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AIIM2015 - Quick Thoughts

By Chris Walker posted 03-23-2015 18:08

  

This year the annual AIIM Conference was held in San Diego, California; way better than last year’s location which was really a few hotels sitting on reclaimed swamp land or something. And it was great to reconnect with people and meet some new folks and blah, blah, blah ….

Overall I found this year’s even much better than last year’s. This could be because: A) I had no responsibilities as a speaker or representative of any company in any form; B) The content was just way more compelling to me. Either way the AIIM crew, led by Georgina Clelland (recently promoted to VP of something at AIIM, deservedly so), deserves huge congratulations. If I’m not dead or incapacitated I fully intend to be at the 2016 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

On to the good stuff …

Priorities

I have to say that I was pretty dismayed, though completely unsurprised, that most people and organizations still view managing information from the risk / compliance side of the ledger. Even one of the vendors I spoke to understood that their tools could do so much more if they were employed for insight and analytics, rather than for responding and defending against discovery and compliance issues. During the conference AIIM run an informal, unscientific survey about organizational priorities:

  

Information Governance

Information Governance seemed to be a hot topic this year, with at least a couple of roundtables and one panel discussion dedicated to it. Good news, right? Sort of. Between the sessions I attended and discussions I had, no one offered up a definition of Information Governance. In fact, one of the IG vendors went so far as to say that they don’t do IG, they’re merely a small part of it. For the record, this is the same vendor that opined their tool could be used for value as well as risk. Regardless of the lack of a cohesive definition (just shows that what the IGI, I, and others have said is true) it was apparent that IG is an important topic.

Enterprise File Sync and Share (aka The mmppfff Problem)

You don’t think that file syncing and sharing is important or disruptive? I don’t know how many sessions at the conference covered the topic, but I attended three:

While Lubor’s session was not explicitly about EFSS, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where things are headed. Actually, you could say that we’re already there, but just not in a very polished way. In his session, Alan pointed out that, while working for some client or other, he and his team stopped counting once they’d reached 130 EFSS vendors.

EFSS is a big deal. No, it won’t kill ECM; depending on the vendor, it will BE ECM. Don’t believe me? Think about ECM vendors coming out with their own EFSS offerings. Some because it’s the future, some because it’s the only way to defend against the likes of some of our favourite EFFS players (130+? Holy Carp!)

Bits and Pisces

Lane Severson and I chatting about big data, analytics, data scientists (that kinds stuff) – if your data scientist type people don’t understand your business and context, they’re not worth it.

The guys in the corner from a three-letter ECM vendor now flogging an EFSS solution – if you can’t answer the simple questions, why are you here? Seriously. Why?

You know who you are – a roundtable session is not where you talk about your product for 20+ minutes to the point the AIIM monitor person has to step in and tell you to give everyone else a turn. That said, once you stopped talking it turned into a pretty good session.

Surprised but not by the absence of some of the EFSS players. You should have been there; I think it would have worked out better than last year.

Panel moderators should be like hockey referees; we don’t know they’re there until a fight breaks out.

 

 



#Oracle #AIIM #EnterpriseSyncandShare #OpenText
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