The project in question has weathered some turbulence – execution delays, budget overruns and most critically, lack of end user enthusiasm for the delivered solution.  

At the surface level, they seemingly did everything right and all the boxes can be safely checked off. However, careful reflection reveals that they ended up where they ended up and not where they wanted because of the disconnect between Marketing and IT. In this instance, marketing drove the project with the assistance of a 3rd party integrator, and the internal IT team was not fully on-board till very late in the game. Important issues like global training, scaling up, ongoing support and service levels were left as an afterthought.

Suffice it to say a sound DAM (or for that matter, any IT) project requires all stakeholders to be aligned from the beginning or else you'll end up with bad karma, and a system that is not fully adopted.

In addition to our cornerstone evaluations of technology vendors, in our DAM Report you will also find sage counsel about the pitfalls that you'll encounter during your DAM project life cycle. While attaining DAM Nirvana is a difficult goal, we at RSG do our bit by at least pointing you in the right direction.

Had any enlightenment of your own recently? Tell us about your experience.

The answer people always prefer is of course, "Actually quite a lot, we've been working in this sector for a while."  By sector I mean industry "vertical," such as manufacturing, retailing, banking, insurance, healthcare, and so forth.  If you understand my business you are a part of my world; if you do not then no matter how clever you may be, you will always be an outsider.

That's basic, yet in the world of content management it's not a message or practice that is commonly followed. Most vendors try (with mixed success) to sell to anyone and everyone.  They argue that the technology is "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical," and that it will work equally well in any industry.  There is a validity to this argument, particularly in the world of web publishing.

Nevertheless the more complex the underlying business process the more the need for somebody who understands your business, My goal here is not to give business advice to sellers of technology, but rather to posit the opinion that buyers are quite right to have a heavy bias toward those that understand their specific industry.

True, most organizations are nothing like as unique as they think they are. Once you have seen one transactional document process you have to some extent seen them all. Likewise one media heavy website is much like another.  Further, the underlying technology used in these situations may have different branding, but they tend to be very similar at core. 

The difference and the value is in detail.  Whether you call it a document, content, a case item, a record, or a deliverable matters. Whether you navigate via product types and sub-types or locations and offerings matters.  As a buyer you want your content management system, sites, and services to be better than your competition; you also want it to be comparable to the competition.  Familiarity matters.  You want to work with a supplier that you can understand, that has an intimate understanding of your world and concerns.  Suppliers you can have conversations with, and and built a long term relationship with. 

The horizontal approach to selling and buying technology makes a lot of sense in the consumer world, but much less so in the enterprise.  The one size fits all mentality seldom works, though that does not stop a lot of suppliers from pursuing any and every opportunity no matter how far outside of their typical market reach and comfort zone. 

It's why we at the Real Story Group consider vertical expertise to be an important factor in our ECM product evaluations, for example.  A vendor might have a great technical solution but zero knowledge of the insurance sector (for example) will often rule them as unsuitable to a insurance-focused buyer.  Speeds and feeds are important, usability and functionality equally so, but a simple and genuine understanding of a buyer's world has just as much, if not more importance in the technology buying process.

Recently, I’ve seen numerous organizations churning out massive amounts of content using faux-CMS methods such as:

Content entry: Word-based forms
Workflow: E-mail and phone calls
Content reuse: server-side include files tracked via spreadsheets
Collaboration: shared network drives
Versioning: multiple versions stored on shared network drives
Archiving: PDFs in shared network drives
Deployment: Simple FTP

To their credit, these organizations have done an impressive job of cobbling together a variety of tools and processes to mimic the functionality that comes with most content management systems. In most cases, these homegrown solutions have served these organizations well -- thusfar.

However, the changing demands of content consumers are putting stress on these methods. With increased content demands, more and more production departments are hitting their breaking points and becoming bottlenecks for publishing important content.

Is your organization one of these?  The good news is that in 2011 there are more options than ever for a Web CMS buyer – we cover 44 of the most significant. All 44 of these commercial products and open-source projects have been around for years and have matured to the point where their base functionality could provide operational wins for you. Your challenge will be to find the right partner to support your visions for the next three years and beyond.

