Submitted by Bob Larrivee
Director/Industry Advisor – AIIM
I had an opportunity recently to
discuss our industry with Cheryl McKinnon, Chief Marketing Officer for Nuxeo.
Cheryl has more
than 16 years experience in Enterprise Content Management and a keen interest
in the challenges facing information workers in the increasingly electronic and
online work environment with a focus on current and emerging trends in
information management, social media for business and the rise of open source.
Here are excerpts of our conversation.
Bob: Please describe your company and role.
Cheryl: I joined Nuxeo as their first Chief Marketing Officer in September 2009.
Nuxeo is a Paris headquartered ECM company, in its second full year of North
American operations after a decade of success in Europe. My team and I look after all aspects of
global marketing – corporate marketing, field marketing, product marketing and
partner marketing.
Nuxeo uses an open source
software development model. We derive our value not from license sales, but
from helping clients successfully deploy their content management
applications. Our business model is
built around revenue derived from the sales of maintenance and support
subscriptions, supplemented by training and professional services.
We are often asked: where
can Nuxeo fit in this consolidating and commoditized ECM market? Our response
is that we are on the forefront of the next wave of ECM vendors. Products built in the 1990s are now reaching
the natural end of their useful product lifecycle. Our focus is investing in
the technical strength of our underlying platform – our Nuxeo Enterprise
Platform is built specifically to be extended and embedded in any number of 21st
century content applications. Content is
now created in the world of mobile, social, open and interoperable; it's the
world we have been architected to meet.
Bob: What do you think are some of the important issues
facing business organizations today? (Technology and/or non-technology)
Cheryl: Businesses are constantly challenged to find balance between opposing
forces. The rapid disconnect between
inexpensive or free consumer applications and clunky, complex enterprise
applications has forced companies to adapt and welcome some disruption or
retrench and become defensive. ECM vendors, unfortunately, have contributed to
some of this confusion with the pervasive compliance as a cudgel message over
the last few years. Now is the time for a new focus on content management as an
enabler of safe collaboration and a platform by which business can become agile
in the fast-paced information economy. Where do I see the key debates?
Closed vs. Open
This debate manifests
itself in several places. For IT managers it is figuring out how and where open
source products can be used to fast-track development projects and reassert
more ownership over the technology platforms being used to solve their business
problems, and becoming less dependent on closed source vendors who aren't
investing in roadmap innovation. This
will be interesting to watch over the next couple of years, as the IT
acceptance of open source for infrastructure (operating systems, databases,
utilities) moves into the realm of the information worker – enterprise content
management, web content management, business intelligence, etc.
It's also the debate that
influences much of the Enterprise 2.0 debate.
Closed work processes, barriers between work teams, fear of disclosure
to outside parties, lack of trust of information workers – the struggle to
encourage information sharing not only across the organization, but into the
extended marketplace of partners and customers is still causing angst in many
corporations. Finding the right balance between lock down and sharing,
distribution of information inside vs. outside the firewall is essential for
each organization to figure out – and there is no one correct answer that fits
every type of company.
Destroy vs. Preserve
The seek and destroy
message inspired by the e-discovery market needs to be balanced with a respect
for corporate memory. Of course companies ought to clean house of irrelevant
paper and electronic content – get rid of the noise, reduce storage costs,
eliminate burden of searching, sort and disclosure when legal issue
arises. But at what point does sensible
destruction of obsolete transactional content begin to erase the more substantive
content that might have value we don't immediately see today?
This is perhaps more of
an issue for public sector, but also for institutions and enterprises who shape
our world – what value do we place on the needs of future institutional or
corporate historians? At what point to
we risk companies not being able to learn from past mistakes because the record
has been wiped clean? The Records
Management profession needs help their enterprises find the right balance
between RM as a foundation for corporate memory preservation and RM as merely
legal discovery smoking gun eraser.
Cut Costs vs. Invest for
the Future
It's easy to slash costs
by halting projects that don't contribute to today's bottom line. Over the last
two years so many industries have had to make difficult decisions to cut staff
and redirect resources to stay in business. Cuts that make sense are those that
help flatten decision-making processes and help evolve into a leaner, more
efficient business model. Businesses
that successfully navigate the uncertainties of the last two years will be
prepared to leave behind outdated assumptions about managing talent in the
knowledge economy, will invest in technology to better connect and engage
internally and externally, and will seek to be more responsive to their
customer or citizen stakeholders.
Companies that really
understand that they're in the knowledge economy will recognize that ECM can be
a competitive advantage for them.
