James Matthew Shepley
Just wanted to let everyone know I’ll be a little busy with our newest addition, James Matthew, born this morning.
So the blogs may be a bit slow in coming these next few weeks (months?)…I’ll dive back in to SharePoint, records management, and ECM once I come up for air!
SharePoint will own ECM – revisited
Almost three years ago, I did some prognostication about SharePoint owning enterprise content management (ECM) in the not-too-distant future.
At the time, SharePoint 2010 was just released to market and the post raised some eyebrows because I thought it entirely plausible that one day SharePoint could be all the ECM anyone needed (other than heavy-duty workflow and image management).
Before you rush to judge me one way or the other, you need both to understand that I was fresh of the heels of a pretty amazing demo at a F500 client who had made the decision to use SharePoint 2010 as their sole ECM platform and to remember that in the summer of 2010, traditional ECM vendors were scrambling pretty hard to figure out how to position themselves relative to SharePoint.
Three years later, what do I think of my prediction?
You can’t do records management in SharePoint (part 2) — but you’re probably not doing it anyway
In the last post, I called it like I seen it: SharePoint out of the box can’t do records management. 2007, 2010, 2013—none of ‘em left to their own devices are worth much when it comes to automating the retention and (more importantly) disposition of your records according to the retention schedule.
But as if that weren’t provocative enough, I also argued that, regardless of system (SharePoint, IBM FileNet/P8/CMOD, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Hyland OnBase, whatever), and regardless of the capabilities of that system, pretty much no one is actually doing real records management on their electronic content.
Check out the last post to see my reasoning for this being true (and let me know what you think of it). In this post, however, let’s turn to what might be driving the fact that almost no one is doing electronic records management (whether in SharePoint or any other enterprise content management system).
I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been feeling especially cantankerous these days when I sit down to write. It all started with my “SharePoint can’t do records management” series, and I hoped I would cheer up once that was done, but I haven’t.
So, with my heightened cantankerousness in mind, I want to explore something that’s been on my mind for a while now and also see what folks think about it (because you all know how much I love a good heckle-fest).
Basically, I feel like the few viable enterprise content management (ECM) platforms out there (IBM P8/FileNet, EMC Documentum, and OpenText EIM) are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable, i.e., you could throw a dart to choose one and be as successful as if you did a full, due diligence RFP.
You can’t do records management in SharePoint
Let’s start this admittedly provocative post with a question: Anybody out there actually doing records management in SharePoint?
And before you answer, let me emphasize that I mean real records management, like, with actual, system-enabled automated disposition according to your retention schedule.
If you answered “yes” to this question, please jump immediately to the comments section and let us all know (and while you’re at it, give us some indication of how on earth you’re doing it), because based on my experience, I’d be willing to bet the answer to this question is going to be “no” in 99.9% of all cases.
And while I’m in a betting mood, I’d also be willing to bet that if you answered “yes”, you 100% aren’t doing it with out of the box SharePoint, because out of the box SharePoint can’t do records management at the level the vast majority of organizations require—it just doesn’t, people, no matter how much Microsoft claims that it does, or trumpets that fact that they themselves use it to. But don’t just take my word for it, ask Bruce Miller.
Transformational ECM VI: Oil and Gas (part 3)
I’m at the end of a series of posts looking at how enterprise content management (ECM) can transform oil and gas (O&G) organizations. In the last post, I walked through some of the strategic transformations ECM can contribute to if it’s aligned properly. In this post, I want to wrap things up by looking at more tactical transformations that ECM can align with to drive tangible business benefits.
Without rehashing the last post, let’s review the main areas of strategic alignment that ECM impacts at O&G organizations before digging into the tactical:
- Mergers and acquisitions - scope and price more accurately, integrate more effectively, realize value more quickly
- New ventures - scale to support the breakneck growth of current O&G environment
- One culture - move from being merely multi-national to truly global
- Goal zero - produce hydrocarbons at the highest level of safety at maximum efficiency
Transformational ECM VI: Oil and Gas (part 2)
In the last post, I began to talk about how enterprise content management (ECM) can transform Oil and Gas (O&G) organizations in some fundamental ways. By way of a prelude, we spent most of the time talking about how not to sell the benefits of ECM to business stakeholders. In this post, with the prelude out of the way, let’s turn that frown upside down and talk about how you in fact should sell the benefits.
Without recapping the entire last post, suffice it to say that O&G companies care about one thing: producing hydrocarbons safely and efficiently. So business stakeholders need to understand how exactly ECM–or anything else, for that matter–contributes to that effort. Otherwise, no amount of best practices, industry standards, or smart-guy consulting frameworks are going to get them to support ECM at their organization.
