Is It Time for DC Power?

In the 1880s, the War of Currents was raging between the two main factions - direct current (DC) which was heavily promoted by none other than Thomas Edison and alternating current (AC) advocated by George Westinghouse. The DC system was developed first and worked well for lighting which was the primary use of electricity in its early days. The AC system, however, has proven to be more efficient for powering motors and for carrying energy across long distances. In the end, AC won and the rest is a history. Today, our electricity grid is AC based.

Thomas A. Edison

When I look around my house today, I see a number of motor-based appliances including the washer, dryer, refrigerator, heater, air conditioner, etc. Those appliances use AC and that is the more efficient source of power for them. Yet increasingly, more and more of my electrical devices use a power adapter because they run on DC power: computer, printer, iPhone, iPad, PC speakers, cordless phone, Apple TV, TV set, alarm clock, radio, not to mention the many devices that use batteries: camera, keyboard, mouse, flashlight, fire alarm, etc.

Using all the power adapters to generate DC power is a hassle because of the lack of standardization. We practically have a different adapter for each device which is hugely inconvenient. Traveling with a bag full of power supplies is a major pain as I have written about in my post Environment and the Power Charger. In addition, power supplies are only about 70-80% efficient which means that about a quarter of the energy we produce (and pay for) is wasted on the AC to DC conversion.

This situation is particularly absurd for the increasing number of households that use solar panels to augment their power supply, often making them entirely independent from the AC power grid. The power produced by the solar panels is DC power. All the solar systems today require expensive inverters to invert the DC current into AC current. These inverters are expensive, often representing a significant portion of the entire cost for the solar power system. They are also inefficient, with efficiencies ranging from 50-90% - this is where we lose up to 50% of the energy produced by the solar panels!

So we are inverting DC solar power into AC current to power the house while losing up to 50% of the energy. At the same time, our devices increasingly use the DC power which requires an adapter that loses another 25% of the energy. So we are losing a significant percentage of the energy that we pay for. That sounds pretty inefficient, doesn’t it?

LED light bulbs may be the trigger

The story becomes even more interesting with the advent of LED-based light-bulbs. Lighting represents about 20% of household’s energy consumption today and switching to the LED light bulbs offers great opportunity to save on the monthly energy bill while doing something good for the environment at the same time. The LED lights are still pricey but those prices will surely go down, just like they did for the fluorescent light bulbs a decade ago. The problem with the LED light bulbs is LEDs work on DC and so each LED bulb has to contain a power converter which converts the house AC into the DC that the LED lights need. More AC/DC craziness, not to offend any rock fans...

All of this begs the question - is it time to wire our houses for DC power? We have standardized DC power in our cars with a slew of gadgets and appliances using the "cigarette lighter outlets" - from phone chargers and GPS to air pumps and mini-refrigerators. Many airlines provide a DC outlet in every seat to power our laptops and other gadgets. Why not have such DC outlets in every room of the house? Why not have the lights wired on a DC circuit?

USB outlets exist today

Sure, we will still need to transport power across long distances and we’ll need an AC circuit to power the big appliances with motors. But most houses have a separate 220V circuit for big appliances in addition to the standardized 110V wiring. In Europe, most house have 220V (well, 240V really) and they also have a 380V circuit for their washer, dryer, water heater and other big appliances. Why not have a separate DC circuit for all the devices? AC would come to the house like it does today but one single converter would replace all of those individual power adapters. On top of that, DC power is easier to store and a couple of batteries could provide an effective backup power supply.

Re-standardizing something as essential as the power system is a major undertaking. But we live in the times of major undertakings. If Google can take pictures of every street in the world and Tesla can build a network of charging stations throughout the entire country and SpaceX can fly to space, we might be also capable of switching to a more efficient power circuitry. We even have a standard - USB - which may not be meeting all the needs, but could be a starting point. Of course, we would first have to convince Apple to add USB interface to all their devices...

PS: Thank you, Brett, for an inspiring dinner conversation!

