I run a software company called Knowledgeone Corporation that produces an enterprise content management solution called RecFind 6 that includes extensive document imaging capabilities. We have thousands of customers around the world and as far as I can see most use RecFind 6 for document imaging of one kind or another.

This certainly wasn’t the case twenty years ago when document imaging tools were difficult to use and were expensive stand-alone ‘specialised’ products. Today however, almost every document management or records management product includes document imaging capabilities as a normal part of the expected functionality. That is, document imaging has gone from being an expensive specialised product to just a commodity, an expected feature in almost any information management product.

This means most customers have a readily available, easy-to-use and cost-effective document imaging tool at their fingertips. That being the case there should be no excuse for not utilizing it to save both time and money. However, I guarantee that I could visit any of my customers and quickly find unrealised opportunities for them to increase productivity and save money by using the document imaging capabilities of my product RecFind 6. They don’t even have to spend any money with me because the document imaging functions of RecFind 6 are integrated as ‘standard’ functionality and there is no additional charge for using them.

So, why aren’t my customers and every other vendor’s customers making best use of the document imaging capabilities of their already purchased software?

In my experience there are many reasons but the main ones are:

Lack of knowledge

To the uninitiated document imaging may look simple but there is far more to it than first appears and unless your staff have hands-on experience there is unlikely to be an ‘expert’ in your organization. For this reason I wrote a couple of Blogs earlier this year for the benefit of my customers; Estimating the cost of your next imaging job and The importance of document imaging. This was my attempt to add to the knowledge base about document imaging.

Lack of ownership

The need for document imaging transects the whole enterprise but there is rarely any one person or department charged with ‘owning’ this need and with applying best-practice document imaging policies and procedures to ensure that the organization obtains maximum benefits across all departments and divisions. It tends to be left to the odd innovative employee to come up with solutions just for his or her area.

Lack of consultancy skills

We often say that before we can propose a solution we need to know what the problem is. The way to discover the true nature of a problem is to deploy an experienced consultant to review and analyse the supposed problem and then present an analysis, conclusions and recommendations that should always include a cost-benefit analysis. In our experience very few organizations have staff with this kind of expertise.

Negative impact of the Global Financial Crisis that began in 2008

All over the world since 2008 our customers have been cutting staff and cutting costs and eliminating or postponing non-critical projects. Some of this cost cutting has been self-defeating and has produced negative results and reduced productivity. One common example is the cancelling or postponing of document imaging projects that could have significantly improved efficiency, productivity and competitiveness as well as reducing processing costs.  This is especially true if document imaging is combined with workflow to better automate business processes.  I also wrote a Blog back in July 2012 for the benefit our customers to better explain just what business process management is all about called Business Process Management, just what does it entail?

In answer to the original question I posed, yes you can save money utilizing simple document imaging functionality especially if you combine the results with new workflow processes to do things faster, more accurately and smarter. It is really a no-brainer and it should be the easiest cost justification you have ever written.

We have already seen how most information management solutions like RecFind 6 have embedded document imaging capabilities so most of you should have existing and paid-for document imaging functionality you can leverage off.

All you really need to do to save your organization money and improve your work processes is look for and then analyse any one of many document imaging opportunities within your organization.

A clue, wherever there is paper there is a document imaging opportunity.

I run a software company called Knowledgeone Corporation that produces a content management system called RecFind 6. We need to be on top of what is happening in the hardware market because we are required to support the latest devices such as Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface tablet. Our job after all is to capture and manage content and the main job of devices like the iPad and Surface tablet is to allow end users to search for and display content.

At this time we plan to support both with our web client but each device has its special requirements and we need to invest in our software to make sure it perfectly suits each device. The iPad is by now a well-known partner but the Surface tablet is still something of a mystery and we await the full local release and our first test devices.

As we produce business software for corporations and government our focus is on the use of tablets in a business scenario.  This means using the tablets for both input and output meaning, capturing information and documents from the end user and well as presenting information and documents to the end user.

When looked at from a business perspective the Surface tablet starts to be a much better proposition for us than the iPad. I say this because of three factors; connectivity, screen size and open file system. To my mind these are the same three factors that severely limit the use of the iPad in a business environment.

Let me elaborate; I can connect more devices to the Surface, the slightly larger screen makes it easier to read big or long documents and the open file system allows us to easily upload and download whatever documents the customer wants. Ergo, the Surface is a much more useful product for our needs and the needs of our corporate and government customers.

So, after a superficial comparison, the Surface appears to have it all over the iPad or does it?

Maybe not given the early reviews of the buggy nature of Windows 8 on RT. Maybe not given that Windows 8 will never be as easy to use or as intuitive as iOS. Maybe not given that the iPad just works and no end user ever needed a training course or user manual. I very much doubt that end users will ‘learn’ Windows 8 as easily as they learnt iOS.

