It's Time for ECM to Evolve

With the RTM of SharePoint 2010 I feel comfortable proclaiming that the days of traditional ECM vendors (i.e. FileNet, OpenText, 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 and at the same time seems 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 complimentary 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 enterprise-wide.  Not to mention the at times awful end user experience they surface…goes back to the primary co-existence strategy theme…use SharePoint as the portal to our repository.  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 enterprise’s content?  Why do we still see huge volumes of unmanaged contents 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 a 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 3 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 than 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 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 enterprise-wide.  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 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 3rd 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 not an 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 3rd party solutions.  The lesson here…most of what most of an organizations 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 1st time about 5 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 cost and the room broke out into laughter.  These folks were used to paying upwards of a few thousand dollars per user for a 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 + 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.


4. Best Practices, Governance, and Information Architecture.  Folks are quick to dismiss SharePoint as an ECM platform because there are not well-established best practices, governance, and IA around ECM.  That is a debatable point in my mind…there’s actually a lot of information out there on these topics…granted, not all good, but there is plenty of knowledgeable folks having thoughtful discussion on these and other topics.  I will say that it’s equally debatable whether or not there are good best practices, governance, and IA available for all the other ECM platforms out there.  I guess the point here is if someone asserts that they are hesitant to implement SharePoint for ECM for a lack of the above, ask them to see the above for any of the others.  It’s just kind of a weak objection and I encourage you to call it out as such.


5. Conventional wisdom is that SharePoint doesn’t scale.  This is almost always asserted by analysts in the ECM space in one form or another. A lot of times it’s not such a definitive declaration, it’s more of an “at least we don’t think it scale” or “there is not enough evidence to support scalability claims” or something like that.  I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it scales quite nicely, both on its own and with the help of add-ons.  KnowledgeLake published a whitepaper a couple years ago that showed 10’s of millions of documents managed in a farm with all the content sitting in SQL.  It worked without issue.  Could they have scaled that out even further and more economically if they remoted the BLOBs with something like StoragePoint…most definitely yes, but that’s more of a storage cost and to some extent a SQL cost consideration rather than a question of the architecture’s scalability.  That being said, there are definitely performance and scalability improvements to be had when you remote the BLOBs from SQL, especially with bulk (…think mail room scanning or customer statements imported from a mainframe AFP stream) operations.  So analysts, naysayers, and the dude from OpenText that calls it ScarePoint every time he does a presentation (…you know who you are), stop hiding behind a perceived lack of evidence that SharePoint scales or the fear that it actually might. 


6. Risk avoidance.  This is the person that hates keeping all their content in that legacy repository, but is risk adverse.  No one has been able to convince them that they can easily and without issue move all that content from legacy platform X to SharePoint.  No one has been able to convince them that it’s an affordable and low to no risk exercise.  No one has been able to convince them that it can be done in a reasonable amount of time with little or no impact to business continuity.  I frankly think this starts with a general level of immaturity within the Microsoft partner ecosystem on what ECM is.  I hear a lot of partners talk about ECM and proclaim themselves ECM experts, but I don’t regularly see evidence to back up the talk.  That has translated into failed implementations and burnt fingers and contributes to the myth that SharePoint can’t be my ECM platform.  It really speaks to the accessibility and approachability of the platform along with the massive size of the partner ecosystem.  It creates a dynamic where an organization has to weed through all the partners out there to find the ones that really do understand ECM, can translate that to SharePoint, and in the end help the customer achieve their goals.  You think I’m unfairly asserting something here.  Go to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble or go search Amazon.com for both SharePoint and FileNet.  Not only are you not going to find much on FileNet (…or Documentum or OpenText or Stellent), but you won’t find anything that ends in “for Dummies”.  Not suggesting that the “ECM experts” in the SharePoint ecosystem are dummies, just that I think the ecosystem has generally over-simplified what ECM is and has little expertise with legacy ECM platforms and getting content out of them and into SharePoint.


7. Job Security.  No, this is not the same person talked about in #6.  This person likes all the content in that legacy repository.  It was hard to stand-up, it’s hard and expensive to maintain, and he/she has created the perception that if anyone other than them even looks at it the whole thing will come crashing down.  This is the clown that keeps the person in #6 from doing anything, acting in their own best interests and not the best interests of their organization.  They like things just the way they are and there is at least one of these folks in every organization.  If SharePoint has any chance at becoming an enterprise-wide standard for content management within an organization, these folks have to be disarmed or marginalized.  You’re also never going to be their friend, so don’t waste any time trying to be.

There are most certainly other reasons, but I think this is a good start.  Feel free to leave a comment with others or challenge my lucky 7.

If you’re currently burdened by expensive and hard to maintain legacy content management platforms or have content in more places than you count and want to get all or most of it into SharePoint but don’t know where to start then reach out to us.  Metalogix has both solutions for getting content from any number of content sources into SharePoint and efficiently and cost effectively managing it once it’s there.  We also have partner companies and friends that can help you where we can’t and would be happy to point you in the right direction.

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