infoarch

Wired is my favorite work-related magazine by far. I read all editions from cover to cover (almost). Recently Wired celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special edition . Reading through that edition is a fascinating trip through history. And it's only been 20 years! For their anniversary Wired also collected some of their most popular articles and bundled them into an ebook. One of the articles struck me. The article is titled:  The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 - 2020 and is written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden. I'm a sucker for these kind of articles. But I found this one intriguing because it was written some time ago. I was curious how well they predicted what was going to happen in the time we are living in now. Of course they got things wrong, but many predictions are quite correct. Go ahead, read the article and see for yourself. But there's one part in this article that I wanted to share with you. It relates to all the posts that have bee...

“Why can't we use LinkedIn for our intranet? At least it works, our intranet doesn't .” Maybe you considered this or heard it in your organization. The question intrigues me and I think we will hear it more and more in the coming years. What do you say in response to this question as internal or external consultant, Communications or IT manager? I'd like to share my thoughts in this post. Dissatisfied about IT The intranet is changing rapidly. The internet provides all kinds of free tools, like Dropbox, Yammer and Google Drive. More and more people are getting used to sharing (versions of) documents, online collaboration, sharing short messages, setting up and maintaining a personal profile, etc. Employees are often dissatisfied about the internal IT-tools and content-focused intranets. These tools cannot compete with the functionality we have on the internet. Free tools as intranet More and more employees are openly, and sometimes secretly, using free internet too...

How will businesses collaborate in the future? This is the core question of a GigaOm Pro report released some time ago. It is titled ' Practical business collaboration: personal tools show the way ' and was written by Thomas van der Wal and David Card. Based on a survey of business managers, problematic areas around business content collaboration were signaled and directions for solutions are given in the report. Much of today's collaboration still happens in email. 96% says they use email for internal content sharing and 92% for sharing with externals (and this does not correlate with age...). Some companies like Atos are (planning on) banning email. Businesses are looking for ways to increase employee "productivity, accommodate or counter email limitations, and reduce costs". If a new tool addresses these topics it will probably be adopted quickly. Searching and tracking documents is still a big problem for companies. Access or lack thereof to content ...

Is your organization a process (several operational steps to get things done) or a network (smart knowledge workers connecting to get things done)? Or is it both? As an information architect I'm often confronted with this question. Usually not explicitly, but in a more implicit way. From an information process perspective you hear people talking about structured and unstructured information processes, for instance. I've shared my thinking about this topic in the past and I'm working on a longer post about this subject (to be published soon). I thought I'd start with something different. Three pictures to show the different views on organizations and how they relate. I'd love to hear you thoughts about these pictures. What I see is managers and business process specialists look at organizations in this way: So, the organization is put together as discrete, operational steps moving packets of information (the gray boxes) forward. (Loops back into the organiz...

The company I work for, Océ , has a clear track record as a sustainable company. Way before it became the hot topic it is in these days. Every year we have a Sustainability Week to focus even more on this topic. During this week an interesting whitepaper was released. It is about 'All in Balance. Océ's eco-efficient and eco-effective approach to analog and digital document'. Reference is made to a paper I wrote with others about (personal) document processes. I hope you enjoy the whitepaper. If so leave a comment below or here .

4th keynote at Intranet 2010 by Peter Hinssen . Will intranets be around in the future? 4 fundamentals: content (old, put stuff somewhere) intelligence knowledge collaboration (newer, share things) The trash bin is not used a lot in IT. We are drowning in information but are starved of knowledge - John Naisbitt. Is information still of strategic value? Paperless office Consumerization of IT. Leading to new behavior wrt information. Information behavior is key. It's moving quicker than hardware development. Digital is the new normal. We are half-way there. Let's take this to the limit. It's not information overload, but it's filter failure. Show me your folders and I will tell you who you work for. The depth of information will go to infinity. The price of information will go to 0. Privacy, we will live in a fish-bowl society. Patience is also going to 0. Users don't want to fill things out again and again. And the internet will be real-time. Now refl...

I've been wanting to post this for some time, but was hesitant to do it. I didn't want it to be 'yet another post on 'Obama and social media'. I hope it isn't, you may be the judge. Much has been written about how president Obama used social media to connect with (potential) voters. For instance: The Global Human Capital Journal : "Social Media is its O/S (Operating system)." This report drills down to the underlying concepts of Obama's campaign, how this fits with the Web 2.0 tools that his team and voters used and what businesses can learn from this. Infonomics had a comparable piece but also stressed the content management side of the campaign. Wired has a slightly different and more critical approach: "Obama's campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn't crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlle...

