The Portable Consultant’s recent RFP was whittled down to two or three vendors and this was the week they did their demo presentations, the penultimate step in the process (all that’s left is price negotiations).

Although our RFP is for a web content management (WCM) system, the client has been interested in enterprise content management (ECM) vendors from the start because:

1) they have no ECM systems currently in place and…

2) at least some of the business case for the WCM overlapped with ECM functionality.

We reinforced this thinking with a WCM RFP that also touched on document management (DM), records management (RM), and digital asset management (DAM) requirements.

As designed, the RFP scoring scheme brought to the top the WCM vendors for whom WCM was just one component of a full ECM suite. The leaders each have full-blown ECM solutions which include WCM, DM, RM (including physical records), DAM, and imaging. This minimizes integration and simplifies pricing, maintenance, and support.

The WCM project team managed to prepare a tightly scripted demo outline that the vendors were told to follow. We didn’t want them simple display their respective strong points and leave us trying to compare apples with oranges. Our script touched on most of the demonstrable features that we listed in our RFP, anyway. There was no reason to go anywhere else because all the scored points were in the script.

So, although all vendors demonstrated what amounted to full ECM functionality the one that stuck most closely to the script is the one that got the client’s full attention… no one in the audience had to worry about what feature was being demonstrated, they just followed a printed checklist.

All the shortlisted vendors’ products met the requirements, but the vendor who stuck to the script is the one that left the most positive impression.

The moral of the story: if you are using a formal RFP process to select ECM (or other) solutions, consider scripting their demonstration and sync RFP requirements. If you’re a vendor, be sure you stick to the script.

Cheers,
-pmh

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