AIIM is the international authority on Enterprise Content Management (ECM).
Information is the Heart of the Enterprise:AIIM NE’s Annual Panel of Leading Experts and Industry Analysts
Tuesday February 13, 2007
Program Information
Moderated by Nathaniel Palmer, a long-time member of the ECM community and President of industry advisors Transformation+Innovation, the panel will examine the latest thinking from the leading lights and industry thought leaders, notably:
Report on the February 13th AIIM NE Chapter Meeting“Information is at the Heart of the Enterprise”by Arthur Gingrande, Partner, IMERGE Consulting
Ed LoTurco kicked off the meeting by introducing two of the latest members of the New England AIIM Chapter, Orbograph (www.orbograph.com) and CVISION (www.cvisiontech.com). Orbograph is a leading developer of recognition solutions for the U.S. check processing market, located in Billerica, MA. CVISION develops image compression and improved optical character recognition (OCR) software solutions for PDF that help companies worldwide better manage document imaging issues.
The panel discussion, “Information is at the Heart of the Enterprise,” featured members Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, Inc., Sue Feldman of IDC, Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group and Perot Innovation Lab, and Frank Gilbane of the Gilbane Group. The moderator was Nathaniel Palmer, long-time member of the ECM community, President of Transformation + Innovation, and Executive Director of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC).
Seth Earley initiated the discussion by suggesting that the biggest problem facing our industry today is that the “velocity of change” is accelerating. Projects can’t keep up with the speed of high-tech innovation, they are obsolete by the time they are implemented and hence project lifecycles must get shorter. Sue Feldman saw technology convergence and the rate of adoption by big companies as major issues, while Frank Gilbane opined that the main problem is faulty infrastructure: the quality of operating systems and structured data bases have not yet attained industrial strength.
Carl Frappaolo rhetorically questioned the basic premise of the discussion, i.e., that information is the heart of the enterprise. Frappaolo answered that it was true, but went one step further and asked, “If information is the heart of the enterprise, then where is its soul?” He answered his own question in one word: people. Users are the forgotten element that vendors typically leave out of the development equation. The real problem is a lack of vision on the part of corporate America, which needs to adopt a user-centric perspective that is directed toward optimizing the long-term use of enterprise-based information. Defining how technology is used, he argued, is as important as the technology itself. Earley expressed his agreement with Gilbane on the infrastructure issue by wryly noting that “vision without execution equals illusion.”
Palmer decided it was time for a few questions. One audience member suggested that the velocity of change is influenced strongly by developers who, in their proverbial rush to market, prematurely release products that have been inadequately beta-tested; worse, each ECM product is built to meet a subset of multiple (and often competing) standards. The questioner went on to assert that this way of doing business promotes application incompatibility, slows down system integration, and acts as a barrier to technological progress. Moreover, the practice of “too many standards” does little to support or advance vision-based system design, and it dilutes records management best practices, which require long-term planning horizons as long as 30 to 50 years.
Feldman disagreed, arguing that multiple standards are necessary to encourage diversity of innovation and that their existence increases competition among vendors. Gilbane pointed out that working with too many standards did little to make the operating system infrastructure more robust. Earley characterized enterprise content management as a “myth”. Frappaolo contradicted his earlier position about vision-based systems design when he commented that implementing the business case now is far more important than what an installed system will look like 30 to 50 years from today. During the panel discussion, Nathanial Palmer demonstrated his expertise at keeping the session moving along briskly, reining in the speakers whenever the conversation turned too esoteric. In fact, he made a point of making certain that the last question put to the panel was asked by one of AIIM’s newer members who works in the healthcare industry. She brought the panel down to earth by asking the questions, “Just what is ECM, anyway?” and “How can ECM help me and my industry?” On that note, the session convened for their scheduled break.
