Sometimes its hard to put the right perspective on things, things up close appear much larger than they perhaps are, while those things that are far in the distance appear small and inconsequential. When you think about it, it is obvious and you don’t get fooled but the effect is still there.

Even within the IT world, even in the IT world of a large ECM Company, it is quite possible to be quite unfamiliar with most of those concepts (but I doubt the words ). Even though IT runs a world-class ECM system, they don’t live ECM (even if they use it).

I’m not pointing any fingers outward, only inward. At one time I worked within the OT IT department, in fact I was explicitly hired to run the “Livelink Online” service, the first hosted Livelink service available (circa 1998). Livelink Online was a SparcStation 20 running 5-6 distinct Livelink V7 sites for various external interests. Given my experience at the time, this was not a job but a morning task, but I digress. The point was that I ran that server providing those sites for Document Management without knowing, or at the time particularly caring as to what “Document Management” or Livelink was. It was just another application to keep running.

Given Open Text’s increasing reliance on its own products, their IT department these days likely has few people with as little knowledge of ECM as I did back then, but I strongly suspect that some of them simply have no need and little desire to understand ECM – and remain very effective and valuable members of Open Text.  But that is the wrong approach and Open Text should foster a very different environment in my view, thsy should have insisted from the very start that people use the tools that they create (where feasible of course), this has distinct advantages and failing to do so brings dangers/pitfalls that are hard to avoid.

GATE Village is similar to Open Text in this fashion, we use the Village itself for our own content management which is mostly around the content management platform called GATE Village. It's power is precisely that it can be used effectively as a content management platform by those people who have no notion of what content management really is (nor do they care to learn about it!). They do have a need for content management, they simply do not have an interest in it. This is similar to many things in our lives, few care how a phone actually works but even fewer care to think about life without a phone!

One of the early decisions we made was to use GATE Village itself as our primary document management and web interface. It was a painful early choice as the Village wasn't really ready for such use, however doing so has made it so that all employees are intimately familiar with our product AND it has ensured that our product has improved much faster than if we had relied upon our customers to ask for changes.

Sometimes the thing we make in our businesses simply isn't usable by our businesses, and that is just fine (a car-parts manufacturer doesn't have to make cars) but when it does make sense, there is a true win-win scenario available (and a lot of rat-holes to avoid) if you choose eat your own dogfood.