• Help manuals for your products or services
• Electronic bills sent by utility service providers
• Insurance quotes and policies

Dynamic Publishing is a catch-all phrase and is often referred to in context of various disciplines such as Component Content Management, Automatic Document Assembly, Document Output Management and Document Automation. In our recently released advisory, we explore Dynamic Publishing Systems and what what their capabilities should be. We also explain how these should be considered not in isolation but in the context of your wider Enterprise Content Management (ECM)  initiatives. To quote from the advisory:

Don't consider DPS in isolation: Dynamic Publishing should not be considered as a standalone system. Content and documents that are within the scope of Dynamic Publishing are often subject to the same stages and processes as any other content, such as publishing workflows, version management, archiving and so forth. Hence, you should consider Dynamic Publishing as part of a broader content management initiative. It is very important that the DPS you select has basic ECM capabilities (repository services), or provides connectors to integrate with external ECM, search, and portal tools.

Here's the table of content of the advisory paper Dynamic Publishing Systems -- A Technical Overview

• Key Takeaways
• What is Dynamic Publishing
• Functional Requirements of Dynamic Publishing
  • Content Assembly
  • Rendering, Transformation, and Conversions
  • Graphics Support
  • Process Management
  • Output Management
  • Multichannel Translation Management 
• Key Advice

This acquisition is an unusual move, as for many years Hyland has been synonymous with document management and workflow solutions for the mid-sized banking and healthcare sectors. With this acquisition, Hyland takes a fairly serious stake in the higher education sector. But not a dominant stake: the higher ed sector has many players; for example Perceptive Software has over 400 clients there, and its a highly competitive market to get into.

Of course it's up to Hyland to decide how to run their business, and where to target their efforts, but it's for their customers and the likes of me to question if this acquisition will prove to be a distraction to the current customer base. I can't help but conclude that it will, as the Hershey acquisition not only takes them into a big new market (though to be clear Hyland did have a few higher ed customers prior to this) but it also delivers a completely new and overlapping ECM technology set. Hyland have not just bought market share, they have bought a lot of new technology. For a company that has long built and developed its own technology, it's hard to predict how this will play out. 

It may be that Hyland will take the best of both technology sets and develop something impressive, but that is hard for even the likes of Oracle and IBM to pull off. They may continue to run the two product sets completely separately, but then there will be overlapping resources and functionality and potential rivalry and confusion. Hyland could just let Hershey do their own thing but as Autonomy and Open Text can attest, that isn't easy either.

Many analysts including yours truly, as well as Hyland's arch competitors, tend to speak respectfully about them as they epitomize the ideals of midwestern honesty and friendliness when doing business.  This acquisition though will test that culture I think, and though I can see no reason for existing customers to get worried quite yet, it wouldn't be a bad idea to watch how things progress with a cautious eye. There may be lots of kisses now at Hershey, but they may not last. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that one!)

Enterprise Content Management IBM-style is typically a million miles away from ECM Microsoft-style. Rather than the broad collaborative environments SharePoint targets, IBM goes after high volume imaging, intensive and complex rules, as well as case and process management. Layering analytics into the equation is only really possible when you have normalized incoming information/documents at the capture stage. Hence this acquisition.

IBM already had some pretty good capture capabilities, but Datacap offers better, and in particular Datacap had a number of industry specific solutions that could be of great interest to IBM. In fact it may well be this ability to extend FileNet more deeply into sectors such as Healthcare and Logistics, as well as further enhancing their existing presence in Insurance and Government, that drove the deal forward.

From a buyers' perspective many acquisitions are problematic, but this one might prove positive.

Let me explain.  To achieve solid business goals with ECM you often have to bolt incompatible components together and hope for the best. Vendors' response -- the ECM Suite where everything worked out of the box and in any configuration -- is still just a dream. Nevertheless, some ECM Suite offerings are starting to look better integrated and a bit more uniform, whilst yet others still look like Frankenstein's children.  Some ECM acquisitions are little more than standalone cash cows, others (like this one) could enhance existing products.

I don't doubt for a second that we will see more ECM related acquisitions (some of which will be capture related) before the year is out. But far from this being a sign that the market is consolidating and shrinking, it is rather a sign that the market is growing and getting ever more competitive.  And as always I will make a point of saying that only time will tell how well this acquisition works out. On paper today it seems pretty sound.

