Imagineers:

Lessons from the AIIM Show

by Mike Alsup

The national AIIM show was held in May at Disneyland (how appropriate!) in Southern
California. This column summarizes my lessons and observations from Anaheim.

The exhibit floor was huge. The Anaheim Convention Center includes the equivalent of four
indoor football fields and the exhibits nearly filled it. Most of the vendors I talked to got good
traffic in their booths and intend to exhibit again. They commented that the walk-in attendees
showed an advanced understanding of their business problems and there were fewer first time
buyers. The exhibits and conference had more of an upbeat feel than in the last couple of years.
This is good news for AIIM.

I was again surprised how much the dominant AIIM Show themes had changed in the last two
years. In 1996, Microsoft, components, and document management seemed to dominate. Last
year, everyone was wrestling with thin clients and Internet standards. This year, the platform
technology issues seemed to have been mostly resolved, and the dominant issues were more
related to the absorption of the technologies into business processes. These issues included
knowledge management, enterprise-wide deployment, and workflow on the web.

Knowledge management is a term that seems to be defined by many vendors to describe their own
products, but the products do such different things. I found a general consensus at AIIM that
knowledge management is an important direction for our industry, but we need to stay focused on
solving real problems until better infrastructure support for integrated knowledge management is
available. I have worked for two organizations, Andersen Consulting and Booz, Allen &
Hamilton, that are widely admired for their knowledge management capabilities. It is important to
recognize that they have been building the foundations for these systems and the cultures to
support them for the last decade. Platform vendors, such as Microsoft, Lotus, and the Web
coalitions, are very focused on knowledge management, and these vendors are likely to provide
capabilities for remarkable systems at future AIIM Shows.

There was tremendous interest at AIIM in large scale document management systems. Karen
Strong had nearly 800 people in her session on Enterprise Document Management. Lotus
Development and OpenText were describing implementations with tens of thousands of users.
The vendors and attendees at AIIM have clearly graduated from the hundreds of users that
departmental systems supported in the past. One of the key reasons for this is the improved
capabilities of electronic mail-based document management systems, such as Domino.Doc from
Lotus, which utilizes Lotus Notes, and DMX/WFX from Eastman Software which leverages the
capabilities of Microsoft Exchange. Additionally, Intranet-based document management systems
are offering features and scalability to support entire organizations. The competition for these
deals is intense.

Workflow was finally of significant interest to the AIIM audience. This was based on the growth
of the Web and intercompany transactions.
Staffware and Action Technologies have rebuilt their business models around Web-based
workflow. User organizations are recognizing that supply chain management across
organizational boundaries is coming and they are going to need to figure out how new approaches
to electronic commerce affect them. Companies want to get away from proprietary EDI
transactions to standardized XML transactions over the Web. After years of languishing in the
background, standards groups, such as the Workflow Management Coalition, had a great deal of
interest in their presentations.

There are still some issues with the basic AIIM Show business model. The product vendors
provide the primary support for the show, but more of the profits in the industry are flowing to
the integrators and services companies who make the products work in customer environments.
Consultants and integrators go to AIIM to see vendor products and to be courted on the floor and
in evening soirees by the vendor community. Anaheim saw this imbalance improving based on an
evolving partnership.

Much more than in prior years, business partners were a major theme of the big vendors at the
AIIM Show. There seemed to be more partners in the FileNET and Eastman Software booths
than there were vendor representatives. As the margins associated with product sales are reduced,
vendors are relying more on their partners to build vertical solutions and support more of the
overall sales effort. This reduces the direct cost of sales for the vendors. Several of the
integrators I talked to described how their work is changing. They are configuring applications
more and customizing them less. Integration projects are getting smaller, and are more focused
on process instead of technology. This makes the integrators more dependent on vendor lead
streams and support. This symbiosis makes the vendor/integrator partnership more critical for
both sides.

As the AIIM Show has evolved, there are almost two separate shows related to hardware and
software. The software business changes dramatically each year, while the hardware business
changes incrementally.

On the software side, there were some important themes. One of the major themes was that
imaging has become a commodity. In order to differentiate themselves, the imaging vendors are
adding "one stop shopping" (imaging, document management, workflow, and COLD in a single
product family, through thick and thin clients) as the reason you would want to buy from them.
This has been fairly successful for the larger vendors, who continue to gain market share.

