AIIM 2002: Insight by the Bay

by Penny Lunt

Web services has been a buzz-phrase for at least six months. There's good reason for this, according to David DeWalt, CEO of Documentum, Pleasanton, CA.

"Web services will increase productivity," says DeWalt. "Developers will be able to grab mini applications and string them together to create enterprise software that fills their needs without any additional programming." And the kicker, music to any technology executive's ears: "This will speed time to market and lower development expenses."

The time has come for business technology leaders to educate themselves about Web services and other emerging topics such as digital rights management, e-process automation and the still-developing content management market.

"You don't want technology to creep up on you," DeWalt warns. "For example, when the Internet boom first started, many companies were scrambling to get Web sites up without taking the time to figure out how to best leverage their content assets or publish that content to the Web." Such a slap-dash approach to a rapidly developing technology could set your company months or even years behind the competition.

DeWalt is among the keynote speakers at the annual exhibition and conference of AIIM International (www.aiim.org) of Silver Spring, MD. AIIM 2002 will be held at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, March 5-8. While the exhibition is expected to showcase nearly 300 exhibitors, the conference portion of the event, which begins on March 4, will include 90 educational sessions covering Internet technologies and enterprise content management issues. Some of the most intriguing sessions include:

Disaster recovery: In a keynote session, executives from two companies that had offices in New York's World Trade Center will describe their recovery efforts in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Roseann McSorley, Deutsche Bank's director of business continuity, will describe how the international bank was able to get its fund trading system back online within five days. Carol Moon, IT director at insurance company Aon Corp., will explain how the company's staff restored a lost customer service center and resumed business within 24 hours.

All-day tutorials: To be held the Sunday preceding the conference, these sessions will provide in-depth insight on important document and content management challenges. "XML's Role in Content Management" will teach how to develop XML strategies that will extend the capabilities of a document or content management system. "Legacy Document Conversion" will answer the question, "What do you do with your old documents once you get a new content management system?" Finally, "Enterprise Profiling" will tell how to shift from a departmental implementation of document and records management to an enterprisewide framework.

Content management: Pat Turocy, principal analyst at Chicago-based Doculabs, will help attendees find their best fit among leading content management products, including those from BroadVision, Documentum, FileNet, Stellent, Microsoft, Divine and Vignette. Lisa Bos, VP at Really Strategies, Lansdale, PA, will explain the role of XML in content management, including how XML facilitates content storage and editing by providing a means of marking up content for delivery to other systems (or clients). Further, she will describe how to use XML behind the scenes as part of content management software, how to capture content temporarily with XML prior to its being loaded into a database, and how to use XML as a way for software components to talk to each other.

E-business and e-processes: Andrew Warzecha, director of META Group, will present a "State of the Market Study" on process automation.

Standards and best practices: Bernard Chester, principal at Imerge Consulting, will present recent developments in the AIIM XML standards effort.

Case studies: Executives of BellSouth will tell how the company used work order fulfillment automation to increase installation speed and strengthen its competitive advantage. The telco automated its approval process and combined documents and design drawings into digital folders accessible to 6,000 internal users.

Todd Hollenbeck, managing director at Federal Express, will provide a look inside the world's largest distributed capture system.

Representatives of the City of Bakersfield, CA, and DePaul University will tell how they're using business process management software to become more efficient.

Portals: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at London-based Ovum, will explain the right and wrong ways of implementing portals.

The future of computing and document management: Dan Elam, president of eVisory Consulting, Richmond, VA, will examine the implications and possibilities of a wide range of technologies, including PCs, handhelds, smart avatars, massively parallel processing, digital paper, HDTV and cell phones. He'll predict which technologies will make it big, which are doomed to fail, what to expect from leading-edge technology and what you can do now to position for the future.

Introductory sessions: For those new to document and content management, introductory sessions early in the conference will provide a foundation for the more intense seminars that follow. "Introduction to Content Management" will explain how to find the right solutions for specific business needs — including matrices that match business content, workflow and Internet/intranet delivery requirements with the appropriate solutions.

In an introduction to digital rights management, Jeffrey Wood, director of content engineering at Really Strategies, will explain the technologies fighting to become digital rights standards; the companies vying for first-mover status; the concerns of publishers and consumers; and the digital rights management's impact on security, transactions and legal liability. "Introduction to Imaging and Document Management" will explain all media, hardware, communications and software requirements and what tough questions to ask vendors.

Keep Up With Changing Technology

Technology insight and foresight await visitors to AIIM 2002. If you drive technology decisions, AIIM is the prescription for better, more informed choices. "As technology advances, new technologies are adopted faster than ever before," says DeWalt of Documentum. "Attending a conference like this one gives you an opportunity to learn from speakers, talk to your colleagues, and find out what other people are doing to prepare and how these technologies will benefit users."