C. Clint Bolte & Associates

Philadelphia’s Convention Center was the site of the seventh annual AIIM Expo and Conference on March 30 through April 2. Held in conjunction with the On Demand Conference, preregistration for the two conclaves was reported by the organizers to be comparable to 2008 or about 20,000 attendees. This figure would make this is the largest convention among all those convened in Philadelphia. Exhibitor participation was likewise strong with over 300 trade show booths.

AIIM seminars comprised 19 tracks and 130+ conference sessions featuring over 100 case studies. This gathering claims to be the world's largest and most important annual event for the Content and Information Management industry. Records Managers and IT buying teams attend to learn the optimal means for capturing, storing, managing, finding, sharing, compiling and analyzing information.

Publishers, corporate brand owners and media buyers, comprise a segment of this enterprise content management (ECM) arena that AIIM engulfs. However, printers must clearly be selecting technologies, work flows, and business processes that are both consistent and compatible with those strategically delineated for the entire company by their client IT departments. This conference accomplished just that. Hence, this article will concentrate solely on the AIIM Conference highlights rather than the more familiar On Demand Conference.

The President of AIIM, John Mancini traditionally highlights the annual “State of the ECM Industry” as a keynote address. In summary this report found that managing electronic office documents is still challenging to 47% of organizations. Modern business communication channels – instant messages, text messages, blogs, twitters, RSS, and wikis – are uncontrolled and off the corporate radar for 75% of businesses. However, this research found that whereas two years ago compliance was the main driver for bringing this content into a controlled and searchable environment, cost savings and efficiency are now the main motivating factors.

As a most appropriate and timely illustration of how content management and web 2.0 can and should work, Mancini outlined the lessons learned from how these technologies contributed to Obama winning the Presidency. The statistics were drawn from the article “Barack Obama: How Content Management and Web 2.0 Helped Win the White House” by Garrett M. Graff appearing in the March-April 2009 issue of Infonomics (infonomicsmag.com)

Lesson #1: Enterprise Web 2.0 (E2.0) is not going away.

In 2007 Obama spent $2.0 million in IT infrastructure. IT was not a “bolt on” but an integral part of the political strategic planning process. The Obama IT team, which numbered 90 by the end of the campaign, managed 100 websites, which greatly facilitated the recruitment of volunteers and the unheard of quantity of 3 million individual contributors to the campaign coffers.

Lesson #2: E 2.0 is a tool, not a strategy.

The Obama camp overcame the classic three ECM implementation problems, which corporate practitioners confess to encounter with regularity. They are (1) process and organizational issues, (2) poor procedures and enforcement, and (3) lack of adequate internal training.

Lesson #3: It’s still marketing!!!

Here are a few of the statistics to verify the penetration offered by this new media.

                              Obama           McCain
Facebook;
   Members              5 million       600 thousand
   Special features  Video links     none
YouTube;	
   Videos               1,827           330
   Views                120 million     26 million
   Subscribers       149 thousand    28 thousand

The Obama Brand was effectively segmented across demographics. His famous 37-minute speech on race delivered in Philadelphia was later viewed by 8 million on YouTube, which was far more than saw it live on television. The Obama camp had dedicated specialized iPhone applications and an exhaustive library of 3 million cellphone numbers, which were used extensively in custom text messaging particularly in the last few days and hours leading up to election day. In October just before the election Obama’s campaign for the first time ever was advertising on Xbox games!

Lesson #4: It’s about organizing, not networking!

Using MySQL™ and PHP, a single core database to serve all MyBarackObama.com (MyBO…imaginative acronym!) users in all their core activities – donations, social networking, and activism. (MySQL™ is a widely used open source database; PHP, launched in 1994 as “Personal Home Page,” is a widely used scripting language for producing dynamic Web pages). Needless to say neither the candidate nor any key staffer exhibited any webophobia. Both the McCain and Clinton camps were reported to exhibit regular friction between their online staffs and the more traditional senior staff.