New Article: Uncommon Thinking About Common Solutions

Most companies that implement Documentum have big plans for it. They want to standardize on Documentum in an effort to reduce IT costs by eliminating the proliferation of one-off content management solutions.

This story is very familiar by now. Large organizations have standardized on databases, operating systems, ERP systems, programming tools, application servers, middleware - the list goes on and on. Standardizing on a common technology stack can keep support and maintenance costs down, and it’s a cornerstone strategy for CIOs everywhere.

But there are some drawbacks to this strategy. I can’t think of very many “one size fits all” solutions to today’s trickiest IT problems. Most hard problems have lots of nooks and crannies where unique needs are lurking. These nooks and crannies are the niche markets where specialty providers flourish, and these niche markets tend to be too small for the big guys to worry about. The big guys are great at solving the 80% of the problem that is common to all of their customers, but they struggle to address the 20% that makes each of their customers unique. The real challenge that companies face when standardizing on an enterprise solution is that each division or business unit might have its own 20%, and when you add them all up, you have a lot of needs that don’t get addressed with the out-of-the-box solution.

Here’s a case in point. Documentum can be deployed across your entire enterprise. It’s scalable enough to handle billions of documents. It can be distributed globally in a federated environment with replication across multiple data centers. It’s got an enormous feature set that’s been developed over more than 15 years. If you are going to standardize on a single ECM platform, you can’t do much better than Documentum.

But even Documentum doesn’t solve every problem out-of-the-box. Take airlines, for example. Documentum out-of-the-box can handle their normal business documents just fine. But airlines also have huge technical manuals called Aircraft Maintenance Manuals. These manuals can have more than 50,000 pages each, and a unique manual is required for each aircraft in the fleet. That adds up to a lot of pages! Because these manuals are so large and complex, they require an army of authors, editors, and reviewers. Add to that the regulated nature of the airline industry, and you’ll find that creating and managing these huge manuals is one of the biggest content management challenges out there. And Documentum doesn’t have an out of the box solution that can do it. The airlines have to customize the Documentum platform to meet their needs.

Now don’t get me wrong - I don’t blame EMC. The airline market is too small for EMC to focus exclusively on it. And this is my point. Most companies will have some unique requirements that are really important to them, but not very important to the big IT vendors out there. These companies face a real challenge when trying to deploy an enterprise content management solution. If they think too narrowly, the solution won’t meet all their needs. But if they think to broadly, they could end up with a customized version of Documentum in each department. And that defeats the purpose of a standard solution.

So what’s a CIO to do?

Josh McJilton has just published an article that could help. As a consultant and project manager here at Blue Fish, Josh has helped some of our clients address this very issue. He’s discovered that there are actually different types of “common IT solution”, and he’s created a model to help you determine which one is right for your business.

Read all about it in Uncommon Thinking About Common Solutions.