The CIP was launched in late 2011 by AIIM, after working with a group of subject matter experts. Following ISO methodologies, they released a exam intended to test broad knowledge across 6 domain areas in the content and information management space. I had my eye on the requirements and process before I joined AIIM as VP of Marketing. Joining them full-time just fast-tracked my exam booking.

Well, that’s not completely true…

What fast-tracked my exam booking was a conversation after work with my colleague Laurence Hart, CIO of AIIM, well-known for for his Word of Pie blog. I can’t remember how the trash talk started, but it ended with a bet. No studying, no prep, top score on the exam wins a blog post from the loser. Plus next round at happy hour.

The key part of our debate that day? The role of information technology for marketers today. Marketers who do business on the web today must view themselves as information professionals. Understanding of how technology can be used to serve prospects, customers and partners is core to the job. Good marketing, I’ve believed for years, is education. Call it content marketing today if you must, but it has always been this way.

Understanding the relationship between content and container, the formats suitable for particular delivery channels, the use of metadata, taxonomy and tags for findability, getting behind the content with BI and analytics to see content history and activity patterns, understanding the fundamentals of digital rights, asset management, version control and content lifecycle – this is what marketers must do in the digital realm.

Good marketing is about tuning content, polishing it for the right audience and channel, figuring out how to get it in front of the people who can benefit from it.

If that doesn’t describe a use case for the management of information to meet top line revenue goals, I don’t know what is. For organizations where intellectual output – like research, software, artwork, music, recipes and formulas – generates revenue, marketers must step up and commit to ongoing information technology competence. Being heard, found and seen is essential to staying in business.

The exam itself?

I was reasonably confident going in blind. I’ve had the fortune of working with some fantastic content management software companies and consulting organizations over the years, and know that I’ve been exposed to a really broad spectrum of content and information management technologies and deployments.

Where I struggled with a few questions was wording. Had to read through the question a couple of times to ensure comprehension. I have given my feedback on a couple of areas for improvement with the next refresh, but overall a minor concern. I looked at it with hyper-critical non-American eyes, to ensure that the exam can stand solidly across the globe. I was confident that the questions I saw were not US-centric and were universal across countries and vertical industries.

I am throwing out a challenge to other digital marketers. Step up your role in the use, selection and validation of the collaboration, web content management, digital asset management, analytical tools you need to run your online presence. Work as partners not only with business management and sales, but with IT. Find a CIO or IT director who understands how technology is there to drive the business faster and more efficiently. Don’t tolerate the server baby-sitters, find a partner in crime to get your content and products out to the people who will care.

Think about taking the CIP exam yourself. There is a sample exam on the AIIM website to help assess where you stand. And a comprehensive set of prep videos that cover the 6 main knowledge domains. When you’re ready, book the exam. Better yet? Take a friend. Maybe your IT director. Make it even more fun by putting a little wager on the results…

I wasn’t looking for a full time gig. My independent consulting work over the last year has been fulfilling, busy and amazingly varied. But…I’ve always been someone who pays attention to the Sliding Door, that split second moment when opportunity presents itself and you’ve got to make the choice to run or walk. (Ask my good friend Craig Hepburn about this…he was there during another one of those moments a few years ago when we were colleagues at OpenText).

What sold me? It was the new vision for AIIM in 2012 and beyond. At first I was a little confused, why WOULDN’T they want to continue being known as the “ECM Association”? Everybody knows them that way. Then a little white board magic made me go “ah-ha.. now I get it”.

It is about a deliberate and decisive move to reframe the association. Putting people first, not technology. About putting a stake in the ground and helping lay a foundation for a new perspective on what it means to be an information professional.

It’s about going from that:

Before....

to this:

...After

Those of us in the world of content and information management are in the middle of one of the most exciting (and occasionally scary) times for our industry. But there’s a lot of big brains who are figuring out where to go next, and I’m excited to find so many of them part of the AIIM community as association members, expert bloggers, Conference keynoters and of course, my colleagues on staff.

I’d also like to sincerely congratulate my friend and now colleague (again…), Laurence Hart of @Piewords blog fame who joins me in this new 2012 challenge by accepting the CIO role at AIIM.

