Interview : Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal, Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator at Information Architected, Inc.

Hello everybody !

Today let's go to USA.

Remember : The subjects I focused on for these interviews are
1. To introduce men and women playing a role in ECM environment
2. To discover the ECM community
3. To explore ECM Solutions
4. To learn more about technologies and content management practices.

Today, I have the great oppportunity to interview Dan Keldsen, Co-founder, Principal, Analyst, Blogger, Educator, Innovator at Information Architected, Inc. and a long-time player in the ECM world.

Hello Dan !

First of all, let me thank you for the time you take to make this interview reality.

Certainly, my pleasure to be involved.

So Dan, you have a lot of roles and titles. But among all of that, what's your favourite one and why ?

Ah, so difficult to chose only one - but if I were to choose one aspect of my working life that drives me the most, it would be as an educator.

Regardless of the work I'm engaged in at any particular time, I always strive to be learning for my own ongoing improvement, and to make sure that when I'm consulting, writing, blogging, presenting, that I'm helping to educate others, and most importantly, to get others to a spark questions that THEY should be tackling to further their education and awareness of the topic at hand.

My belief is that unless you are continuously learning, you are only going to fall farther and farther behind what is possible in this world - and who can afford to do that?

In December 2008, you have founded Information Architected, Inc. What's the purpose of this entity? Could you describe it ?

Sure, Information Architected is a phrase that is meant to flip conversations around from their typical TECHNOLOGY focus - such as "we need a wiki!" - to the business goals that need to be accomplished, such as needing to rapidly assemble a distributed project team in a professional services firm. Deciding what tool is appropriate comes AFTER the business need, not before.

This becomes a flexible question that can help people get to the root of what they're looking to do.

What is YOUR Information Architected for?

To increase sales? To reduce customer support calls? To engage your customers in conversations? To move faster than your competition? None of that happens by accident, and unless the technologies you put in place to SOLVE those problems is put together, purposefully, to create the end result, it will be far more difficult to guarantee that result.

If you run the question out a bit further, it becomes, for example, Is your information architected for collaboration? with your customers? to co-create new products? in a "crowd-sourced" social community? And how does that system connect to any other systems that might be "behind the firewall?" How does compliance factor into this? How many languages need to be handled? Is access necessary via mobile?

People don't want more tools, they want to solve their problems, but all too often, technology leads the discussion, causing serious limitations in the ways that organizations are thinking about how to solve their business problems. It seems trivial, but it's a battle fought every day in the business world, and frequently, lost.

What's your work day after day ?

Ah, the life of a startup! The glamorous side is over-rated, for those who haven't tried it. Fortunately, between the background of my partner, long-time colleague Carl Frappaolo, who had started two companies prior to this, and myself, with a varied background including marketing and hands-on development, we don't have to spend much time in running the details of the business. The great benefit of starting up a company these days is that nearly every service we need can easily be bought and activated in a matter of minutes, for example, our website was literally up and running with branding and initial content, in a matter of hours.

Which of course, in this economy, allows us to not focus on the plumbing of the business, and instead identify and serve clients. I have to say, as a former day-to-day IT guy, running racks of servers, this is quite a refreshing change! As I've said for a long time, even when I was a day-to-day IT guy coding and fixing, the less you have to do to get your technology to do your work, the more you can focus on whatever your business ACTUALLY does - creating new drugs, more fuel efficient cars, etc.. When technology becomes a burden, plain and simple, you're doing IT wrong.

The client-facing work varies - providing strategic consulting, at this point, most often on decreasing costs of operations, and increasing delivering value to customers more quickly and effectively through collaboration, keynoting and presenting at various conferences and events, rewriting and delivering the 2009 edition of AIIM's 4-day ECM Course - including a focus on MIKE2 (an open source methodology for ECM implementation which I've become intimately familiar with over the last year), creating some of the newest and deepest SharePoint research available on the web as of this writing, and more.

