@CherylMcKinnon actually brought the daisy along ! #aiim09 #aiime2

Yes, yes I did.

Was honoured to be invited to represent Open Text on the annual AIIM Vendor Panel Showdown this week. Moderated by the energetic and thought-provoking Dan Elam, the audience had the opportunity to hear first hand from senior management from the big guys: Open Text, IBM and EMC.

Why the odd blog title today? On Tuesday I strolled through Reading Terminal Market on my lunch break from the show. Lo and behold just around the corner from the most excellent Hershel's East Side deli was a floral shop with buckets and buckets of lovely daisies and gerbera. Our Bloom team at Open Text has adopted the white daisy as our personal commitment to the Enterprise 2.0 program we launched last year. It's a symbol of spring, flourishing, unleashing potential, of hope and renewal. I twittered jokingly about whether I should stick one in my hair for the vendor panel.



So I bought some. And I stuck one in an empty water glass and brought it up to the panel podium with me. It was my personal reminder to speak the language of the customers in the room. To tone down the buzzword bingo jargon speak, to do my best to be authentic, honest and represent my company credibly.

It reminded me to talk about what's important in the ECM world. That compliance is a natural outcome of doing good business. That the human voice is important. That getting users engaged with the system and USING IT is the best metric of success. And I was really glad to read some of the backchannel tweetstream comment favorably on my approach.

And it reminded me to look at the positive. I didn't want to bait the competition by answering the very last question about why I would discount a competitor and not worry about them. The other two companies are forces to be reckoned with in the ECM world, and have successful customer deployments just as Open Text does. I have too much respect for my former colleagues who now work with those companies, and for many of my recent new colleagues who have come from those organizations.

A strong, educated diverse vendor community demonstrates health of the industry. I wasn't in the mood for a pot shot.

Living it, Not Lip-Synching it - Becoming an Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner

AIIM Expo is in the City of Brotherly Love - Philadelphia - this year... and what better place to explore all of the collaborative, cooperative goodness that is Enterprise 2.0...

I registered for the Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner Workshop. The 2 day course was compressed into one as a pre-conference tutorial before Expo kicks off on Tuesday. Via the magic of Twitter over last few weeks, was glad to get to know the instructor, the smart and funny Hanns Kohler-Kruner (sorry but I think he'll always be HannsKK now...).

The jam-packed day was worth it. I would not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues, partners and customers. But of course, always room for fine-tuning...

But What About the Human Voice? We spent a useful chunk of time exploring the evolution of Web 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0 and discussing the relative merits of accepted definitions. But the workshop materials proposed an updated definition that quite frankly, I didn't buy. Is E2.0 really "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise"? Too focused on the 'technologies' and no mention of the underlying cultural, change-agent or human elements that 2.0 has the ability to surface and nourish. I still prefer the original Andrew McAfee take: "use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. At least we have a sense of people, and building connections between and among key stakeholders inside and related to the business. But… bonus points to the AIIM definition for acknowledging the “extended enterprise”. Recognizing that trusted relationships are outside as well as inside the firewall is the underlying message of what Open Text calls the “Social Marketplace”.

Blogs! And Wikis! Oh My! Perhaps I have become overly sensitive to this particular issue (Hi Colleagues!) but using “blogs and wikis” as lazy shorthand for Enterprise 2.0 just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blogs and wikis are buckets of text. Err… that’s it. (Don’t worry – I have the same beef with people who say ‘compliance’ as lazy shorthand for records management…) Overemphasis on individual types of tools that sit under the label of 2.0, and not nearly enough about the value of contextual interactive communities. Successful adoption of 2.0 practices and technologies are heavily dependent on shared objectives, common purposes of a team of individuals. Community workspaces and transparent team discussion/debate (which may or may not be in blog and/or wiki format) is the glue that holds it all together. Value rises out of the aggregated harvested wisdom of experts and individuals (which is not the same thing as wisdom of ‘crowds’). It’s this community-centric approach to work that allows the withering away of needless email. Not blogs for the sake of blogs.

The Sore Thumb Moment: One section of the course that could easily be eliminated is the chapter on “Lowering the Barriers to Integration & Development”. The discussion of lean thinking, agile software methodology, FISDEV just didn’t seem to fit – perhaps the accelerated 1-day version of the curriculum didn’t do it justice. But I didn’t see how the topic fit under the chapter called “Business Drivers for Enterprise 2.0”. When I think of “Business Drivers”, I think about measurable improvements or objectives an organization would want to accomplish with an E2.0 strategy, like supporting a virtual organization, enabling their front line, better protecting corporate memory… not software development philosophies.

But I'm thankful that AIIM has stepped early and thoughtfully into Enterprise 2.0. It's the right community of dedicated information management professionals to highlight the importance of balance if this new social networking phenomenon is going to take hold in business - security, auditability, informed debate over where records management and digital preservation fit - hugely important topics for today.. not tomorrow.

I think all of the attendees walked away satisfied… thanks so much to the AIIM Expo team for choosing a venue with reliable FREE wireless. It meant that the twitter-addicted half of the class could share reading lists and exchange contact info via the “back channel” and even virtually loop the original course developers and Enterprise 2.0 Market IQ authors Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo into the mix… check out the tweet-stream for yourself: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=aiime2

… more later this week…