eRoom created a mess. Was it the software or IT?

I came across a post by an individual sharing their story of how they made a mess with eRoom.  He talked of communities and openness and how eRoom prevented that — creating a “debacle”.   My response to his blog post was that I agreed and disagreed.  And I’d like to elaborate on that….

eRoom is a business tool like anything else.  If you don’t use the tool the right way, or educate users on how to use the tool the right way…then you just might make a mess.   I’ve seen some great uses of eRoom and in other cases, it was just a place to dump files. 

I’d argue the problem was in the way this organization deployed and managed eRoom.  The IT was not CLOSE enough to the business to understand exactly how people were using the tool and educating them on how they should be using the tool.   eRoom is not a tool for building open communities within or outside an organization and is not about love, peace, and the 1960s.   I “heart” eRoom was just not part of the marketing strategy from what I remember.   eRoom is a tool for secure workgroup and team collaboration!!!   Plain and simple.

Yes, people want communities and openness to share knowledge and connect and locate expertise….all that great web 2.0 stuff.   And we’ve seen a new set of tools to help address that.  However, the demand for eRoom grew because customers wanted to put content on their extranet and securely work with suppliers, partners, clients, contractors, and everyone in their extended enterprise.  

The point here is that you need to think about CONTEXT before you rollout this type of technology and make it too CONVENIENT for people to start creating messes in.   What’s the business focus?  Who is using it?  Why?  How do they want to use it?    Synchronously?  Asynchronously?  Are the users on the road alot?   What is the business context? 

Now I’m not opposed to openness and community.  However, you also need secure collaboration for projects, client work, product development, mergers & acquistions, etc….  And as much as the 20th century command-control organization might be slanting towards openness and community — I have to point to Tom Davenport (one of the foremost thought leaders for years on all this knowledge stuff) who believes that companies compete an analytics.   And my take on that is as follows — you need to take those analytics and provide visibility, transparency, measurability, and accountability to managers and partners and customers — IN A SECURE collaborative context to protect the single most important competitive advantage that companies have in this copy cat world we live in.   And that is what eRoom is best at — both inside a company and outside.  

Sharepoint – the new intranet

It seems that many businesses out there are looking at Sharepoint not just as a portal, collaboration & content management solution …. but as a replacement to their current intranet … in effect Sharepoint becomes THE intranet.   This is an interesting revelation and one way to view Sharepoint within an organization.    I can definitely see small and midsize businesses thinking of sharepoint that way.  For a large organization, I’m not sure sharepoint is quite there yet to replace the corporate intranet….

Sharepoint replacing your intranet — becoming the intranet — that’s a big deal.  A lot of planning & analysis, a lot of time, a lot of effort and headaches.  Does it make sense in the long run? Yes.   But you will need to consider some type of phased approach.   Like getting shared team workspaces out there first so users become familiar with them and start to adopt them and see the ease of integration with MS office.   Then introduce other parts to the equation as you slowly migrate your entire intranet over to sharepoint.  Don’t just rush into rolling out Sharepoint because you think it will solve all your business problems.   Otherwise, Sharepoint will just become another problem by itself.

Some economics to consider

eRoom’s days are numbered.  I remain a fan but I’m realistic.  Why?  Simple economics.   Sharepoint Services is free — and customers are looking to reduce costs today wherever possible.  And switching off of eRoom will save money in the short run.   The return on investment to hire some consultant or 2 to migrate off of eRoom will be recouped in a year as companies save the maintenance/support they used to pay EMC.  

Now MOSS will cost them down the road and it’s unsure if these eRoom customers actually consider the total cost of ownership and how Sharepoint might affect that over time.   The reality is that Sharepoint is untested in a large deployment — and no one really knows what type of mess it might create down the road.  You just might be migrating one mess of eroom, documentum, notes, fileshares to an even bigger consolidated mess in sharepoint —  that is if its deployment and growth are not managed properly.  

And keep in mind that it’s not easy to do migrate off a platform like eRoom…as eRoom in most organizations as mission critical an application as email.   The switching costs are high.  Even a small installation with 1 eRoom server and a few hundred rooms and a few hundred gb of data is not a trivial migration.   Imagine 7 servers or 20 servers and terabytes of data.   Sure you can write some code that dumps data out of eRoom and puts it into Sharepoint.   However, the project planning and change management planning that needs to go into this does takes many months if not longer and is a significant investment.   I think the point here is simple economics. 

I think EMC shouldn’t forget why thousands of customers use eRoom today and grew eRoom so quickly in their organization….it’s called user adoption as eRoom was easier to setup,  easy to install, easy to use (compared to the alternatives) — which made it a very economical application with a solid ROI.   And customers paid for that convenience (with licensing costs).  However, today customers no longer have to pay for the same convenience as Microsoft gives WSS away and offers a comparative collaboration and content management alternative.   And you’ve got other web 2.0 competitors jumping on the bandwagon making it a more competitive landscape now.  So you have to look at simple economics if you want to compete.  

Anyway, one word of caution for anyone thinking of migrating to Sharepoint….eRoom and Documentum have been battle tested for many years — and Sharepoint has not been tested.   And as someone who has spent years traveling the globe making this technology work over the last decade, troubleshooted headache after headache after headache — it is NOT easy to scale and manage any collaboration & content management application.   Sure, sharepoint has tight integration with office and WSS is free and there are some very positive feature of the application as a whole.   HOWEVER…I leave you with this final thought….

Collaboration & content management technology has become and will continue to become mission criticial for managing projects and streamlining and running your business processes.   Economics is really important to consider….   But so is reliability and scalability.   Think about it – can you live without email today?   Yes and no…but if email is down, it’s a headache for a CIO to hear the user complaints.   So if I’m a CIO — do you want to trust your mission critical business processes to something that has not been tested and proven????    If it goes down….if it doesn’t quite work right….or doesn’t scale right…. do you want to trust your business on it?    So seriously think about that as you think about saving costs in the short run.   Take baby steps if you are going to migrate…. think about context, make sure you are close your users, and get the right advice.  Be skeptical of the cool demos, song and dance, and marketing before you make an investment in this type of technology – no matter what platform you choose.

 

Facebook: The New Portal….

Facebook started out as a simple app to rate other college kids at Harvard. It evolved into what is today “finding friends and doing cool fun stuff online”.  What facebook does really well — they say “I do this in my real life with my friends….how do I do this in an online world that is convenient , easy, and fits my lifestyle.”

My prediction is that Facebook will ultimately become the portal of choice (where people won’t goto Yahoo…they’ll goto their own facebook page). The real power in facebook is that it aggregates other technology into it. Take a facebook application like Trip Advisor for example — that’s not just “cool fun stuff” to do with friends — that’s called online marketing by word of mouth. What restaurant is good in Charlotte, NC? Let me ask my friends or my friends friends. I’m a restaurant in the area — do I market with flyers, tv, google search? No. You market inside Facebook.

Facebook has single handedly turned marketing on its head — as businesses can no longer shout out information about their products or services via TV and other means — they need to penetrate your social networks from the ground up virally.   Ultimately….it’s all about the Facebook platform — and Facebook being “THE platform”….