It has been a long journey but we are finally getting settled in Houston. Thought this shot at night would be interesting. Enjoy. If you click on the photo you will be taken to some additional pictures shot during the evening.

Well the article I wrote, “The Swiss Army Knife of ECM?”, was published in the AIIM Guide to ECM Purchasing.

I talked about this article and posted the article I submitted back in February.

Some of the other articles in the guide are very good. I recommend taking a look.

Well, another year has gone by since I started BetterECM.  Wow, how time flies.  Writing posts for BetterECM continues to be a very valuable experience.

This has been a significant year of change. For myself, a big career change leaving the vendor world (software or solutions provider) to that of a major customer with global needs. I am still getting my arms around this massive challenge. For the industry, the changes in the marketplace continue with the recent announcements this past year: Autonomy acquiring Meridio in October 2007 and HP acquiring Tower Software in March 2008.

I am still struggling to post more often, but my new role at BP has made writing posts consistently difficult. I will strive to improve.

Here are some interesting statistics as of today:

• Total Views: 110,606
• Best Day Ever: 575 Readers — Tuesday, August 14, 2007
• Totals

• Posts: 160
• Comments: 254
• And the most interesting metric: 43,435 spam comments

Looking forward to the next year…

I had the pleasure of speaking at a joint AIIM and ARMA event in Chicago last week. Joyce Osborn organized the event and did a fantastic job gathering over 150 attendees.

Even though the weather was raining last Tuesday, the audience was lively and had great questions.

I have posted the slides I presented at Slideshare.net or you can view here if you click through to my Blog.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe has a good post discussing the acquisition of Tower Software of Australia by HP: HP expands archiving, e-discovery, and compliance portfolio with acquisition of Tower Software.

I have been anticipating Tower Software being acquired by somebody for over three years.  At one point, I thought HP would acquire Open Text. Hmm, I wonder if they went after Open text and the price was too high?

Anyway, I will be interested to see what HP will do with Tower combined with their Integrated Archiving Platform. I will be skeptical of the combined solution due to the limited scalability of Tower Trim. When I speak of scalability, I am referring to supporting a global organization with tens of thousands of users spread across the globe. This scenario is not easy to support.

I saw this post last week when I was trying to catch up from my recent travels: Peter O’Kelly’s Reality Check: Toshiba’s HD-DVD going the way of Betamax | Technology | Reuters.

I have been waiting to see who would win the  war. Anyway I decided to wait and see who might win and I was glad I did.

This weekend I was at one of the warehouse stores and they had both the Sony Blu-ray player and the Toshiba HD DVD player. The Sony was $380 and the Toshiba HD DVD was $75.  The funny things was that the employee that asked if he could help me had no idea that anyone buying the $75 HD DVD player would be buying something that will be useless in a month or so

Well, this has been a long time coming. I am happy to see that Microsoft finally released the DoD 5015.2 Add-on for Moss 2007 a couple weeks back while I was trekking around the UK and Europe.

I am proud of the work our team did in creating the new features for the MOSS Records Center last year.  The extremely collaborative nature of the project and development with the Microsoft  Product Group using the SCRUM agile methodology during the project showed me the possibility of a high performing team with this methodology.

I plan to implement the MOSS Records Center with the Add-on in the next several months.

Here is the Microsoft Post: Announcing the DoD 5015.2 Resource Kit for SharePoint Server 2007.

From Arpan Shah’s blog: “We just posted advanced SharePoint videos and whitepapers on TechNet”

The videos and white papers are located here

I wrote this article for an AIIM E-Doc Buyers Guide last summer. I am not sure if it will be published and almost forgot I wrote.  Recently I started sharing it with some colleagues and thought I really should share this with my readers.

So, here you go. This is very high level and serves as an overview of MOSS as it relates to ECM. I think it can be used to help educate folks who are not familiar with MOSS. I hope you find it useful.

Read the article

Well only two months into 2008 and my travels have made it difficult to keep to my goal of at least one post per week.

Over the last two weeks I was on the road in London for a week of meetings followed by a week in Lisbon, Portugal.

This was my first trip to Lisbon and I had a chance to tour the city and visit Sintra.  If you ever get the chance to visit Sintra I highly recommend it. The Palácio da Pena, or “Castelo da Pena” is a stunning example of Portuguese architecture from the Romantic period.

Well it happened again. My friend Jesse Wilkins who writes Informata, tagged me this last week with my second memetag. I was tagged last year and had to write 5 things you didn’t know about me.

This one is a bit more challenging since I have to come up with eight more things other bloggers and my readers do not know about me. So, here goes, eight things that others don’t know about me, and then I will tag eight people to carry on the meme. I know - sort of like a chain letter.