Social Media Hype Cycle

One of my ten Content Management Predictions for 2013 was that Facebook will hit rocky grounds in 2013 and that its growth will stall. Sure enough, just a couple of weeks ago, it has been widely reported that Facebook has recently lost the number of unique monthly visitors in the US. According to Nielsen, the number of unique visitors to Facebook’s website in the US has declined by 11 million - from 153 million to 142 million between March 2012 and March 2013. Another analyst firm, SocialBakers, appears to be confirming the trend by observing a similar decline in the UK. In addition, Gartner just published a report called How B2B Marketers Use Social Now which states that B2B marketers are abandoning their attempts to use Facebook as a way to connect with their audiences.

I’m actually not a Facebook doomsayer. In fact, I am an avid user. These kinds of data points may very well just be a blip. A certain slowdown was inevitable, though, which is why I wrote my prediction. Facebook has been rising very, very quickly and the expectations were just too highly inflated. Some degree of disillusionment was inevitable.

Well, all of that reminded me of the Gartner Hype Cycle - one of the business tools I like a lot and that is perhaps a bit underutilized today. The Hype Cycle, explained in detail in the book Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskin, describes the key phases through which a technology can go:

Gartner’s Hype Cycle model

Connecting the recent Facebook data and my assessment of Facebook’s current situation with the Hype Cycle, I have mapped Facebook and other social networks onto the model. The Hype Cycle, though, has not been developed to examine specific products but rather technologies. To accommodate for that, I had to make a little modification, using the same poetic terminology that Gartner introduced. Because products do actually fail and disappear, I had to add another branch onto the chart. Come to think about it, technologies do fail too...perhaps Gartner should add my addition to their Hype Cycle model?

My modified Hype Cycle model

Now, we can map the actual social media products onto this chart:

The Social Media Hype Cycle

Obviously, it takes some time for us to figure out what some of the social networks are good for. Sometimes, they fall victim to hype that anticipates more practical use cases or greater adoption than are realistic. An example of that is Facebook and its use for B2B marketing. That can sometimes lead to disappointment and loss of a particular audience or all of the audiences. On the other hand, after some experiments, we often do figure out the practical use and the social media tool becomes useful.

Here are some of my explanations on the state of the various social media in the context of the Hype Cycle:

Facebook has reached its peak of inflated expectations and that’s the reason behind some of the negative reports. Clearly, the service is hugely popular but it appears to have reached the limits of its usefulness. New innovations such as the Social Graph are mostly useful to advertisers rather than to the users and it is the danger of excessive advertising that is Facebook’s greatest threat. It is not clear today, what kinds of activities we will be using Facebook for in the future and there are many fashion trends on Facebook that keep coming and  going - remember poking, gifting of virtual gifts, the Farmville craze, or the daily workout updates? Those have all come and gone. Perhaps that is the primary purpose of Facebook - to try things out on a massive scale and see what works in a highly connected, social environment. But before we have figured that out, there will be a decent dose of disillusionment along the way.

Google+ has reached a critical mass of users but its audience is still limited. Chances are your family relatives are on Facebook and they are not on Google+. While you can have a very vibrant, special interest community on Google+, you can’t use Google+ alone because a good portion of your family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances are not on it. At the same time, Google continues innovating with cool features such as the hangouts while they have the advertising bit figured out which is what most of Facebook’s innovation is being wasted on today.

LinkedIn is clearly ahead of everyone else in terms of reaching the plateau of productivity. This is a social network for business, with a clear purpose and an obvious use case - recruiting. While your grandma might not be on LinkedIn, everybody in your business world has a LinkedIn profile, even those who are not on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

Twitter has established itself as a productive tool in the business of quickly learning about what’s going on. We are no longer tweeting about what’s for dinner but rather about what we believe should matter to our followers. Whether it’s the recent political rally, the stock market swings, the latest corporate merger, or tonight’s sports scores, Twitter is really good for all of that.

