b.cognosco

Brief glossary of enterprise application types and document technology categories from AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management). Complete with magik decoder ring for TLAs. w00t

Enterprise application definitions. AAIM International has published a set of definitions for Enterprise Applications. While it doesn't distinguish between "content management" and "document... [ Source: Column Two]

Interesting (?) exchange in a print industry discussion group regarding the recent demise of yet another technology services player. The death of printChannel has once again brought out the hawks and the dogs.

Mr. H. defends the status quo. His arguments are rote: No one should buy services from a company that may not be around. The products are overbuilt and over priced. The prices keep dropping. IT salesmen are con-artists and buzzword bullshitters. Customers don't want it. They don't use it if I have it. A web site and e-mail is all anyone needs.

Many of these are true -- time-tested epithets honed in the spiraling collapse of a 10-year technology-spending spree, the likes of which hasn't been seen in over a hundred years. Such periods tend to flush out the P.T. Barnums of the world, and with them all the fluff and brouhaha of a circus. As the circus tent folds all the nay Sayers stand up and say "I told you so," while some of the clowns are led off in handcuffs.

But at the periphery, a lot of people are quietly thinking about what happened. They're asking questions about the failed businesses, trying to understand what market gaps they saw (or thought they saw), what market gaps they missed (or misread). They're analyzing whether the attempts went too far in some areas, or not far enough in others. They're aligning the failures and matching up the common elements, mapping them against new market knowledge that emerged in the chaos. Thinkers and planners and doers are going outside industry boundaries, testing what happens if they link one to another, or to something else.

And they are doing it under your radar. They aren't making press releases on WhatTheyThink.com. They aren't talking to printers because they don't think of what they do as print. Print is merely an artifact of manufacture. They don't see you and you don't see them.

The print industry rolls on -- smug in it's belief that their customers don't want or need or know how to use these buzzword services. And they're right. Ford's customers didn't want mini-vans. Motorola's customers didn't know anything about digital cell phones. None of ATT's customers gave a hoot about packet-switched services. All of those companies were right, too. Dead right.

A few print companies grow as others leave the market or die. Most everyone comes to accept a shrinking industry as the norm. Owners and managers sit back in leather chairs and lament the good old days, when things were stable, customers were plenty, and competition wasn't so cutthroat. They rail against the newfangled technologies that waste time, effort, and resources. But one day -- in 2, or 4, or 6 years -- they wake up and find that someone has reduced the market price of their primary product to effectively $0 and they don't have a business. Worse, it's some company or business they never heard of or, at best, thought had nothing to do with print.

It happened to cotton mills and railroads; to dairy farmers and ranchers. It's happening to the Telcos. Nokia did it to Motorola in two years. Maybe it takes 10 years, but it doesn't matter. The point is you don't know when and you can't predict it. But you can bet it will happen. The printing industry as we know it is dead, to be steamrolled like family farms, and replaced with something we don't yet understand.

While Mr. H is congratulating himself on serving his customers face to face (which IS the way his customers want to be served), someone (probably not a printer) is figuring out how to bypass Mr H's customers altogether, probably delivering a product direct to THEIR customers. One day Mr. H wakes up to find he's having pleasant conversations about the Good Ole Days with his former print buyer customers down at the unemployment office, and he wonders how it happened.

Most New Economy management theorists are not worth reading, but Peter Drucker has seen two revolutions, and he speaks with both wisdom and clarity about this change in our world. He starts the preface to his most recent book, Managing in the Next Society, with the following:

I did once believe in a New Economy. The year was 1929 and I was a trainee in the European headquarters of a major Wall Street firm. My boss, the firm's European economist, was convinced that the Wall Street boom would go on forever.

Mr. H, and those like him, don't believe in a New Economy either. They believe in what they see -- what's always worked before. But Drucker goes on to say that sometime in the 90s he realized society is changing. We're not at the end of a technology cycle, we're at the beginning. And what happens to us next won't come from where we expect it.

So I can't help Mr. H. After all, he's right -- at least from where he stands. I have nothing to gain from trying to save him from his future, and no interest in wasting my time in a discussion with him. He'll have a fine, if shrinking, business for another few years, and then it will disappear, to be replaced by something he never imagined. But he will be old and gray and won't really care anymore.

For me, it's much more worthwhile to try and figure out what is coming next -- at least as much as I can -- and to try to be a part of it. I'd rather hasten the transition, not prolong it. I'd rather take the offensive and risk failure, than stand idly by and ensure it. I wish Mr. H good luck. He's going to need it. I hope I don't have to meet him in the unemployment line.

Demystifying Document Management

6:41:52 PM

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A concise, well-written summary and overview of content managment issues that categorizes CMS applications and provides a brief look at features, caveats, and pricing. I'm rapidly coming to think of New Architect magazine as a must read publication. This article covers far more than document management. It puts the major types of CMS into perspective, and does so in a jargon-free, understandable way. A good primer for those just beginning to study the problem.

Demystifying document mangement. Every now and then I come across an article that so neatly sums up a current issue that I get quite jealous about the skills of the author. That is certainly the case with Demystifying Document Management by Michael Bronder in new Architect. Michael states that "The CMS marketplace is... [ Source: Intranet Focus Blog]