The Future is Participation Management Richard Medina Co-Founder & Principal Consultant The Future is Participation Management IBT@DMSEXPO

How Do You Get There from Here? Broader and deeper human participation is the most significant change in the content technologies these past few years. But how do you get sufficient benefits, while controlling the substantial potential costs and risks, when no one knows what the optimal “target future state” looks like? Should your next steps be to: Provide external social media capabilities to customer service, marketing and sales – thus letting the world in? Mobile-enable your mature process-worker ECM applications? Do something else? I recommend that you get a good map. Then you take one step at a time – in any direction.

Your Content Initiatives have 3 Dimensions Content Management Addresses the input, control, and output of electronic information. It ranges on a scale from simple to complex. Process Management Addresses the rules, orchestration, automation, and control of processes. Participation Management Addresses the amount and complexity of human engagement – of human interaction, collaboration, collective deliberation, analysis, and creation. It measures both the breadth and depth of such participation.

Here are the 3 Dimensions -- Focus on Participation Management

Level 1: Low Enterprise Participation

Level 2: Moderate Enterprise Participation

Level 3: High Enterprise, Low Extra-Enterprise Participation

Level 4: Moderate Extra-Enterprise Participation

Take Only One Step at a Time -- in Any of the 3 Directions Identify the current state of your opportunities and select one. Determine what that application would look like under ideal conditions. If your budget were unlimited, what kind of mobile, content management and process management capabilities would it have? Now inject the constraints imposed by reality. Determine what your realistic target state should be for that application (given your budget, risk tolerance, etc.). Then close the gap between your current state and your target future state — but take only 1 step at a time. Think of it as a game where you can only move 1 step in any of the 3 dimensions per turn.