Bumped into an article and a post that got me thinking. One is an older article (that I reread after going paperless ). It is titled "Tailoring IT Support to communities of practice" by Agresti (in: IT Pro, 2003). The other is a recent blogpost by Oliver Marks, "Sorry, the helpdesk doesn't cover that" . What I was wondering is: How many companies are crowdsourcing their IT helpdesks? I see most companies still maintaining traditional helpdesks. So, every employees knows the numbers he/she should call, you call the helpdesk and they try to help you. Usually there's also a system to support that process. This tool supports the helpdesk to manage calls and their solutions. And employees can check the progress of their incident/question. However, we all know lots of stuff that is IT helpdesk-ish is solved by asking colleagues for help or Googling the solution. And the solutions the helpdesk provides to one colleagues is shared among the helpdesk people, but...

Recently I was asked to blog for IT Executive . IT Executive is a Dutch magazine and website about IT to help executives in IT decision-making. I thought I'd give it a go and will be starting soon. Tags van Technorati: IT , blogging

Nice comparison of IT, Operator & Executive, and Social Computing culture on the IBM developerWorks platform. I don't agree with one row though. It says IT finds that "Information can be captured and frozen in time". The Operator & Executive cell has not been filled in. I would say they agree with IT on this topic. Social Computing does not agree with IT on this. According to Social Computing culture information is alive and also co-evolving. Remember ?

An interesting article was published in the July-August 2008 edition of HBR. It was titled "Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference" and written by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson . It interested me because McAfee is one of the authors - I try to follow his work. Furthermore I was curious what they had to say on the way companies invest in IT. In most large companies the large part of the spending is on large corporate-wide systems, like SAP. And not on an enterprise-wide collaboration tool or corporate intranet, for instance. So, what do they have to say? What I’ll do is summarize the article for you, passing on the highlights. But first a couple of comments: I’m surprised to read they advise companies to define (new) ways of working after deploying a technology platform. I thought we should define our working methods first? I’m surprised they don’t mention PDM/PLM (Product Data Management/Product Lifecycle Management) systems as examples of enterp...

Olivier Amprimo over at the Headshift blog has a very long and interesting post on "Taxonomies > Sensemaking > Adoption" . First of all Olivier points us to Marchand's strategic information alignment framework. This model is pretty well-known. Nonetheless, I took another good look at it after reading Olivier's post and even printed it to hang in on the wall as a constant reminder. Why? Well, Olivier shows us why many innovative IT projects struggle. I advise you to read his whole post, but I'll pass some main points - I hope I got them… - here: In theory, IT policies are to address the four elements evolving in a sequence "manage risks" > "reduce costs" > "add value" > "create new reality". In reality this taxonomy displays two distinct (and often non-compatible) behaviours: -    manage risks and reduce costs -    add value and create new reality This is a good reminder! This is why the big PDM and ERP...

Interesting post about the (need for a) changing IT department/employee on ReadWriteWeb . Some highlights: A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret "user-speak" and present them with the tools they need even if they didn't know how to ask for them in our language. (...) The I.T. 2.0 guy will need to know not just what software is best for the company, but whether or not it should run behind the firewall, in the cloud, or a combination of both. (...) The I.T. department, though, will have to adapt their current solutions to fit this new workforce - one that's not always connected to the company network, but surfing unprotected Wi-Fi from their local coffee shop or their own home wireless network. I.T. will need to find ways to push through the security updates and patches their users need, even if they're never remoting in to the company network. I.T. also needs to be more wary of lost and stolen company laptops filled with company data. I.T. will be dea...

The other podcast I listened to was an ITConversations interview with Shane Pearson ( BEA ). I'll be shorter on this interview. What I found most interesting was Shane Pearson's remarks on the IT organisation of the future (it's around 6:50 in the interview). He does not believe that IT will eventually, in the future, control all the new (and old) technology and employees will be forced to use what's on "the approved list". It's not governable. And it's not worth it. What he thinks we will see is in the next 10-15 years is that the IT department will take a different approach. Comparable to how many companies approach their corporate phones: you have to use one of a couple of providers, but are allowed to pick any phone/communication tool you want. People get comfortable with the tools they use at home. Their blog of choice, their wiki or IM of choice. They will be more productive if they can keep using these tools of their choice at work.