I’ll be keeping the Candy Strategies site alive, as my own blog for topics that interest me and aren’t directly relevant to AIIM research or education. I’ll do more writing on my Expert Blog Site on AIIM Community, where Bryant Duhon has full permission to nag me when I’m behind schedule.

March 20-22, 2012

See you in San Francisco…

But today I unsubscribed from their weekly digest email. Who ever is behind the curation of the topics-of-the-week email newsletters needs to give their head a serious shake.

Here’s what greeted me in my inbox late this afternoon:

Quora #FAIL

The thread responses seem legit enough. But WTF was the newsletter curator thinking when this headline was selected as the subject line? I know as well as anyone how finely tuned marketing automation tools can be when targeting content to readership. Crossed my mind that maybe my Quora avatar set off some kind of prospecting radar.

So poor judgement or crappy automation on their part lost a digest subscriber. It was a long enough day already and coming home to spammy insults in my email inbox isn’t what women in the tech world need these days.

The guy beside me did nothing illegal. He did something perfectly normal for a Friday night: he drank a beer.

But as he got out his wallet to pay for it, he asked the bartender to “ring it in as food” because his company policy did not allow him to expense alcohol while on business travel. And the bartender happily obliged. “You wouldn’t believe how many so-called hot dogs we sell here”. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Who cares, right. Maybe 7 bucks, he could have spent triple that on a steak dinner and cost his employer way more money. If this pint was his only claim for the day, he’s probably doing them a favour, right?

I wanted to ask him what company he worked for, but didn’t. I’m glad I resisted, because now I know that the company has a culture of deception, and its employees are liars. These little sleights of hand are a slippery slope. If we cheat with a fake $7 meal chit, do we become more comfortable with a $50 gift card from a supplier? What about a $2000 creative-accounting commission report? How about a forged signature on a safety inspection? What’s that tipping point on the moral compass?

This guy, the manager who signs the expense report, the accounting clerk who double checks the addition of all the neatly stapled receipts probably know exactly what happens. Because everybody does it. Yet they jump through this little hoop of deception to be compliant to some arbitrary corporate policy. It made me wonder why these policies exist.

Save money? Unlikely. The amount in question was probably less than most of the appetizers on the restaurant menu. Cost controls can be easily imposed with strict per-diem ceilings. 10 bucks is 10 bucks. Demanding scrutiny of menu choices is just micro-management at that point.

Morality? Perhaps. Some companies attempt to project a particular ‘brand’ by setting ethical or family values standards. We observe just how successful these policies are every time we turn on the evening news.

Liability? Perhaps. Maybe some type of travel or corporate insurance clause is rendered null and void if alcohol is involved. If that’s the case, it was clearly a #fail in this scenario.

I don’t have an answer to this issue, but it bothered me. I felt as though I had just witnessed an otherwise nice person break a rule for the purpose of meeting a compliance obligation. I became uncomfortable wondering if this was just the tip of the iceberg.

And, I’m haunted by the image of the some poor shipping dude at the airport having to pull boxes and boxes of frozen hotdogs through security inspection because of a sudden spike in sales…

I had a flashback to 2010 this week when I saw a new whitepaper published by Sitecore. It equated open source to a siren call. Jive Software pulled a similar stunt in spring of 2010, attacking open source web content management and social software. It was a marketing #fail and the company rightfully pulled the paper from its site when the hypocrisy of the arguments were revealed.

I hope Sitecore considers the same move.

(Background on the eerily similar Jive fiasco available on Matt Asay’s Open Road and on the Oregonian).

The Jive mea culpa, issued by CTO Mike Tucker was honest and appreciated.

“Frankly, the title was a dumb mistake on our part. I’ve asked the team to take the document down as it’s far too easy to infer a religious war of which we’re simply not a part.

“Setting the record straight: Jive has consistently made substantial Open Source contributions. Examples include the Openfire, Spark and Smack projects as well as the code contributions Jive employees make to several of the open source frameworks we use. There are few movements that have unleashed as much innovation as Open Source and we’re proud of our continuing contributions.”

I was surprised and disappointed that in 2011, this type of competitive FUD is still thrown. The WCM and social media world is run on open source. Bottom line. I wrote about some of this a few weeks ago on Fierce Content Management. Throwing darts in the direction of open source as one big massive software category shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works.

