infoarch

Andrew McAfee recently wrote about success factors for Enterprise 2.0 . It's a nice short post and gives a good list of (categorized) success factors. To comment on some of them: Tools are egalitarian and freeform For the first time I thought: should the admin rights to these tools also be given to all. I don't mean 'read/write' access, but also: being able to add participants/accounts, changing access rights for internals and externals, etc. The toolset is quickly standardized Yes, I would agree with this statement. But I wonder if this will hold in the future. People have been writing about employees being able to select their own tools inside and outside the organization. Excellent gardeners exist Interesting, is this a.o. the new role of the traditional Information Management department? Slack exists in the workweek Love this one. This is true: we need slack in our work to share, learn and act. Listening to Andrew's presentation (his above-mentioned post is a ...

The University College Lond (UCL) CIBER group recently published an interesting and strange report on "information behavior of the researcher of the future" . The study was "was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviors in the most effective way." So they focus on the " Google generation" which they define as "those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web." The goal of the study is to find out if they "are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behavior as mature researchers?" And "whether or n...

Web Strategy's Jeremiah Owyang has an insightful, short post on the difference between Forums, Blogs, and Social Networks . I agree with Mick's comment that the definition of "social networks" does not fit all kinds of social network tools, but it's a good start anyway. As soon as people understand what a social network (tool) is, we can start telling them about the different flavors. In the comments Jeremiah also gives a definition of a wiki: "collaborative white boards" or "libraries". I still find the "visual definitions" of wiki's, rss, blogs, etc in short video's by Common Craft also say it all. Related to this post Jeremiah also has an interesting video-interview with himself on social networks and what they mean for enterprises and enterprise marketing.

Anecdote’s Shawn gives his “lessons learned” about knowledge management as if he were asked to give a key note on this topic. In short (- please go ahead and read the full version -) they are: All KM is change management Link to what matters (which sometimes is the business process) Collect stories early and often (success stories from inside the organization) I agree with all of them. They are important issues. W.r.t. stories I would say: if you don’t have stories from within the organization, look for them in other companies. Yeah, then they can say: this won’t work for us, but at least you have a debate! W.r.t. “what matters” for the employees: my experience is that it often has nothing directly to do with the business. For instance, employees see to much reinventing the wheel and people not talking to each other and want to change this situation. So, what would my list be? understand people and the way they work (relates to change). Try to really connect your KM program to ...

Interesting checklist by Bob Glushko of "Berkeley". It is "a set of analysis and design phases that yield implementable models of business processes ". I was wondering if the order of the checklist mattered? E.g. shouldn't 'user types' be higher up than 'document types'? Well, Bob already posted a lengthy answer to my questions . Thanks Bob! Bob agrees with reorder of the checklist, but then it's not a nice acronym anymore (-- I understand, good reason). Bob explains the context of the checklist by telling about "the snake". It shows the change in order of the checklist. Nice model and I will "ride the snake"!

Understanding RSS is a critical factor "in the successful adoption of wikis (and other social media tools)" in enterprises, says ChiefTech's James Dellow (- I'll write more on this post soon!). If so, then explaining RSS to others is important. This blog post by Common Craft with wonderful blogposts and vid's addresses this issue.

Something interesting for the weekend... When you get to work and open your email, do you experience some kind of tension? Most people seem to. Have you ever paid attention to how you breathe when you read your email? Your breathing changes! As Alex Wright said: This seems like one of those discoveries that was hiding in plain sight. Thinking about it, there's no question that I do indeed tend to hold my breath while reading my e-mail. So does this have a name? Yes it does, says Linda Stone (yes of "continuous partial attention" a.o.). It's called Email Apnea . Email apnea is "a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email". She found our from her own work practice, but also she: ... observed others on computers and BlackBerries: in their offices, their homes, at cafes. The vast majority of people held their breath, or breathed very shallowly, especially when responding to email. I watched people on cell phones, ta...

