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CIP, the Lingua Franca of ECM

By Tony Paille posted 03-14-2018 09:42

  

lingua franca

To me, one the biggest value of the Certified Information Professional program is as common language for Enterprise Content Management. The lack of this common vocabulary easily costs tens of thousands of dollars to vendors and can add months to the vendor selection cycle for end users.

Having been in the enterprise content management space for twenty years and worked with many different ECM vendors, it still amazes me that we still don’t have a single vocabulary. Is there a difference, or similarity, to what one vendor calls a version and another a revision? What’s the difference between a compound document and a virtual document? Vendors cannot even seem to find a common ground for what to call values associated to a document. Do we call them properties, attributes, keywords, or index values? You would think that this wouldn’t matter but it does, to some.

After working for sixteen years with one ECM platform vendor and its partners, I found myself moving to another platform. I was immediately placed in a training plan that would last for two months. I finished each day of general ECM training in under an hour. ECM technology does not change but how it’s presented by each vendor does. If we as vendors see this confusion, do the end users? Yes. And to see the evidence you only need to look at a first time RFP (Requests for Proposal).

The first introduction of most vendors to a customer is the RFP. What most customers don’t realize is that this list of questions sent to various vendors to solicit responses can be a strong indicator of which vendor taught the end user about ECM. Using a term like “attribute” versus “property” or “role based permissions” rather than “group based permissions” may not seem significant. But to long time practitioners they can quickly identify with which vendor the end user is familiar. And much of that doesn’t matter.

This is why one of the side benefits of the CIP program is that it creates a standard vocabulary for ECM. As CIPs we talk the same language. We can cut through the vendor lingo and get to the meat of the problem. Vendors and customers should look to this too. Vendors could save tens of thousands of dollars per new employee by hiring CIP candidates or using CIP based training. Customers can insist on CIP trained consultants, or have their employees trained as CIP, to rise above vendor lingo and understand the true capabilities of ECM. In the end, having a team with the right skills will save any organization money. Wait, or was that “a team with the right attributes?”

***This article was written by Marko Sillanpaa, CIP. Marko is a futurist and ECM advisor based in West Palm Beach, FL. He is the co-founder of Big Men on Content and can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/markosillanpaa/.***

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