infoarch

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice. As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for? The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman , addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendo...

Just a small post to invite you all to join the next KMers Chat on this Tuesday, October 5 from 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. I'll be moderating this chat. Participating is easy. All you need is a Twitter account. Just wait for the chat to begin and make sure to append your tweets with #kmers . Lots of interesting and smart people join in . This chat will be about: Relating structured and unstructured knowledge processes . Here's a short overview of this topic and some questions: Knowledge Management is currently often related to the unstructured information and knowledge processes in organizations. In the past the focus of KM was on the structured side. But how can/are these combined in organizations? More specifically: how does enterprise 2.0 relate to BPM? (As you may know this is being heavily debated now on the web.) Questions: Intro: Is the summary clear? Is the distinction clear? What do you call unstructured information/knowledge processes and structured pro...

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...

Ran into this interesting news via Michael Sampson's blog : EMC started a company that will focus on personal information management. I've always wondered why the large enterprise information management vendors never adequately addressed the personal information space. I found they basically said: use the enterprise system, even if it doesn't fit your personal way of working. Will Decho, the new company, truly address this gap? I'm really curious if they will and will follow this step. Also refer to EMC press release and Decho site (which basically tells you Decho now 'only' sells a backup service). Tags van Technorati: knowledge worker , knowledge management , content management , information overload

I have a pile of articles on my desk categorized as "someday/maybe". Meaning (following GTD) I will read them "someday" when I have time. Well I recently ran through the stack and found an article that I should have read before, although it's from 2006. It is an "Ethnographic study of collaboration knowledge work" by S.L. Kogan and M.J. Muller ( IBM Systems Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 2006 ). It was a really interesting read. For one, to see how far we have come. But it also stressed some issues in collaboration that are still very hard to support digitally. To begin with the last point. This article gives an interesting Table (table 3) with an overview of "Attributes associated with work processes". Or, in another way, it summarizes the tension knowledge workers live in. These tensions are: - unstructured <> structured - static <> dynamic - ad hoc <> predefined - one person <> multiperson - single use <> re...

Insightful post on the 'Grow Your Wiki' blog , clearly describing the difference between internet and intranet wiki's. And the difference between ecm and wiki's.

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...

Interesting post on the future of document management , relating to Google Docs. I agree with most of their vision of the future. Employees being able to select their own email and collaboration (web) apps. However, there is another issue to be addressed: if all employees will be able to use their own email and collaboration apps, how do you facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse in the organization? Any ideas? Should the Information Management department monitor all these email and collaboration apps and manage the interesting stuff centrally?

Nice demo of how Cocreate integrates structured and unstructured information! The CAD model is encapsulated in a Word document and a task is added to it. This can be seen in Sharepoint and in Cocreate tooling. I was wondering: Is it also possible to view the actual CAD model/file in Sharepoint (not encapsulated in Word)?

Relating to this post by Column Two , which is more about web content structuring/un-structuring, I'd like to ask you the following questions. But first I'll give you some context. Introduction Product research, development, engineering and manufacturing is an interesting process. To certain extent it is structured and follows agreed upon work flows. On the other hand much is done in an ad hoc and unstructured way. An important part of product research, development, engineering and manufacturing is information management. To design a product information must be gathered, structured, distributed, searched, etc. Over time a clear description of this product (part) is stored, versioned, communicated, etc. These facets of data, document, information and knowledge management are also sometimes very structured, while in other parts of the process totally unstructured. Most companies manage structured data, documents and information fairly well (in PLM and ERP systems). Most inf...

“Keynote High Volumes, High Pressure, High Stakes: Managing the Documentation for the Milosovic Trial” (by Catherine Gerth, Head Archives and Information Management at NATO HQ) at PCC 2007 Summit . The information exceeded the organization’s ability to manage it with existing processes and technologies. The accused decision to defend himself further complicated things - the boxes just did not fit in his cell. This presentation describes the creation of an eDisclosure portal and how the ICTY worked with vendors to transform its technology and business processes to support eDisclosure. Another problem is translation problems. How to disclose load of documents? In boxes? Doesn't fit in the court room and in the prison cell... On CD? How do you handle 53 CD's if you're looking for something? Put every single CD in your computer, search, etc? No. Ok, then DVD's. Doesn't help much either. Their vendors came up with a solution: a portal. They rescanned 2.5 million docume...

Vendors at the PCC 2007 Summit : - Microsoft - Interwoven - Vivisimo - EMC - Quasar - Vignette - ZyLab - BEA systems - IBM

“Knowledge Management in a Connected World” (by Regina Casonato from Gartner ) at PCC 2007 Summit . - how is the role of KM in workplace initiatives evolving? - what are the best practices for KM success? - how can you incorporate new PCC technologies in KM projects? Regina stresses that she will not talk about technologies with respect to KM. KM is about people. Knowledge Management is not in their Hype Cycle anymore because it has reached the “plateau of productivity”. Knowledge Management can now really be about Managing Knowledge (not products) - workplace products such as portals, content management and collaboration are good enough to get out of the way - emerging technology will help people manage knowledge in new ways - people, business and operational issues remain the most difficult Key issues of this presentation: What must we consider when starting a KM initiative, and when improving KM projects in their second or third iteration? how can KM help specific vertica...