MySpace has evolved to a surprisingly resilient social network for the music scene and music fans. While MySpace clearly lost to Facebook the big war of general purpose social media, it may become a very viable special purpose social site. We’ll see which way it eventually goes.

Quora has yet to find its purpose. The ability to ask questions and receive answers from a large community of similar minded people is powerful, but the practical use cases are limited. Market research would be the obvious suggestion but the heavy self-selection bias limits the usefulness of this social network.

Foursquare is experiencing some disillusionment. While a few passionate users continue checking in and telling the world where they are - and in some cases that alone is somewhat interesting (yes, Mr. Steve Wozniak) - the practical benefits of that are rather limited. Basically, the only use case so far has been to better target advertising which is not what most people want more of. Foursquare is rapidly hitting the trough of disillusionment.

Pinterest is quickly climbing up the slope towards the peak of inflated expectations. We haven’t quite figured out what is it good for but it is cool and addictive. A classic formula for a hype! Inevitably, the trough of disillusionment will follow.

Ping is quickly following SecondLife through the ravine of demise into the valley of oblivion.

So there you have it. This is my way to analyze the state of Facebook and the entire social media market using the Gartner Hype Cycle model and some creative license. You may not agree with all my assessments but we will surely see a lot of fast-paced change in this space!

Scalability Redefined

Scalability matters. Obviously. But scalability seems to mean many things to different people. Most commonly, scalability is equated to the number of users - people - accessing a particular system. That's a good start, but we we have to of course consider the degree of concurrency. There is a difference between a solution that 1,000 people use once or twice a week versus a solution that 1,000 people pound upon continuously.

In large deployments, there is also the question of how many systems are actually really being used. Early in my career, I spent several years working at Novell. It was the heyday before Windows NT and the company enjoyed a commanding market share. Large and small companies used Novell networks. But we knew, that an average (software) server always had only about 100-200 users working on it. Sure, there were some companies with 100,000 employees that used Novell NetWare. Those were big deals, big deployments, and examples of high scalability. Right? Well, not really.

Those large companies were in reality running hundreds of separate Novell server instances and each one of them would still get just a couple hundred users. I see a similar pattern with today's deployments of Microsoft SharePoint and, to some extent, also with Exchange. It is quite a different kind of scalability when 100,000 users all share a single instance of an OpenText repository - even if that repository runs physically across multiple hardware servers.

There are more dimensions to scalability than just the number of users, though. The number of operations or transactions comes to mind - from MIPS to the number of credit card purchases. How about the number of objects under management? Examples could be the number of documents, number of customers, number of transactions, number of contracts, number of relationships, number of suppliers, etc.

To be scalable, enterprise software must not be just capable of holding the number of objects in a database or repository. It also has to provide the ability to efficiently view and manipulate the data. If your web-based user interface shows the objects in blocks of 20 while you have millions of objects to sort through, your application might not be very scalable! By the way, having a single data container capable of holding millions of objects is another dimension of scalability.

There is yet another factor that needs to be added to the definition of scalability: the metadata. This is the data that describes your data. Without metadata, your data only contains what is explicitly stated in it. Sometimes, that may be useful by itself but in most cases, we want to add lots of enterprise related context. We want to add information about people and teams who work with the data. Information about the organizational structure and approval hierarchies. Information about projects to which the data belongs. The deadlines, the cost centers, the retention requirements, etc. The metadata can be often richer (= bigger) than the data itself. But it is absolutely critical in the enterprise and your application needs to scale to accommodate it.

There are many factors that define scalability and looking just at the number of users can be often insufficient or even misleading.

The Social Groupthink

The groupthink is a well documented psychological phenomenon where a group of people, usually insulated from any counterbalancing point of view, ends up making gravely irrational decisions. During the phenomenon, the group is driven by the spirit of harmony, collaboration and the desire to reach consensus. The more the reasoning progresses, the more the group is mutually reinforcing its one-sided perspective while it completely discounts any alternate point of view. The results can be disastrous and many events in history have been attributed to the groupthink, including the US Navy negligence prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the US invasion of the Bay of Pigs.

