What can iTunes and Evernote teach us of ECM

I have presented this idea before.  People or organizations interested in using ECM technology to better manage and more importantly better find information always look at the shiny chrome or bells and whistles of the technology. However; the reality of what is needed in order to see the benefits of the technology become apparent.

So let us take a look at iTunes and Evernote; two seemingly different technologies and applications; however both can reside local on your hard drive and or be in the cloud so you can share across different devices.

Why is it that iTunes works so well ( or some other technologies similar ) ? The technology has incorporated a governance strategy of metadata, categorization and classification schemes to ensure you can find and save your content easily.  You the end user are not really asked to manage metadata tags or classification rules and schemes.  So this is an example of information management being done very well since all you do is search or look and find and use.

Now as mentioned; Evernote can reside on your hard drive or in the cloud as well.  Evernote’s task is to manage and store multiple formats of content for you: pictures, audio, video, links, notes (text), etc.  You name it and you can probably get it into Evernote.  But what about getting the information back out ?  You hope search and or your notebook structure will suffice; which if you are like most people doesnt work. Have you tagged anything in Evernote?  Have you given thought on how to structure your notebooks in a orderly fashion ? Have you leveraged OCR capabilities to extract more information ?  Probably not, so Evernote if not properly managed by the end user will not work well as more information is added to it over time.  

So you have iTunes with metadata, taxonomy and classification being managed for you so that you have confidence in the technology to work and get information and be productive (and by the way iTunes manages more than just audio and video content types remember ) and with Evernote showing us that if left to most end users metadata, taxonomy and classification do not exist and therefore satisfaction drops quickly with the promise of new technology.

Bottom line: Whether in ECM or Information Management focus on Governance and Categorization as a key factor in success.  And more importantly as the lines between ECM and BI blurs even further through link analysis and entity analysis you will need a robust taxonomy, metadata, classification plan.