The playing field has been leveled in the document management systems arena due to falling
prices and the Web. There were lots of small document management vendors exhibiting at AIIM.
The Web and better infrastructure tools have made it less expensive to build competitive
horizontal products. The Web has also made it much less expensive to look big and thriving.

The definition of a "document" is changing. Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags have been
designed to replace HTML tags for Internet documents. XML tags enable processing information
to be included in the document, not just in the data base of information about the document.
Microsoft support for XML makes it an even bigger deal. Everyone at the AIIM show, especially
vendor technical representatives, agreed with this premise, but no one knew how soon or how
much change would result from XML standards. There is a huge vertical opportunity for
standardized templates to encapsulate transactions within specific vertical industries. Banking,
Health Care, and Insurance were identified as industries that were moving down this path.

I found most of the AIIM hardware to be startlingly similar to AIIM in 1992. Scanners, monitors,
and optical storage devices have changed very little. Granted, the costs have come way down and
the infrastructure is remarkably more robust. Many of the hardware promises of the imaging
business are not being fulfilled. After years of promises, there is still very little DVD on the floor.
Optical technology, including WORM devices, MO devices, and jukeboxes were much less in
evidence than in prior years. Kodak has exited the 14" optical market, and I only saw 12" optical
disks in a few booths. Many people were saying that they expect magnetic disk performance to
continue to improve and eclipse optical storage altogether. The message I derived from the
hardware side of the AIIM Show was that, except for scanners, document management systems
hardware is no longer a separate category, it is just infrastructure hardware.

There were not enough micrographics or records management exhibits on the AIIM floor. This is
too bad. Believe it or not, micrographics sales are relatively stable and there is a massive installed
base in many large organizations. Kodak used to talk about taking chances with being able to
view a document in 25 years based on film, CD ROM or WORM technologies. Obviously, users
will still be able to view and print from film. This argument is still true, but there are fewer people
listening.

Records Management is a small but growing presence at AIIM. The Association of Records
Managers and Administrators (ARMA) exhibited and several vendors showed how document
management and records management could be integrated in their systems. The science and
standards for records archival and retention are critically important to the AIIM audiences as they
build the imaging and document management systems that will replace paper and microfilm as
corporate knowledge repositories. An excellent Doculabs panel recommended that users include
records management experience on document management systems design teams to ensure that
no one needs to enter retention information late in a document life cycle. Every client I've talked
to recently wants to see a link between the major document management vendors and the major
records management vendors.

The program was packed with excellent speakers and breadth. There were two days of tutorials
and presentations before the exhibits began, and attendance in those sessions was excellent. The
attendance trailed off noticeably in the last two days as the Program competed with the AIIM
Show exhibits. The Program Committee works on a schedule that requires submissions in early
August of 1998 for the 1999 AIIM Atlanta conference, so if you want to be part of the program
next year, submit early. Visit the AIIM home page for more information. (WWW.AIIM.ORG)

I would give my Most Effective Marketing award to Microsoft which seemed to be everywhere in
a quiet and positive way. On the servers as operating systems and data bases, and on the clients,
thick or thin. In some ways, the AIIM Show was the best advertisement for Microsoft I've ever
seen. My Most Welcome New Participant award would go to Chase Manhattan Bank. Chase
exhibited the depth and breadth of their internal imaging applications at the show. "Chase is in the
Relationship Management business " relationships with clients, shareholders, and our vendor
partners. AIIM affords us the forum to showcase those relationships and build new ones" said
Anita Ward, a Chase Senior Vice President. If AIIM can continue to attract user organizations,
its future will be very bright indeed.

Every vendor I talked to offered product information on their Web site. Every business card had
an Internet address. A logical extension is that all product information, including demonstrations
and customer testimonials, will be available on the Web. There will be a virtual AIIM conference
on the Web and there won't be a need to spend as much time and money as it takes to attend a
conference like AIIM. Still, people keep coming to the AIIM conference in record numbers. This
is a testament to the value and viability of the AIIM community. The Documentum representative
in the Microsoft booth offered the contrary view. "We aren't exhibiting here because we didn't
generate enough business last year to justify coming back". This was very much a minority view
in Anaheim.

Thornton May finally received his well-earned AIIM Company of Fellows recognition. I hope
that AIIM can continue to attract dynamic individuals like Thornton who can see beyond their
own position to support and contribute to the Chapters and AIIM as a whole.

Mike Alsup is a Principal with Align Solutions Corp. Send comments, questions, scathing
remarks or new ideas to malsup@alignsc.com.