One unkind reviewer even referred to the Surface as a light-weight notebook.  I don’t agree though with its attached keyboard it is very close. I do think it is different to a notebook and I do applaud Microsoft for its investment and innovation. I think the Surface is a new product as opposed to a new generation notebook and I think most end users will see it that way too.

As is often the case both products have strengths and weaknesses and the real battle is yet to come as early adopters buy the Surface and test it. This is a critical time for acceptance and I hope Microsoft hasn’t released this product before it is ready. The early reviews I have read about the RT version are not encouraging especially as everyone still has awful memories of the Visa experience.

Microsoft is super brave because it is releasing two new products at the same time, the Surface hardware and Windows 8. Maybe it would have been smarter to get Windows 8 out and proven before loading it on the Surface but my guess is that Microsoft marketing is in one hell of hurry to try to turn the iPad tide around. There must be a lot of senior executives in Microsoft desperate to gain control of the mobile revolution in the same way they dominated the PC revolution. The Surface plus Windows 8 is a big-bang approach rather than the more conservative get-wet-slowly approach and I sincerely wish them all the best because we all need a much better tablet for business use. Apple also needs a little scare to remind it to be more respectful of the needs of its customers. Competition is always a good thing for consumers and Apple has had its own way with the iPad for too long now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPad but I am frustrated with its shortcomings and I am hoping that more aggressive competition will force them to lift their game and stop being so damn arrogant.

I am about to place my orders for some Surface tablets for testing as soon as the Windows 8 Pro version is available and promise an update sometime soon about what we find. Watch out for an update in a month or so.

I own and run a software company called Knowledgeone Corporation that produces an enterprise content management solution called RecFind 6. As such, our business is the design and programming of complex, heavy-duty application software. This means that we do the hard stuff, including all of the invention, and that I need really clever and innovative and productive IT people (mainly programmers) to work for me.

I have written previously about how hard it is nowadays to find the quality of people I need, see my previous blog entitled “Where have all the good applicants gone?” However, there is an even bigger problem in our industry with an ongoing fall in standards that began way back with the Y2K problem in the late 1990’s as everyone panicked about the problem of date handling once the year 2,000 clicked over.

The problem was basically one of greed where emerging countries like India realized there was a lot of money in providing IT expertise and started mass-producing so called ‘experts’ and shipping them all over the world. Very soon a resume or list of qualifications or certifications was all that was needed to convince paper-bound and rules-bound bureaucrats that an individual had the prerequisite skills to either immigrate or be awarded a work permit.

And of course, young people in countries like India and Pakistan and the Philippines moved into the IT industry not because they were motivated by the prospect of becoming IT professionals but because it was their ticket out of poverty and an entry opportunity into countries like the USA, Canada and Australia. So, we started to fill up the ranks of IT professionals with people that did not have the aptitude or motivation, just a strong desire for a better life (and who can blame them?).

Greed raided its ugly head again as local executives linked bigger bonuses to lower costs and the Indian companies further reduced ‘real’ qualifications to increase the supply of experts. Universities also got in on the act, again motivated by greed (more students equals more income) and standards were again lowered to create  a production line mentality, “Just pump more out of the system, we can sell them overseas!”

The law of averaging applies and as you gradually increase the number of the less talented and less well qualified people into the talent pool the lower the ‘average’ standard becomes. It is analogous to starting with a glass of the best Scotch Whiskey and then gradually adding more and more water. After a while it isn’t worth drinking because it isn’t whiskey any more, it is just flavoured water. We have similarly diminished our IT talent pool (especially in the ranks of programmers) to the degree where the average programmer can’t actually program.

For a long while we imported tens of thousands of these less-than-adequate programmers and they filled up the holes in mainly large enterprises like banks and finance companies and the public sector where they could hide their lack of real expertise. However, and unfortunately for them, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has accelerated the growth of outsourcing (back to even less qualified people in places like India, Pakistan and the Philippines) and our recent immigrants are now losing their jobs to their home country-men. I find this ironic but maybe you don’t agree.

In another previous blog, the world according to Frank, I predicted a significant rise in unemployment numbers within our IT industry. I also said it has been happening for some time but that the real numbers won’t be clear until around mid-2013.

Greed will continue to drive the outsourcing phenomenon just as it will continue to drive the lowering of standards and the overall effect on our industry will be significant as the available pool of real talent becomes smaller and smaller. Similarly, local opportunities for real professionals are disappearing fast. Many of you will end up having to help justify your boss’s big bonus by approving software created overseas when it isn’t really up to scratch and many more of you will relegated to fixing the crappy code being delivered to your company from the outsourced incompetents. Not a good future for real professionals and definitely not an environment of high job satisfaction.

When I began as a programmer in the 1960s everyone I worked with was highly motivated and everyone had a high aptitude because it was such a difficult industry to enter. You had no chance of working for a mainframe vendor unless you scored at least an A+ on the infamous IBM or Burroughs or ICL or GE or CDC aptitude tests. We were a very small and very exclusive group and to my mind, a dedicated band of professionals who were in IT because we loved it and were really good at it. The average level of expertise was extraordinarily high and this is now patently no longer the case because our industry has changed dramatically since those early and halcyon days.