To give a practical example, a healthcare professional will need awareness of all the documents related to a particular patient. These documents and records are sorted and managed through their lifecycle as a "Case" even though they may reside in different locations, have different owners, other relationships, and different retention policies.  Other individuals may also need to interact with these documents for the purposes of billing or insurance. Same documents, different purpose. There may also be multiple legal and compliancy requirements to attend to.

In theory at least, Case Management provides you with the tools to pre-define and orchestrate those requirements. Permissions, rules, metadata, and processes all play a part in what can be a highly complex system. 

For some organizations, Case Management applications built from ECM platforms form the core of their business, and more will in the future. The need to better manage the massive volumes of transactional documentation is growing more acute, and Case Management will certainly play an increasingly important role. 

Yet almost more than any other scenario, Case Management demands good information governance and squeaky clean relevant data. Without it everything falls apart. The fact that so many organizations are lacking here is another key reason Case Management is not as widely deployed as it could be. 

Selecting the right software to meet your Case Management needs is difficult, since everyone claims to do it,  but very few do it well.  The nightmare scenario for a buyer of a Case Management system is to buy a vanilla ECM software system and then just bring in a .NET or Java developer. You are not only buying technical functionality you should also be buying deep and very specific domain expertise, and without the right combination of the two you can be in trouble quick.

ECM vendors such as Hyland, Objective, Open Text, EMC, Autonomy and IBM all have deep expertise and knowledge in the particular industry sectors that they design systems for (Pharma, Legal, Government, Intelligence, Healthcare, Insurance,  Law Enforcement, Retail etc). They know (mostly) what works and what does not, and they understand industry specific business processes right down to the task level. You are paying as much for that knowledge, as you are for their software.

Assuming though that you do have your document house in order, and already utilize Case Management, there are some interesting developments on the near horizon -- most notably the use of business intelligence and analytics tools to extract further value from what is already a rich information set.  Consider the possibilities of early fraud and discrepancy detection or new and emerging trend analysis from the very rich data within your documents.  BI has long been locked solely into the 20% of data that is structured in the enterprise, and is a valued tool set. But very large and clean volumes of documentation that have been given a tight structure can be mined these days too, and those documents theoretically at least, represent the other 80% of the data we deal with in business.  In fact some organizations are already starting to use tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects in Case Management deployments, and they are liking what they see.

And remember it's our job here to ensure that technology buyers make the right decisions via the use of our research, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to continuously talk with buyers and users who are at the coalface.  So if you are an organization that is using Case Management along with some kind of BI tool, then  I would love to chat with you in confidence to hear more about what works and what does not just drop me a note and we can chat.

Ironically, it's early days for a combination of technologies that have been with us separately for many years. Yet this could prove to be a very good long term marriage.

Though not really a surprise that Documentum wants to build up its Case Management credentials in this burgeoning area (just think Healthcare, Government, Litigation and Insurance), it's far from clear why anyone would chose EMC Documentum over any other vendor's Case Management offering.

Case Management solutions vary widely, from pretenders to fully fledged players. Everyone from Autonomy to FabaSoft to Oracle has an offering,  There are even some third-party options available for SharePoint. But how each vendor approaches Case Management differs, since specific buyer requirements differ widely too.  Some enterprise buyers seek good BPM capabilities,  while others seek complex metadata management services, records management and retention or even the relative ability to manage files that can range from physical items through to rich media in the same context.  

There is much talk amongst consultants and vendors of the "commoditization" of ECM, but I see little evidence of that in the real world.  Sure, anyone can offer you check in/out and version control and workflow -- but not everyone does those things well, or even adequately -- and some do them too well and deliver you complete confusion and overkill.

One thing is for sure: one size most definitely does not fit all for Case Management.  Therefore, any buyer without a very solid handle on their business requirements and processes is walking into a selection minefield.

As for EMC Documentum, I gave up trying to understand their ever changing strategy(ies) some time back.  From once being the clear market leader they are now in an ever more crowded and ever more specialized and complex field (we cover about 30 in our evaluation research).  That said, EMC Documentum continues to be a key player, and we will continue to evaluate them, and on occasion recommend them to some advisory clients, assuming Documentum makes sense for that client's very specific needs.