I had some time to read a couple of posts on "Intranet" that I'd like to share with you (- like I did before ). Richard Dennison of BT has a couple of interesting posts. For instance on: what is an Intranet? I mentioned the first post before, but there's a second post too . Here's some interesting remarks. On using Internet tools for the Intranet: Anyway … one interesting comment that Shel made in the piece was about ‘duplicating’ internet tools for intranets … this has certainly been my experience to date of how intranets evolve and take advantage of innovations that happen on the internet. However, I wonder if that will continue to be the case in the future, or if companies will be forced to allow employees to conduct more and more business activity on the internet itself in the ‘native’ tools (… providing security, legal, etc, risks are mitigated). (...) Playing catch-up on an intranet is becoming less and less sustainable and, due to the rapid rate of innovati...

Stop using email and blog more! That basically sums up the interview that was held with IBM's Luis Suarez on "Effecting Blogging: Joining the Conversation" . You can find the whole interview here . It's an interesting interview that gives all kinds of tips and tricks on "getting started with blogging", "tools for blogging", "why blog?", etc. I was hoping to find answers to a question I have for some time now. I wonder how bloggers keep track of comments they left somewhere. How do you (Luis and others!) keep track of comments you posted on someones blog post?

Can you believe someone saying: "I stopped using email!"?! Well, Luis Suarez just said it and he's doing it too. This is what he wrote: Yes, I'm giving up on e-mail! At least, work related e-mail! That's right, this week I have launched a new experiment, or initiative, at work where I have diverted most of my conversations into social computing and social software tools, both internal and external. You did what?!?! Yes, I surely did!! Just like you are reading it. Last Saturday I decided that enough was enough and I created a post in my internal blog where I was mentioning that from that day onwards I would not be answering any e-mails, nor write any e-mails myself either, but instead I would make the most out of social software tools and social computing, in general, to get in touch with other knowledge workers and collaborate further sharing and exchanging our knowledge over there. I'm really curious how long he's going to keep up with it and what his...

Some time ago I pointed you to "interesting questions about Intranet" on Jane McConnell's blog . It's too bad that I was the only one who tried to answer the questions... I'm really curious what others would answer! Anyway, Jane started to give her answers to the questions one-by-one . Go and take a look and join the conversation!

ColumnTwo commenting is broken, so I'll comment here. I'd like to pass you this interesting post. I agree fully with the statement that " Wiki markup has no future ". Some time ago I pointed to Pikiwiki as my new standard for wiki's.

Interesting pointer to an article about the security of paper and digital documents . Are digital documents more secure than digital ones? Some time ago Xerox demonstrated ink that would fade from the paper after a certain period of time.

I too use the 'Getting Things Done' system for my work. I posted on it several times before . Just recently I ran into Ton Zijlstra's "Thoughts on GTD System Weaknesses" . It's always interesting to hear how others use GTD and value it. Ton has been using the GTD system for about 9 months. What I clearly recognize in his post is that GTD is not one-size-fits-all. I've been using for about two years now. You have to tweak it to make it fit for your (type of) work. I actually also don't use GTD strictly. For instance, I don't use the filer cabinet in the way David Allen describes in his book. And I do also prioritize my tasks with dates using my Palm, as commentor Oliver Gassner writes. I would disagree with Ton that GTD is all about lists. It is also about lists. But the lists should be kept short and actionable. GTD says we should fill tasks in our agenda if they require a certain amount of time and have to be done before a certain date. So rea...

A nice thought to ponder on in the weekend... There's nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Ran into this nice quote by Victor Hugo in: Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership . Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness .

A lot of attention is being paid to collaboration these days. Allan Leinard of GigaOM is "desparetely seeking better collaboration tools" . The interesting part of that post is the fact they're looking for a collaboration platform to collaborate internally and externally. After evaluating several tools they still haven't found the ideal tool. This is what he's looking for: What we would like to find is a set of collaboration tools that will allow us to build a knowledge base that is useful for both our internal diligence and our network of advisers. Ideally, the tool would take our mailing list traffic, automatically organize and tag it, and then allow context-based searches. Other desired features would involve both propagating popular information up and down the knowledge base and allowing members to rate it (perhaps in a Digg-like fashion ). Interesting requirements! I don't know of any commercial tool that can do this either. IBM does seem to be using som...

Just wrote about the possible paperless office and home the other day. Here are two examples from practice of people telling us why the paperless office is not around yet. One is from Inside Knowledge on "The Simplest KM Tool", the notebook . And the other is on why some like to read printed documents/book and what the implications for the print industry.

