Enterprise Content Management & The LT Challenge

LT forces in enterprise content, (1) Democratization of Content Creation (2) Democratization of Content Distribution (3) Connecting Supply and Demand, gave rise to the vast amount of content and digital assets created in the course of doing business. In essence, these forces drove content creation towards the tail of the content-value curve.



The x-axis of the graph is the amount of content and the y-axis indicates the value of the content as defined by the organization, this value will vary across the organizations and between organizations, examples of value to consider include (1) Risk Factor; or (2) Regulation factor.

The Head of the curve is where you will find content that an organization considers high value, access to this content is typically restricted, a retention policy is applied to the content and it tends to participates in one or more business processes. Organizations have managed thise content by deploying advanced enterprise content management (ECM) systems such as IBM FileNet and EMC Documentum.

The Long Tail of the graph, which I believe contains the vast majority of content created in the enterprise, is the domain of several other applications most notably of which is SharePoint/MOSS 2007. This tail is the result of a combination of (1) the availability of content authoring tools especially Microsoft Office; (2) the lowered cost of distributing the content created and; (3) search technologies which allows all content stored to be indexed and searched. The deployment of these applications was largely limited to the departmental levels in organization and the central IT groups did not pay much attention. The deployments of these applications became so widespread that several niches developed and most of the valuable content that IT investments in Advanced ECM systems was deployed to cater to was no longer finding its ways to the advanced ECM systems.

The growth of the tail presents several challenges to the organization. For central IT groups, it is an infrastructure/support challenge, largely because the applications that enabled the tail where not central managed. Central IT is reigning in the uncontrolled deployments of these applications by incorporating them into the organization’s IT infrastructure and planning its deployment across the organization.

The LT is also a risk management and compliance nightmare for organizations. Organizations continue to struggle with what to do about the content in the tail as the value of content increases i.e. moving the content in the tail to the head. Companies would like to leverage the capabilities of their advanced ECM platforms and years of investment in developing business process, retention policies and compliance initiatives for these platforms. CIOs want to mitigate the risk and address compliance concerns while allowing employees to continue to collaborate in the knowledge creating activities which drives innovation and business results.

The challenge for organizations can be summarized as follows (1) moving content from the tail to the head as value increases (2) making all content readily available within the constraints of the access rights established for the particular content and regardless of the system in which the content is stored and (3) helping employees find content to promote sharing of best practices and reuse.

The Long Tail Forces in Enterprise Content

In my previous post I introduced the idea of The Long Tail (LT) of Enterprise Content, in this post I'll discuss the tree LT forces in enterprise content.

- Democratize Production
- Democratize Distribution
- Connect Supply and Demand

Democratization of Content Production
The democratization of content production in organizations started with the release of word processing software for the PC. As the use of PCs as a productivity tool increased with deployments across the enterprise, employees began to do their own word processing tasks. Further advancement in the PC hardware and software industry: (1) inclusion of hard disks in PCs (2) networked computers (3) Windows OS (4) Computer Server significantly lowered the cost of producing and storing content which led to more content that ever been created.

Democratization of Content Distribution
With the release of Portal/Collaboration software such as SharePoint Portal Server and Plumtree, employees began to collaborate in ways they were not able to in the past. Granted, employees had been able to share content through e-mail or by putting them on file servers, the content on these file servers were however not indexed therefore finding anything was a nightmare. Portal/Collaboration software however democratized the distribution of content, employees can now share and collaborate on content in ways they are not been able to do before. For example with SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) any employee can create a document library ( a repository for content), invite others to collaborate on the content and the content in the document library is available to anyone using a web browser.

Connecting Supply and Demand
Another effect of Portal/Collaboration software was that is connected previously un-findable content to the demand for the content through the enterprise search solution that was a common component of the portal software. For example with SPS, employees could now search for content stored on either file servers, SPS Document libraries, Exchange Servers, Lotus Notes and several other repositories by simply entering a search term in SPS search UI. The search component of portal software helped to connect the supply of content with the demand for it.

The Long Tail Of Enterprise Content

Organizations have applied the 80/20 rule in addressing the challenges posed by the vast amount of content and other digital assets created in the course of doing business. CIO's have generally focused their enterprise content management efforts on content considered to be highly valuable ("the hits") to the organization. A content's value was largely determined by one of the following factors; (1) an organizations need to mitigate risk; (2) expert opinions (3) regulations governing the organization's industry and (4) participation in business process automation applications.

