Web 2.0 meets Content Management

During the past week in Philadelphia, the annual AIIM Conference on information management, www.aiim.org, was held at the Convention Center in Center City. This is a great place to have any event as the Reading Market is right across the street for all the eats and good foods that get trucked in from Pennsylvania Dutch country and around the area. I like attending just for that reason.

The AIIM organization runs a quality conference with many good keynotes, breakouts and sections to attend. The conference is quite well attended because intelligently they also share the expo hall with the printing and copying (OnDemand) conference. That concept seems to make even more sense in this economy and AIIM has been doing this for a while now.

While I didn’t go to all the sessions this year, the few that I did focused around the social media theme, where it’s headed for the enterprise, and what the content management systems vendors are doing with it and about it.

The keynote that was most interesting to me was Andrew Lippmann from MIT’s Media Lab. He discussed the four or five areas that he characterized as putting things out of whack in our society. Such as Scale – Andrew said that not all things small can scale up. And too often we get caught up trying to make that happen in business and it doesn’t always work. Same thing wth Opaqueness – that is our processes and solutions are so complex that they lack clarity and transparency. Ithought that was quite relevant to our issues in finance and banking today.

I also listened to a panel of IBM, EMC and OpenText executives describe their approaches to both social media and what they see on the competitive landscape. Also quite interesting since these 3 companies control the majority of software sales in content management. I thought Cheryl McKinnon who represented Open Text had the most up-to-date approach, but both IBM and EMC had a good deal to say as well. It seems there will be a lot of continuing efforts to bolster this fastest growing end of the business.

More to come on this and some other interesting topics.