So what is the future for real IT professionals who are in this industry because they love it and are really good at it? Like with all things, I believe there is good news and there is bad news.

The good news is that as a true IT professional your value is higher but, probably much higher than the less-than-competent manager who is interviewing knows. This is because many incompetent programmers have now managed to become incompetent managers and this situation protects incompetent programmers but punishes highly competent ones. Basically, your manager isn’t smart enough to recognize how different you are to the average programmer in his team. This makes getting paid what you are really worth very difficult.

Ergo, if you are really good at what you do and want to be paid what you are worth and want to do challenging and satisfying work your only chance is to select a company doing challenging work and a smart manager to be interviewed by. Oh, and don’t select a company with a greedy CEO who is looking to increase his bonus by outsourcing (regardless of the result) and lowering costs to impress the board and or shareholders. Sounds like a tough ask to me, thank God I am self-employed.

Would I recommend the IT industry to any young person today in high school contemplating a future career? No I probably wouldn’t. I would probably recommend accountancy, business studies, medicine or dentistry instead. So where am I going to find the really bright, talented and motivated programmers I need in the future? This almost certainly doesn’t bear thinking about but maybe it is an opportunity as most problems are.

We need a new way to select and train IT professionals; the universities are simply not doing a good enough job. Is there anyone out there with the money, ideas and knowledge willing to set up a new kind of highly selective IT training program? If so, please contact me, I will be more than happy to be one of your first customers.

I run a software company called Knowledgeone Corporation that builds an enterprise content management software solution called RecFind 6 and that sells to government and private corporations all around the world but mainly the western world. That is, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the USA and Canada. Thankfully, I don’t sell much into mainland Europe so the imminent collapse of the Eurozone will have little short term impact on my business.

Whereas we are not immune, Australia has fared better than most but mainly due to our resources industry exports, not our self-congratulating politicians. Have you ever noticed how politicians are quick to claim credit for good times but never claim blame for bad times? When bad times arrive all we hear from our previously brilliant economic managers is that it is out of their control and due to external issues like the world slowdown. I wish I could get a job like that.

Because I have to guess what the future will bring I get up early every morning and watch the overseas news and business channels. I also watch the Australian business news when that comes on around 7:00am.  At work I subscribe to a number of business newsletters and I monitor the markets using a Bloomberg app on my iPad. In other words, in the limited time available (I do have a business to run), I try to get as much information as I can about ‘what is happening’.

In December 2011 I wrote a blog titled, “What will be the real impact of the meltdown in Europe?”  I have just read it again and today looks pretty much like I forecast. China has slowed down and Europe and the USA continue to talk rather than do.

Europe is still a mess, Greece will never repay its debts and we are still to face the fallout of bigger countries like Spain also not being able to repay its debts. Germany and France are now in a much worse state than they were in 2011. France is now under a socialist government that doesn’t believe in cutting wages or pensions and Germany is facing the real prospect of moving into a recession.

The UK lurches along with an incompetent government run buy upper-class university debaters and teeters on recession while the USA in election year is going backwards fast and may get much worse in 2013 if they don’t soon fix what they are calling the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ or the imposition of a much heavier tax burden on everyone starting in the new year.

I read an article in the Financial Review this morning where a pundit said no one should expect any improvements in Europe until around 2018. We should be so lucky.

I have listened to Gillard, Swan, Abbott, Bernanke, Obama, Romney, Draghi and countless experts and none have filled me with confidence. In fact, none have yet convinced me that they have any idea how to solve the world’s financial problems.  

It is obvious that we have not improved since December 2011; in fact, we have gone backwards since then.

The well-fed and pampered bureaucrats of the EU are now promoting what they call ‘closer fiscal union’ to solve the problems (and protect their jobs and extensive benefits). However, ‘closer fiscal union’ translates to “Give up your sovereignty and your right to self-determination and let us faceless bureaucrats in Brussels make all the decisions for you” and most ordinary people of Europe are smart enough to know this. This is a solution proposed by the elite for the benefit of the elite and ordinary Europeans would be crazy to accept it.

The alternative of course is the breakup of the Eurozone and the loss of tens of thousands of cushy jobs for the useless paper pushers and senseless legislators now protected within the walls of the EU monolith. It is their jobs they are worried about, not the jobs of ordinary people in Greece and Spain and Portugal and Italy and France, etc.

However, I am now going to forecast that the Eurozone will break up and that all the extended, protracted negotiations and procrastinating going on in Europe is just to delay the inevitable.  It is to give the elite and the banks time to get their houses in order and to minimize the impact of the break-up when it comes. I think we will see the first fall-outs in 2013. Greece is the best bet closely followed by Spain, Portugal and Ireland but an even bigger danger is that the German taxpayers will get tired of paying extravagant southern European pensions and will revolt and force Germany to leave the AU.

