Too Many Vendors Or Not Enough Innovation?
One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.
He got me thinking about an often-overlooked characteristic of the content management sector: the sheer saturation of vendors and solutions.
As he put it, "I think, from even just a pure economic perspective, the No. 1 reason a content management company will go out of business is because there's not enough room for all of them."
And why is that? Is it because of our propensity to view any company that touches content or manages data as a content management vendor? Or is it a classic case of the vendors' desires to be all things to all people? It's really a combination of both. It's just too easy to pass up a sales opportunity for companies that he says are "just trying to stay afloat."
That brings up the notion of innovation. If content management companies are just keeping their heads up above water, how can they think freely about what the next customer needs? And throw in the fact that the space has several publicly traded pure-plays along with what he described as the big dogs (Microsoft, IBM, EMC) and you have a sector on a quest for real differentiation.
The publicist to the CM stars also mentioned how tough it is to predict a long-term view of the industry, citing things like open source, SharePoint, and consolidation as potential speed bumps to growth and innovation. Open source has to be the one that looms the largest. As Alfresco's co-founder told me this week, "Open source is the only distribution model that can compete with Microsoft's distribution model."
Perhaps some of the CM vendors should take a page from the less-entrenched software companies building the knowledge worker apps of tomorrow. It's not just R&D tunnel vision and loads of cash that allow companies like Alfresco, Jive, and MindTouch to do what they do. It has more to do with taking a fresh look at your market and how you need to serve your customers. You see, Jen in Finance doesn't want another big repository that she has to search. She doesn't want to cut and paste content from different applications. She wants to mashup up her own content and she wants it to live and breathe in her own workspace.
I liked the way Jive's Sam Lawrence attacked the innovation thread earlier this week. He sent me his take on how enterprise software's heavyweights could eventually be overtaken by social software's up-and-comers.
This has obviously been debated ad nauseam, but the perfect storm of open source, cloud computing, and Web 2.0 certainly makes for interesting speculation.
The disruption he mentions already is being felt by CM vendors everywhere. When will it drive the innovation needed?
Enterprise Content Management is not just a repository, its a corporate strategy
If a business thinker would get an opportunity to interact with a strategy guru from Wharton, MIT or Harvard, they would realize this fact the most. While enterprises today are trying to catch up with the velocity of the treadmill they are on, unknown to many and so called Innovation, they might excel at accessing diverse set of resources from the Global resource pool, or strive hard to rebrand the product stack architecture for their customer while they are facing threats from the 800 pound gorillas in the business.
They are most likely to miss out on a point, which makes a difference to their existence in the long term, lifecyle of their information.
Every citizen of this ever shrinking globe, whether a geek or a layman would have a different definition or meaning to the word, "content". The main reason for this disconnect in understanding though you have encyclopedia's today at an arm's length is due to the traditional thought process.
A high employee turnover is a concern for techpreneurs or even start-ups, since they invest large sums in training employees to match their work culture and requirements. But, did someone try to figure out where does all the wealth of information that these employees generate during their tenure with the enterprise go once they move out? And this knowledge & experience brought to the table is not just sitting in the ERP, CRM and self-service applications that the employee uses on a day to day basis, its the collective sum of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports that the employees generate.
How is all this knowledge captured, managed, stored, preserved or delivered? There are insights into an organizational processes, market trends, customer behavior that enterprise applications have tried to capture for the last 3 decades, but miserably failed.
A complete definition of Enterprise Content Management is complex since it encompasses so many technologies.
Think about the processes like rectruitment where an employee shares all his records, his background, his credentials; think about the amount of paper your enterprise consumes just to be able to share information back and forth within teams, not to forget the shipping cost, the printing cost and the cost to maintain file cabinets.
Enterprise Content Management has always been percieved as a good to have capability, until the paper records either catch fire, get destroyed in a flood or simply, if the decisions made by executives are based on incomplete information.
The complete industry is moving towards content enabling their vertical applications, automating the flow of content in their business processes, streamlining the security concerns associated with sensitive communications, building knowledge bases. But, the big question is where to start from?
Ideally, one should look at what is available. In majority of the cases, you would observe, an enterprise running multiple databases, multiple storage systems, a workflow built-in into the
enterprise application business processes like HR (Recruitments & Payroll), Financials(Contracts, Accounts Payable, Accounts Recievable, Secure deal collaboration, Expense Reporting), and list goes on.
How to leverage your existing investments into technology and how to align your content management strategy with your corporate strategy is where majority of the organizations get stuck. Not having the inhouse talent to cope up these increasing prominent challenges turns the ball in either the vendors or consulting firms court. Consults ideally suggest a rip and replace strategy which does not work for all. The need is for a solution which plugs into what is already available and gets
acceptance from the end user community rapidly without effecting the operations or any formal enforcements by IT.
Specialized vendors act upon these challenges, but the hidden costs associated with customization or implementation are normally beyond the thresholds of the budgeted investments in IT. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to be a part of the largest ECM vendors conference. But, I was disappointed to observe the short sightedness of some vendors who percieved Content Management as something which aligns with just the Portals (Internal or external), the context of Content management from a Business Intelligence, Enterprise Applications, End User Security, Email archivals, Digital Asset Management perspective was completely missing and alein to majority of the vendors.
Though portals are significantly transforming from static to a rich internet application experiences, though the flow of information from the top of the pyramid introduce multiple solutions in the radar, just being able to make your portal talk to your content management repository is not good enough to be in perfect alignment with your corporate goals. Next time, you speak to a consult or a vendor, ask him about the breadth of capabilities they offer and how these can help you protect your existing investments.
Posted by: Mayur Palta | 05/13/2008 at 11:53 AM
Look at vendors that address specific industry needs and trends.
Steve
www.careconverge.com
Posted by: Steve F | 05/08/2008 at 09:51 AM