The "modest sellers" of enterprise content, content deemed not so valuable, as defined by the organization, was largely left unmanaged; at best some organizations provided a file server where employees could store this content. In recent years however, organization have come to realize that the combined value of these modest sellers was equal to the value of the highly valued content. This is the Long Tail (LT) of enterprise content and managing the volume of content produced by employees is a huge, enterprise content management, challenge for organization.


Chris Anderson coined the term “The Long Tail” to describe how the internet has made possible a world in which the combined value of modest sellers (in the world of movies, books and music) equals the sales of the top hits. The long tail has been applied to other industries and I will explore its applicability to enterprise content and in defining an enterprise content management strategy.

Leadership from Behind

The following quote from Nelson Mandela's autobiography , Long Walk to Fredom, captures the type of leadership required for an agile team to be successful. In the passage, Mandela recalls how a leader of his tribe talked about leadership:

"A leader, he said, is like a sheperd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind"

Are you leading from behind?

Super Bowl XLII and Status Reporting

If the New England Patriots were on a software project their status report before Super Bowl XLII would have read something like 95% complete. The project team would have felt comfortable that the functionality was almost done and there wasn't much to worry about. The current status may have even led the project manager to abandon all risk mitigation plan for the functionality, after all, there wasn't much that could go wrong at this point.


As it turns out the 5% that was not accomplished by the Patriots was the most significant 5% of the project. The loss to the New York Giants means that the project goals were not accomplished. You can attribute the loss to many factors: Tom Brady's Footgate, The Giants' defense etc. The important lesson is that the 5% that was not accomplished killed the project goals.


So the next time you are sitting at a status reporting meeting or you read a status report that says something is 99% complete, don't fall asleep. Ask about the 1% that has not been completed, make sure it is not the most important 1%, the one that is likely to put the 100% of your project goals at risk. Personally, I don't use or allow people on my team to report percentage complete numbers. I ask to know what is done (and be clear about the definition of done) and what is outstanding.

You've Got a Thick Accent ....

I was in Wellington, New Zealand recently and I shared a Taxi, from the Airport to the hotel, with a colleague/friend. During the drive she asked the Driver for direction to the nearest shopping mall/district since her luggage did not show up in New Zealand, to which the driver responded "It's hard to understand you, you've got a thick accent, where is the accent from? ...."

As an immigrant in the US with my Ekiti accent, I get the "where is your accent from?" question every now and again to which I joking respond "What accent? I don't have an accent". Most Americans don't believe they have an accent, to most they speak the English language with the standard accent and the British speak with it with the English accent. Considering the US dominance especially in Entertainment and Global News Airwaves (read CNN and CNBC), the American accent may appear to be the standard but it is not. English is the language of the Englishman and that is the standard accent.

In any case, it was nice to observe my colleague's reaction and I couldn't help but laugh. I had finally been vindicated!!!

I'm no Scrum Purist

The other day I was asked if our team was practicing Scrum in the purest form or a hybrid of Scrum which blended our prior processes with Scrum practices.

This got me thinking "Is Scrum a methodology or a framework". Without getting into the academic definitions of methodology and framework, a methodology to me describes a set of steps that must be followed as specified by the creator(s) of the methodology while a framework is a prescriptive guidance. With a framework you are welcome to use all or part of it depending on what works best for your environment/culture. I think of Scrum as a framework, it provides guidance on software project management, and best practices for project planning, communication, reporting, time management and team composition. You can certainly adopt portions of Scrum to enhance the productivity of your team and improve your project results, which is what we have done with our adoption of Scrum.

For example, the Microsoft Solutions Framework(MSF) Team model prescribes a team of peers with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This in my opinion allows for individual accountability as well as team accountability. In addition, it incorporated the Scrum philosophy of self-managed team. This model worked well for us and there was no reason to change it, especially since it wasn’t anti-Scrum.

We however adopted Scrum planning, time management and reporting practices because we needed to improve visibility into our progress. Now progress is measurable at the end of every sprint and we no longer waste our time with status reporting that mean nothing.