment." ) Sounds good, doesn't it? As simple as launching a web browser. And a potent answer to Joe Tucci's (COB and CEO of EMC) concern that there's still too much involvement from IT.

    All that being said, let's look at the Documentum part of EMC's TCM solution which enlists Documentum Application, Documentum Archive Services for Imaging, Documentum Process Suite (BPM), and Documentum Task Space. According to Mark Lewis, President of EMC Software's CMA division, Documentum Task Space(which is an easy-to-use interface that enables you to quickly retrieve documents and perform high-volume transaction processing) will be getting a new, improved interface in Q3 of 2008.

    When TaskSpace was first introduced in D6, self-proclaimed (but seemingly undisputed) Documentum Guru, Johnny Gee called it," a configurable framework is built on the Forms Builder technology. Using Forms Builder, a systems analyst (non-developer) can build a simple application within days or change the UI in real-time." While this may not yet spell friction-less...

    The TaskSpace upgrade isn't the only change coming for TCM. EMC's Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) product will be integrated into Documentum and TaskSpace later this year as well. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the BAM product, it came to EMC through the acquisition of ProActivity which described itself as " the most flexible, scalable, and cost effective business process optimization solution available today. Our customer's return on investment is typically proactivity measured in weeks, not months". Dave DeWalt, who was the President of EMC Software at the time, explained the purchase to the press as follows:

    "Almost daily, customers stress to me their strategic need to optimize their business processes such as invoice processing, claims processing and loan origination. Manual process design and requirements definition is expensive, tedious, slow, error prone and widely recognized as the root cause of project failure. ProActivity brings to EMC a critical content management technology set to augment and enhance EMC's ability to address these needs through the industry-leading EMC Documentum business process management (BPM) software suite."

    For anyone who wants to read up on an analysis of EMC's BPM tools, Sandy Kemsley describes them in great detail.

    So how was Documentum's TCM received? I fear industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe would tell me that I've asked the wrong question. He says that "ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is now CMA (Content Management and Archiving)" at EMC (almost suggesting that if we want to find Documentum, as we once knew it, in EMC CMA's product line we'll have to dig for it). But that being said, he also called TCM, "the star at EMC" and claimed that with it "EMC has a strong hand to play."

    Customers I've spoken with, even those who are Documentum devotees, like the commercial. The biggest question I've heard from them is whether Documentum/EMC/CMA has the best BPM tool on the market. After all, BEA has its Aqualogic product and given that both Weblogic and Oracle (which are now owned by the same company) exist in a multitude of enterprises, defining what a single vendor enterprise solution  looks like may not be as simple as it seems.

    ]]> What's to be seen through a wider lens? tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.97 2008-06-02T06:40:49Z 2008-06-02T06:44:25Z

    A few Documentum-oriented readers of this blog have e-mailed me back-channel to ask why I wrote about Captiva two posts ago; the answer I gave is this: "To provide a view through a wider lens." From my observation, EMC's intention is to design products around business-oriented solutions; therefore no specific product, almost by definition, can do the whole job. So while a Documentum developer, for example, may see his/her role as customizing, configuring or writing code around WebTop, DFC, DCM and so on; EMC looks at the entire solution set: "How can we build as close to a Plug'n Play for our customers as possible ?" A good example of this is EMC's Transactional Content Management solutions set. It's built for clients who have Accounts Payable Processing, Health Insurance Document Generation, and Business Process Management (the demo at EMC World was around information exchanged between an individual involved in a car accident and his insurance company) needs. These are areas in which high-volumes of information are input ( the EMC solution enlists Captiva), then managed via Documentum and finally delivered to customers in various formats and through various means through Document Sciences which does "customer communications management."

    The idea between marrying these previously disparate products is simple- EMC can offer a full solution to its customers- the interfaces come "built in." And if we are to take Mark Lewis at his word (and I see no reason not to) the approach offers a competitive advantage to EMC, "We're the only supplier in the industry with an end-to-end solution."