In a way the procrastination of the European leaders has been good for Australia because it has given our banks and financial institutions the time they so badly needed to do as much as possible to isolate themselves from the inevitable European collapse. As far as our major banks are concerned the longer the talks go on the better because it allows them to withdraw from Europe and minimize the inevitable impact.

China is slowing and this is to be expected given that since the beginning of modern economies we have moved through economic cycles and that natural cyclic rhythm isn’t likely to change. Ups and downs are part and parcel of the game. However, when you consider the growing demands of the Chinese middle class and the fact that China adds twenty to thirty million new job seekers to its economy each year it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that China will continue to grow for many years to come and will continue to buy our food and resources. In fact, China’s insatiable appetite for resources and food, especially food, will become even more so.

India is also growing but India is so corrupt and so inept at the top that it won’t keep pace with China’s much better managed economy. However, the future demand from Asian powerhouses like China and India and even from lesser economies like Indonesia will continue to power western economies like Australia albeit at a lesser intensity than a few years ago. We in Australia may have to downgrade our expectations and manage our money a little better but we are not yet facing the prospect of a recession, just slower growth and higher unemployment. Worst case is you may have to buy a Toyota instead of a BMW (if you still have a job).

The real and most painful impact in Australia will be in the loss of jobs particularly in the manufacturing and services industries. I think my industry, IT, will be hard hit as our big banks and financial institutions continue or even accelerate their cost cutting programs as they prepare for the mini Armageddon of a Eurozone collapse and of the USA also sliding into recession because of the gross ineptitude of its government. I believe that it probably won’t be until around mid-2013 that we will all become aware of the real extent of job losses in Australia. This coming bad news is also probably why we may see an early federal election called. The current federal government is cunning enough to want to go to the polls on the basis of promises and a good news story, not the unpalatable facts.

Let’s see if I am right.

The financial and IT news services tell us very pessimistic stories about the major PC players like DELL and HP. The general gist is that sales of PCs are down and sales of tablets are up and that the share prices of DELL and HP are falling. Just yesterday, the CEO of HP announced to a stunned market that 2013 will likely be worse than 2012. She also lamented the frequent turnover of HP CEO’s since the demise of Carly Fiorina. But to my mind that was a strange thing to do when also announcing that she won’t be improving anything and in fact will be in charge when things get worse. The mental picture I get is of the captain steering the ship into the rocks. My guess is that the musical chairs game at the top of HP will continue for some time yet because market analysts don’t like bad news and shareholders don’t like falling share prices.

So is the PC dead? Will we see it completely replaced in our homes and offices within a few short years? Are you still planning to buy a new PC? If so, why? Is business still planning to buy more PCs, for example to support Windows 8?  Will business in fact move to Windows 8 in 2013 or 2014 or 2015? Why would anyone be investing in expensive new PC hardware for their home or office? Are there better alternatives available now?

To my mind the global financial crisis that began in 2007/2008 has at least as much to do with falling PC sales as the advent of clever tablets from people like Apple. All over the western world people are holding back on spending money and are simply not replacing ‘older’ PCs or notebooks. In fact, I see the current crop of tablets as complimentary devices to PCs and notebooks, not replacements.  I blogged about this previously in “Why aren’t tablets the single solution yet?” and still believe my arguments to be valid.

My customers for example, still use PCs in the office to run my enterprise content management system RecFind 6 and use notebooks to run it when travelling. However, they are also now demanding that I provide support for a range of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. But my customers are not replacing their PCs and notebooks with tablets, they are using tablets in an appropriate way to extend what they can do with mobile workers.

I also think that companies like DELL and HP are their own worst enemies. They have both exhibited a surprising lack of innovation and salesmanship and their marketing people seem to be about five years behind the market. They have both outsourced their services and support to awful Indian call centres and focussed more on reducing costs than on improving customer service. Customers have a way of showing their disapproval by walking away and I believe this is what they are doing.

So whereas I think tablets are the future I don’t think they are capable enough yet to replace PCs and notebooks in the office environment. I think most people have a tablet in addition to their PC and notebook (and smartphone).

I don’t see tablets, even the next generation, having all the functionality and screen size and power we need to replace PCs in the office. Even in the home, the small screen size of a tablet mitigates its value as does the lack of applications and connectivity; not everyone wants to replace their working backup drive and USB printer just to accommodate Apple.

I also think that PCs and notebooks are too expensive and that Intel, DELL and HP are too used to big margins. In economics we talk about the intersection of the price and demand curves; the theoretical point at which we make the most money. Set the price too high and you sell fewer and make less money. Set the price too low and you sell more but make less profit. Somewhere in the middle is the point where we set our price to get the optimum sales and profit results.

