(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Chris McNulty, Senior Product Manager
for SharePoint and OneDrive at Microsoft.
Over the past decade, as part of digital transformation,
organizations have increasingly turned to the cloud
to help manage their burgeoning arsenal of digital content.
Content has always been king, but as we've seen
organizations move from petabytes to zettabytes and beyond,
struggling with this is expected
to be a challenge for years to come.
However, many organizations have learned greatly
from patterns of the past.
That's why today, Microsoft is joined by three visionaries
from the world of content.
Today we have John Mancini, Chairman Emeritus of AIM,
Cheryl McKinnon, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research,
and Ian Story, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft.
So John, welcome.
- Good to be here, Chris.
- Tell me a little about how you got started
in this wonderful world of content.
- I started with AIM about 25 years ago
and the focus then, was on
documents and workflow and so we migrated
the organization to focus more on web-based technologies
and now increasingly on more technologies focused
on what we call intelligent information management.
So it's been a long journey, a lot of changes
but at the core has always been people,
process and technology.
- So Cheryl, you're Principal Analyst
at Forrester Research.
- I am.
- How did you come to be part of this
wonderful world of content?
- Well I actually started as a history major.
I didn't come from a technology background.
- Interesting. - And I started to realize
through a series of summer jobs doing my masters that
the world was going digital.
So I kind of pivoted into the technology world
just to understand how we're gonna be able
to preserve and protect a lot of our digital heritage.
- So Ian, as Principal Program Manager at Microsoft,
although I know, I'm not sure everyone understands
what that means in your day to day.
- Sure, so I sit on the leadership team for SharePoint
and OneDrive, and I have three primary functions.
The first is working with customers,
second is working with partners,
third is working with analysts and in my spare time
I'm also Microsoft's representative
on the AIM board of directors.
- Any history that you want to share with us?
- Well you know I started in this industry 20 years ago
at a manufacturing organization.
I was a customer, a warehouser, and I worked on a tool
there called Content Services.
From there I went into banking Washington Mutual
and then JPMorgan Chase and then I spent a few years
working for a competitor of Microsoft's, IBM
also a partner, of course, and then I joined Microsoft
a couple years ago.
- So we talked about Enterprise Content Management, ECM,
and that's traditionally the name given to this discipline
but increasingly we've seen the rise of other terminology.
Intelligent Information Management, Content Services;
what do we think is going on there?
Is this just a new name for the same process
or is there something really transformative going on?
- Well, I think there's something
really transformative going on here.
I think when you go back to ECM, it was really
conceived in the era in which people were trying
to automate very specific document intensive,
very complicated processes, and that worked well
in that environment; things like new drug application
processes and insurance claim processing
and things like that.
I would never think of it as a market segment
I would think of it as a description of things
that people are trying to do with content and information.
- So I think regardless of whether we're talking about this
as a process, or as a tool set, or as an end result
I think we all agree we're talking about content here.
But what's interesting is I think there's also been
an evolution in what is content and what is not.
- Well, that's a good question.
It used to be easy.
You know, it used to be that, content was the unstructured
documents that were kind of in contrast to more structured
data that was held in rows and columns of a database.
And now two things have occurred;
one is that all those lines that existed between
structured and unstructured content,
if they ever really meant anything to users,
are all blurred and nobody really cares
what the difference is. And the kinds of content
isn't just document anymore and it's not just
Office files anymore.
It can be video, it can be audio, it can be all sorts
of different things. And so it has gotten to be,
I think actually, information that encompasses
both data and content is probably a better description
of what we're talking about.
- Cheryl, do you think the document is still going to be
as prevalent a format in 20 years?
- I think the document will be a prevalent format,
but I think the equivalent of a document equals a file
is the part that is starting to erode.
As we see a lot more of the online and software-
as-a-service authoring tools, things that
allow a lot of collaboration and co-creation activities.
I mean, these aren't often files
until we choose to export them.