In general, the second half of the panel discussion covered the evolving Internet and how it continues to change our lives and America’s economy. The following topics were covered: Wiki-based Websites (Earley concluded, “Wiki is a terrible idea that turned into something remarkably useful”); third party custodians of e-commerce transactions (Feldman says that none can be trusted yet); Best Practices (Frappaolo thinks we should take a look instead at Worst Practices); and the “Google Effect” (Feldman reported that a lot of people don’t purchase items directly off the tail-end of a Google search; instead they transact their purchases from the original host site when it’s time to buy).
Toward the end of the session, the discussion took off on a tangent as each panel member pontificated about the term “Ontology” as it pertains to ECM (“Ontology” is a term co-opted from philosophy that means “study of being”). Again, Mr. Palmer displayed his mastery at moderating the panel with some well-chosen, closing remarks.
SPONSORS
Certeon (www.certeon.com)Certeon’s S-Series™ Application Acceleration Appliances provide the industry’s first solution for Application Intelligent Networking™ to deliver application acceleration, security, and scalability over the WAN. Certeon’s S-Series appliances accelerate all WAN traffic, but are optimized for specific mission critical distributed content delivery and collaboration applications such as enterprise content management (ECM), work flow management, process management, search and communications. More and more, centralized enterprise applications are being remotely accessed over Web portals such as SharePoint, eRoom, and WebSphere. Certeon’s S-Series appliances accelerate all HTTP/S network traffic to significantly improve application response times for content search and retrieval, while maintaining end-to-send data security. Certeon uses application intelligence to turbo-charge application response times over the WAN by greatly reducing the amount of unchanged data going over the network. With less traffic on the network, application response times significantly decrease, enabling more users to gain access to more content faster.The net result is a 1000% improvement in application responsiveness and organizational productivity. Certeon has enabled enterprises worldwide to optimize the responsiveness of their content delivery, work-flow, and collaboration environments in a variety of industries such as the government, manufacturing, finance, health care, and utilities. Founded in 2003, Certeon is a private company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with European offices in The Netherlands. For more information, visit www.certeon.com or call 781-425-5200.
KofaxKofax, a division of DICOM Group plc (LSE: DCM.L), is the world's leading provider of information capture software, according to research by Harvey Spencer Associates. Kofax products enable the automation of business processes by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents from throughout organizations, transforming them into retrievable information, and delivering it all into line-of-business applications, databases and archives. The company's Ascent platform is the most popular information capture application worldwide, and its VRS (VirtualReScan) is the de facto standard for scanning productivity. Kofax products are widely used in finance, government, insurance, healthcare, and a broad range of companies and agencies that must capture critical business information from paper and electronic documents and forms.
DataBank IMXDataBank IMX is a national single-source provider of document imaging software, hardware and document conversion services. Locally, the New England Region is managed by Bob Zagami and the management team at their Canton, MA sales and production facility.DataBank IMX is a nationally recognized Platinum Reseller and Diamond Award winner for technical support and service from Hyland (OnBase) software. We are also one of the top ten resellers of Digitech Systems software in the country. The history of this organization in Canton dates back to 1886 when the Spaulding Company was founded. Along the way Spaulding acquired Graphic Microfilm of New England in 1973 and merged with Information Technology, Inc. (ITI) in 1993. They were then acquired in the original ImageMax IPO in 1997. In 2005 Dick Aschman and Chuck Bauer acquired the assets of ImageMax and formed a new company that is now DataBank IMX.Bob Zagami has been an active member of the New England Chapter for over thirty years and currently serves on the AIIM National Board of Directors.
VignetteFor more than 10 years, Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN) has helped organizations worldwide transform their content from a liability to an asset. Vignette's family of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions lets these organizations leverage their records, documents, Web pages, images, multimedia and other unstructured content to create new opportunities, expand profits, manage their risk and realize greater savings and efficiencies. Vignette is headquartered in Austin, Texas with local operations worldwide. Visit www.vignette.com .