For example, if Apple priced the New iPad at $5,000 if wouldn’t sell any and it wouldn’t make any money but if it priced it at $10 it would sell a shed-load but also wouldn’t make any money. At $400 plus it seems to sell as many as it can produce and also make the maximum profit. Apple has found its optimum price point.

Every vendor struggles for the optimum price point and over time as technology matures and becomes more common, prices have to drop. I don’t think the prices of PCs and notebooks have dropped enough. It’s just economics stupid, your PC and note book prices are way above your optimum price point and that’s one reason why people are not buying them.

So no, I don’t think PCs are dead. I think their sales have dropped because of a combination of the ongoing global financial crisis and poor management and product decisions from the major players like Intel, DELL and HP. Apple has cleverly capitalised on this situation, it didn’t create it. Apple is clearly innovative, HP and DELL are not.

I believe that we are yet to see at least one more re-invention of the PC and notebook, albeit of a higher quality and with more innovation that Intel’s Ultra Book attempt at reinventing the notebook. The re-invention should also come with a new lower pricing algorithm, not a raising of prices as attempted by Intel with the Ultra Book range of notebooks.

So, Intel, DELL and HP; the ball is firmly in your court. You all employ scores of really smart and innovative people. Why don’t you give them the challenge? If you come up with a realistically priced and innovative new PC solution I would certainly buy a few. But, please do something about your service levels; I for one am really tired of being bounced around Indian, Singaporean and Philippine call centres. If foreign call centres are part of the new deal I am afraid that I want no part of it. That model is broken. If you want my business then I demand better service.

I run an application software development company called Knowledgeone Corporation that develops enterprise content management software applications. My customers are generally big business and big government and part of my job as the designer of our applications like RecFind 6 is to predict what my customers are going to ask for in twelve or twenty-four months’ time.

I read a lot of technical papers and forecasts and blogs and try to ingest and evaluate as much as I can about where our business is moving so that I can make the changes necessary in our products to meet future demand. I have been doing this for twenty-nine years and like most pundits, sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong.

Like Gartner (that never seems to get it right) I have been silly enough to publish a number of my predictions as white papers and they make interesting reading years later. Some examples are listed below:

2009   Windows 7 – Frank’s views

2007   Technology as a Tool – Where is Records and Document Management Heading?

1998   The Thin Client – The Next Panacea?

1997   Knowledge Management – The Next Challenge?

1996   Information and Records Management Towards 2000 – Electronic Document Management Principles.

1995   Document Management, Records Management, Image Management, Workflow Management,…What? The I.D.E.A.

I have also published more predictions in my blog, a few examples follow:

09/2011        Will developers, Corporates and Government upgrade to Windows 8?

11/2011        Mobile and Web – The future of applications?

12/2011        The real impact of mobilization – how will it affect the way we work?

01/2012        Will desktop virtualization be the final nail in the computer room coffin?

03/2012        What is the future of software applications in 2013 and beyond?

The obvious problem with publishing prediction is that you can’t always get it right and you will be judged at a later time when everyone is a lot wiser. However, people in my business have to predict the future because we start working on a new product a year or more before we are able to sell it. In a way, it is a silly business. We invest man years and large amounts of money designing, building and testing software applications long before we can get any kind of return on our investment.

Games makers have a similar problem, they have to invest millions and many man years long before they know if their game is going to be a success or not. This is why we have to predict the future and why we need to get it right more times than we get it wrong.

Right now I happen to believe that the world of software applications is going through a major paradigm shift. The advent of powerful mobile devices that really began with the first iPhone has changed the way most people want to work with applications. Like the PC network paradigm change of the early 1980’s, this one is also end-user driven, not IT Department driven. In fact you may conclude that the often reactionary IT heads of the commercial world have been dragged kicking and screaming into this revolution just as they were in the early 1980’s.

The availability of smarter and more powerful mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad have already had a major impact on PC and notebook sales and have caused major vendors like Intel to re-evaluate their product lines and strategies. In Intel’s case it first tried to leverage off old technologies with the promotion of ultra-books and now it has announced a move into new processors for mobile devices to rival those from companies like ARM and Qualcomm. Similarly, Microsoft, late to the party as usual, is now focusing on its new range of surface tablets and new versions of Windows 8 to support mobile devices.

As I said above, it is significant than none of these major changes have been driven by the usual suspects like Microsoft and Intel, they have been caught napping and are now in catch-up mode.

So, what are my chances of correctly predicting the future if giants like Intel and Microsoft with their huge budgets and research departments can’t get it right? Or, is the problem not one of budget but one of corporate arrogance? I will leave that judgement to you.

In my view the move to faster, smarter, more powerful and more user-friendly mobile devices is inexorable. When I now look at my office with its bulky PCs and masses of wires and connections it looks like a museum honouring the 20^th century. My iPad in contrast, looks like the beginning of the 21^st century; still not there yet but definitely the progenitor of coming office computing.