Reading the “whitepaper”, it is clear that the attack is directed at one particular competitor. Why that was not simply stated in the title, instead of taking broad brush potshots at decades of cutting edge development, is not clear to me.

Let’s dig in a bit, shall we?

The paper begins with an introductory explanation of how “Open Source is Low-Cost Software with High TCO”, and then proceeds to “debunk” the 3 Myths about Open Source.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Unsubstantiated numbers are thrown around, stating that 5% of a total implementation cost is software, with 95% on support, maintenance and implementation services. Absolutely true that any CMS deployment will have a higher services component than initial license cost. Zero source is cited, nor is there any breakdown of how using an open source CMS resulted in more than double the cost. Just a pie chart.

The paper quickly loses credibility by using the extremely broad brush of “open source CMS”, making general statements that can easily be proved untrue by a serious assessment of the products and projects on the market. There are dozens, if not hundreds out there. But here we learn that “the heart of the problems with open source CMSes: poor documentation, minimal or nonexistent support organizations behind them, no cohesive training and user adoption programs”.

This broad statement is frankly, inaccurate and a load of BS. There are dozens of open source CMS products out there that offer 24/7 top-tier service level agreements, training courses and rich technical documentation (not hidden behind a paywall).

And now for the “Myths”:

Myth #1 – Open Source Applications’ Scalability and Capabilities Are as Good as Commercial Software. The paper quotes a partner, attesting to the “unpredictability of open source” as a killer for budgets, time lines and client satisfaction. Really? When some open source platforms claim to power 15% of websites, and Apache Web server supports nearly 100 million sites (almost 60% of the web per October 2011 stats tracked by Netcraft.com).

This is how we define unpredictability?

Myth #2 – Open Source is Well-Supported by a Community of Developers

Open source community development models have “no accountability”. This is of course substantially untrue, but differs from project to project. Nearly all major projects have some form of vendor backing or strong ecosystem of service providers.These companies invest in code contribution, peer-to-peer support and documentation. Many very large software companies, including IBM, Adobe, SAP, Oracle contribute to open source projects because their development road map depends on it.

In the content management space, many open source projects are vendor backed meaning that support contracts are available for production environments. Nuxeo, eZ Systems, Liferay, Alfresco are just a few I know well. Some of these companies have modeled their business and development models on the billion dollar open source company: Red Hat. Community projects that act as engines of innovation for the resulting downstream solutions, packaged applications, or enterprise editions are common.

Ye olde “one throat to choke” canard is dutifully trotted out. Playing the FUD card as though vendor-backed open source projects and those with strong partner ecosystems don’t know how to pick up a phone. An interesting sidebar quote says that “I have five people at Sitecore who I know would respond to me at two in the morning”. Awesome. Wouldn’t it be cooler to have hundreds of people in every global timezone monitoring help requests and responding through multiple channels? In addition to the 24/7 service level agreements the vendor backed projects already provide?

It’s tough, today, to find even proprietary products that don’t include open source under the covers. Companies that take fire at “open source”are probably shooting their own upstream foundational tools.

Myth #3 – Open Source is Cheaper than Commercial Software.

Open Source software is cheaper than Commercial Software. Because there are no license costs. What is not free when adopting open source tools is the ongoing support, maintenance, services and training. Same things you’d plan for with a proprietary system. Does anyone really plan a production software deployment without budgeting for those recurring costs, regardless of the license agreement of the product selected? The “slippery slope of open source” means radically higher costs, harder implementation and botched environments, according to the paper spokesman. Funny, I see a slippery slope when I hear organizations get a content management project moving quickly, efficiently and without needing to play the game of sales cycle theatre. And then they wonder what other parts of their enterprise IT ecosystem can be shifted to an open source alternative…

That’s my 2 cents. To judge for yourself, download it and let me know your thoughts. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, this unsophisticated perspective of open source development models must be ready to be put to bed.

Ah… the siren call of FUD. Never fails to lure proprietary vendors to shipwreck on the rocky coast of a new competitive world they don’t understand.

