Thursday, September 10, 2009

My 'First ECM'

There's a great little conversation, recently started by my former OT'er Cheryl Mckinnon and a friend of her's, running around some ECM blogs out there. The premise is to tell the story of how you got started in the ECM world. You can read some of the 'first ecm' stories here http://wordofpie.com/2009/09/08/my-first-content-management-application/#comment-7087

Here's mine...

I actually came to the ECM world via a very WCM focused perspective. My first ECM/WCM project was actually a set of home grown tools written in Perl. Around 1997-98 I was hired by a great start-startup named Interactive8 in NYC. Like many we were capitalizing on the dotcom bubble and had developed the online presence for several companies ahead of the curve in creating their online brand; A&E Television (biography.com, historychannel.com, etc.), M&M Mars, DeBeers Diamonds, Maybelline… Anyway, we had a creative team, a strategy team, and my technical team that was responsible for the light web development of the time (online quizzes, polls, and a cool e-comm store on a customized implementation of Intershop) and running our own hosting center. When I arrived, a typical day was creative folks mocking up screens, HTML/production folks making it into something browsers could view, and us writing Perl/MySQL apps and getting the stuff hosted and replicated. That obviously didn’t scale so we actually wrote some slick little apps that would do things like allow copywriters to save text files in a certain directory that a cron job would pick up and update relevant html files.

Well, capitalizing on the bubble…the tail end of the bubble, we merged with 7 other companies and did an IPO and formed Luminant Worldwide. One of the other 7 companies was Align Solutions from Houston where I met Mike Alsup, Quack, and colleagues. They quickly educated me on the in’s and out’s of DCTM and core docman. Soon after that I was on a project for a large telecomm where we integrated DCTM 4i, Verity K2, and Epicentric portal.

So, my ‘first’ I still have to give to our custom tools for wcm. My first ‘commercial’ ECM project goes to DCTM.

Great idea Cheryl and Laurence!

Friday, August 28, 2009

Actions speak louder than words...or numbers

Just got back from ILTA '09 and a tremendous time catching up with customers, partners, and colleagues within the legal industry. As expected, attendance was down a bit to prior years but the conversation and dialogue about technology's importance in today's economy certainly was not. I'll have another post in the next couple of days on my take of the conference.

One big announcement Open Text made was the fact that 90% of the AmLaw 200 now use Open Text solutions (Press Release). We and our customers have recognized that firms need more than just basic document management to meet their ECM needs. I think Brook Lee, CIO at Fox Rothschild, summed it up best in saying, "From my experience, Open Text has a definite commitment and focus in the legal market. They can help firms see beyond document management and deliver solutions for firm-wide ECM." For some time our customers have had to endure phone calls and spam regarding percentages of the AMLaw rankings. While most of the signage and message that I saw from our competitor was squarely focused on corporate legal and how they can facilitate search across the enterprise rather than compliant management of the content itself, I thought it was very telling that they seemingly felt the need to respond to our release on the event's last full day...and that their response was chock full of numbers: 75 of 100, 10 of 10, etc.

So we said 90% of 200, they said 75% of 100 and 100% of 10...I guess the old adage holds true, that you can use statistics to prove anything :-) Personally, I think our statement speaks for itself. The real meat of our announcement is the fact that our customers are investing in more than core document management and they're choosing to do it with Open Text. I'm thankful to you, our customers, who help prove this out every day.

I wonder how much clout these numbers hold with you our customers or whether we're just contributing by providing entertainment, let me know in the comments!

And, if you still have a special place in your heart for numbers, how about this one?

Fortune magazine ranks Open Text 15th Amongst World's Fastest Growing Companies (Press Release)

I didn't see any other legal technology vendors on the list. As a buyer, I'd be very happy to know that some of the world's most well known financial analysts see stability and continued viability in the technology I've chosen to deploy. :-)

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The User Group Meeting Of The Year

Last month I had the absolute pleasure of being able to attend the Upper Midwest Open Text User Group annual meeting. For the last several years I had heard the stories, heard of the fun, and heard of the great exchange of information within this predominantly eDOCS focused User Group. Well, in this case reality lived up to the hype.