I see the same picture when looking at enterprise application software. Most of it, including my product RecFind 6 (based on the very latest Microsoft .NET technology), needs to be completely redesigned for the coming mobile world and this is the real challenge.

Everyone now knows (or should know) how to design games and small simple apps for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad but most of us are still struggling with the redesign of heavy-duty, feature-rich and enterprise-strength applications like RecFind 6 for the new mobile platforms.  We can’t just scale them down, we have to come up with a completely new way to communicate with our mobile end users. We have to discard the technology we are most familiar with and re-invent our solutions using new and unfamiliar technology.

Just like Intel and Microsoft we have to change our game and we have to do it fast because this particular revolution isn’t being driven by us, it is being driven by end-users and the innovative people at companies like ARM and Qualcomm and Apple all of whom have had very little impact on corporate application software in the recent past.

The current paradigm shift is still in its early days but it will completely change the way we all run our businesses in the near future. If only I could predict exactly how.

I own and run a software company that designs, build and supports enterprise content management solutions. As such I have a lot of servers and workstations and performance and reliability are of paramount importance to me.

I had been a loyal Dell customer for many years. I have bought 40 or 50 servers, hundreds of workstations and dozens of notebooks plus other assorted paraphernalia such as racks, projectors etc. Back a few years ago Dell was a great company to do business with and its website made the selection and ordering of all the equipment I needed a breeze. Its support, both sales and technical was also top notch.

Even though I still think that Dell servers and OptiPlex workstations are great quality I no longer buy anything from Dell.

The reasons are to do with lousy service and the quality of its Australian web site.

The website is no longer easy to use or bug free and it is just annoying and no longer the really helpful resource it used to be. I have tried to tell Dell this on many occasions but no one is listening.

I also hate dealing with Dell’s Indian support centres and absolutely refuse to deal with an Indian based sales representative. If Dell wants my business then it needs to start doing business in Australia with Australian resident staff.

Every time in the recent past when we have had problems with Dell equipment it has been a nightmare trying to get things resolved. Again, I have gone out of my way to document these occurrences and tell the local Dell people but no one is listening because nothing has changed. If anything, and based on my experience today trying to get service for a Dell printer, it has gotten considerably worse. I do not enjoy being bounced around Indian call centres. Why does Dell senior management think it can reduce its costs by making me waste hours or days of valuable time when all that should be required is a few minutes?

Obviously, the powers to be at the top of Dell think reducing costs by reducing the service level is good business. Let me tell you as an ex Dell customer that it is not good business. Because I am a small customer in the scheme of things Dell probably doesn’t care that I have stopped buying Dell equipment. But, I can’t be the only Dell customer that is absolutely fed up with the new model with everything outsourced to India and the annoyances of the Dell website.

My point is that Dell used to be the best hardware company in the world to deal with and that it had the most reliable equipment and the best service level. Then someone at the top had all these bright ideas about how to lower costs. In my humble opinion, that person at the top needs to be replaced with someone who understands that customer service is paramount and that as the service level drops then so too will sales.

I still love my super reliable Dell servers and OptiPlex workstations and would dearly like to deal with Dell again but I and my staff are simply no longer willing to put up with the frustration of trying to do business with Dell via Indian call centres.

Hopefully someone with clout in Dell will read this Blog and realize that Dell’s fall in sales world-wide has less to do with the global financial crisis and more to do with its cost cutting. Hopefully that person will also be concerned with the massive eroding of its customer base and want to do something about it.

Here is my free advice. Dump your useless and unbelievably annoying Indian call centres and bring support back to the local country. Stop playing around with your website and give us the previously easy to navigate, easy to use and easy to configure and order website of previous years.

I would love to start buying Dell equipment again but you have alienated me just as I am sure that you have alienated hundreds of other previously loyal Dell customers.

Dear Dell, please give me a reason to come back.

I may be wrong but I think it was AIIM that first coined the phrase Enterprise Content Management to describe both our industry and our application solutions.

Whereas the term isn’t as nebulous as Knowledge Management it is nevertheless about as useful when trying to understand what organizations in this space actually do. At its simplest level it is a collective term for a number of related business applications like records management, document management, imaging, workflow, business process management, email management and archiving, digital asset management, web site content management, etc.

To simple people like me the more appropriate term or label would be Information Management but as I have already covered this in a previous Blog I won’t beleaguer the point in this one.

When trying to define what enterprise content management actually means or stands for we can discard the words ‘enterprise’ and ‘management’ as superfluous to our needs and just concentrate on the key word ‘content’. That is, we are talking about systems that in some way create and manage content.

So, what exactly is meant by the term ‘content’?

In the early days of content management discussions we classified content into two broad categories, structured and unstructured. Basically, structured content had named sections or labels and unstructured content did not. Generalising even further we can say that an email is an example of structured content because it has commonly named, standardised and accessible sections or labels like ‘Sender’, ‘Recipient’, ‘Subject’ etc., that we can interrogate and rely on to carry a particular class or type of information. The same general approach would regard a Word document as unstructured because the content of a Word document does not have commonly named and standardised sections or labels. Basically a Word document is an irregular collection of characters that you have to parse and examine to determine content.

