Social ECM

With titles such as Madden NFL 10, Rock Band and Sims in its portfolio, video game developer Electronic Arts has to stay on cool's edge -- inside the company as much as out. "When people come in the door here these days, they say, 'Hey, how do I connect with people? Do you have a social network?' " said Bert Sandie, director of technical excellence in the University Group at Electronic Arts (EA) in Vancouver. "The reality is, having a social network , search and a knowledge portal, especially in larger corporations, is essentially becoming the cost of doing business, like email was 20 years ago."

One of the questions at a "town hall" debate I facilitated at last month's Enterprise 2.0 conference addressed the topic of information lifecycle management for enterprise social spaces. Most of the attendees didn't seem to think it was necessary. I disagree. All information -- be it official enterprise documents or social content -- follows lifecycles, and you shouldn't just publish-and-forget, on your intranet or any public website. This same lifecycle mantra is promoted heavily by enterprise content management (ECM) vendors looking to get into the social computing game. But does that mean you should buy Social Software from your ECM vendor? I have my doubts. The end-goal is effective networking and collaboration, so any tools you acquire should still be measured foremost by that yardstick.

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it. Open Text watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform — Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is becoming increasingly "socialized," with more Web 2.0 functions being incorporated into it."We are seeing a refocusing on collaboration through the intersection of content and social media," says Leonor Ciarlone, senior analyst at Gilbane. "Content management infrastructure provides the core environment to make collaboration information-centric and is now adding blogs, ratings and other social media."R.V. Anderson Associates (RVA) is a consulting engineering firm with more than 200 employees and a broad range of projects oriented around multidisciplinary engineering. Serving primarily eastern Canada and India, its offices are geographically dispersed. Information resources were similarly scattered across different sections of the company, and were not easy to find when needed. Also, a number of senior associates were planning to retire, and RVA did not want to lose track of the intellectual capital those staff members had contributed.