1. I have tried a great number of professions/jobs throughout my life including; lawnmower mechanic, boat engine mechanic, bowling alley mechanic, security guard, Navy pilot, aviation safety officer and aircraft crash investigator, stock broker, Chief Information Officer (CIO), company president, consultant, Chief Technology Officer, and now Director for Information & Records Management at BP.
2. I love music. I enjoy most genres except country western and played the trumpet and french horn in high school. I listen to music to help grease the creative skids when trying to write articles, papers or need to do some thinking.
3. My first car was a 1958 American Rambler which I paid $90 for. I subsequently restored the car from one end to the other, including rebuilding the engine. I know, pretty slick looking car right?
4. I read constantly and sometimes have two or three books going at once. Sometimes I do not finish a book and lately I have decided that’s OK. I guess I am a learning junkie and I am always looking for new inputs and ways of approaching problems.
5. I love cooking (like Jesse and Alan) and really like grilling. I guess my love for cooking rubbed off on my youngest son who is now a Sous Chef for the JW Marriott Grand Lakes, Orlando.
6. Over the years I have lived in 19 different cities (one of those in Okinawa, Japan) with the current city being Houston, TX.
7. I was very active in Boy Scouts growing up and attained Eagle Scout with a Bonze Palm.
8. I love photography. It started in elementary school when my father bought me a darkroom kit (digital had not been invented yet :-)). I specialized in infrared black and white photography during college and now I am getting into digital with my Nikon D40X and I use Adobe Lightroom for processing and Photoshop CS3 for special processing. I have a lot to learn.

Now, to return the favor and tag eight more: Eddie, Frank, Jason, Arpan, Lawrence, Ed, Joanna, Rob

I added a new page to BetterECM today which has all the presentations I have uploaded to slideshare last year.

I hope my readers find this new feature useful. Let me know what you think.

This comes under the heading of “How Did They Do That?”. This white paper (Records Management Solution Demonstrates Power of SharePoint As A Development Platform) that is available on the Microsoft Downloads site, provides some details of the “MOSS as a Development Platform features that were exploited when we built the DoD Records Management Add-on for MOSS.

Another white paper by one of my former colleagues, Vishwas Lele, is a great treatise on using MOSS as an application development platform. You can download it here.

Back in August I wrote about the photo safari my wife and I took in South Africa. Well it took some time to work through almost 1,000 pictures I shot and process them. I really enjoy photography and this trip and experience reminded me how much I have missed exploring the world through a lens. Anyway I wanted to share some of the pictures. The sunsets were spectacular!

If you want to view a small subset of the pictures I took I uploaded some of them to Zooomr and you can click here.

Had a little fun with this one.

Happy New Year to my loyal readers. I’ll bet many of you were wondering if I would ever write a post again. Well here we go…

Looking Back at 2007

Last year was a year of amazing change for me personally and for the ECM industry. A year ago today I would have never guessed that I would be making a significant career change in 2007 by accepting a new position with a Global 50 energy company with global scope and broad operational responsibility. All directly related to making ECM better for my company. Also this change would impact my family by moving us to Houston and involving travel globally on a regular (1-2 weeks per month) basis. Whew!

At the beginning of 2007 the big news was the launch of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and the potential impact on the ECM marketplace. Also Web 2.0 was gaining ground and becoming part of the everyday lexicon. I even spoke about this at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco last April; Is It Possible To Successfully Manage Content In The New Wild West: ECM In A Web 2.0 World. By the end of 2007 Web 2.0 has become somewhat passe’ and everyone is now talking about Enterprise 2.0 and some companies are actually doing something about it. Taking the Web 2.0 social technologies and capabilities and making them part of enterprise content management solutions.

Last month while in London for a couple of weeks I had the opportunity to meet with founders John Newton and Ian Howells at the Alfresco world headquarters. Alfresco is making ECM in a Web 2.0 world a reality by integrating the Alfresco content management platform with leading open source Web 2.0 social computing technologies and services such as Facebook for collaboration, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, MediaWiki for wikis, TypePad and WordPress for blogging. The idea is very interesting and I think they are on to something by providing corporate users with tools that are intuitive, easy to use and in some cases, ones that they already have experience with.

One thing I think is missing is a governance model for this type of extremely flexible and user controlled content management environment. What may be needed is what I am calling a Governance 2.0 model. I think if Alfresco proposes a governance model that addresses some of the security and compliance concerns that corporate users may have with this “Web 2.0″ style ECM solution then they will really have something. I really want to thank both of them for sharing their ideas and thoughts with me last month.

