It’s tough out there if you’re trying to kick off a critical information management program. Whereas most clients I speak with want to significantly improve their capability in how they manage information, they find it tough to get funding for major programs of work This is where I believe some real benefits come through for MIKE2.0 – you can still get a comprehensive, highly relevant approach more quickly though reuse of the framework:

You can use the approach to drive cost reduction, through a comprehensive approach for:
• Technology and system consolidation
• Alignment of common information management programs
• Operational efficiency through better data quality and efficiency

You can reuse free content and improve delivery quality:
• A common, open framework that can be reused across all your projects
• A common, open framework for external providers
• Free collaboration technology

You can build momentum for your priority business initiatives:
• Make sure you have a fact-based business case
• Improve data and analytical capabilities to meet new business demands
• Prepare for major changes related to merger integration

I find businesses will spend money these days on information management – you just need a strong “case for change”. To read more, check out the extreme blueprinting and roadmapping approach to building a transformational IM strategy and some recent Case Studies.

A visit to the AIIM Roadshow 2009 in London, UK, helped me get a quick update on the state of the ECM industry. Doug Miles gave the key note presentation with results from a recent AIIM survey:

• Focus for investment in 2009 will be on Document Management, portals, Enterprise 2.0, Electronic Records Management and Search
• Document capture, MFPs, OCR, digital mailroom are falling behind in importance
• Software expenditure (i.e. license fees) will be up, services including training (which will harm associations like AIIM) are stagnating
• Most organisations achieve the expected return on investment (ROI) with their ECM investment, in particular with hard $ ROI; but interestinly enough, most overachieve their soft $ ROI – This makes ECM look like a pretty low risk investment compared to some of the other IT initiatives.
• 43% of organisation achieve a payback within 12 month on their document capture and digitisation projects alone!

Doug moved on to discuss Microsoft’s offering for ECM, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS):

• 12% of respondents stated that MOSS is their chosen ECM suite (enterprise wide)
• Collaboration is stated as the top reason to implement MOSS
• Although Enterprise 2.0 and Search are only 8th and 9th on the priority list, with ~25% of respondents working on that
• 5% and 22% of respondents stated that MOSS is compatible or works in parallel to other ECM solutions

We also got a bit of visionary (wishful?!) thinking:

• Focus for ECM should be on creating an “ECM Central”, a central capability as opposed to single purpose solutions
• Drive ECM towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via single sign-on (SSO), open source and open standards
• Provide enterprise search for retrieval across all repositories and systems
• And consider managing assets “in place” as opposed to endless migration efforts from one system to the next
• Interestingly enough, 35% of respondents want to migrate to a single system
• 34% will provide linkage between systems via portals
• and only 9% are considering or implementing enterprise search

We’ve recently added some new functionality to the MIKE2.0 site that will help our users have a more dynamic and personalized experience.  Go to the home page and you can drag-and-drop portlets on the site to give it a more indivual feel.  This is just the early stages and we’ll be adding a lot more functionality over the coming weeks.  You can see a bit more about what we’re building here.

Let us know what you think about the approach!

How healthy is your collaborative community? Well, measure it! You will have seen that we have introduced more analytics and activity portlets to omCollab, which you can find on the Home tab.

You can also check out the wiki statistics of MIKE2.0 via the following links:

1. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
2. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:Statistics?action=raw
3. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:ContributionScores