The John F. Kennedy cabinet during the Cuban Missile Crises - another "groupthink" at work

In the world of social media, groupthink is very common. On social media, we tend to follow people who share views that are consistent with our own views. Hockey fans follow other hockey fans, single mothers follow single mothers, wine connoisseurs follow wine connoisseurs, and democrats follow democrats. This natural selection is the result of a rational behavior - we engage with people with whom we share common interests.

On top of that, social media like Facebook employ filtering algorithms to reduce the torrent of updates we get exposed to. These filters are based on explicit personal preferences (i.e. interests stated in our profiles) as well as on the results of our interactions. If you like a post about kittens the algorithm will reason that you like kittens and chances are you will be seeing more posts about kittens. Over time, you end up ‘liking’ various comments, pictures, and pages. Based on your liking, Facebook starts presenting you more of the stuff you like from the people who’ve shared liked news before. That happens at the cost of all other news in your newsfeed. As a result, you get exposed only to views from friends who you “like" more and more and you won’t get exposed to anything else. This is a fertile breeding ground for a groupthink with all its shortcomings.

Now, consider social software in the enterprise. Its promise was to stimulate employee effectiveness and foster innovation by bringing together diverse groups of employees who bring in different expertise and who share different points of view. Yet, if we end up with conversations where only the employees thinking the same way talk to each other, the results of social software will be greatly reduced.  

There are, of course, many other great uses for social software in the enterprise i.e. collective decision making, process collaboration, or customer service. Yet with the need to drive the corporate innovation agenda on top of the priority list for many CEOs, the promise to use social software for ideation is very compelling.

To make that happen, we must avoid the social groupthink. We have to be very careful about the filtering algorithms we employ and we have to devise strategies that encourage employees to engage with others beyond their existing teams and functions. Tribal interactions are good, but engaging across a variety of employees is what stimulates corporate innovation.

Gesture Control in the Enterprise and the Consumerization Chasm

When Microsoft first shipped Kinect as an add-on for the XBox 360, I thought: “Wow, there is a new way to interact with information!” Sure, Kinect was designed for ‘full body gaming’ as Microsoft calls it but the ability to use gestures to find, access and view information seemed very promising. Ever since the 2002 hit movie Minority Report, we are yearning to work with information the way the Tom Cruise character did: using gestures.

The original - Steven Spielberg's Minority Report 

The use cases in the consumer space are primarily focused on gaming and the interaction with entertainment media. Using iTunes on AppleTV or Netflix on Xbox is great but, let’s face it, searching for movies using a remote control with no keyboard is a pain. Gestures could help with browsing the content while voice recognition could solve the typing problem.

Microsoft Kinect

The use cases in the enterprise, though, are far more promising. Just think about the surgeon with sterile hands who needs to flip through a series of X-rays, zoom in, start and pause a video recording from a echocardiograph, and quickly query a drug database. Think about the aircraft mechanic with oily hands who needs to access a repair manual for the latest model of a jet engine. How about the teachers explaining the latest material in front of a class of students? Or the speaker on stage using his hands instead of a geeky laser pointer...or instead of a fork lift like Al Gore did in The Inconvenient Truth? There are many possible professional uses for the gesture technology!

Yet, how come I don’t see any of this in the real life? Maybe Kinect isn’t good enough? Maybe it is sold only through the same stores that sell the gaming consoles and ignore the enterprise? Does Microsoft Marketing perhaps need help? There is a Kinect for the Windows web site promoting a software development kit (SDK) but there are no business examples featured on that site.