- Cheryl, do you think in 10 years organizations
will have more or fewer repositories than they have now?
- So, you know, I actually wrote a little bit last year
about, you know, are we shifting to this, you know,
post repository world. Where the repository becomes less
and less, you know, the value-add of a content management
platform. And what's really important is, you know, do we
have the connectivity to federate or inter-operate so we
can pull content from multiple systems, but hide the
complexity from the day-to-day information worker
and just present what they need to complete a task, you
know, through their mobile app or through an alternative
line of business application or in their office productivity
tool of choice.
- So we know being in the cloud has been a trend for years.
In Office 365 alone, Microsoft has over 400,000 customers
who are using it.
Is the cloud truly transformative
or is it just another data center?
- When we used to survey people 3, 4 years ago
and particularly an AIM audience,
which is very focused on control and access to content
and information and records - - Right.
- And we would ask them whether the cloud
was part of their strategy, people wouldn't, you know,
just say, "No," they would say, "Hell no!"
And when we look at it now, 82% say, when they look
at the primary direction of their efforts
in the next two years, 82% say it's in the direction
of either the cloud or a hybrid cloud on-prem strategy.
- Don't you find there were also some organizations
who tried to do exactly the same things in the cloud
that they were doing on-premises, who'd say the cloud
is a big enough change?
- I think really what's going on is that
people want choice even organizations that
tend to be biased towards an on-prem approach.
They want to have that as an option out there.
So having both sets of capabilities, I think,
becomes really, really critical moving forward.
- So both sets? - Yeah.
- Cheryl, do you agree?
- I do actually, and we've got data that shows that
the tipping point in terms of having most
enterprise content management deployments on-premises
has now shifted to more hybrid and hosted
moving toward software as a service.
So I think, you know, this hybrid world is where we're
gonna be living for the next few years as organizations,
you know, are at different stages of a road map to cloud.
- So you mentioned a couple of years.
Do you think that it's a . . .
ever a permanent trend to be hybrid?
- I think it's gonna be here for a few years.
Permanent? Not necessarily.
I think, you know, as organizations take a look at,
you know, what are their more complex content
or process management workloads,
for example, if they have deep integrations to other
on-premises line-of-business applications
that's a lot tougher to just move into a cloud service
overnight where spinning up a new project team
or new, you know, corporate internet site, that's much
easier to do net-new kinda clean slate
in a cloud application.
- So Ian, have you run across any customers who
aren't trying hard enough in the cloud, I guess I'd say?
- You know, I'd say from a content management point of view
most of our customers are either in the cloud
or moving toward the cloud aggressively.
But to Cheryl's point there are a lot of other systems
that they have - their ERP systems and CRM systems and,
you know, custom things that they've built in their
organizations and so forth - that are on-prem and will be
on-prem for a long time. And they're struggling with how
to move those to the cloud as well.
The other thing I would say is the customers
that have really heavily customized their on-prem
deployments of content management tools, you know,
ripped out the code that was provided by the vendor
and written their own code, their own UI's,
their own integration points and so forth,
they tend to struggle the most because, you know, oftentimes
moving to the cloud you can't necessarily change
all the code that's in the SaaS offering
that's provided by the vendor.
- And I think it really goes a long way
in terms of helping solve kind of the perennial challenge
in the content management space around user adoption.
Because so many of the historical deployments
have been on-premises, highly customized,
they are hard to upgrade.
- So we're talking about some, you know, fear and
reluctance or even fear and loathing about the cloud.
But with that, you know, I think there still are legitimate
reasons why organizations need to keep some
of their uses and some of their content on-premises.
What are some of the good ones that each of you have heard?
- When I talked to some public sector, you know, government
agencies and highly regulated agencies - especially,
you know, if we look into Europe for example -
if they don't have the confidence that they've got
a local vendor that can provide, you know, in-country data
residency requirements for sensitive information, then
they'll often choose to stay on premises
until they have that comfort.
