Open Source ECM - Interview ENG- Dr Ulrich Kampffmeyer- ProjectConsult

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Interview : Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer, Managing Director andFounder of PROJECT CONSULT

„Guten Tag“ everybody !

Today we make a travel to Germany.Today, I have the great honor to interview

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer, Managing Directorand Founder of PROJECT CONSULT in Hamburg, Germany

. He is as well a member of the Board of Managers of the

DLM Network

EEIG

, the organization which administers the

new records management standard MoReq2

, published by the

European Commission

. Hewas also founder and chair oft he German

association VOI

and held different positionswithin the international association

AIIM

. In other words, he know the meaning of contentand information.

Guten Tag Dr. Ulrich !First of all, let me thank you for the time you take to make this interview reality and toshare your knowledge about ECM.So Ulrich, as usual I read information about my interviewee and I find a number : 30.You have been in the document, content and knowledge management industry now forover 30 years... For a young happy-go-lucky ecm consultant like me it's "Woooowww".Could you present yourself and main facts of your experience ?

Well JM, it is not „in the industry“ because we both know that our industry, described asdocument management or enterprise content management, is not that old. Since 1976 I have been working with software in the field of analysis and documentation. My first computer projects were in the archaeology and soil sciences domain. I developed software for cartography, automatic classification of objects, statistics, video acquisition, documentation,classification and reconstruction system for archaeological findings. So my first documentmanagement projects were for museums and research institutes.Later on, I was working for scientific research institutions, document management vendors,universities and consulting companies. This led me to combine theoretical academic, programming and system design skills with project management, business process analysis,moderation and solution design advising. July 1st, 1992, I founded my own consultingcompany, which is working in Enterprise Content, Records, and Knowledge Managementfield for end user organizations only. Beside that I was active in associations like

AIIM

,

VOI

,

DLM Forum

and others, and wrote some books, studies, lots of articles and other publications like our P

ROJECT CONSULT Newsletter

.

http://www.opensourceecm.fr http://www.open-source-ecm.com

Interview : Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer, Managing Director andFounder of PROJECT CONSULT

And now what's your work day after day ?

Part of the day – when I am not under a tone of our customers sites – is filled withadministrative work. I have to perform as Managing Director. In regard to projects I have tocontrol quality of final versions of documents where I have the role of quality manager in the project. A lot of time is taken by email correspondence and phoning with prospects,customers, staff, freelance consultants, journalists and so. I try to reserve blocks of hours for writing reports for my customers, research or just contemplation. Some hours a day, when I'min the office, I go to the internet – communities like XING, Informationzen.org, facebook, bloglines, publishing sites, industry portals a.s.o. When I'm travelling for seminare, customer workshops, or congresses, most of this work is delegated to the traveling and waiting hours.But most important of my time is spent with my customers in workshops, discussions, or meetings. It's not only to give advice but also to learn each day as well.

You have found project-consult, in 1992. Could you present your firm ? What kinf of services do you offers ?PROJECT CONSULT Unternehmensberatung GmbH

works in the field of archive,document, content, records, business process, information lifecycle, and knowledgemanagement only. With my colleagues at PROJECT CONSULT we have been running morethan

200 projects

designing information management strategies, carrying out analysis anddesign of organisation and processes, writing tenders, selecting products, solutions and systemintegrators, running projects as project managers or as quality control managers, conductingworkshops, writing policies and legal expertises and so on...We are small company combining hired staff with speciliazed free lance consulters. Our customers mainly come from Germany and Switzerland, but we have as well worked for supra-international organizations like UNEP or ESA, international companies in Europe andother clients from abroad. Clients come from all industries and our main task is to help themto solve organisational problems related to documents.Beside projects work, we were engaged in the creation of standards like

GEVER

inSwitzerland, the electronic archiving standards for the Federal Savings Banks Group, and theECM standards for the Social Insurance Group in Germany, we engaged in

MoReq2

,

ISO15489

and

ISO 19005

, and more.

http://www.opensourceecm.fr http://www.open-source-ecm.com

Interview : Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer, Managing Director andFounder of PROJECT CONSULT

Let's back to future, I know it will be quite long but is it possible to summarize thecomputerization and dematerialization of information since you started yourexperience?

In the last 30 years I faced a lot of changes from host computers with character-only display,the first PCs, early networks, evolving internet and now all this 2.0 stuff. I looked on all theshort-sighted developments of the hardware and software industry in the early years.Imaging was born because host and early PCs could not display and handle images.Documentmanagement was born due to the restrictions of hierarchical file manager.Workflow was bornto support collaboration and to conncect the users.Our industry in the past lived by the errors and niches created by the IT mainstream vendors.This time is gone and our industry is loosing its USPs, Unique Selling Propositions.Document and enterprise content management is becoming IT infrastructure, dissolving at themiddleware layer, becoming services, being no longer visible at the user desktop. Modernclients and web interfaces are enabled with the capabilities to handle documents, processesand other information assets.We are living in a digital world and I sometimes suffer as digital native. Especially the last tenyears have changed the perception of how we handle and how we use information. With 2.0 itis beyond everything our industry had developed as assets in the past. Document relatedtechnologies become integral part of every software application.

For you what was the worst and best idea on content management area?

The worst idea in the CMS arena was to re-develop everything which had already beendeveloped in the document management arena. The web guys often re-invented the wheel andcreated solutions, which didn't take care about compliance, documentation, consistency,authenticity, persistance and other issues. The web generated more problems for documentmanagement, records management and electronic archival than we had before and these problems are not solved today.The best idea of content management was lately skipping the barriers between structured andunstructured information. The key is, to look at digital information as an integrative concept – data in an database is just information, content in an WCM is just another form of digitalinformation, and records and documents are as well only different by format, legal or businessvalue, it is all digital information, that may become - combined with logic, context andmeaning - even knowledge. Modern information and content management solutions must andcan handle any type and format of information. This is the important step to overcome thedifferences in systems and concepts of the past, which will lead to the development, that ECMand WCM will disappear inside the IT infrastructure. Their functionality will become part of standard software and operating systems, and will be a commodity in the near future

http://www.opensourceecm.fr http://www.open-source-ecm.com

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