The UMOTUG actually holds its meetings on the Mississippi River. That's right, on a paddleboat!! Diane Bowers of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is the group chair and did a tremendous job as MC. What made this meeting so 'unique' for me was the conversationalist atmosphere. In recent years I think interactions between vendors and customers has become far too formal and structured. On the boat we had no PowerPoint, no slide handouts, etc. Just people discussing their ECM strategies, the direction of eDOCS, the direction of Open Text.....and the beautiful weather. All in all I'd say that there were probably about 30 or 35 customers representatives present and I felt that a lot of good information was shared throughout the day. In addition to myself, Cheryl McKinnon and Lani Jacobs were able to join from OT discusssing Social Media and Legal items respectively.

Finally, a very big thank you to Bryce and Jerry of ADV Document Systems for their sponsorship of the event. I could think of nothing better than to see more regional user groups using this format in 2009. Hope I get an invite for next year because I'll certain return :-)

Friday, July 17, 2009

The Power of Words...

One of my first ECM projects was building a knowledge portal/intranet for one of the world's largest telecommunications companies. During the course of the project, we hired a consultant who had a degree in Library Science to help us define the global taxonomy of the content to be published. Now, she had spent much of her life focused on being a librarian and had forgotten more about taxonomies then I'll ever know myself, but, she ran an exercise that always resonates in my memory. She showed us a picture of a forest stream and asked us how we would categorize the image. Of course, our answers were varied and all over the map: stream, forest, peaceful, water, serene, green, nature. It goes to show that one image can render various interpretations and reactions, even amongst a group of like-minded folks.

We often take for granted the choice of words that we use to communicate. Most of the time verbal communication allows us to quickly clarify or redirect our meaning when using any given word. But, the written word can be even more powerful as you leave much of the interpretation up to the reader.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hosting two of our Legal eDOCS customers, at our corporate headquarters in Waterloo. I know those of us on the Open Text side found the two day session tremendously insightful and I was very happy to hear from both customers how helpful the meetings were for them and how well they felt the time was spent. One of the surprising takeaways for me, however, was the perception of the eDOCS 5.x roadmap that both firms had coming into the meeting. Despite all of our (the eDOCS team) best efforts and intentions around customer communication, it would seem we were/are still missing the mark a bit with our message.

You see, both firms came into the board room that day with the belief that we would be spending a considerable amount of time talking about their journey from eDOCS DM to the ECM Suite; i.e. how they would migrate from one platform to another. So, why are those specific words highlighted? Well, because it was precisely our decision to use those words that led these customers to believe that they would be forced to switch platforms. Consequently, the realization of the power of words is something we have learned to be conscious of.

While the eDOCS team believed that the use of the phrase "journey to the ECM Suite" was most positive in connotation, the reality was that for these firms, and most likely many other customers as well, the message they received was one of migration and not integration. The fact of the matter is, eDOCS DM 5.x is integrated to the various components that make Open Text's ECM Suite. What does this mean for customers? It means that customers who wish to continue using eDOCS for their document management needs and possibly leverage their existing investment with Open Text by implementing other features of the ECM Suite (Enterprise Library Archiving, Email Archiving, Enterprise Connect, etc.) may absolutely do so. Open Text has created these integrations and the roadmap for customers to do just that...and that's what we mean when we say "a journey to the Suite."

Another example of 'the power of words' that I came across in the last couple of weeks was from our friends at Autonomy/iManage. In a recent press release by Autonomy, the headline read: "Autonomy iManage First To Deliver Mobile Document Management On The iPhone To Legal Market." Is Autonomy's use of the word "first" accurate, ignorant to other vendors, or just venturing into that gray area of truth that so many of us in marketing are often tempted by? According to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a Principal Analyst with CMSWatch, they were not the first, but rather the sixth. You can read Alan's blog '...in the spirit of debunking myths...' at CMSWatch.com. I have to admit, I was quite pleased to see our long time partner, Matrix Logic's, iPhone for eDOCS DM offering right at the top of his list.

I do wonder, though, if the use of words in this fashion matter to customers and prospects? Do you see press releases from Open Text, our competitors, or your other vendors and just accept the words used as fact? Or, has the misuse of words in marketing just cemented the cynicism in all of our communications?