Google Glass, those hip looking glasses with a built-in computer screen (and a computer) have a similar potential in the enterprise. There are many professions that would greatly benefit from this kind of “always on display”. However, Google’s primary concern right now is making sure that a lot of celebrities get their picture taken with the Glass on their nose. They don’t even talk about business use cases. I worry now that Google will spend all its energy on devising schemes on how to push ads to people while they walk down the mall. Sure, we have seen that too in Minority Report but, honestly, that part of the movie sucked.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass

Microsoft Kinect, Google Glass, and other interactive devices such as the MYO wrist device or the Leap Motion Controller, combined with the Siri-like voice recognition are the future of computing. Touchscreen has its limitations. People have only so much tolerance for the small screen size of a smartphone - which is why the so-called phablets have become so popular. The interaction with a computer of the future will likely not involve fingers on glass but rather gestures, voice and perhaps even thoughts.

MYO is a gesture control armband

While using such interactive devices to browse movies is cool, using them in the enterprise can result in some really powerful benefits. Unfortunately, the leading vendors such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all chasing the consumers right now. Consumerization is hitting the enterprise but the vendors only think about the consumers and not about the enterprise. The innovation in enterprise computing is stagnating today and there is a chasm. And where there is a chasm, new opportunities open up for new entrants...

How Come Fax Isn't Dead?

When was the last time you sent a fax? I bet your answer is probably going to suggest that you don’t use fax machines much anymore. Yet the statistics are surprising. According to the industry analysts Davidson Consulting, there are almost 100 billion faxes sent each year worldwide. CouponChilli estimates a smaller number - 17 billion faxes annually - but either way, it is still a lot. The market for fax services is growing at impressive 15.2% CAGR as new technologies such as Fax over IP and cloud-based fax are dramatically reducing the the cost of faxing.

But let’s face it - fax? In the age of email, interactive web sites, and omnipresent mobile devices? There are so many alternatives - from email, FTP, managed file transfer, to interactive web sites, sophisticated BPM solutions and most recently even the easy-to-use cloud-based shared folders. How come we are still using faxes so much?

One of the arguments is usually the legality of the “wet signature”. Supposedly, our legal system is perfectly satisfied with an illegible scribble transmitted at 204×98 dpi but an electronic or digital signature on an electronic document is not good enough. I’d argue that’s a bogus argument - after all, a digital signature can use a much stronger authentication of the signatory which should make the digital signature much more legally binding. Only when notarized, do wet signatures come close in terms of security and legal admissibility.

Another argument is the confirmation that you get when you send a fax. That fax confirmation page (sometimes called the Transmission Verification Report) can act as legal proof that the recipient actually received the fax. That might come handy, for instance, when you fax an invoice. However, it also assumes that the right person has actually picked up the received fax and that it didn’t end up in the waste bin by accident.

This argument is also not very convincing. Electronic transmissions via email, ftp, managed file transfer, or shared folder usually all come with an audit trail. There is also no reason why an email system could not be setup to automatically send a confirmation - most e-commerce and customer service solutions do it today. A secure audit trail should be a much better proof of delivery than the easily falsifiable fax transmission report.

Then there is the cultural argument. We are all used to faxing, right? The New York Times reported recently that this is a big issue in Japan. Japan has by far the highest number of fax machines per capita. But give me a break. Japan is a country with thousands of years of tradition - from Zen gardens to calligraphy to the sword swinging samurai. And all the sudden,  they are culturally attached to a fax? Or a technology that was adopted at the end of the 1980s? Ah, come on!

Maybe, it is the ease of use - everybody knows how to use a fax, right? Right. To sign a document, I have to print it, sign it by hand, and stand next to a fax machine to wait to see if the transmission was successful. If the line is busy, I have to try again later. Yeah, right...that’s really easy and convenient...

I suspect that the reason is complacency. Complacency of organizations in banking, insurance, healthcare, government and other sectors. The Customer Service group would probably like to replace faxes but they are scared of Legal. The Legal group is scared of technology. And, IT does what Customer Services asks them to do after checking with Legal. In a way, this is actually about culture. But not in a good way.

Picture from the 1999 cult movie Office Space. I'm sure it's copyrighted but it fits so well here.
You have to see it, by the way! (That should get me off the hook with 20th Century Fox).