    According to the top three vendors in the ECM-space (EMC, IBM, Oracle). the market calls for infrastructure-based solutions (this supports EMC's mission to increase its presence within a client firm) with everything as much "out of the box" as possible. Gartner says that, "The increased focus of infrastructure vendors, especially Microsoft, on content management has led to consolidation in the ECM market." So, if everyone's right, Wall Street should be pretty happy. EMC Storage customers seem to be. I can't find data to support that for EMC CMA or Documentum specifically, but if you want your vote to be included in the larger EMC picture, go here.

    Where am I going with all this? Perhaps to ask a few questions and make a few points.

    1) If the almost out-of the-box trend continues and you're an IT professional who works in the ECM Space, your job will be more and more about optimizing configurations and less and less about design, coding, and customization.

    2) It may make sense to get total-vendor solution savvy- understanding how a solution set works as a whole might create efficiencies and/or generate cost savings (maintenance, at the very least, should be simpler) for your employer or customer.

    3.) Are ECM customers sacrificing the use of best-of breed-technologies when they marry a vendor?

    4.) What's happened to leveraging leading-edge technologies for competitive advantage? Are ECM solutions not geared toward that anymore? (When products like Documentum and CoreDossier were new, early adapters could beat competitors in getting therapies to market first by leveraging the Document Management and Publishing technologies to complete and publish FDA submissions in record time. Being first to market in Pharma often wins customer loyalty and market dominance. for years.)

    5.) What happens to innovation in the space? Gartner says, "The shift toward larger infrastructure vendors - with IBM, Oracle and EMC competing at the high end and Microsoft commoditizing the market at the low end - ultimately means fewer choices for end users and less opportunity for innovation.

    ]]>     A Friction-less Future? tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.96 2008-05-28T21:31:48Z 2008-05-28T21:51:20Z I'm interrupting my three-part series on Transactional Content Management EMC-style because of a particular word: FRICTION. Although I don't want to go on record saying it was used in every keynote at EMC World, not a keynote speaker I listened to failed to say it...... friction

    Joe Tucci, Chairman of the Board of Directors, President and Chief Executive Officer of EMC, said there is "still too much friction between IT and the Information Creators." Now I can't jump into his brain, but I think he meant to imply that "information creators" and information consumers, for that matter, shouldn't really need to interact with IT very much, if at all.

    Howard Elias, President, EMC Global Services and Resource Management Software Group; Executive Vice President, EMC Corporation, said that, "There is too much friction" in IT. He insisted that despite the great strides made in Information Technology. too much friction continues to exist between the  information being created and the users that wanted to consume it

    Mark Lewis, President of the Content Management and Archiving Division of EMC Corporation, not only used the word friction, but he went on to say that EMC's new Transactional Content Management platform will be, "uniquely optimized for business agility that enables organizations to deliver a highly-adaptive, proactive, customer-centric application."

    Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, used the word in his blog earlier this year: " Less friction is good, and leads to all sorts of wonderful things,"  and he even blogged on the topic during Day 3 of EMC World.

    World-record holder of the longest job title (General Manager of the SharePoint Technologies Group and Senior Director of the Compliance Applications Groups for EMC's Content Management and Archiving Business Unit) and EMC employee Andrew Chapman, uses the word in his post-EMC World blog-post:

    "MORE INTERESTINGLY IS HOW/WHY DID SHAREPOINT BECOME SO PERVASIVE IN THESE ORGANIZATIONS TO THE POINT THAT IT IS NOW AN ISSUE FOR THESE CUSTOMERS TO SOLVE?

    • Great question. IMHO Microsoft did a great job of creating a solution in a space what had almost no friction. The layer in which SharePoint resides is so multifaceted - it can be viewed as an über-file system, an extremely rich development platform or a layer under Office that provides basic productivity tools. Previously there was no easy way of extending Microsoft Office in to an organization's processes. Oh, and people believe that it comes for free.it doesn't but even the illusion of a bargain is a great sales tool. "

    I could go on........ I  have an endless number of instances to list, but my point's already made. EMC is looking to put business users into the driver's seat and minimize the need for IT involvement.

    A consumer-like Web 2.0 experience is headed for the Enterprise courtesy of EMC. The question to ask: How does this affect me?