There’s been some great debate among some of the ECM pundits on Twitter on the topic of “paper free” as a goal for enterprises and even individuals. (Yes, yes… we all love the old joke about achieving the paperless office the day we achieve the paperless toilet…) But few will argue that reducing bottlenecks and improving online accessibility for routine transactions must be a goal for private and public sector organizations.

For the last couple of years, AIIM has promoted “World Paper Free Day” on the last Thursday of October. It’s a great time to stop and think about how some organizations still use paper as a crutch, keeping so many types of routine transactions in a rut. Paper reduction has many angles: going “green” and saving trees, removing inefficiencies, creating a more streamlined work environment, freeing up storage and archives space. All great objectives.

But it’s not as simple as some pundits like to think.

Until we agree and aggressively adopt open standards for digital preservation, going blindly into a paper-free frenzy is merely shifting one set of problems for another. Closed systems, single-point-of-failure cloud services, proprietary device formats feel like a looming disaster for those of us who get paranoid about the implications for future historians. What happens when our day-to-day electronic transactions are unreadable or unfindable a few years from now, never mind generations from now.

Paper-free is OK, but not the answer until we figure out how businesses, governments and societies will protect the evidence of our human transactions online.

AIIM has published some great toolkits and resources to help break down the paper bottleneck. I also recommend a recent blog post from Laurence Hart, a great read on achieving freedom from paper, rather than going paper-free.

For those of you in the Ottawa or surrounding area, we invite you to join our local chapter event on October 27 as we welcome noted document capture technology analyst Harvey Spencer, along with Bruce Covington, Director at Public Works Canada responsible for document imaging strategies and what digital means in Canadian Federal Government. Hope to see you Thursday morning.

Registration Link

Calling all information and content management practitioners in the Ottawa area…. The ARMA NCR Fall IM Days is on again this year, November 23 and 24. The ARMA National Capital Chapter is celebrating its 40th year, and once again has assembled a speaker lineup of deep expertise and experience.

I was very pleased to learn that my session on Open Source and Open Standards: the next generation of Information Management was accepted. I’ll be speaking on Thursday, November 24 at 2:10pm. I’ve presented on variations of this topic at the Toronto ARMA education day in June, the UK IRMS conference in April, AIIM New England in March, and to the Columbia, South Carolina ARMA chapter in January. I’m looking forward to adapting the key themes specifically for the needs of Canadian public sector IM professionals.

There’s so much opportunity out there to rejuvenate our content management thinking, strategies and practices by considering alternative forms of software delivery and acquisition. I think the time is ripe to talk about this openly and objectively right here in Ottawa.

See you in November! Click here to register for the ARMA NCR IM Days.

As I blogged in February, I love attending public committee meetings to learn more about the decision-making process, and to hear first-hand how our politicians and senior officials think about important issues. My favourite committee is the Standing Committee for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

This morning I chose to sign up for their email notification service. In this new session of Parliament, they changed the location and meeting times of their regular meetings and I didn’t want to miss out.  According their the House of Commons committee website, the subsribers [sic] will receive alerts on all committee activities.

I created a user ID by providing my email address, and submitted a password.

Creating a subscriber account

Within moments my subscription confirmation was received. And lo and behold was I not shocked to see what had arrived in my inbox. Yes, a confirmation of my subscription…complete with my password in its full blazing glory of clear text.

Don't think the irony of the disclaimer small print didn't make me chuckle

So let’s recap this one, shall we?

1. This Parliamentary Committee is specifically tasked with issues related to information access policy, privacy, ethics, disclosure, etc etc.

2. The W3C stated years ago that there it is simply not possible for passwords to be securely transmitted in clear text in any way. In their words “Clear text passwords are a serious security risk“.

3. Public sector is notoriously fast to cut access to internet services, social networking sites, collaboration and cloud-based tools because of  the inevitable excuse of “security” risks.

I’m laying this out there because it is yet another example of how Canadian public sector has fallen desperately behind in the adoption of online technology and effectively using digital communication and collaboration tools.

The knee-jerk excuse of “security” has been revealed to be lip service. And it embarrasses me as a citizen who wants to safely and securely engage with my government in order to learn more about decisions and policy.

Now excuse me for a couple of hours while I run around the internet and change anywhere else that particular password has been used.