To quote from the article,

Most businesses assume that compliance costs money and does not improve their bottom line. Because of this, there is often a reluctance to invest in compliance initiatives. While it is indeed true that it does cost money, you should also remember that by being compliant, you can improve your processes, make you business not only more agile, but also more consistent. So despite the initial pain, compliance initiatives can make a positive impact to your bottom line as well as top line. Companies here in India sadly tend to lag behind their global counterparts when it comes to implementing compliance initiatives. However, to be more competitive, they will have no choice in the future but to invest in compliance.

With the Satyam and IPL scandals rocking India, there couldn't be a better time to think about Compliance. As for how ECM technologies can provide a platform for  your compliance-related initiatives, maybe we can help...

Let's consider an example. You need to display a list of all new auto insurance claims to an agent. It's a fairly trivial task to do this with a gadget utilizing an RSS feed of new claims that displays using a colorful tabular format. A vendor might claim that most business users understand RSS and could create such a gadget.

However, someone actually needs to create that feed in the first place. And that is by no means trivial, because you will need to create integrations to one or more back-end systems such as a customer information system, policy management system, a customer correspondence system, and a document management system. When you integrate with these back-end systems, you will also need to consider all standard application development needs -- such as transactions, exception handling, scalability, logging, and so forth. This may in turn require the development of new service interfaces.  Plenty of code to write.

Second, I am not convinced that most business users understand feeds in a way that's required to create these applications. Even if we assume they are, you will probably need to filter or extract the right information out of the feed, and I don't think it's likely that your business users will understand the complex regular expressions needed to do that.

So before you choose to use something that promises "increased productivity" because of "zero coding" always consider the whole application and not just the functionality required for displaying feeds. It is possible that for your use cases, such a solution would be a good fit. But if a no code front end solution needs huge amounts of application development effort, you should be prepared for that as well.

We covered several such issues in our recent advisory and will continue to expand these in our Portals and Content Integration research.  In the meantime, remember that "simple to use" seldom is...

People outside of highly regulated environments typically assume that records and retention management in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and energy is state of the art.  This is far from the case.

Most often Records Management is underfunded,  inadequately resourced, and unloved.  It is no cliche to say it is also often run from underground, literally in basements out of sight of those who need to do "real work." 

In places where records are actively managed, they are usually managed well, with detailed and well-maintained file plans and retention schedules.  But many organizations only manage a fraction of the records they should be.  For example very few records management departments include e-mail as part of their remit, yet e-mail is where all the "stuff" happens. 

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

Here at the Real Story Group we currently support a number of large advisory customers who are looking at records management strategically across highly complex working environments.  We have others who are looking at the whole issue of information management and ECM more strategically than in the past, and have begun to include RM as a component or a recognized future element of their work. 

That might not sound like much, but just a year or so ago it seemed like nobody cared.  Things like e-government initiatives, healthcare reform, demand or need for more self-service applications, increased regulations, and so forth seldom have the immediate impact people expect. And in a world where decisions can get driven by today's opinion polls, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the biggest and most profound changes we encounter in our society occur at a far slower pace.

The most overused phrase in my personal lexicon is, "time will tell." But I fervently hope that time will tell us that awareness of the importance of RM and archiving has slowly risen to the fore.

To quote:

Workflow services can help minimize the cost and time required to coordinate common approval processes -- but only if the service does what you want it to do, and users don't "work around" the system....

Subscribers to our WCM and DAM research streams can download the workflow paper here.

Here's an example that's been tried around the world with varying success.  Say you're running the web presence of some medical organization. As such, you have information on how to deal with various diseases, both on a general level (hygiene and disease prevention) and very specific (what to do when a flu breaks out).

Suddenly there is an outbreak of a new disease; let's say the elephant flu. You could prepare a news bulletin, which would automatically appear on information portals for medical professionals, consumers, etc. -- all the sites targeted to specific audiences for which this news might be of interest.