    ]]>     What's Up with Captiva? tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.95 2008-05-27T06:37:15Z 2008-05-28T21:54:03Z Most of us in the Documentum world don't spend too much time thinking about Captiva. "It's Input Accel re-branded," is how one Documentum developer describes it. Another calls it, "Document Management .5. It's what companies used to scan paper in, stuff that wasn't created electronically." And that definition is good enough for a woman I interviewed six months ago; she got sick while searching through paper-based clinical study archives. "This stuff needs to be in the computer, not where it gets moldy," she says. But EMC and Wikipedia see Captiva as something more than a tool that scans, stores and catalogs documents originally recorded on paper, electronically. Its larger value-add is......

    Ar EMC World 2008, EMC Software President Mark Lewis said that in Q3 of this year EMC will introduce advanced form capturing capabilities into Captiva, "with the ability to get more and more information from forms." In Q4 of this year, EMC plans to deliver Project Athena which will introduce a tighter integration between Captiva and Documentum.

    Why does this matter? According to Lewis "We're (EMC) the only supplier in the industry with an end-to-end solution". Lewis is referring to Captiva on the front-end (Input), Documentum (Content Management) and Document Sciences (output). These three pieces are necessary for Transactional Content Management (TCM) where Content and Transactions are tightly intertwined. Note: Both Document Sciences product features and TCM  features will be discussed in later posts.

    How does this affect jobs and the employers of ECM professionals is a question I'm always asked and feel behooved to answer. In terms of ECM jobs as a whole, provided that TCM takes off, job opportunities will grow as Transactional Content Management becomes an application that  companies choose to empower more and more business processes. And those who have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor will acquire in-demand skills first, and as at all times when the demand for qualified professionals exceeds the supply, they'll get paid more. But the roles will be different, partly because of EMC's new SOA and SaaS architectures, and partly because previously disparate EMC solutions will flow into each other thereby creating a demand for workers with a broader set of knowledge.

    Finally, what does job growth look like for workers with Captiva experience? The chart below (which tracks the number of job listings containing the word "Captiva") comes to you courtesy of my friends at Indeed.com Needless to say, demand over the long-haul is growing.

    captiva Job Trends

    Scale: Absolute - Relative

    clip_image002]]> Get Webcited! tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.94 2008-05-22T18:52:06Z 2008-05-23T00:59:12Z

    I've received a number of e-mails from folks who are not at EMC World asking "What exactly is Magellan about? Will it interface with MySpace or Facebook? Will it be integrated with WordPress for blogging? I even heard something about iPhone...

    I posed these same sort of questions to Whitney Tidmarsh while she was waiting to be interviewed in the International Press Room at EMC World. And while I don't have a direct quote to offer,her answer was, more or less, yes, yes, our general plan is to let clients use whatever collaborative/social networking/mobile delivery platforms they choose, we'll try to support them, but not in the beta version, not in Magellan ESSENTIALS.

    I don't intend for this latter part to sound like a downer; in fact, I think a small,limited-featured start is a good idea. Marketing gurus like Guy Kawasaki say that being the second entrant into a space isn't a losing proposition and adds that rolling a full-featured product out before the kinks have been worked out is a mistake. I second that... Users want to use stuff that works, not sit around thinking about how cool it will be if it finally does.

    In any case, what Magellan will do, according to EMC's CMA division president Mark Lewis, is to provide client code that grabs and synthesizes information from wikis, blogs, mashups and the like for the Documentum repository.

    The demo of Magellan was impressive, even to web-junkie like me. Information-filled bubbles popped-up when Whitney (who looks like a younger, curvier, prettier Vanna White) pointed to certain tagged words; there was even a demo of how google maps could be accessed to find contextually relevant information (the demo pointed to all the carpet stores in an x mile radius from a selected location).

    The user-experience was richer and more friendly than most anything I've seen related to Documentum. I didn't have to ask, Why is this cool?... Because it was. The look, the feel, and the content itself is exactly what developers, managers, architects and project owners want to deliver to their end users. No one wants to use tired technology at work, and cool stuff at home.  GenY and Millennial workers simply won't have it.

    As I mentioned before, EMC's decision to empower knowledge workers in the ECM space is to be applauded.