The result is that you can hardly open a bank account, refinance a mortgage, buy a car, or submit an insurance claim without having to send a fax. In some countries like Canada and Germany, it gets even harder as they require signed documents for stock trades, change of  address, and other relatively mundane tasks. No you can’t just call them. They need it in writing and signed...

But don’t despair, if you need a fax solution, you don’t need a fax machine on every floor anymore. There are some pretty cool network and cloud-based fax systems out there and OpenText (my employer) happens to be the market leader in this space. Just check out that Davidson Consulting page.

As consumer, though, I hope that the fax will soon die. It ought to be replaced by the interactive web or mobile BPM solutions. In any case, OpenText has a solution for you here ;-)

Maybe, There Are No Systems of Engagement

A couple of years ago, I took part in an AIIM project that was examining the recent changes impacting enterprise software systems - consumarization and mobile, social, and cloud based software. Spearheaded by none other than Geoffrey Moore (yes, the one of Crossing the Chasm fame), we ended up defining the terms systems of record and systems of engagement. You can find the AIIM paper by Geoffrey Moore here.

Geoffrey Moore

Since then, the terminology of systems of record and systems of engagement entered the mainstream nomenclature and it is used regularly in various discussions. The systems of record are the traditional (yes, old-fashioned and boring) applications that enterprises have been relying on to manage their critical information. The systems of engagement are those hip, new applications (with, ehm, sometimes questionable ROI) that were supposedly the future of enterprise software.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that we got it wrong back then. When I look at the current landscape, the traditional enterprise applications have all taken on the aspects of systems of engagement. Pretty much every application has a mobile story. There is no mobile enterprise software market. All decent enterprise software has mobile capabilities today. Most enterprise software vendors have added social capabilities to their software. Many of them have launched their cloud initiatives. In fact, I am not sure that there are many viable systems of engagement left out there. Even the vendors who started in the systems of engagement world are rushing to add some of those boring system-of-record features like a repository, security, and governance in an attempt to look more like true enterprise software.

Take the Customer Experience Management market as an example. Those were supposed to be the ultimate systems of engagement - the web based applications engaging with the company’s customers, partners, and employees. But to a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), these applications are not just about engagement. They are about leads, opportunities, and deals. The Marketing department is being measured by the strength of the pipeline and the opportunity-to-deal conversion ratio. To the CMO, these systems are his systems of record as much as systems of engagement.

In reality, there are no two separate worlds. No systems of record and systems of engagement. What used to be referred to as systems of engagement are a new set of capabilities that have, greatly improved the traditional enterprise applications. When done right, they can significantly augment the usability and adoption rates of enterprise software. But they are not a separate market. They are features.

There is only one type of enterprise software - systems that manage enterprise information.

The Maslow's Hierarchy of a Strategic CIO

Not that long ago, IT departments were responsible mainly for making sure that knowledge workers got access to whatever information was available and for keeping the lights on. That latter responsibility was all consuming. PCs and enterprise systems were still going through their growing pains and varieties of system failures were all too common. The job of the chief information officer (CIO) was more about troubleshooting and firefighting than anything else. Information Technology (IT) was simply a cost center - just like travel or communication.

Well, things have changed. The systems we work with are, for the most part, reasonably reliable. We don't have to reboot our PCs twice a day just to flush out the memory leaks. 99.999% uptime is not that big of a differentiator for servers, routers, and switches anymore. Users don't call the help desk daily and access to information is not the challenge at hand. Today, we have information. We have a lot of information. In fact, we have way more information than we could ever consume.

Herein comes the change in the mission of IT departments. As organizations came to realize that information emerged as a key source of competitive advantage, they were increasingly looking at their IT departments as a key stakeholder in corporate strategy. All of the sudden, the CIOs got what they were always dreaming about. No longer the troubleshooter, no more the firefighter - the CIO is now the strategist.

