Lean Implementation with Sharepoint and Documentum

Is it possible to have a lean implementation with enterprise applications like Sharepoint and Documentum?

I recently saw a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco by Eric Ries called Lean Startup. While the focus was on startups, it certainly applied to new products and new systems/application. In his presentation he talked about “Stop Wasting People’s Time.” For those who have gone through or are going through the painful implementations of Sharepoint and Documentum, you know what I’m talking about.

Ask yourself, are you wasting people’s time with your implementation? Will that new system you’re implementing actually be used? Are you taking too much time to implement it? Was it developed using the traditional waterfall project development approach or have you started adapting agile development? Ries evolved agile development with customer development. In today’s enterprise consumer adaption, the software that is able to provide consumer-owned applications with consumer IT management will win the market.

Sharepoint and several SaaS software such as Salesforce.com and Caspio.com have certainly proven this approach. Enterprise application consumers want it lean. And BTW, lean, does not necessarily mean cheap. It means small cost of entry, fast deployment, and most of all dynamic capability to change it’s parameters. Your consumers want their applications in a KISS mode – “Keep is Simple and Stupid”, they want it yesterday, they want it cheap, they want it to work, and they are not exactly sure what they want.  Sounds familiar?

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 introduces a lot more new and improved features that help make lean implementation possible. Among the features include their improved Sharepoint designer with rich features that can be configured by a consumer power user/administrator.

EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) 6.5 offers a fresh new approach versus the traditional Documentum implementation. As advertised

“xCP sets a new standard for rapidly building applications, offering a single composition platform that combines a fully integrated set of technologies with modeling and configuration tools, best practices, and a design emphasis on configuration versus coding.”

After talking to some long-time Documentum customers, it’s obvious that there is some hesitation on whether this is just a marketing hype or something that will actually meet the lean implementation methodology.  From the time xCP was introduced last year, there have been several successful implementations of xCP. Are you surprised? The one thing to remember is xCP is just a platform. How you implement it is what will make it lean.

The Challenge:
Lean implementation does have its pains. They include but are not limited to:

• adapting agile and customer development and release cycles
• providing appropriate corporate governance infrastructure
• providing sufficient training and support to consumer business units
• providing a dynamic enterprise platform that meets the lean consumer requirements

-Erwin Chiong, Trends Global LLC