    "Behind the firewall" shouldn't correlate to "no fun" or feels like I'm working in a prison." If you want to be the first to get a taste of it all, here's the link Registration for EMC Magellan Essentials Beta Community Access.

    ]]>     It's finally here and it's... tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.93 2008-05-20T23:05:43Z 2008-05-21T01:36:14Z Documentum's first Web 2.0 product. Initially it will be made up of ESSENTIALS for collaboration and guess what the price will be ( if you're an existing Documentum customer)?

    Code named Project Magellan for now, it will include vehicles for blogging, wikis, collaboration and more.

    From what I can tell, it will work together with all of our favorite products and access, store, and archive pertinent data.

    More on this later today or tomorrow.... Look for it to be released in Q3.]]>     Live from EMC World tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.92 2008-05-20T09:09:34Z 2008-05-20T16:25:51Z For anyone who hasn't been to EMC World before, it's huge , especially compared to Momentum. And when it comes to size... paste whatever attribute and meta tag (spell check insists it's two words) you want on to it, it matters. So being the rebel I am, instead of my usual long posts, I'm going to write small, short, posts on the different aspects of what I have seen and experienced.
    The conference officially opened last night with a real nice reception (I'm talking pasta cooked to order, Virginia ham sandwiches, exotic appetizers, free booze) and the Goo Goo Dolls.

    I'd paste in the video but the web's incredibly slow, at the moment, and I know ya'all are smart enough to look'em up on YouTube, should you so desire.
    Aside from the fine food and music at the conference, there are people, lots of them, over 9300 according to EMC's esteemed leader, Joe Tucci.

    And when I say people, I'm talking folks from all over the world. At the press Q&A today, Tucci took questions from journalists from Korea, Poland, Israel, Argentina, Germany....need I go on?)


    The questions seemed to be all storage,iomega (though the acquisition is not yet complete), VM and business strategy related, so I kept my big mouth shut. Are you going to release a version of Content Server that is optimized for 64-bit bit hardware? didn't seem to be appropriate for him ( but Mark Lewis, who heads up EMC software, will be getting it from me tomorrow, I promise.)


    Software and ECM is just one of five of EMC's big businesses and since that's my one window into EMC, it feels, just a little....disruptive. Not in a bad way, though. And much as I'm often critical, Tucci seems like a smart, highly focused, competent leader who knows exactly where he's going. Paste a non-IM attribute on to his mission,and he'll set you straight. Ask him what kind of company he's likely to buy next, he'll refuse to answer. Why? The stock in that market goes up 10% and the purchase becomes more expensive. The man's not going to work against himself or his stockholders. I don't see many leaders who seem both smart and straight forward all that all that often.


    When EMC says it wants to be "Where Information Lives" , take it to heart. What does that mean to you as a customer, systems engineer, investor, supplier...figure that out and you'll find your role in EMC's quickly growing world (EMC spent 1.8 billion in acquisitions last year.)

    I'll post more later. If you have any questions for me to ask Mark Lewis, or anyone else at EMC software, I'm all over it tomorrow.

    Still to come...What's new in Documentum 6.5? Hint: Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey hey, bye bye ...and hello to JRun!

    ]]>     Documentum Partners- Wake-up!!! tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.91 2008-05-15T04:31:06Z 2008-05-15T04:43:58Z

    I'm not sure how obnoxious I am...If you follow the Wikipedia entry, you'll find out about me.

    I'll be following it, to find out about you!

    ]]>     An Antidote to SharePoint Gone Viral tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.90 2008-05-09T07:31:24Z 2008-05-10T01:50:34Z

    My Documentum-buddies morphed into software analysts and began evangelizng on SharePoint's shortcomings- specifically on how it handles structured and unstructured content, complex documents, validation and security...

    Now, I'm too smart to argue when I know I'm outside my league, but I did ask them when they last heard of a renegade user displaying his music collection in an eRoom (someone at Pfizer used SharePoint to do that, according to one of the presenters.).

    Besides, IT departments should want users to be enthused by and engaged in technology, shouldn't they? (Or is there a need to curb their enthusiasm?)

    Back to SharePoint, it seems like a whole lot of people, other than me, have bought into its promises; Bill Gates says SharePoint sales will exceed $1 billion this year.

    That's a whole lot of software.

