Making the case for ECM Solution Architect

Last week, Marko, the Big Man (no fun intended, I am as big myself), in his post “Calling out the ECM Posers “was feeling sick about the posers in the ECM industry and the significant damage they cause to the industry reputation. He suggested the technical certification as a way to avoid them. JohnnyGee later added that customer also to blame for concentrating in cheaper resources and not taking the time to check references.

I totally agree with both gentlemen, but I like to add my view in the pursue of a solution, by making the case for a project role that hardly exist in today’s world of ECM projects. The role is the “ECM Solution Architect”.

This role is different than the Enterprise Architects. These guys have too much responsibilities to worry about the many of the lethal details on ECM solution.

The ECM solution Architect plays a main role in creating the overall solution and helping in the design, but the significant contributions come on paving the project road, maintaining consistency and becoming the “Holder of the Vision” during the solution development. Also the responsibility goes further to interface with EA, infrastructure team, CM and Vendor’s sales and support team.

Currently, in most projects the reasonability of the solution Architect is scattered among the Project Manager, Functional lead, Technical lead or even worse fall between the cracks where the original vision and objectives of the solution are always lost in translation.

In simple words, the ECM Solution Architect is the proponent of the “Solution” in the ever-increasing complexity of technical environment, budget pressure and demanding clients.

The question here is where can we find the mystery person? I wish they grow them on trees but the fact is it takes a cretin amount of experience in different roles to build up the knowledge and experience required to become an ECM Solution Architect. In my personal view, even after that, it takes a special person to keep and hold the “Big Picture” and become personally interested in the project beyond understanding the requirements, but keep looking at the end goal. This role is not an evolutionary path from developer, business analyst or project manager, it is more of a revolutionary path with some secret sauce.

I hope I made the case for the role ECM Solution Architect.

Welcome to “Eye on ECM”

For many years I have thought about starting my professional blog but as an executive with Accenture Information Management Service and one of the leads for the Documentum Experts Network with responsibility to support and promote Documentum within the company and for its clients, it was not easy to express a personal opinion that might aggravate the public relation gang, vendor’s alliance team or blindly stumble over a corporate deal somewhere around the globe.

Now that I’m free and independent for more than six months, I am enjoying the exchange of ideas with many of my friends on their blogs.

It was always my personal philosophy to keep things short and sweet adding that I lack the writing talent and style that many of my friends have Marko (Big Men on Content) and Laurence (Word of Pie), I have no plans to compete on long and exotic articles but I will try to concentrate more on condensed observations to key ECM issues and enjoy the dialogue.

Look forward for meeting all of you.

Walid