SPEAKERS
Sue FeldmanIDCSusan Feldman directs IDC’s Content Technologies Group, and specializes in research on search and discovery software and digital marketplace technologies and dynamics. The Content Technologies Group tracks and analyzes software that manages, organizes, maintains, archives, distributes, and creates access to unstructured information in any format. New research on the digital marketplace and its requirements for technology infrastructure was added in 2006. Ms. Feldman’s area of specialization includes market research on search engines, text analytics, unified access to information, categorization and other information retrieval technologies, as well as digital marketplace dynamics. The Digital Marketplace: Search and Business Technologies program, in addition to search engines and search engine optimization and analytics, also studies the dynamics for the emerging advertising-driven digital marketplace. It analyzes the opportunities for and threats to IT vendors and online content providers. The underlying technology for doing business online is also covered by this program.Ms. Feldman won the 2003 James Peacock Research award at IDC for her work on modeling and forecasting the search and retrieval technology markets. Her current work includes creating an interactive model for the digital marketplace. She has written and edited numerous articles and books about the Internet and information retrieval technology for which she has won several national and international awards. Before coming to IDC in 2000, Ms. Feldman was President for twenty years of Datasearch, an independent information consulting firm, where she consulted on new retrieval technologies such as natural language processing, search engines, usability of online systems, and digital libraries. She wrote the chapter on search engines for the 1999 volume of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science and was the first editor of the IEEE Computer Society's Digital Library News. She has designed and taught courses and workshops in information science and is a frequent speaker at conferences. She is a former president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals, and an advisory board member for several conferences and organizations.
Nathaniel Palmer, ModeratorNathaniel Palmer is President of Transformation+Innovation, as well as the Executive Director of the Workflow Management Coalition. Previously he was Director, Business Consulting for Perot Systems Corp, and also spent over a decade with Delphi Group serving as Vice President and Chief Analyst. The author of over 200 research studies and published articles as well as the critically-acclaimed management text “The X-Economy” (Texere, 2001), Nathaniel is a widely-recognized industry expert who has been featured in numerous media ranging from Fortune to The New York Times. He has authored dozens of articles in IT publications such as CIO and InformationWeek, as well as Senior Technical Editor of Business Transformation and Innovation. He has also been featured as a guest expert on National Public Radio and World Business Review. His regular column “Open for Business” is featured in each issue of the Enterprise Open Source Journal.Nathaniel can be reached via email at npalmer@tranformationandinnovation.com
Carl Frappaolo Delphi Group (A Perot Systems Company)Carl Frappaolo is Executive Vice President and co-founder of Delphi Group, a Perot Systems company. With over 25 years of experience working with a broad array of business solutions including knowledge and content management, portals, search engines, document management, workflow, BPM, records management, imaging, intranets and electronic document databases, Mr. Frappaolo is well versed in the practical business aspects and technical aspects of implementing large scale e-applications. Valued for his technical, practical and market expertise, he has consulted with a variety of organizations spanning multiple industries including: Pfizer, RR Donnelly, The First Church of Christ Scientist, American Family Insurance Group, Merck, Lockheed Marietta, Northwestern Mutual Life, Union Pacific Railroad, Lockheed Martin, Guardian, ING, Las Vegas Valley Water Authority, Johnson and Johnson, Glaxo SmithKline, American Express, Apple Computer, First Union Bank, The State of Washington, The Clorox Company, The City of San Diego, Xerox, IBM, AT&T, Bausch and Lomb, Air France, Towers Perrin, Nabisco, The World Bank and Syntax Corporation.Mr. Frappaolo is the creator of Delphis Knowledge Management Methodology (KM2), Portal Design and Development Methodology (PDDM), e-learning methodology (ELM) Stair-Step and TBA design methodologies. He sits on the board of the Electronic Document Systems Foundation. Mr. Frappaolo has been recognized by AIIM International (the Association for Information and Image Management) as a Master of Information Technology