    Gates says SharePoint's success is due to, "the result of the great combination of collaboration and information management capabilities it delivers."

    Others aren't so sure. After all, don't many companies already own collaboration, document management, and content management products like eRoom, Lotus Notes, EMC Documentum, Interwoven Teamsite or BEA Aqualogic Interaction ?

    If so, then isn't buying SharePoint redundant, kind of like buying a MINI when you already have a Rolls Royce?

    What if the MINI is more comfortable and less bulky than the Rolls, that's the argument SharePoint lovers are making. Besides, they go on, you have to consider that it's cheaper to operate and requires little or no driver training.

    They may have forgotten to consider that their new purchase needs to be armored and secure (or maybe they think that it is.)

    So while first-generation ECM vendors continue to sell their products based on promises of safety and protection (spelled COMPLIANCE), they're pasting Play's nice with SharePoint stickers on their products to make their bulk tolerable.

    What happened to selling sizzle? (especially when it's actually there)

    Industry experts predict that it will take a year, or so, before SharePoint users start shouting that SharePoint doesn't deliver on all of its promises. When they do, IBM's sitting pretty, they've just built a product that provides a way out; it's called Quickr.

    I haven't seen the product yet, but I can imagine the sizzle. ]]> Time to diversify? tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.89 2008-05-05T20:35:49Z 2008-05-05T20:39:40Z

    This could look like good news EXCEPT that license revenues seem to be falling. They were $58.6 million in  Q1 of 2008 down from  $68.5 million for Q1 of 2007 according to CMS Watch. And while the loss doesn't seem big, it's huge in comparison to the previous quarter's performance, Q4 of 2007 saw CMA license revenues come in at $115.3 million, "after trending upward all year" notes the CMS report.

    "A 50 percent plunge in license revenue, quarter over quarter, is never good, no matter what the reason(s) behind it," notes CMS Watch analyst Kas Thomas.

    If the trend continues (and I'm hoping that it won't), then the demand for Documentum-specific skills will shrink and the supply of professionals who posses them will stay steady or grow (and I think it is growing right now.)

    What could this mean to those who hold their Documentum-related skills as a commodity? That the market-value of your commodity may not grow any faster than the rate of inflation (translated: you won't have the bargaining power you've been accustomed to) UNLESS you pair it with something that's hot.

    Buy. Sell. Hold? I say hold AND add something hot to your portfolio.

    ]]>     Shift Happens tag:brilliantleap.com,2008:/blog//1.88 2008-04-30T07:05:17Z 2008-04-30T07:10:43Z

    As an aside, early Documentum adopters might recall Geoffrey Moore author of Crossing the Chasm evangelizing at Momentum conferences (he was also on Documentum's Board of Directors.) Moore's message was so important that a good number of my Documentum Signature Partner clients considered Crossing the Chasm to be required pre-interview reading.

    2.) Interwoven piqued attendees' interest and enthusiasm with pre-conference podcasts which generated pre-conference chatter on the home-front.

    3) The product previews and announcements promised to deliver "new wins'  for not only technical people, but also for the end-users who typically sponsor (read: pay for) projects. Example: "Interwoven can not only store and manage documents and content. When paired with a tool like Vivismo, it can give the user access to the (particular or aggregate) knowledge contained within." (I'm not going to explain this. Let those wheels turn in your head. Think metadata.)

    4) The speakers covered topics such as how Web 2.0 technologies are trickling into the enterprise. (Coming from a time when technology used at work was far superior to technology that could be afforded and mastered at home, this is kind of wild. I'm not suggesting that this is a revelation, but that it should challenge corporate IT departments to "get with the program" or lose respect. This may, in fact, be why SharePoint has been so readily embraced- it has the "feel" of  a web-accessed Web 2.0 product.)

    5) Interwoven's David Hickman explained how enterprise search can leverage an organization's existing data-stores to unleash knowledge. (Databases contain data, not knowledge. Why do I say this? Flour, sugar, milk, vanilla and eggs are not the same as a cake, are they?)

    6.) The concept of "expertise search" was introduced as were Enterprise Mashups.

    There were, of course, all kinds of technical sessions and user testimonials as well.

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