Looking Forward

Looking forward toward 2008, I am excited at the possibilities the responsibilities of my new position offers. I am also responsible for the personal data privacy program for the company and will be expanding my horizons and knowledge in that direction. The biggest change I see looking forward is that I now have a chance to actually prove that I can make ECM better for a large multinational corporation. It has to be workable and I cannot do this for the organization or “to” the organization. My job will be to take the tools (both technical and procedural) and help the organization grow the capability to better manage information through people, process, and technology capabilities that my team helps to grow organically over time.

This is a huge challenge but I am eager to make a difference and continue to share what we learn. What works and what does not work. I am also committed to helping lead the effort to create a new professional discipline for information management professionals. I wrote about this before but my thinking and approach has evolved over the last four months. In my next post I will share my new manifesto that makes the case for this new professional discipline.

I am not one for New Years resolutions but I am committing to the goal of trying to write at least one post per week here at BetterECM. Now that I have drank from the fire hose over the last four months and have pieced together a plan going forward I think that this goal is achievable.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions and will continue to share what I learn and continue to learn from other’s outstanding blogs also. Thanks and Happy New Year!

Hat tip to Lam Le who is a member of the Bamboo Solutions Product Team. He has provided an excellent, in-depth, and detailed article on SharePoint User Management.

Here is the link to the article and the following is the link to a PDF of the article.

Nice Job Lam!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint, MOSS, Microsoft

I alluded to an upcoming change in for BetterECM in my “Where In The World Has BetterECM Been?“ post last week.

Well, it is finally time to let the cat out of the bag

I will be leaving Applied Information Sciences where I was the Chief Technology Officer, Collaboration & Portals at the end of this week.

I will be joining one of the leading global oil and gas companies as Director, Information and Records Management. This new position will be an exciting challenge and will really put the notion of better ECM to the test. Readers of BetterECM will get a close up glimpse of some of the challenges we are facing and the strategies and approaches for addressing some of these challenges.

I have always been an advocate of change for stimulating growth. I think this new challenge and the associated changes (both professional and personal) will be good for BetterECM. My Hope is that over time we will discuss much broader and strategic topics together related to managing information effectively.

Oh, and just to make things even more interesting, my new position requires that my wife and I to relocate to Houston.

The two core issues which need to be addressed for “Effectively Managing Information Becomes Strategic” are how to effectively educate organizations on the strategic value of information and devising a well-defined career path for information management (IM) professionals.

As I thought about an approach to addressing the two core issues I wanted to look for an existing successful model to emulate.

Then it hit me…Six Sigma!

I looked back at the amazing transformation that has occurred over the last 20+ years around improving business processes and the success and popularity of Six Sigma and now Lean Manufacturing. Six Sigma was pioneered at Motorola over 20 years ago and was brought into mainstream business culture by GE and Honeywell. According to GE, “Six Sigma is a highly disciplined process that helps us focus on developing and delivering near-perfect products and services.”

Key Concepts of Six Sigma

Lean Manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) but also from other sources. Its success is based on reduction of the original Toyota ’seven wastes’ in order to improve overall customer value. Core to the philosophy is the elimination of waste (streamlining processes where possible) and continuous improvement.

One Six Sigma feature that appealed to me in designing a new model for addressing the effective management of information was the establishment of rigorous training for Six Sigma practitioners. The fact that there are defined levels of competence; Green Belt for initial training, Black Belt for more advanced training and certification and then Master Black Belt, is very attractive. Another reason this model appealed to me was the broad recognition of the methodology and the perceived strategic importance of implementing Six Sigma programs and having Six Sigma professionals in the organization.

In my next post I will describe my proposed model.

I have to apologize to the readers of BetterECM for my lack of posts over the last several weeks. I just returned from a two week vacation out of the country. I had a wonderful time in South Africa on safari. It was really quite incredible. My friend in the picture just wants to say hello to all the BetterECM readers out there

Also some big personal changes are about to occur which I will announce shortly. Preparing for these changes has consumed a good deal of my time and energy over the last several months.

Anyway, I am back, reinvigorated, and ready to  pick up where I left off with part 2 of “Effectively Managing Information Becomes Strategic: An Approach” later today.

Thanks to all my subscribers and readers for hanging in there.

Although desirable, the statement in quotes above has not become a reality for most companies and organizations. Unfortunately establishing the necessary policy frameworks, standard operating procedures, and implementing the necessary technologies to manage corporate information effectively continues to be viewed a burden that must be minimized at all costs. The typical response to “fixing” the problems associated with ineffectively managing information tends to be tactical in nature and not strategic.

With the growing volumes of electronic information and the increasingly complex and dynamic regulatory environments faced by all organizations, effectively managing information must become strategic. However the big question is how to educate organizations on the strategic value of information and provide a well-defined career path for information management (IM) professionals. I have devised a proposed approach for addressing these two issues.

In my next post, I will discuss the successful model that I recommend be emulated.