Like Newtonian physics, the above generalisations do not apply to everything and can be argued until the cows come home. In truth, every document has an accessible structure of some kind. For example, a Word document has an author, a size, a date written, etc. It is just that it is far easier to find out who the recipient of an email was than the recipient of a Word document. This is because there is a common and standard ‘Tag’ that tells us who the recipient is of an email and there is no such common and standard tag for a Word document.

In our business we call ‘information about information’ (e.g., the recipient and date fields on an email) Metadata. If an object has recognizable Metadata then it is far easier to process than an object without recognizable Metadata. We may then say that adding Metadata to an object is the same as adding structure.

Adding structure is what we do when we create a Word document using a template or when we add tags to a Word document. We are normalizing the standard information we require in our business processes so the objects we deal with have the structure we require to easily and accurately identify and process them.

This is of course one of the long-standing problems in our industry, we spend far too much time and money trying to parse and interpret unstructured objects when we should be going back to the coal face and adding structure when the object is first created. This is of course relatively easy to do if we are creating the objects (e.g., a Word document) but not easy to achieve if we are receiving documents from foreign sources like our customers, our suppliers or the government. Unless you are the eight-hundred pound gorilla (like Walmart) it is very difficult to force your partners to add the structure you require to make processing as fast and as easy and as accurate as possible.

There have been attempts in the past to come up with common ‘standards’ that would have regulated document structure but none have been successful. The last one was when XML was the bright new kid on the block and the XML industry rushed headlong into defining XML standards for every conceivable industry to facilitate common structures and to make data transfer between different organizations as easy and as standard as possible. The various XML standardisation projects sucked up millions or even billions of dollars but did not produce the desired results; we are still spending billions of dollars each year parsing unstructured documents trying to determine content.

So, back to the original question, what exactly is Enterprise Content Management? The simple answer is that it is the business or process of extracting useful information from objects such as emails and PDFs and Word documents and then using that information in a business process. It is all about the process of capturing Metadata and content in the most accurate and expeditious manner possible so we can automate business processes as much as possible.

If done properly, it makes your job more pleasant and saves your organization money and it makes your customers and suppliers happier. As such it sounds a lot like motherhood (who is going to argue against it?) but it certainly isn’t like manna from heaven. There is always a cost and it is usually significant. As always, you reap what you sow and effort and cost produces rewards.

Is content management something you should consider? The answer is definitely yes with one proviso; please make sure that the benefits are greater than the cost.

I own and run a software company building enterprise content management solutions (RecFind 6) and I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Windows.

I love Windows because it is a universal platform I can develop for that provides me access to ninety-percent plus of the business and government organizations in the world.  I only need one set of source code and one set of development skills and I can leverage off this to offer my solutions to virtually any organization in any location. We may say that Microsoft Windows is ubiquitous.

I hate Windows because it is overly complex, unnecessarily difficult to build software for, buggy and causes me to have to spend far more money on software development than I ought to. There are many times each year when all I really want to do is assemble all the Microsoft programmers in one place and then bang their heads together and shout at them, “for heaven’s sake, why don’t you guys just talk to each other!”

Linux on the other hand, even in its many manifestations (one of its main problems), is not ubiquitous and it does not provide me with an entry point to ninety-percent of the world’s businesses and government agencies. This is why I don’t develop software for Linux.

Because I don’t develop application software for Linux I am not an expert in Linux but I have installed and run Ubuntu as a desktop operating system and I really like it. It is simple, clean and easy to use; more ‘Apple-like’ than ‘Windows-like’ to my eyes and all the better for it. It is also a great software development platform for programmers especially using the Eclipse IDE. It is also free and most of the office software you need (like OpenOffice) is also free. It also runs happily on virtually any PC or notebook and seems to be a lot faster than Windows.

So, Ubuntu (a flavour of Linux but a very good one) is free, most of the office software you need is also free, it looks good, runs on your hardware and is easy to use and uncomplicated. So why isn’t it ubiquitous? Why are people and organizations all over the world paying for (and struggling with – who remembers Vista?) inferior Windows when Linux varieties like Ubuntu are both free and better? Why are users and organizations now planning to pay to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8 when alternative operating systems like Ubuntu will do the job and are free?

