Thursday, December 14, 2006

 

Enterprise Content Management and Security

Dann Connelly of J&J made me think about several problem spaces in his panel discussion at the 451 Group Conference this week enough for me to take action on them...



Over the past several years, many vendors have invited me to serve on their vendor advisory boards. This week alone I have gotten two pings from security vendors with this request. I need to ask myself whether this is just a part of vendor relationship management or simply a way to lull me into sleeping at the helm.

After all, why can't us enterprisey folks who desire features to be put into vendor products simply request them and have vendors do a little homework on their own to figure out how to make them globally applicable to all of their customers. Being on an advisory board doesn't guarantee me that the features I need to build truly world class enterprise applications will actually show up. It only guarantees that I will have a conversation with lots of folks, something of which I believe is already fulfilled via my blog.

Anyway, over the last several months I have had the opportunity to talk with architects at Boeing, Pfizer, Merck, Allstate, Wachovia, Bank of America and others and realize from a security perspective that ECM vendors are treating us enterprise customers like a step-child.

It was intriguing to learn that all of these players have asked of features of their vendor which we all have in common where the vendor has responded cordially indicating that those are great ideas but no other customer has articulated them.

In the ECM space, I have uncovered that we all desire the following features to be implemented immediately and in a high quality way:
I wonder how open source ECM vendors such as Alfresco align with this thinking. If closed-source vendors don't nail the problems of large enterprises then this may be the opening they need. I suspect though that Matt Asay is already on it.

If you happen to be employed by a Fortune enterprise and would like to see ECM vendors improve their security posture and would like to participate in a conference call with other Fortune enterprises on this subject, please leave a comment specifying your work email address and I will send you an invite...






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