There's nothing like time constraints to focus a message, in the instance I'm reporting today, ten minutes for Lubor Ptacek, VP for Product Marketing at enterprise content management vendor Open Text, to give a run-down of The [Content] Problems Waiting To Be Solved. Here's my report...

Seth Grimes, Contributor

November 10, 2010

2 Min Read

There's nothing like time constraints to focus a message, in the instance I'm reporting today, ten minutes alloted to Lubor Ptacek, VP for Product Marketing at enterprise content management vendor Open Text, to give a run-down of The [Content] Problems Waiting To Be Solved. Here's my report...This report is my first shot at live-blogging. I'm at Open Text Content World, where Ptacek spoke as part of an Open Talk Theater series that brings company executives before small groups in a much more useful form, for me at least, than the ethereal ballroom keynotes that execs seem typically to prefer. (Disclosure: Open Text is paying me for market-strategy consulting. I did register for OTCW before that contract was in place and I had not had contact with Ptacek until the talk.)

The problems:

  1. Too much information… and where do we put it?

  2. Storage: What we storing goes beyond text, and sizes increase given in quality.

  3. (Decent) Metadata... "is a massive problem that has not been solved today… If your strategy relies on users, you will fail."

  4. Social Compliance... "is not going to happen [voluntarily]. We have to find other ways."

  5. Desktop. "But what is a desktop? 90% of content lives on [personal] devices… on multiple devices, and they are not synchronizing with each other."

  6. Security. "The security of the ECM suite doesn't matter, once [the content] is outside the suite…. Rights management has been out there for 15 years, but usage is less than 1%."

  7. User interface. With QWERTY keyboards, we're using an interface that was designed to slow us down.

  8. Electronic Trail... via GPS, via cameras with face recognition, via recording of financial transactions. "Either we live with this Orwellian society… or we will have to change legislation or develop a very different tolerance toward privacy."

  9. Privacy. There is a much bigger issue than [information disclosed on platforms such as Facebook]. It is compilation of information from social and other sources to create profiles, a serious problem.

  10. Content Types. "There is much more content to come:" voice mail, mapping, analytics, machine-generated data. "It's big, hard to manage, hard to analyze, but useful and needs to be shared."

  11. E-Signatures. "Sooner or later, the law will need to change to allow biometric devices [for identification]."

  12. Content Borders. Yet "wasn't the Internet supposed to be borderless?"

What made Ptacek's talk worth reporting was its topic and content. What made it refreshing is that it was decidedly not a product pitch. Open Text is on the road to solving many of the problems Ptacek outlined, but the company is not there yet.

For more, follow Ptacek on Twitter at @lptacek.There's nothing like time constraints to focus a message, in the instance I'm reporting today, ten minutes for Lubor Ptacek, VP for Product Marketing at enterprise content management vendor Open Text, to give a run-down of The [Content] Problems Waiting To Be Solved. Here's my report...

About the Author(s)

Seth Grimes

Contributor

Seth Grimes is an analytics strategy consultant with Alta Plana and organizes the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. Follow him on Twitter at @sethgrimes

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