One on One with Frank Gilbane of the Gilbane Group

Frank Gilbane is President & CEO of the analyst and consulting firm Gilbane Group, Inc., which runs two content management conferences each year: One in San Francisco in June and one in Boston in the Fall. Gilbane has been involved in information management technologies since the early 80s and throughout his distinguished career has helped found several companies. He's also been involved with several standards bodies including SGML Open (now part of OASIS), ANSI, ISO and CALS.

We asked Gilbane about what he learned at his most recent conference in Boston about the current state of content management.

FCM: You had a conference in Boston in December. What were some of the big trends?

FG: I would say the largest trend was an accelerated broadening of technologies companies are looking at for building web applications. I think that is true in general, but certainly for the content-heavy applications our conference is focused on. The most obvious example of this (at least at our conference) is the incorporation of social media tools into both internal and external facing sites. If you look back at our events to the stories and debates about enterprise wikis and blogs you can see this has been going on for five years or so, but the pace has picked-up dramatically. Another trend is the commercialization of open source solutions.

FCM: What, in your view, are the biggest content issues facing organizations and did you think vendors at the conference were addressing those needs?

FG: I think the vendor community as a whole is doing a decent job of refreshing product technologies, and I think that is what we should mostly expect from them. Organizations have other issues than buying products though, and while vendors offer some help here, it is a mistake to depend on them. Companies need to do a better job of learning more about how to work with various content types, and how to organize and architect information to serve their business needs more effectively. They also need to do a better job understanding enough of the technology to make well-informed decisions. Actually, I think IT is getting much better at this.

FCM: The CMIS technical committee had its first meeting in Redmond recently to hash out the spec for CMIS 1.0. How significant do you think CMIS is to the future of ECM? Were people talking about this at your conference?

FG: I have not read the CMIS spec so I can't comment on the details, but I think CMIS is a good thing, just like other efforts to provide some standardized ways to access content in multiple repositories like JSR 170/283 and some of the older initiatives. I don't think there will, or needs to, be a single standard way to do this. These kinds of standards can easily become too complex to catch on, hopefully CMIS will avoid doing so. We have written often over the years about information and content integration, and it remains one of the most difficult challenges facing large enterprise applications. Of course repository integration is of more interest to "ECM" vendors and apps.

FCM: How important is search in the success of a content management system?

FG: I think search is important to everything, but of course there are many different types of content management systems with different search requirements. Website search is certainly important, but in a different way than it is in an R&D Intranet or KM application. There are big differences between convenience and mission critical search and between web search and combinations of web/data/"deep web" search. To measure success you need to match the business requirements to the search functionality. Search is not as easy at it looks to most, and we have found that many, if not most, search implementations have not met expectations.

FCM: What impact do you see the economy having on content management in general?

FG: "Content management" is a very broad category. It is safe to say that many huge deployments, especially those that would be considered "ECM", will either be scaled back or put on hold, some may be canceled outright. In the case of "web content management", especially efforts aimed at increasing customer interaction and reach, the effects of the economy will be much milder. This is both because of their (usually) lower cost, and the importance of growing market share to offset customers scaling back. Although the current economic crisis is very different from the .com crash, I think we will see some similar behavior from companies regarding enterprise IT. Good IT people are still in short supply, and C-level execs are more cognizant of the business value of IT. I think IT will look for less capital-heavy projects, and try and do more in-house. Because expertise in content technologies and their application is still harder to find than most IT expertise, there will be some effort to at least maintain enough resources, and preferably keep things moving to avoid being behind the competitive curve when things turn around. Even though open source is not necessarily cheaper, there already is, and will continue to be growth in open source. Also, although this is a very difficult time for media companies, it will be tough for them to survive for long without efficient and usable multi-channel publishing capability, and this cannot be accomplished without content management.

FCM: How well do companies understand social media? Are companies asking for your help in this area?

FG: One of the most interesting debates, and one that came up in many of the conference sessions at Gilbane Boston, was around the use of social media for corporate use. Twitter, in particular. I would say that there is a very wide range of understanding about the role of social media tools could/should play in enterprise applications. One mistake people make is to confuse the actual use of, for example, Facebook, with the possible use of it or similar technology. To quote myself from an intro to a report Lauren Wood wrote for us four years ago, "But, being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments." People still make this mistake, although more so with Twitter than wikis.

Because our events are line, and because we focus on technologies that we consider either ready for prime time, or ready to be considered for prime time, we often have lively debates about these kinds of issues. Some commenters saw some of the debates at the Boston conference about enterprise social media as being a generational battle. While there is some correlation between use opinions and age regarding social media, I don't think it is especially useful to think about the issue that way. Also, whether someone overuses Facebook for personal reason at work is not relevant to whether a Facebook-like tool could be used to increase communication and collaboration with customers or colleagues.

Yes, many companies are looking for some help with all this, and we'll be continuing this debate at Gilbane San Francisco in June.

Related Articles:
One on One with Content Management's Movers and Shakers