It’s Time for ECM to Evolve

With the RTM (release to manufacturing) of SharePoint 2010, I feel comfortable proclaiming that the days of traditional ECM vendors (i.e. FileNet, Open Text and Documentum) are numbered. The picture of a bunch of dinosaurs looking up to the sky as a big fiery ball bears down on them comes to mind. It’s appropriate; these dinosaurs have prolonged their existence by adopting a wide array of co-existence strategies in a thinly veiled attempt to pigeonhole MOSS as a complementary offering. It is (and has been since 2007) a viable alternative or replacement, something that has been proven over and over again by partners like the company I co-founded, BlueThread. We took a great platform, filled some gaps, worked with some partners, and made it easier for organizations to adopt it as a true ECM platform.

SharePoint has most of the content management capabilities an organization needs. Out of the box it delivers exceptional forms management capabilities and reasonable records management capabilities that are vastly improved with SharePoint 2010. Add portal, collaboration and business intelligences capabilities that you won’t find in any other CM/DM platform and an enormous partner community that fills any real or perceived gaps and it’s game over.

And SharePoint’s approachability from an IT organization perspective, along with the high rate of adoption within an end-user community, makes it the only viable enterprise content management platform available today in my mind. The expense and complexity associated with standing up and maintaining these legacy CM platforms prohibits them from being deployed enterprisewide. Not to mention the at-times awful end-user experience they surface (going back to the primary co-existence strategy theme). These platforms are at best point (i.e. claims management at a healthcare insurer) or departmental (i.e. accounts payable) solutions.

So if I’m even only partially right, why haven’t more companies adopted SharePoint to manage all or least most of their enterprises’ content? Why do we still see huge volumes of unmanaged content sitting on file shares? Why are organizations still putting their content in underutilized, yet highly expensive, legacy content and document management solutions? Why do they still fill file cabinets, filing rooms and warehouses with a small forest’s worth of paper? I did the traditional ECM thing for 10+ years and have been doing the Microsoft SharePoint thing for going on 7+ now, so I think I know at least some of the reasons why. So here I go, we’ll see how I do...

1.  Microsoft has to rely on partners to deliver true or total ECM. As a longtime partner, I hear this one a lot. Can someone please define what it means to be a “true or total” ECM platform? That would be like me saying, I’m a true American or a total Italian. To the guy working on the assembly line in Detroit, I am probably a true American because I’ve never owned anything other than a GM, Ford or Chrysler automobile. But the guy working the line down at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, KY, will very reasonably argue that the cars he produces are every bit American and would not give me “true American” credit for my choices. Total Italian? I like pasta, pizza and Italian pastries from Sorrento’s Bakery in East Hanover, NJ, where I grew up, and my three boys are Nick, Vinnie and Joey. But I’ll take a cabernet over a chianti most of the time and if “Jersey Shore” is about being Italian, then I’m officially changing my nationality. So what’s the lesson here? This assertion is all about perspective. To some folks, SharePoint OOB will do what they need it to. But if they want to scan documents, they’re going to need something like KnowledgeLake, just like you’d need a Kofax or Captiva if you were going to implement FileNet. If you want to do BPM (not workflow—there is a difference. One makes people more efficient; the other tries to remove people from the process) you’re going to need something like K2, just like you’d need Pega or Lombardi if you wanted to do more than what was offered OOB with the others. And if you want to have short, near and long-term storage options for your SharePoint content, you’re going to need something like StoragePoint, just like you’d need Tivoli or some other hugely expensive solution if you wanted to do what StoragePoint does with FileNet or any of the others. So with this in mind, maybe (A.) we can agree that SharePoint is not one-size-fits-all and a company’s perspective and requirements will ultimately dictate how true or total SharePoint is as an ECM platform and (B.) agree that complementary partner solutions are good and needed and not scary. They should not be seen as evidence that SharePoint is somehow incomplete. They exist to make SharePoint applicable across a wider range of solution patterns and usage scenarios, whether we’re talking about ECM or not. They allow organizations to get more out of their SharePoint investments, which I think is good for everyone... the customers, Microsoft, and the partner ecosystem as a whole.

2.  SharePoint is incomplete. Somewhat related to #1, but not entirely. This is more about the whole 80/20 rule as it relates to traditional ECM platforms. 80% of the cost is represented by 20% of the functionality. Microsoft is happy, and from my perspective rightfully so, delivering 80% of the functionality for 20% of the cost of traditional platforms. It’s that difference that makes it the only true ECM platform on the market because it’s truly accessible enterprisewide. That other 20% of functionality is used by such a small percentage of the users within an enterprise that it normally can’t be cost-justified. By way of example, I worked with a large Blue Cross Blue Shield that was contemplating a move from Stellent to SharePoint and the Stellent guy (I’ll talk more about his kind in #7) couldn’t accept SharePoint as a replacement because it didn’t have this obscure set of features available out of the box or from a third party. This was a 20,000+ person organization. Anybody want to guess how many people used these features? Less than a dozen! So the rationale for not replacing an expensive and highly underutilized legacy content manage platform with SharePoint was the needs of .06% of the organization’s employees. If the job function of these people was mission critical and there was no alternative approach to addressing their requirements, then I guess you may have a justification, but there was nothing mission-critical about what they were doing and there were several viable alternative approaches using SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities and readily available third party solutions. The lesson here: most of what most of an organization’s end users will need is there out-of-the-box or readily available from partners. Don’t allow the lack of highly specialized and often expensive functionality to hold you back. In all likelihood that specialized functionality is making it harder and more expensive than it needed to be in the first place.

3.  Anything that cheap can’t be any good. I heard this for the first time about five years ago when I was presenting to the Chicago chapter of AIIM on SharePoint content management back in my KnowledgeLake days. They loved the message, lots of nodding heads, and then the sales guy threw up a slide on what it all costs and the room broke out into laughter. These folks were used to paying upwards of a few thousand dollars per user for FileNet just for document imaging; throw in workflow or records management and you were talking several thousand dollars per user. So a message promoting the idea that you can do pretty much everything you’re doing in a FileNet in SharePoint plus some add-ons for the cost of FileNet maintenance was so beyond belief that it amused the 100+ attendee audience we were presenting to. To say the least, it was an eye-opening experience. As SharePoint has evolved and become more prominent in enterprises, the cost of the traditional ECM platforms has dropped, but you still find this attitude from time to time, especially in large organizations.