Changes

Today is my first day at AIIM. 

Let me back up a bit. I have left Access Sciences to join AIIM as a full-time employee. This was not a change that I anticipated or took lightly - Access Sciences is a wonderful organization filled with smart, dedicated people. I am grateful to Janice Anderson and Anne Tulek for having given me the opportunity to work there since April 2007. 

Why the change? It's no secret that I've been interested in the role of social media in the enterprise for a number of years. I've gotten the opportunity to write articles on how to manage these tools as records and I've developed workshops ranging from lunch meetings to full-day seminars on effective use and management of social media. I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of folks in this space at the defunct Office 2.0 conference, the always-forward-thinking Defrag conference in Denver, and other industry events. 

I've noticed that there are lots of discussions about how to "do" social media from the perspective of the individual user of the tools and with a focus on commercial tools. There are some folks talking about the enterprise perspective, but not nearly enough of them. And it's only been recently that anyone has addressed the need to manage some of the outputs of these tools in a consistent fashion. 

AIIM recently brought in Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, to help it determine where the industry is headed and how to position itself accordingly. Some of the results of this work can be found at http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory or http://www.slideshare.net/jmancini77. In a nutshell, the idea is that for its entire existence AIIM has been the association for "Systems of Record" (SOR) - those places where content is stored, secured, managed, accessed, and published. But systems of record aren't enough. Organizations are increasingly collaborating in a non-document-centric way. Instead, collaboration takes place through LinkedIn, and Yammer, and many other tools that don't always lend themselves to management via SOR. 

Organizations are turning to what Moore calls "Systems of Engagement" (SOE). These systems have their roots in consumer technologies like Facebook and Twitter, smart phones, and geolocation-enabled services. Organizations are successfully using these tools to scale their engagement with customers and partners; enable their communications with rich media and location and presence awareness; and engage customers where they are, on their time, through tools they are already using. My role is to help organizations determine how best to leverage SOEs to drive collaboration and engagement with their customers, partners, and constituents.  At the same time, my background in SOR will help those organizations to ensure that they use SOEs in a way that is defensible and that meets applicable compliance requirements. 

It's my first day so there is some fuzziness over exactly what this will look like. But I think it's an exciting time to be in this industry. I look forward to restarting this blog post and to starting the work required to make this a success.