During the past month we have had our user conference, Alfresco Summit, in San Francisco and London and it was great to see everyone. I normally give the corporate direction keynote at the end of the first day. Given all the sessions that are presented during the day, I like to add a theme to lighten up what can be serious and technical information. This year's theme was Star Trek only because I liked idea of the pun on the Enterprise, but also because I have been watching Star Trek all my life and it truly was an inspiration to get into technology. When my father became the Operations Officer on the real USS Enterprise, I considered it destiny.
The more serious theme in the presentation is the transformation of the enterprise into a digital enterprise. Immediately many people think, "didn't that happen in the 1990s?" Well, no. Companies put a eCommerce front-end with their web site and although they put the label "Digital" on it, it's not exactly restructuring the organization. As Gartner has put it, "Digital business is not the decade-old concept of e-business in a new wrapper. It is a radically different and more disruptive change.” This was in a report titled "What the Board of Directors Needs to Know about Digital Business", a title which in itself indicates things must be different. Also, with Gartner's Nexus of Mobile, Social (really more like Forrester's Consumerization of Software), Cloud and Big Data, there is more of a point to that Nexus other than forces colliding and doing what exactly? I guess you can call it Digital Fusion.
I have been able to talk to a lot of analysts, consultants and customers about their digital initiatives and have had a chance to reflect on them. Also the AIIM board has taken this up as a topic and it has become a theme of AIIM's next conference. I even saw Geoffrey Moore get into it with his "Let's Get Digital" post on LinkedIn. However, despite all the excitement and amount of words that have been expended on this transformation, there is still not a clear definition of what a Digital Enterprise is, let alone a road map to get there.
I believe that there is a significant place for Enterprise Content Management, Process Management and Collaboration in making this transformation. The transformation itself will have a dramatic impact on our lives as knowledge workers as well. You can see my thoughts in the presentation on SlideShare below. I'd like to know yours.
I hope to write more about this topic, because I have a heck of a lot of thoughts on it already. But you know me, maybe I will and maybe I won't. ;-)
