Re: Scan This Book! - New York Times

I had received a few links forwarded by various contacts and clients to read the article "Scan This Book!" recently published in the New York Times, and written by Kevin Kelly (of Wired fame).

It's quite the lengthy article, and well worth reading for anyone interested in search, new business models, and the changing face of content ownership.

I had a number of flashbacks while reading the article - roughly 12 years ago, when I first started at Delphi Group, our CEO/President Thomas Koulopoulos frequently gave examples of what the future of content management and search/retrieval might look like in the future. One example was something like this - "imagine in the not too distant future that all of the content you could ever want to access could be carried in a 1x1 inch cube and tucked in your pocket. The capability to store the information has now disappeared, but the issue of being able to retrieve the appropriate content without being buried by all if the irrelevant information has, more than likely, now become an immense task."

This was pre-Web, and for most people, pre-Internet, and certainly pre-iPod, pre-Google, and pre-desktop and laptop computers with 40, 60, 80, 120+ gig hard drives.

Content management still has not been embraced as widely as it probably should (with companies who have focused on structured systems [databases, ERP, etc.]) claiming that unstructured content doesn't matter, and that the ROI in addressing any problems with "content" is not sufficient enough to bother with.

Enterprise search has had solutions galore for many years now, yet most companies still have pitiful search in place inside the organization, and even rarer still - comprehensive search across all repositories, as I have mentioned before, my colleague, Hadley Reynolds has often quipped that there is no such thing as true enterprise search, because even with federated search and large, in theory, enterprise-wide content management, there are still large black holes where no search can penetrate the desktops, shared drives, legions of intranets, Sharepoint installations, wikis, etc., and in which content management is also not employed.

My how the times change, and the capabilities march on, yet adoption lags behind, even as costs continue to drop across the board for all of the technology, hard and soft, involved in implementing these systems.

I've recently been exploring how the rise of open source seems to finally be on the road to tapping the enterprise from a system/application level, specifically ECM and WCM (web content management) standpoint, rather than strictly at the network or operation system level (Linux variants being the big waving flags there). Enterprise system sales models tend to be nearly entirely counterintuitive to promoting large-scale adoption of these systems - with story after story after the million+ dollar ECM solutions being bought and implemented, yet with the number of deployed and used seats being less than 20% of the people in an organization. The costs are high, the user experience is distressing to unusable (post your content in 20 easy steps - including self-assigning metadata), the value to the users is through the floor (nothing in it for the individual, only for managers and above, as typically explained to me), and lack of strategic (or even tactical) important to the organization - it's a wonder ECM is sold at all.

But if the costs of ECM suddenly dramatically shrink (to somewhere between 10-40% of "commercial" ECM), and the usability is addressed so that content is both easy to place in the system, and easy to find again later, this may be the disruptive innovation that ECM and WCM so desperately need to sell the benefits to the great unwashed masses (or even those who have been oversold on "big ECM").

Suffice it to say, I would definitely recommend reading the "Scan This Book!"article, and would welcome conversations around that article or this blog posting, to hear what people are doing with regards to ECM, WCM and search, whether pursuing open source or commercial solutions.

Also, as a science fiction tangent, I would recommend Bruce Sterling's novel "Distraction" as a key to thinking about the future (or the "NOW") of copyright and content distribution. I had the pleasure of briefly speaking to Ray Ozzie (then of Groove [most famous for Lotus Notes prior to that], now at Microsoft - see his blog for always interesting and personal technology insights) at a CTO conference in Boston a few years back, and suggesting based on his keynote that he should consume this book. Turns out he was in the middle of reading it, although had hit a hump and had not found the time to finish it out. I hope he has had time to read the rest, as the future it describes will certainly hit Microsoft as much as the rest of us - and the giants of any industry affected by copyright, fair use and the like have much more to lose in the end game.


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