More succinctly, we provide Analysis, Consulting and Education - or you could think of us as ACEs for short. ;)

Analysis feeds our Consulting work, which is frequently part Education as we work at "teaching a man to fish" rather than stay on site for months, and the entire set of offerings loops back around to refresh itself with each engagement.

If you are not aware of what ECM can do for you, you've been sold a bill of goods that didn't deliver - by a solution provider or integrator, are looking to improve HOW you're using your current investment, or looking to replace all or some portion of your ECM environment - we can drop into your environment, assess this situation, and provide pointed guidance on how to quickly start making progress, whether towards a long-term or short-term strategy.

I visited your site : http://www.informationarchitected.com/ and It's the first time I found the term Innovation Management. Could you explain this term and the link with content management ?

Innovation Management is a relatively new term - the basic premise is that "Innovation" is not magic, it shouldn't be accidental, and if organizations are going to succeed at any point, and specifically NOW, in this economy, then innovation needs to be addressed and managed, in order to actually make it happen at all, let alone consistently.

The tie to ECM is that the process of innovation management can be greatly improved by layering many of the core components of ECM. For instance, the "front end" of innovation, where as many ideas as possible are generated, are generated and feed into some place where it is "captured" - just as a form, contract, or other piece of content would. That front-end is then moved through a process or workflow, to allow others in the organization to collaborate around improving, validating or dropping the idea. The actual implementation of the idea, if it makes it this far, could shoot into another process, perhaps separate from the ECM system, such as to set a new automobile design into motion. By capturing this entire process in an electronic system, it can be thoroughly tracked, made visible to all who are participating in that process, and undestood how long it takes to bring a new idea to market, who is best at this, and so on.

This is fairly cutting edge, although the core concepts that support innovation management are not new. My interest in this topic began when I was working in the Innovation Lab of Perot Systems about 4 years ago. It's a fascinating area, and an area that organizations need significant help in seeing how it is possible to manage innovation in a systematic way.

While I am happy to help people with the more typical day-to-day uses of ECM, such as streamlining e-commerce, improving intranets, designing systems to allow distributed collaboration, creating publishing systems that allow distribution across paper, websites, mobile devices, etc., it is quite useful to be able to point to the larger and more thoroughly modern ideas that innovation management represents. IBM or Google, for example, are prime examples of addressing innovation in a serious way from a cultural standpoint, and in building the technical environment to innovate all the time, with as broad participation as possible from their employees, at the least, out to their customers and partners.

By the way, where did the "ECM Experience" begin for you ?

I accidentally stumbled into the world of ECM. Prior to my "official" introduction into ECM when I first started working at Delphi Group in 1994, I'd built an internal solution for a previous employer to track library clippings in the pharmaceutical press, and to manage marketing and sales materials for a distributed workforce. What we now talk about as tagging or metadata, and content re-use, I'd accidentally "invented" (not really, but it was certainly seen as a new invention to my employer at the time) as a way to save myself and my colleagues time. Who knew I'd make a career out of ECM after that?

The journey I've made since then is something that I try to condense and infect others with - and that is the simple fact that unless business and technical people are working together, they are only doing their organizations harm.

Until business people and technical people can translate what they are mutually looking for, placing blame on either side does nobody any good. I'd started in the IT world as what I'd call a "classic IT guy" - focused more on operations and tactics rather than in supporting what the business would need to grow to meet tomorrow. At some point I realized I'd better be part of the solution or I was going to be a boat anchor to the growth of the business, and once that lightbulb went off, I did everything that I could to be the "go to guy" and speak both in business and technical terms. Having people on staff, or at hand, that can translate between the business and technical worlds is a KEY to getting the right things done for businesses. Unfortunately, it's still fairly rare to find companies that have people with such skills.

It's been a long, strange, yet rewarding journey since then. We're only just beginning to realize what is possible given a hyperlinked, collaboratively-driven world - I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds - and to help bring people along the path as it unfolds.

What's your feelings about Open Source solution and open source movement in the CM ecosystem ?