- The security kinds of things that Cheryl talked about,
and particularly the data residency side, you know,
as that gets more and more complex over time
and as geographies step in to, you know, put their brand
on where they want data to be, that becomes another issue
why some people say, "Well, in this case
we'll keep it on-prem."
- So, GDPR has recently gone into effect
in the European Union,
and it reminds me, in many regards, of some of the focus
nearly 20 years ago on Y2K, that there's both risk
and opportunity with something like GDPR.
Cheryl, what do you see as some of the advantages
to the organization of having to comply with GDPR?
- Well I think first off, it kind of compels
organizations to really understand their end-to-end
content and data holdings, you know, build out that map
so they know where any kind of risky content might reside
or any other, you know, employee
or customer confidential information -
where does it actually reside, and can we retrieve it,
secure it and potentially even destroy or disclose it
depending on the requests?
- And it's not an insignificant undertaking at scale.
The survey that I did - basically people came back and said,
on average, they thought it would cost 4800 euro
to find all the information about a customer
and deliver it in machine readable format
back to that customer.
Well, you start multiplying that times the number
of requests that people are gonna get,
and it really puts an incentive on people to get serious
about how they manage their information.
- When you look at the industry,
certainly Microsoft is not alone in
using AI and cognitive services to help enrich
the entire part of the content experience.
Do we think that this is going to become
something that is not just prevalent but pervasive
and noticeable or something that becomes a background
service that we just take for granted like printing?
- Even though it seems like we've been doing it forever,
when it comes to sub-processes it's really in
its very early stages. - Right.
- And I think automation and artificial intelligence
is going to pave the way for that and make those
engines much more powerful in the future.
- And I think we also are gonna bump up against, you know,
kind of, some of the contradictions in terms of
how we have managed information over the last
couple of decades.
I mean, for organizations with very aggressive
retention and disposal policies, from a records
management perspective, I mean, they're missing
huge swathes of what could be potential useful signals
and sources, to be mined as part of this.
So you're just keeping kind of a small subset of the records
because it's less expensive to do e-discovery;
you're also missing a big chunk of your corporate memory
that could actually contribute to some of the findings
and analysis. And think about organizations with
still large paper stores.
If you can go back, you know, 10 years in terms of digital
contracts for your customers, great.
Well, what if you can go back 50
because you've actually been able to digitize
and extract information that can lead to more
intelligent decisions, going back over longer periods of
time because you've done that conversion.
- So compliance and records management and retention
have long been, you know, pillars of how we manage
information at scale, on-premises or in the cloud.
How do you see that as a discipline,
evolving over the next 10 years?
- Well, I think that there's a lot of opportunities
as we just talked about moving into, you know,
more of the using the algorithms, understanding what is
the right kind of algorithm to do different kinds
of categorization, classification.
I think that these roles, because they're often
subject matter experts in their particular lines
of businesses, they understand the corporate taxonomy,
you know, how they've been using things like metadata,
could be in a very good position to be, you know, kind of
the trainers of the algorithms going forward
rather than just the retainers of the records.
- I think there is an intense need
for simplification, as well.
You know, I think we over-pivoted, or the pendulum swung
a little too far in the Sarbanes-Oxley days
and, you know, large organizations that no longer exist
because they kept things longer than they should
or what have you, and it just feels like there's
this need for simplification and to streamline the process,
make it easier. But I think there's also a need,
just generally speaking, to say, "Maybe we'll accept
what we think is a little bit more risk by simplifying this
and, you know, doing big buckets or what have you,"
but in reality it's not more risk than having something
that's so complicated that nobody follows it.
- So if you think about what's going on now
with cloud content management as a second wave
or a second opportunity for records management -
how do we as practitioners and how does the industry
as a whole make sure that we don't repeat
the risk that our records archives become
the warehouse where documents go to die?