Better still, since you've already built up a large repository of information, it would be easy to launch an elephant flu theme site: just define the kind of content you'd want in there, and hey presto, with one click you've got an entire site with all the information (http://www.allaboutelephantflu.org). Content specifically on the elephant flu, but also the more generic topics on how to deal with a disease or whom to contact.

You can imagine why this is a compelling concept. Which is probably why I've seen attempts in many different areas, ranging from media companies, governments, product marketing companies, and insurance companies.

But, I said, elusive dream. Many have tried (I count myself among them), and many have failed (unfortunately, I can't really discount myself entirely from that group, either). That's because there are three major problems when you've actually implemented the infrastructure to do it. Since this is only a blog post, I'll pick the most obvious one for now.

The content needs metadata for this to work. Many will tell you that "people won't tag." No, seriously, they won't tag content with the right labels, add the right metadata, or correctly categorize, "even if threatened with being fired." And even if they do tag, it will be haphazard and inconsistent.

This is a very real problem. But at the same time it's complete nonsense. Because if this were the case, why would people meticulously tag and file their holiday snapshots on Flickr and Facebook? Somehow, in their spare time, they do identify the people in a picture, add keywords to a shot, give it a meaningful title, and actually describe it. Without having to be threatened with being fired, or even having to be beaten with a stick.

Partly this is because they get the feedback that makes it worth their while to do so. If you identify your friends in a picture on Facebook, they (and then their friends) will immediately find it and start commenting, which creates a positive feedback loop to tag some more. More importantly though, it's really easy.

If you get back to work the next day, and have to laboriously click ten times, scroll, add, categorize, while thinking what the right category within the taxonomy would be, it all feels like an insubordinate amount of trouble to go through. In most WCM systems and implementations (and dare I say it -- most ECM implementations are much, much worse) it's just too much trouble.

Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some change. There are now quite a few ways in which CMSs can make it easier on your editors to identify the content they're producing:

• Using a "free-for-all" folksonomy, where you can just quickly type in a few keywords. The problem of course, is that the tags will often be wildly inconsistent and ambiguous. Check a tag cloud near you for tags like "New York," "NY," "newyork," and of course, the typo that got away, "new yok." This can be made easier by type-ahead auto-completion of tags. Some systems will start listing suggestions as you type, and helpfully, with some, what you type doesn't have to be the beginning of the tag ("york" will also suggest "New York.") The auto-complete effectively normalizes the tags (i.e., at least all of them will be "New York.") It may still be ambiguous and inconsistent, but at least for many purposes, it'll be workable.
• Using suggestions. Usually with the help of an embedded search engine such as Lucene, the system comes up with tags and related links for your content (based on similar content it finds.) At first, this will need quite a bit of training, but the great thing is that the more content is accurately identified, the better the system gets. The suggestions can be used to completely automate the process, but since you'll still have the original author at hand in the editing screen, you can take advantage of this and ask them to validate the suggestions as they are saving the content. That's a lot easier than having to think them up themselves.

It's still more common to see any folksonomy functionality smoothly integrated into Social Software, and auto-categorization or auto-classification is an area where Search & Information Access systems are usually way ahead. But a few web CMSs are making headway into this territory, as well. For GOSS, which has mostly customers in the UK government, its ability to suggest related content, and categorize it in the IPSV (the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) is a unique selling point, and the company has been honing this for the past few years. Hippo (who, incidentally, recently won a large Dutch government account, so there may be a pattern there) is working on releasing similar functionality this fall.

There are others with such capabilities; but at the same time, many are lagging. A system that hides keywords and categories on the fourth tab, three items down under "metadata," and then makes users jump hoops to enter the information isn't likely to help. And some products are so thin on metadata, no amount of customization is ever going to make it work for your users. Carefully check before you buy.

But the good news is that if you share this dream of at least partly automating a metadata- driven architecture, the metadata part of that dream can be realized. Of course, that means there are at least two other major hurdles to take -- but that's enough for now.  I'll return to this topic again...

Within that service we cover XML authoring tools: the software for creating and editing highly complex documentation, be it DITA structured technical documentation, complex translation work, or product information designed for multiple re-use. But our research goes beyond the editing and authoring options at the front end, and evaluates all the leading CCM (Component Content Management) tools that have been designed to manage the publishing and workflow of these complex XML document components throughout their lifecycle.

