I wanted to try something a little different for this post. I’m doing an assessment of what went wrong with Alfresco for a Canadian university. They purchased Alfresco back in 2008/09, initially to handle some of their web content needs. Things haven’t gone so well. Below is a quick wrap up email I sent to the project sponsor after the first few days of stakeholder (patient?) interviews. Sadly, what I found happens more often than not, and it’s not restricted to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform deployments.

I just wanted to give you a quick recap of the last few days:

• Of the people I spoke to, no one advocated for getting rid of Alfresco
• Unless something to the contrary comes up in the next few weeks, there is no reason to believe that Alfresco is the problem
• Alfresco was likely the wrong choice back in 2008/09, but the product and company have since matured to the point where it’s no longer the case
• There is a general feeling that Alfresco is/was underfunded, under-resourced, and lacking in executive buy-in / mandate
• It appears that there is no executive support or commitment to mandating Information Management practices using Alfresco as a standard tool set to implement
• There was/is an element of Alfresco (or any ECM platform) being a magic bullet, rather than a platform on which to build solutions
• It seems that all the Alfresco initiatives over the years have been done as individual projects, rather than under a program of managing information
• The consulting services engaged focused on the mechanical & “how to” aspects of Alfresco and related tools, without any of the advisory & “what should we do, why we should do it” services

At this point it’s my opinion that the problems are cultural and environmental. If the culture and environment change Alfresco will succeed, providing the right resources are engaged in the right way. If the culture and environment don’t change Alfresco will fail, as will any other platform brought in.

If this sounds like you or someone you know, give us a call or leave a comment; we’d love to chat and, who knows, help you out.