The mission of ifridge – to inspire “fresh ideas for the digital economy” – meshes very well with the spirit of education, advocacy, and the Web’s 3 Os (open source, open standards and open data) that compelled me to found Candy Strategies Inc.

We’ve entered into a partnership where my team and I can help ifridge and the growing portfolio of innovative companies that has turned to ifridge to fast-track their sales, marketing and corporate strategies.

Work hard, play hard, respect for people, always looking forward, never back, using creativity to make the world a better place: it’s a compatible corporate value system that makes me optimistic about this alliance. Let’s see what we can do.

When I left the traditional enterprise software world 2 years ago, it was after a lightbulb went off in my head: it was important to walk the talk. Despite the corporate tech jargon about empowerment, engagement, social workplaces and marketplaces, few examples of truly collaborative business software communities actually exist. The ones that do exist are predominantly within the open source development model.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been fortunate to attend LinuxCon in Vancouver as well as the Ottawa FOSSLC events.

Clay Shirky @ LinuxCon

Clay Shirky‘s keynote at LinuxCon on the topic of “Structured Fighting” was particularly noteworthy for its recognition of the “squishy human stuff” that is inextricably intertwined with technology. (A fantastic recap here at opensource.com) Community success is not a love-fest or rah-rah set of corporate fanbois. It’s about users, developers and implementers who have skin in the game. Perhaps as coders, but possibly also as beta testers, bug reporters, translators or documentation proofreaders. Civilization (and good technology), according to Shirky comes from “More people pooling resources in new ways… after arguing about it for a really long time.” “Structured fighting”, to use Shirky’s terms, means mutually agreed codes of conduct, roles, and ultimately how decisions are made.

Mekki MacAulay @ FOSSLC / #SC2011

Another great talk on the topic of communities was given by software engineer and business PhD candidate Mekki MacAulay at the Ottawa Software Developer’s Haven event. Drawing upon some of his academic research, MacAulay analyzed survey results from several open source project leaders to assess the factors that led to community implosion or drift. The key findings, I am convinced, could be applied to any type of community, not only from the software or open source world.

Adaptive vs. Recursive Practices and Effect on Community Density

Practices that affect community density, ie, the “push and pull” factors, in MacAulay’s talk, can be described as adaptive or recursive. Adaptive processes are those that are those that change or morph to reach out to new participants or scenarios. Recursive practices are those that apply existing procedures or structures to new situations or challenges. The research sought to compare adaptive vs. recursive community practices to their relative success at enabling or disabling participation.

The findings, while on the surface surprised some of the attendees, weren’t really a shock upon reflection. Adaptive processes are likely to be enabling because there is a conscious effort to find new ways to get participation. When peripheral players feel engaged, and equipped to contribute, the power shifts from the central leaders out to a broader spectrum of the community. Finding new ways to contribute appropriate for newbies means building confidence faster. A new community member could start by helping with documentation, if they’re not ready to commit code.

In my interpretation: get players to put some level of skin in the game early, and you’ll more quickly build the pool of advanced contributors.

However… these adaptive processes can occasionally alienate. MacAulay found that practices that catered too much to the newer players could lead to a community fraught with uncertainty, fragmentation, loss of traction. “Cowboyism” can make things fuzzy, especially in a new community without a strong core of veterans.

This actually makes complete sense to me. Personally, I see a red flag when a service or product jumps too high to ‘engage’ me by begging for input on what I want to see next. Gives the impression there is no roadmap or strategy and I question its focus.

Recursive practices, while sounding negative in tone, could also result in deeper community engagement. As MacAulay noted, this is particularly true in established communities. Documented procedures and guidelines that demonstrate purpose, or provide stability and common direction, can help kick-start participation.  Guiding new members to how-to guides, recommended mailing lists/forums, mentors, is an essential part of passing down of “corporate memory”.

This is knowledge transfer and respect for corporate memory in action. As a primary use case for enterprise collaboration and content management, communities that distill and pass down the core principles and successful approaches make it easy to cultivate the students and apprentices who can master… then innovate.

The recording of the full MacAulay session is posted at the event site. Recommended viewing for anyone interested in community dynamics, software development and the open source as a social marketplace in action.

* Bonus points to anyone who identifies the political quote that inspired this title…