I read a lot of technical papers and IT blogs and I notice that the Linux community has been having similar discussions for years. As an ‘outsider’ (i.e., not a Linux zealot) it is pretty obvious to me that the Linux community is the main reason Linux is not ubiquitous. Please read the following ZDNet link and then tell me what you think.

http://www.zdnet.com/linus-torvalds-on-the-linux-desktops-popularity-problems-7000003641/

When I read an article like this two terms come immediately to mind, internecine bickering or sibling rivalry. How many versions of Linux do we need? The Linux fraternity calls these distributions or ‘distros’ to the insiders.  At last count there are around 600 ‘distros’ of which 300 are actively maintained.  Ubuntu is just one of these distros. How would the business world fare if there were 300 versions of Windows? Admittedly, most of the 300 have been built for a specialised use and the real list of general use versions of Linux is much smaller and includes product names such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Debian, Arch, openSUSE, Red hat and about a dozen more.

But, it gets worse. On Ubuntu alone there are there main desktop environments to choose from, GNOME, KDE and Xfce.  Are you confused yet? Is it now obvious why Linux is not the default desktop operating system? It probably isn’t obvious to the squabbling Linux insider community but it is patently obvious to everyone else.

Linux isn’t the default desktop operating system because there is not a single standard and there is never likely to be a single standard. No software developer is going to invest millions of dollars in building commercial applications for Linux because of this. Without a huge library of software applications there is no commercial market for Linux. Windows reigns supreme despite its painful problems because it provides a single platform and because software developers do invest in building millions of commercial applications for the windows operating system.

Until such time as the Linux community stops its in-fighting and produces a single robust, supported version of Linux (when hell freezes over I hear you say) the situation will not change. The inferior desktop operating system Windows will continue to dominate and Linux will remain the plaything of propeller-heads and techies and old guys like me who really like it (well, the Ubuntu version that is, there are too many distros for me to become an expert in all of them and that is the core of the problem).

I run a software company and I design and build an enterprise strength content management system called RecFind 6 which among other things, handles all the needs of physical records management.

This is fine if I have a big corporate or government customer because the cost is appropriate to the scale of the task at hand. However it isn’t fine when we receive lots of inquiries from much smaller organizations like small law forms that need a records management solution but only have a very small budget.

A very recent inquiry from a small but successful engineering company was also a problem because they didn’t have any IT infrastructure. They had no servers and used Google email. However, they still had a physical records management problem as well as an electronic document management problem but our solution was way outside of the ballpark.

Like any businessman I don’t like to see business walk away especially after we have spent valuable consultancy time helping the customer to understand the problem and define the need.

We have had a lot of similar inquiries lately and it has started me thinking about the need for a new type of product for small business, one that doesn’t require the overhead and expense of an enterprise-grade solution. It should also be one that doesn’t require in-house servers and a high overhead and maintenance cost.

Given our recent experience building a couple of iOS (for the iPhone and iPad) and Android (for any Android phone or tablet) apps I am of the opinion that any low cost but technically clever and easy-to-use solution should be based around a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet.

The lack of an in-house server wouldn’t be a problem because we would host the solution servers at a data centre in each country we operate in. Programming it wouldn’t be a problem because that is what we do and we already have a web services API as the foundation.

The only challenge I see is the need to get really creative about the functionality and the user interface. There is no way I can implement all the advanced functionality of the full RecFind 6 product on a mobile device and there is no way I can re-use the user interface from either the RecFind 6 smart-client or web-client. Even scaled down the user interface would be unsuitable for a mobile device; it needs a complete redesign. It isn’t just a matter of adapting to different form factors (screen sizes), it is about using the mobile device in the most appropriate way. It is about designing a product that leverages off the unique capabilities of a mobile device, not trying to force fit an application designed for Windows.

The good news is that there is some amazing technology now available for mobile devices that could easily be put to use for commercial business purposes even though a lot of it was designed for light weight applications and games. Three examples of very clever new software for mobile devices are Gimbal Context Aware, Titanium Mobile SDK and Vuforia Augmented Reality. But, these three development products are just the tip of the iceberg; there is literally a plethora of clever development tools and new products both in the market and coming to market in the near future.

As a developer, right now the Android platform looks to be my target. This is mainly because of the amount of software being developed for Android and because of the open nature of Android. It allows me to do far more than Apple allows me to do on its sandboxed iOS operating system.

Android also makes it far easier for me to distribute and support my solutions. I love iOS but Apple is just a little too anal and controlling to suit my needs. For example, I require free access to the file system and Apple doesn’t allow that. Nor does it give me the freedom I need to be able to attach devices my customers will need; no standard USB port is a huge pain for application developers.

I am sorry that I don’t have a solution for my smaller customers yet but I have made the decision to do the research and build some prototypes. RecFind 6 will be the back-end residing on a hosted server (in the ‘Cloud’) because it has a superset of the functionality required for my new mobile app. It is also the perfect development environment because the RecFind 6 Web Services SDK makes it easy for me to build apps for any mobile operating system.

So, I already have the backend functionality, the industrial-strength and scalable relational database and the Web Services API plus expertise in Android development using Eclipse and Java. Now all I have to do to produce my innovative new mobile app is find the most appropriate software and development platforms and then get creative.

It is the getting creative bit that is the real challenge. Wish me luck and watch this space.