"Transforming Business and Workplace Performance - Technology as Great Enabler” (by Tom Austin from Gartner) at PCC 2007 Summit . The transformation in the workplace is all about externalization. Tom gave a couple of examples (that can also be found (mostly) in the book Wikinomics ): 1. Proctor and Gamble : "connect and develop" instead of internal research and develop, want 50% of innovations from outside the company, 200 times as many researchers outside than inside the company. Lots of this doesn't require technology! What they did was sign up to open networks, such as: NineSigma, InnoCentive, YourEncore and yet2.com. They posted questions on difficult issues they had here. They set up internal idea changes, web-community-based market. IT was the great enabler here. 2. US Patent and Trademark organisation wiki experiment. Started with posting the software patent requests. 3. Threadless: design T-shirts together. Post your design, people vote on them and based o...

“Web 2.0, Ajax-based High-End Publishing Tools Transforming the Enterprise Market” (by Eric Duchemin, General Manager of HAFIBA on behalf of Quasar Technologies ) at PCC 2007 Summit . Never heard of Quasar so I thought I’d visit this talk instead of the IBM one. Quasar comes from the high-end publishing market. Enabling newspapers to publish by themselves. They supplied tools to produce printed documents. They saw a gap between Document Management and Content Management. A lack of tools for high-end publishing support, such as workflows and process support. They combined ECM with high-end commercial publishing tools (called ECP). HAFIBA is a French pre-press company. HAFIBA thinks that traditional pre-pres will disappear. More will be done by users and done dispersed. So, they wanted to develop a service for their customers. They started to build some technology, but needed more. Then they found Quasar. Security of data is important in the magazine world. They were also looking for a...

“Clash of Titans ( IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Google vs. Others)” (by Tom Austin and Nikos Drakos from Gartner ) at PCC 2007 Summit . Choosing your strategic suppliers is more improvement than ever. So, you need to know where these vendors are taking you. Your workplace investments increasingly go to fewer enterprise vendors. What disruptive trends will impact the workplace titans? What are the workplace products and technologies that IBM and MS offer and how do they differ ? What inadequacies do the titans have? 5 major mutually reinforcing discontinuities open source software as a service global class (meaning: a new class of systems, more than the grid, exceeding performance at lower costs) web 2.0 consumerization Tom and Nikos will look into each of these to see if this is a threat or opportunity. Microsoft and IBM are mentioned most by companies when they are asked which vendor they would like to get away from. What are they doing well? IBM - portal: number one share - content ...

"So not done: Search Technology’s Strategic Future will surprise you” (by Whit Andrews from Gartner ) at PCC 2007 Summit . - what is driving the pervasiveness of information access technology? - how will enterprises deploy the power of information access technology in unexpected ways? - how are vendors responding to increased popularity of information access technology? The search box bridges users and data of all kinds is built up by users, relevancy and data indices/interfaces. In YE12, search logic in more than 75% of new installations will contain some internal user identity. Search comprises everything on the continuum, structured to unstructured data/information. Users have no idea that something is not searchable. Support for extending the searched: the spider and the ant . Spidered data is collected and the index remains iterated but static invoked addressed return current pages. (Pro: stable/known - Con: Can go stale, link rot, enormous storage need) A query-driven ant ...

“Say Goodbye to Enterprise Content Management” (by Karen Shegda from Gartner ) at PCC 2007 Summit . It’s clearly getting towards the end of the day… This talk was titled “Goodbye to content management”… meaning “as we know it today”. Karen gives a good overview of the trends in content management (web 2.0, service-oriented architecture, less focus on document itself, XML, consumer-driven technologies, etc). Lots of overlap with this talk . And that’s all for Wednesday! I’m having a drink! See you tomorrow.

“End-user case study: Portals, Content and Colllaboration - Communication Comes in full circle at Dow Jones” (by Mary McCall, Director, Employee Communication Dow Jones ) at PCC 2007 Summit . Just a couple of notes on this talk. Dow Jones owns Factiva , which started in 1999. Mary tells about how they step-by-step, year-by-year implemented collaboration tooling. She stresses the three C’s: - C ollaboration - Common C ommunications platform - Global Corporate Culture It all starts with the needs of the employee: all of the relevant content, only the relevant content, in the right form, at the right time, fastest. That is the Factiva marketing slogan! But what do users need? - conduct an information audit. Have users write done their information needs during their work. An employee is looking for information. Ask him/here: where did you find it, how did you find it, could you find it, etc. This give you items for your case. They are ( also ) moving to Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007). They...

" Sharepoint : making collaboration happen!” (by David Bennett, ISS Global Development Director, Linklaters on behalf of Microsoft) at PCC 2007 Summit . Linklaters uses Sharepoint. Linklater is a law firm that focuses on mergers and acquisitions. It’s a global firm, 6000 people world wide, most offices around London . 2 prevailing business drivers that have enabled them to develop: - deregulation - technology Basically they are a document house. 1.6 million new documents in 2006. In 2007 there will be more. 165 million emails stored in their KVS (email archiving tool). They have centralized systems and a centralized architecture based on: - Citrix - SAP - Documentum - Office - Sharepoint They used to use Nextstep . Now moved fully towards Microsoft. Why collaborative work? - one of the main reason was that now 75% of their work involves more than one office They decided to set up a ‘Legal Desktop’ and set this up in Sharepoint (which is also their Intranet), so everybody has al...