Efficient collection, reuse, protection and distribution of their
corporate work product will help them stay relevant and responsive. And we've
entered an era where cost is no longer an inhibitor. The beauty of open source
ECM is that organizations can get their project moving TODAY. There's no
barrier to starting, regardless of where the budget approval sits. Zero cost to
download and begin testing and prototyping means building a platform for
corporate content applications can happen without the sales cycle theater
charade imposed by the legacy vendors.
Bob: Based on your experience and findings, how do you feel
business organizations can prepare?
Cheryl: Organizations can best prepare for any of the challenges described in
the previous question by really analyzing where and how content drives their
business. Tracing the flow of content through some of the most essential
processes – thinking horizontally – can be an illuminating exercise. Mapping
out the hand-off points between teams, figuring where defaulting to more open
access removes workflow steps, helping demonstrate dependencies across business
units – this can form the basis for innovative redesign of internal processes.
Companies that are still
stuck in the proverbial content silos are those that tend to be structured
vertically – whether because of org chart or technology choices limit content
re-use. If organizations can map out those
most essential business processes: procurement, lead generation, product
design, customer service, or others inside their specific industry value chain,
and understand where content gets created or consumed along the way, it becomes
easier to envision applications to support the business. Content needs to be
viewed across its natural business lifecycle – not just its disposition
lifecycle once it loses its relevance.
Bob: What future role do you see for education for vendors,
systems integrators and users?
Cheryl: ECM education can be most valuable when it helps connect the technical,
business and governance interests that often are cohesive inside an
organization. We've been talking about the importance of cross-functional
planning teams for years, but I think the time is right to keep accelerating
this message. More and more business
users are tech-savvy: the rise of the web for personal and consumer use, of
social networks and low cost laptops and smart phones means people are far more
open to engaging with technology when the purpose is clear. Designing and deploying clear, meaningful
applications with well-articulated purpose – ie, 'why' content needs to be
managed to meet the needs of the business – will lead to success.
This approach also
directly supports the need to look at content horizontally – from its
creation/capture, through revision and collaboration cycles, to publication
through multiple channels, to sensible retention, preservation or disposal
phases. Thinking of the technical, business and legal/governance issues as three
layers across a horizontal process rather than three separate spheres is where
education can help shape better ECM success.
I've always believed that
education is the primary purpose of marketing. Helping organizations think
about their content management challenges and making them aware of
possibilities to improve their business.
One of the areas of ECM
education I intend to develop over 2010 is to be vocal about the fact that some
of the assumptions we adopted in the 1990s that are no longer relevant. ECM needs to be for everyone. The 2006
Federal Rules of Civil procedure affirmed this: it no longer matters whether a
company is big, small, private or publicly traded. Everyone has the challenge
of electronically stored information that might be subject to legal disclosure
one day.
Thus, ECM has necessarily
become a commoditized technology space – Microsoft Sharepoint has done
wonderful things by getting basic content management features and concepts into
the hands of mainstream business users. And the new generation of open,
interoperable, flexible ECM platforms, such as Nuxeo, will expand to fill the
gaps for more complex or unique content management applications far more
rapidly than the rigid, closed, heavy footprint architectures of last-century
products.
Bob: Do you have any other insights for our readers?
Cheryl: I can't remember the last time the ECM world has been so full of
excitement and potential. This is a fascinating place to be, and career
opportunities for IT or business professionals who want to invest in this space
I believe will abound. This is a great time for AIIM's education program to
help drive ECM into its next phase.
I'd like to see open
source ECM drive entirely new sources of demand for content management
professionals. Working with
organizations that previously didn't deploy because of the very high up-front
costs, or with organizations that want to have more control over their
application building and customizations, with domain experts who want to design
entirely new vertical applications for specific industry use cases, and with
companies that are already technically savvy and don't want to sit idly,
waiting for vendors to get around to their enhancement requests... this
is the new world of opportunity that now opened up.
Thank you for sharing
your views with me and our audience. I wish you and Nuxeo all the best and will
be watching and listening as you progress.
Current
Contact Information for Cheryl McKinnon – Chief Marketing Officer, Nuxeo
Email:
cmckinnon@nuxeo.com
Blogs: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/cmckinnon/ http://candyandaspirin.blogspot.com
Linked
In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherylmckinnon
Twitter: @CherylMcKinnon
Skype CherylLMcKinnon
SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/CherylMcKinnon
Bob Larrivee - AIIM
Email: Bob Larrivee – AIIM blarrivee@aiim.org
Follow me on twitter –
BobLarrivee
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