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The End of ECM?

By DANIEL ANTION posted 06-28-2011 16:54

  

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week, Andrew McAfee raised an interesting fear. Could computers using technology like that demonstrated by IBM’s Watson, make E2.0 technologies irrelevant? He explained that he worries, albeit not much, that Watson, which beat its Jeopardy opponents by scouring tons of unrelated material, could navigate piles of content without tags, comments, recommendations, tweets and retweets. The end of E2.0? No, I am certain that the end of E2.0 will be in the form of E3.0, and that we will live to see E5.0, but what about the end of ECM?

Mr. McAfee painted a picture of a corporate world influenced by “bad bosses and new-fangled computers” that would steer us back into an unconnected workplace. I don’t think that will happen, but on the ECM front, I think it might be “good bosses and unsuspecting users” that would usher in a sea change. Think about it – content management without metadata, scanning without the need for indexing, backfilling without the need for an army of temps. Could a Deep Analytics enginelike Watson replace the bits and pieces of data added by subject matter experts, authors, peers and managers? I don’t know if it could, but I can’t think of a single person that I know that would say no to that technology if it were affordable.

The feature that deep analytics could offer ECM that I would appreciate would be eliminating the need for clairvoyance. With one of Watson’s cousins in our server room, we could forget about trying to figure out what part of a document from today will be of interest in 20 years. Search is supposed to eliminate this need today, but search is ineffective. Search results today use a “here are a few thousand things that might be useful, you decide” approach to analytics – humans are still required. Deep analytics is like search that has been working out in a gym for year, a search engine that knows what we should be searching for. In a world where most users, by my observation, can’t be bothered to use Advanced Search, I think a Watson-like search engine would be welcome.

When I think of the work that I put into SharePoint, I see many places where Watson could contribute. We spend a lot of time designing lists and libraries, to get the right metadata in place. Then we spend even more time making it easy for people to enter the metadata. Then we spend still more time making it easy for people to find new content, find other peoples’ content, and find related content. Lately, we are spending time on top of all that to extract information from all the stuff we’ve helped people to collect and enter. Could all of that become irrelevant someday? Could SharePoint just morph into a Watson controlled glorified share-drive? I don’t know if it could happen, but I don’t think I would try to stop it.

I don’t think deep analytics is a threat to E2.0. Mr. McAfee also pointed out that “E2.0 succeeded because it meets a business need and meets deep rooted human need to be in community.” The deep rooted human need will keep E(n).0 alive and well. I think it will keep ECM alive and well too. We are social beings, and a major benefit of E2.0 that was discussed at the conference (sorry, I forget who said this) was the way in which “content leads us to people.” As long as we want our content to lead people back to ourselves, ECM will matter. 



#sharepoint #Search #Watson #SharePoint #ECM #metadata #e2.0
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