and as an Information Systems Laureate, and in 2000, was bestowed the Distinguished Service Award by AIIM.Mr. Frappaolo has authored over 300 studies on the technology and practices of e-business, portals, Knowledge Management and Electronic Document Management and has been cited and published in leading industry periodicals including, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, BYTE, Knowledge Management Magazine, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, KM World, Imaging Magazine, ImagingWorld Magazine, CIO, Data Base Advisor, INFORM, CommunicationsWeek, Network World, The Review, CD-ROM Professional, Managing Office Technology, Beyond Computing, Today's Office, Document Imaging and Windows Management, and Digital News & Review. He is the author of four books: Electronic Document Management Systems: A Portable Consultant, an extensive text that analyzes the role of the electronic document as the cornerstone of todays knowledge-based paradigm of computing (McGraw-Hill, 1995); Smart Things to Know About Knowledge Management, the leading primer on this business paradigm (Capstone, 1999); ExecExpress Knowledge Management, a critical business executives view on knowledge management (Capstone/Wiley, 2002), and Knowledge Management a primer on the business and technical aspects of knowledge management (Capstone/Wiley, 2006).Recognized as an industry leader with great technological foresight, Mr. Frappaolo is a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows and has delivered the keynote address at numerous national and international trade and user conventions. His audiences consistently find his presentations thought provoking and always on the cutting edge.
Frank GilbaneGilbane Group, Inc.Frank Gilbane is President & CEO of Gilbane Group, Inc., organizes the Gilbane Conferences on Content Management Technologies. Frank is also a Managing Partner at Lighthouse Seminars LLC, a producer of educational events for enterprise software. Frank serves on the board of directors of APT (Art Plus Technology), a Boston-based firm specializing in communications strategies, information delivery, and document processing solutions for the financial industry.Before founding Gilbane Group Inc. Frank was with the market research and consulting firm CAP Ventures, Inc., an Inc. 500 company in both 1997 and 1998. Frank joined CAP Ventures as a corporate officer and member of the Board of Directors in 1994 when CAP acquired his company.Frank was the founder and former president of Publishing Technology Management, Inc., a founder of the French firm TechnoForum SARL, co-founder of the Documation conferences in the U.S., Canada, France, the UK, and Switzerland, and founder of the Gilbane Report. In the early eighties he held various positions in software development, marketing, and senior management at Texet Corporation and Quadex Corporation.Frank was a founder and former member of the board of the Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros). He was also a founding member of the Board of Advisors to SGML Open (now OASIS), is a past member of ANSI, ISO, and CALS Standards Committees, the Graphic Communications Association (now IDEAlliance), the MIT Enterprise Forum, the Advisory Board of the MIT Press journal Markup Languages: Theory & Practice, served on the advisory board of the University of Washington School Content Management Systems (CMS) Evaluation Lab, and a recipient of the GCA's TechDoc award. Mr. Gilbane has a Bachelors degree from Boston University and a Masters degree from Tufts University in Philosophy.
Seth EarleyEarley & Associates, Inc.
Having founding Earley & Associates, Inc. in 1994, Seth Earley is one of the leading experts on how to best leverage content within the business environment; his unique expertise is in the areas of taxonomy development, metadata standards and information architecture. His previous work includes projects for the IBM Office of the CIO in application architecture and system performance tuning for a worldwide deployment, architecture for the GE Capital Virtual Boardroom which spanned 30 plus business units, development of process analysis and solution architecture courses and workshops that were taught worldwide, and development of enterprise information architecture and application of metadata to a large government agency. He possesses a unique combination of business savvy, technical capabilities and the ability to bring people together to see a common vision. Mr. Early is a Founder and Chairman of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum, a community of KM practitioners and experts, and the facilitator of numerous conferences and workshops. He is a guest instructor at the Theseus Institute in Nice, France as well as the author of several respected training programs. He can be reached at www.earley.com .
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