What organizations need is the ability to make better decisions - using the right information. They need insight. They also need to apply information to create an impact on their business - to grow revenue, attract new customers, enter new markets, and generate innovation. And finally, they also need to drive productivity and continuously optimize their business processes.

Not to forget, enterprise information must also be secured. As it represents significant intellectual property, it has to be protected from intentional or unintentional misappropriation by internal or external actors. And let us not forget the need to address compliance and information governance requirements and to protect the company from legal exposure.

All these requirements reminded me of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and so I have attempted to map the CIO needs into a similar model:

With all of this, the strategic CIOs have their hands full. They still need to keep the lights on but now, they are major stakeholders in defining corporate strategy. Combine that with all the new technology trends such as mobile devices, social software, and cloud computing and you get the picture of the magnitude of their challenge. But I guess that being strategic is way better than fighting fires all day long, right?

ECM - Fish or Fowl?

Enterprise software companies usually fall into one of two main categories: application software and infrastructure software. The common wisdom suggests that enterprise software vendors are either building infrastructure that enables multiple applications to operate or they are delivering applications that solve actual business problems.

ERP is a typical application software. The ERP applications solve specific business problems such as how to optimize the use of enterprise resources, how to accelerate HR processes, or how to reduce the amount of materials in stock without slowing down production.

Platforms such as operating systems, databases, and application servers are infrastructure software. Communication software ranging from EDI to messaging, file transfer, and email is infrastructure software. Virtualization software and administration/management software are infrastructure. Infrastructure does not solve any particular business problem - it can be applied to solve any number of them.

That begs the question, what is enterprise content management (ECM). As it turns out, ECM is rather unusual. Unlike almost any other enterprise software category, ECM can be deployed as infrastructure or as applications. Many customers I have seen, have deployed their ECM as a platform with multiple applications built upon it. They clearly consider ECM part of their infrastructure. Many customers have also deployed their ECM at the heart of their information sharing, archiving, or retention infrastructure. Gartner assigned ECM to what they used to call the Knowledge Worker Infrastructure category. There is no doubt about it - ECM is infrastructure software!

Yet, there are many deployments of ECM software devoted to applications - solutions for very specific business problems. Examples include contracts management, early case assessment, invoice processing, customer onboarding, plant asset management, digital marketing, and technical publishing - to name just one example for each of the seven types of content applications that I have introduced in my recent blog post. These deployments are not infrastructure, they are applications. Clearly, ECM is application software!

That makes enterprise content management quite unique - it can be deployed as an infrastructure and it can be used as an application (or multiple applications). There is hardly any other enterprise software category that comes with this level of complexity. The only other category I could think off is business process management (BPM) - a software category that shares a lot of synergies with ECM.

This uniqueness may explain some of the identity challenges that ECM has been having over the last two decades. Who owns ECM? Who’s in charge of the ECM architecture in the enterprise? The answers have never been very clean cut. Depending on the organization, the ‘owner’ may be in IT or in any number of corporate functions.

Most enterprise software vendors fall clearly on one side of the dividing line - they are either application vendors or infrastructure vendors. They may attempt to reach across that line, but their DNA is usually pretty hard-wired. SAP is an application vendor. VMware is an infrastructure vendor. IBM doesn’t do applications. Salesforce may claim to be a platform but it is really an application with the ability to be extended by add-ons - nobody would refer to their SFDC deployment as infrastructure. There are hardly any mixed vendors outside of ECM.

OK, people usually mention Oracle as a company that provides both - database software (infrastructure) and application software (ERP, CRM, etc.). That is true. However, Oracle has gotten to this point via a very aggressive acquisition strategy and its database, middleware, and application businesses are operating independently from each other. They are effectively several enterprise software companies under a single brand.

I believe that we have to accept the fact that ECM may mean a completely different thing to different people. It doesn’t make it any easier to describe (or sell) but it also makes it a much more exciting market. The versatility of ECM is something that both the vendors and customers often appreciate.

Because, ECM is unique!