- I think one of the challenges that we at AIM have is -
"Okay, how do you take a lot of those practices
that were traditionally defined in an on-prem world
and migrate those into a cloud environment
so that people don't make the same mistakes
they made the first time?" Because, you're right,
we've all seen cloud implementations that turned into
just glorified instances of the file share.
You know, it's just a horrible dumping ground of junk
and that's not where you really want to get to.
- I think that, you know, we didn't quite get there
in the on-premises world because it was too expensive
to go back and index the billions and tens of billions
and hundreds of billions of documents that I had.
I didn't have the compute capacity to do that, and so forth.
I think the cloud will open that door up with
the scalability and the compute capacity
that you have in the cloud.
- And I think it also opens the door -
in addition to all of the scale performance advantages,
especially at large scale - the ability to have that
information more broadly accessible, shareable
by other parts of the organization, even
by members of what I often have been calling
"the extended Enterprise."
So you've got critical suppliers, partners,
even customers can benefit from that information,
and, you know, trying to share that securely in on-prem
systems can be much more difficult than if you can open up
a door to certain segments of your cloud content management.
- So looking forward, there's obviously been a lot
of innovation that's come up in the last few years,
as well as things that are likely to come up
in the next few years.
What's something that excites you about the next 10 years?
Something you've seen or that you really can't wait to see
that we as an industry get it right?
- You know, when you start to think about five years
from now: how are people going to interface with our content
systems? How are they going to interface with processes?
What are millennials going to expect in terms of an
interface? Are they really going to be sitting there,
typing into a laptop?
Gonna change a lot, and I think it's going to be
really exciting to see what happens there.
- Yeah, I would agree with that.
Just the opening of new ways of creating and
generating that content to begin with,
including using AI services to generate, you know,
news articles, summaries -
I mean, it sounds a little bit crazy,
but this concept of knowledge management
has come roaring back with a vengeance
in the customer calls I've had over the last
few months. And it's - I've referred to this as kind of
"information FOMO," that fear of missing out 'cause they
know the stuff exists. They just don't know how to get to
it, where it resides; and I think the opportunity to kind of
mine into multiple systems, structured or unstructured,
it really kind of opens up
the door to new ways of knowledge delivery to people
who are really thirsting for insights.
The thing that terrifies me also, is this area
of digital preservation. And, John, I know you've been
talking about this, but, you know, I just think that we
are underestimating the fragility
of a lot of our digital artifacts.
Are we gonna be able to look at this, preserve it,
yeah, access it in 10, 15, 50 years down the road?
This is my historian hat coming back out.
But also even things, you know, tactical like link rot,
right? We rely on online information so often;
we embed links in our email, and our documents,
and, you know, there's some data out there that shows
if you look at scientific legal journals, I mean,
a third of that is already dead links.
So we really need to think about this stuff.
- There was something I read once about -
they were predicting 100 years from now
there'll be two kinds of digital archeologists:
hard and soft.
The soft will be experts in missing file formats;
the hard ones will tell you how to make
that Blackberry work again.
(all laugh)
- So, when I think 10 years out
I'd combine the two things - John talking about voice
and new ways to interact, and Cheryl talking about
knowledge management and preserving that knowledge.
I think we're quickly heading down a path
where you've got embedded and wearable devices, and so
forth - not just me wearing one on my wrist,
but much more . . . interesting use cases they're, you know,
Elon Musk and many of the other leaders
in the industry are looking at brain interfaces
to computers, and so forth.
So being able to interact in new ways -
whether it's a voice, whether it's something wearable,
whether it's something implantable -
and then having access to all that information,
I think that's gonna just completely change
again the way things work.
- Well, I just wanted to say thank you very much
for joining us here today.
This has been a really interesting and educational
conversation for me and I hope for those
of you watching out there.
Once again, I'd like to also thank John Mancini.
- Thanks for having me, Chris.
- Cheryl McKinnon . . .
(soft music)
. . . and Ian Story.
- Great to be here.
- Please keep watching for more information
here from Microsoft.
Thank you.
(music fades)