On other occasions we separate technologies into different categories, where others may have bundled them together. An obvious case here is our Web Content Management research and our Enterprise Content Management Suites research. Just in the past fortnight I have been asked by more than one person why we have two subscription services for the same technology. Well the simple answer is that it is not the same technology: the technology to manage outward (web) facing content and sites, versus the technology to manage inward-facing (documents and files) content and filing systems is quite different. But nevertheless it is a very fair question to ask, because to someone outside the industry (and even some insiders) that distinction is not always obvious.

Confusion can come about due to vendor branding strategies or a plethora of nebulous acronyms used within the industry. For example Interwoven (recently acquired by Autonomy) did a good job of branding their WorkSite (document & files) offering quite separately from their TeamSite (web content) offering. Other vendors such as EMC Documentum or Open Text use a single brand moniker (such as "digital media") to cover all their content-focused software offerings regardless of each component's specific purpose, while in other instances product names can even be synoymous with the firm's brand, as with ADAM and Sitecore.

Then there is the issue of acronyms. We use the term ECM as it is the most commonly used term for document-based technologies, however in different regions and industry segments ECM is referred to as EDMS, EDM, EDRM, Document Control, IM, IDM even KM. As an advisory firm we have to call our research and services something, and we are faced with picking and choosing amongst a myriad of terms, typically choosing the most well-known term currently in use.

Our job at CMS Watch is to make sense of the complexity of the technology offerings out there for you, the buyer - and that can be a challenge at the best of times. We believe it's safe to say that we have more research available to our subscribers on content technologies than all of our competitors combined. But volume, depth and breadth is not all that separates us from our competitors, we are in addition avowedly a firm that follows the market rather than "makes" it. Thus, we don't try and come up with new acronyms, terminology or market segments, we don't cheerlead for the industry or get involved in market sizing, we stick to the basics of evaluating current release products side by side and evaluating the importance of current trends.

So here is my challenge to you. We evaluate over 200 products and sub-divide those into 10 subscription services, which in turn are sub-divided into about 5-8 sub-categories each. We try to use common terminology so that you the buyer can relate to and locate the research that meets your needs, but that does not always work as well as it could. So if you find the product evaluation(s) you need, but locate them in a place - or grouped in a way you find 'surprising' or 'interesting', let us know. Tell us how you and your colleagues perceive these technologies, what you call them, how you would categorize them differently, how you explain them to your internal clients or project teams. Truly we would love to hear from you as this industry remains a dynamic and very moveable feast at times....

EMC has made a developer edition of Content Server freely available, and they have also provided a similar free developer environment for xDB. At the same time, each free developer edition will have an accompanying online community that provides code samples, tutorials and full documentation.

All in all, this represents quite a significant turnaround for EMC Documentum and one that is to be applauded. I can speak from personal past experience of the nightmare of finding basic technical advice regarding Documentum releases, and being reduced to scouring the web for potential (and often unreliable) information. This announcement will also provide a sigh of relief for those who have had to pay license fees for Documentum development environments. More importantly it shows EMC 'opening the kimono' (as that awful phrase goes) more widely than we might have expected.

We often comment that Microsoft has also gone from being a secretive firm (even about current releases) to (in the case of SharePoint) a very positive level of openness, community support and involvement. As always it will be time that decides the success of the EMC initiative, but I suspect it will be just as successful as Microsoft's community initiative around SharePoint, as there is an established, vibrant and very sizeable Documentum community out there who have long awaited this day.

Last time around, re-engineering led to ERP and benchmarked best practices. This time around the dynamics are different. Business agility is the latest fashion. That requires technology to be infinitely reconfigurable, but also highly organized at the infrastructure level to have a chance of working. As business applications try go the Web 2.0 route, surely ECM vendors should be working to support customers via best practices and benchmarked processes. Yet a severe lack of consulting skills in the space, along with an endemic disregard for customers leaves many ECM buyers with complex repository and rules management systems that they have no idea how to configure and use properly. Business agility will drive the next wave of change, and ECM could become a key component in that mix, but only if our industry learns the lessons of history, and works with customers to fully maximize their ECM investments -- supporting them long before and after the Purchase Order is cut.