John,
Your ‘8 Things Learned Working at AIIM’ (http://info.aiim.org/digital-landfill/aiim-transition-john-mancini-aiim16-changes) words-of-wisdom are very well received. I would like to share 4 of my personal most memorable moments, thus far, of the John Mancini-era. (P.S. John, I’m looking to add 4 more to this list to make ‘8 Things’).
- AIIM conference 2012
Without a doubt AIIM was is in a serious time of transition; as was the entire Information Management industry. John made some extremely bold, as well as controversial, predictions during these years. He was a true visionary and passionate about this new technology convergence of Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoCo).
(http://www.aiim.org/About/News/42931)
Here is a brief except of the event:
AIIM, the global community for information professionals, is pleased to announce a new AIIM Conference March 20-22, 2012 at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, CA, focused on "Managing Information in a Social, Local, and Mobile Era". The new AIIM Conference will feature fast-paced and inspiring keynote speakers, unparalleled networking and interactivity delivered through tracks on: engaging customers and employees in new ways, transforming processes through mobile technologies, and maintaining control in the cloud.
John absolutely nailed these three trends.
"The convergence of social, mobile, and local technologies is revolutionizing the way we think about enterprise information," notes AIIM President John Mancini.
2. BoxWorks
With John being an East Coast resident and myself being a West Coast resident it’s sort of a rare opportunity that we get to visit with each other in person. However, one of the events that we seem to see each other most often is the annual BoxWorks event. As mentioned previously John has always been a big proponent of ‘The Cloud’ when it was still a ‘Fad’ and some of the naysayers within the ECM Community (you know who you are) discounted ‘The Cloud’ as a viable ECM repository. Remember those days just a few short years ago? John attended ‘Cloud’ events such as BoxWorks to better understand true industry trends instead of the traditional vendor propaganda against disrupted technology.
3. AIIM conference 2015 (http://www.aiimevents.com/events/aiim-conference-2015/event-summary-b5182b0ad5914646996e43ff61112e74.aspx)
At the AIIM conference 2015 in San Diego, John and the AIIM team did a great job of encouraging ‘engagement’ as a theme and it worked extremely well. I’ve attended many technology conferences in my career and far too often the highlight of the event is the technology exhibits and not the information being presented at various breakout sessions. This was not the case at AIIM 2015. The sessions were lively, interactive and extremely spirited. I heard many stories of great debate and discussion. I truly feel that after 3 years of the new AIIM conference that AIIM 2015 embodied John’s big vision of ‘engagement’ more than ever.
4. ABBYY Analyst Day Japan 2015
John’s excellent reputation and positive influence knows no geographic boundaries and never was this more apparent in Japan this past year. John was the keynote speaker at ABBYY Analyst Day Japan 2015 in Yokohama, Japan. He gave a presentation entitled Embracing the Future where he articulated key trends in the worldwide Information Management and general technology markets. I feel that his content was well-received and particularly interesting to the Japanese audience.
Conviction, Passion and Sincerity
I, too, have recently made a career change which was not coordinated with John’s transition, however is very much in line with his public comments:
http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/aiim-adds-content-marketing-advisory-services/
“The market for me is very unsettled. It feels very much like it did in the late '90s when e-business was starting to sweep through," he said, adding that he thinks AIIM has the resources to "help people sort through that."
Best of luck John and I can only hope to continue to evangelize great technologies, process and policy with you for the sincere benefit of others.
-Kevin