infoarch

It still excites me every time when my RSS reader and tweets point me to interesting content I wouldn't have found by myself. It is true: Interesting information finds me. James Dellow pointed to Cecil Dijoux's interesting slide deck about 'The nature of software and how it changes the business' . The nature of social software and how it changes the business - Cecil Dijoux from SocialBizForum There's lots of good stuff in the presentation. What particularly struck me was slide 55 and 56. Those two slides are about how Enterprise 1.0 tools, like ERP, CRM and PLM tools, relate to Enterprise 2.0 tools. These slides are important for many IT departments and high-level decision makers to understand Enterprise 2.0 is not an either-or, but and-and game. I find we still have a long way to go here. Some time ago I wrote about this along two lines: relating business processes to networks , and relating different types of work to tools . It's interesting how e...

A while back Thomas Davenport wrote an interesting McKinsey report 'Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach' . It's a thought-provoking piece. It goes against the trend to say knowledge workers should be left alone, they're smart and know what to do. Davenport says we should provide more structure to knowledge work. Providing knowledge workers "well-defined context of tasks and deliverables". It's time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work - one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the task different knowledge workers perform. Davenport clearly also looks at the down-side of the free-access model for knowledge work. Are all knowledge workers really up to their task? Davenport clearly says 'no'. There are different levels of knowledge work tha...

Helen McCarthy, eCommunications Manager at Nestle. Nestle is a huge organization. 280000 employees at Nestle (100000 in factory), 449 factories, operations in 83 countries. Nestle runs their old portal on SAP. Of course they also have email, fileshares, etc. What they needed was collaboration, up-to-date content, reduced information overload, transactions/workflows, global vs local communications, ability to target, confidentiality/security. They set up a new portal based on SAP. One landing page, showing relevant information to the employee. But the employee couldn’t decide if he/she wanted something else targeted to him/her. The targeting was too restrictive. The technology was as well. So, they had a Kit-Kat break! ;-) They now want to model their intranet around their internet site. Their internet works and won awards. It was built on Sharepoint and so the intranet will be as well. They're aiming for the iPad as the standard of usability. Nestle's intranet will have the em...

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...

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...

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...