If you follow my blog you'll know that I'm intrigued by the ongoing debate on "the (myth of the) paperless office". You can find two of my posts here and here . Just recently, an article about the paperless home was published in the New York Times titled "Pushing Paper Out the Door" . Most of the article also applies to the office too. The article is a good read. It's not filled with high expectations, but looks for practical ways to reduce the consumption of paper. And some people are interviewed that are working on paperless homes. Scanning in all your paper stuff (also pictures etc.) is one of the (known) ways. What I think is the real barrier is the first step: deciding to go digital and scanning in all the paper you already have (or throwing it away). Furthermore you need a simple tool to help you easily store the files, add filenames and tags. Looking at my own life I do clearly see I use less paper. And I use paper in a different way than a coup...

Again an interesting post by Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb ! It's on the the new "Work from Home" Generation. I agree with most of this post. It nicely sums up the pros and cons. The comments are interesting to read too. It is my experience that working at home every now and then, really increases productivity. I seem to look at my email less (I simply open it less...). Furthermore I take a stack of stuff to do with me. Usually stuff to read and write. Almost always I get through the whole stack. I would (for some reason...) never be able to do this at work. So, I agree with one of the comments: working home say one day a week would be ideal.

Well, what if the Internet went down...and didn't come back up? Some say: It ain't gonna happen. ... "The loss of the Internet for days, weeks or permanently would mean more than just an end to annoying spam and being cut off from the ideal way to settle bar arguments. The ongoing explosion of virtual business services of all sorts, accounting, payroll and even sales would come to a halt, and so would many companies. Customer service could still be handled by phone, except where the phone system was Internet-based. Much more severely affected would be complex project management between companies, especially those projects based on shared CAD (computer-assisted design) files or even shared PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) files. On the other side of the discussion, however, only about 20 percent of respondents to an Internet poll on potential failures thought that loss of Internet corporate communications and collaboration would be catastrophic and 10 percent...

Finally had time to listen to Dave Snowden's talk at KMWorld 2007 on Knowledge Management And if your not interested in knowledge management, do listen to the stuff on complexity and "the Magic Roundabout". It's is funny and interesting. (Tags, categories and knowledge sharing). The recording is not too good, so listen to it in a quiet environment. But the talk is very interesting. If you know Snowden's work, lots is recognizable. Topics are: what web 2.0 means for knowledge management, complexity, language, sense making, social tagging, taxonomies, etc.

Wow, this is an interesting development: Google Launches Localized News Service. I was wondering: Is/Will it also be possible to publish your own local news to Google Local News? And, talking about 'local': a company can also be seen as something 'local' (even if it is a global company...). So, couldn't this also be used to offer all the aggregated news of one company on Google News?

Some time ago I posted on "Google docs and the Future of Document Management" . A future was envisioned that employees would be " able to select their own email and collaboration (web) apps. " ZDNet points to an initiative by Google that shows that this vision is not crazy or unrealistic. Google is offering a free Team Edition of Apps. You just fill in your email address and that of the people your collaborating with and off you are! Here's a video explaining it all. However, my question about 'corporate memory' and 'corporate information management' is not answered yet.

Wonderful and funny talk about 'The art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki on IT Conversations . Love the 'roll the D.I.C.E.E.' part on product innovation. (18:00) Great products need to be: D eep (deep products), I ntelligent (you see a product and say: Somebody was thinking!), C omplete (totality of experience), E legant, and, E motive (the product generates strond emotions).

A couple of day ago I pointed to a post about the future of Document Management . Here are the predictions by CMSWatch on CMSWire . Two interesting ones are: #3: MOSS enters the valley of disappointment They continue on their “SharePoint is a virus” bend predicting it’s growth and the inevitable backlash, particularly in larger enterprises. The backlash relates to compliance issues as organizations lose site of their data in their SharePoint sites. Organizations also start to wake up to the reality that it isn’t cheap to build applications in SharePoint (at least not as easy as Microsoft had led people to believe). (...) #7: Facebook backlash in the enterprise As fast as it’s been growing, Facebook may meet it’s maker in the enterprise as organizations try it and find disappointment. Why? It’s not a platform for information-oriented collaboration and it’s security capabilities are less then stellar. Actually I was quite surprised by the cynical tone of the predictions. Not very objec...