Whether the topic is open source, SaaS or MOSS/SharePoint, the more options that potential buyers have, at a variety of price points, and with choices for whether they have to buy, build, rent, lease or deploy in some other manner - having far MORE options, and as a result, more competition, can only do good things for this industry.

Open source solutions that provide a "full suite" of capabilities for ECM are not nearly as easy to find as it is to find open source solutions that "only" provide blogging, wikis, social networking, and so on.

I've found that most of my clients, or discussions with buyers/users of technology still have more fear than acceptance of open source. Understanding the licensing models, setting the expectations for customer support, all serve to provide a bit of an uncomfortable feeling for many people. I'm not saying that SHOULD be the case, but for all of the positive benefits shown by the investment IBM or Sun, for example, have made in their own cost-savings in open source, the general corporate public world has not yet reached the "tipping point" in seeing open source as a real option.

That said, in working with a federal agency recently, they were quite willing to embrace open source, and had just begun to ramp up their development staff, as some recent RFP responses had quite an expensive price tag that they were not prepared to accept.

When presenting potential solutions to clients, all options are available in my toolbox - whatever set of tools will serve the client, I will suggest as valid options. I will say, in the face of economic mayhem, solutions that are cheaper and faster to deploy, rather than expensive and complicated, are beginning to make a lot more sense to people. Why that didn't make sense BEFORE, well, that's a topic for another day.

On the technical front, I've long said that ECM environments have some of the most hostile interfaces both for "normal" users, as well as for administrators and developers. Open source providers have helped to change that perception to a certain degree, as the individual pieces underlying the open source "stack" have been pulled into single installers, and unified frameworks, but there is still quite a bit that can be done in open source and the traditional commercial ECM world to make the interfaces and overall management MUCH more streamlined.

Finally, can you recommend us weblinks or blogs about ECM or IT in general ?

At this point, there are very few blogs that I regularly read. Most of the blogs that I read are those entries that are specifically pointed out to me by people I'm following or who reply to me on Twitter (I'm @dankeldsen, incidentally) - or entries that I find, regardless of where they are posted, by various agents and alerts I have, setup on topics such as SharePoint, ECM, Enterprise 2.0, and so on.

I've been a longtime user of LinkedIn as well, and have begun to see many interesting questions and concerns posted to various ECM, search/findability, BPM and Enterprise 2.0 groups.

Whether content is on a blog, forum, community or generically a "web site" - it's all content to me. Wherever useful insights are arising, and discussion are being had, if it's of interest to me or clients I'm working with at the time, I'll be there. I strive to point out "the best" content as I find it, and post these finds via Twitter, my blog, and social bookmarking sites such as delicious and Diigo. All of those resources are likely to be more useful, and more current than any single list I could provide here. My sources change on a daily basis.

What would you say to conclude this interview?

The many benefits and possibilities of ECM are still not well understood by most businesses, although that has begun to change due to the increasing adoption and use of web content, as well as the rise of open source, SaaS and SharePoint. Whenever I interact with companies who are still driven by paper-based forms, cold calls, direct mail and faxes, I wince - they are missing huge opportunities. If we can all work to help raise awareness of what ECM can do for them, in language they understand, then we can ALL look forward to much better experiences as customers, patients, workers, teachers, students, and on and on. Anything I can do to help you and your readers to that end, my virtual door is wide open!

Many thanks, Dan, for this interview. We wish you an exciting journey on the ECM Road!

Thank you, Jean Marie, and great to be a part of your journey as well.

Find out more about Information Architected at:
http://www.informationarchitected.com/

You can find Dan's blog at:
http://www.BizTechTalk.com/

Follow him on twitter at:
http://twitter.com/dankeldsen

Sample his presentations at:
http://www.slideshare.net/dan.keldsen

Or connect with him on LinkedIn at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dankeldsen

PS : You can download this interview at this url : http://www.scribd.com/doc/13658395/InterviewInformationArchitected-DKeldsen-ENG-Open-Source-ECM-Interview-ENG-Dan-Keldsen-Information-Architected-Inc