Today someone asked what The Portable Consultant knew about Hyperion, the “Business Performance Management Software” company.

Now, I’d heard the name and seen some presentations in relation to their financial solutions for corporate governance and regulatory compliance, but I thought I should have another look at their web site before I replied to the email. In doing so I stumbled across an article that began with the following fascinating words:

“In the aboriginal language of Dyirbal, ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ is one of four general categories of objects in the world.”

Wow…

The article is entitled Structured Text and Unstructured Data [update: now only available at Internet Archive- here] and it very quickly gets into categorization, textural data mining, ontologies, and similar issues…

“The Dyirbal language uses four basic categorizations for all things:

I. Bayi: (human) males; animals
II. Balan: (human) females; water; fire; fighting
III. Balam: nonflesh food
IV. Bala: everything not in the other classes.

Let’s examine how they categorize and why:…”

Most of the time I’m more concerned with practical matters… such as whether the ECM vendors responding to my RFP really have an open and extensible architecture. But sometimes I like to ponder the wider issues of information architecture and knowledge management. It’s not that I’m expert in those areas, but I wouldn’t mind being a student again. If I were a student, I wouldn’t mind having this article’s author as a teacher. He, or she, knows how to grab your attention and stir your imagination.

The Dyirbal language strikes me as so poetic. It reminds me of a Star Trek story, Episode 2/Season 5 – Darmok, featuring an alien race who could not be understood because they spoke in metaphors. The point being that, to differing extents, so do we all.

When I google^TM “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” I come up with this book by George Lakoff on Amazon. Wikipedia tells me the sad fact that there are only about five speakers of the Dyirbal language left in Australia.

My “take away” was the article summary which states:

“In the future, more companies will realize the need for extending their Business Performance Management solutions with ECM and textual data mining. Partnerships and interfaces with textual mining companies and ECM vendors will increase.”

I think I understand that… and the Dyirbal classification of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
-pmh

The “small” web content management project The Portable Consultant has been working on has awakened the slumbering ECM giant within the client organization.

The manager with whom I have been working, was asked to present an ECM roadmap to key executives that would place our WCM project in the context of the full pantheon of ECM: document management, imaging, collaboration, digital asset management, records management, and a portal infrastructure.

This is a pretty tall order, even for an ECM consultant, but together with our project’s business analyst the three of us assembled a reasonable roadmap with Best Practices as our compass and some high-level organizational requirements as our guide. We packaged ECM as business processes wrapped around ECM tools, like the web content management system, and presented them in a logical sequence – well, a “reasonably logical” might be a better term given that WCM was, for historical reasons, the first ECM project out of the gate.

The challenge in a presentation such as this is to convey enough detail to get support at the executive level without getting bogged down in details, especially technical details.

As well as the logical (and stunningly beautiful!) Visio diagrams I prepared for the PowerPoint presentation we also gave out full colour copies of the ECM at WORK poster from AIIM, the ECM Association. As soon as I came across it I knew this poster was perfect for our purposes. It reinforced many of the points made in the presentation and highlights areas that might otherwise have been missed by our audience: Compliance, Collaboration, Cost, and Continuity. Three of these are difficult concepts to sell because they are often not seen as having a great deal of quantifiable value. The fourth section on Cost tells it like it is: “While ECM can be a costly initiative, what are the costs of not properly managing your content?” Our presentation could have used those words, but it means more when it comes from an industry association like AIIM.

Registration is required to download the AIIM ECM at Work poster, but registration as an “associate” is free and the site has a lot of very useful material for anyone interested in ECM.

Cheers,
-pmh