infoarch

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 ...

Social Media should support networks within companies and over its boundaries. It should break down silo's in companies. The same goes for the silo's in people's lives, work and private life. But does it really? I've been wondering about this topic for some time. I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto  and found it's been mentioned there as well. And now with the arrival of Google+ people are wondering if this will be the social backbone (must-read piece BTW!). What am I talking about? Well, we have all these social tools that support parts of our lives. Some only work on the intranet, some only on the internet. Some are more for personal, private sharing, others are more work-related. Many have approximately the same functionality. So, you always get the question: Where should I share my information (without pushing the same information to all these services at once)? And where do I get an overview of all my social interactions? I was hoping somet...

What is the future of intranet technology? Looking at the cheap social tools, what should intranet teams invest in? And what does mobile mean for the intranet? These were just some of the questions Tony Byrne addressed in his keynote at the Intranet Conference ( Congres Intranet ). Byrne advised the audience to focus on a light-weight application architecture for the intranet. Lots will change in the coming years and is changing. Making the architecture lighter will give room to respond to new technology, changing business and user needs. One central intranet platform is not (going to be) enough. Make sure the elements and functionality of the intranet can be clicked together and mixed. Organize for mashups. Another theme in Byrne’s talk is the social layer. We should add a social layer to the intranet. Make the technology more human through social. Integrate the elements of social everywhere in your intranet, like tagging, commenting, social networking, location, etc. Byrne als...

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business. Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value. Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift . Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization. Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning). We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like: lower operational costs networked productivity business agility effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder) customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening) Where is business practice going...

Some notes from the open space about Enterprise 2.0 and business processes: If you don't impact the business process with Enterprise 2.0 you won't unlock value. If you introduce a new tool, you can't make them use it. Tools should fit in their daily routine. If not, users will easily reject it. There were differences about using force to get people to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tooling. Most said, Don't use force, make it voluntary. But it does depend on the type of e2.0 project. For instance, an example was given about social project management. In this case you agree to do project management in this way. But with communities using (a bit of) force is restrictive. Helping people use e2.0 tools and integrating them in their work processes requires patience and lots of training. Sometimes you even have to start by explaining what a webbrowser is. Focus on the e2.0 concepts not on the tools. Most people understand the concepts better than the tools... Enterprise 2.0 pr...

Some time ago I said: Vacation First . I wanted to share my review of professor Andrew McAfee's book Enterprise 2.0 before I went on vacation. That didn't work out. I wish I could have written this review sooner, because the sooner you read this book the better. I'll tell you why. Andrew McAfee coined the term 'enterprise 2.0' (in 2006) and has been one of the leading thinkers in the space of applying web 2.0 concepts and tools (or 'collaborative media' as McAfee likes to call them) to the workplace. This book summarizes his thinking over the years. Of course he's been blogging and speaking about this topic. So I was wondering if this book would bring me new insights. Well it did. And to me this is why I love books. You know thinking about the topic you're reading about in a book won't stop as soon as the book has been published. But a book does give you a summary of past thinking and concepts for future thinking. And all that in a limited...

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...

Just to let you know: I will be giving a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt am Main in October. Please find the full schedule here. My talk will be about our microblogging experiences and my vision on how the information and communications processes supported by microblogging relate to more formal business processes . Hope to see you there!

I was planning to write two more posts today and this evening, but I decided they can wait. I really wanted to write about two things that I'm really hyped up about: Andrew McAfee's book Enterprise 2.0 . Great read, great book. Really good overview of the Enterprise 2.0 landscape for people that are new to this interesting field and even for the experienced early adopters. I'll share my review in September. Lots of debate has popped up quite recently about Enterprise 2.0 and business processes. I was working on a post, based on all the older and newer posts that I've collected . Great stuff and very deep thinking going on there. But 'vacation first'. I'm heading to Germany, near Trier , and hope to be there with my family. Really looking forward to it! So, blogging and tweeting will be slow! See you later.

When do you have enough information to make a next step or a decision? As you may know I love to process lots of information. Depending on the type of information I'll dive into it deeply or just dip my toe in it. After processing lots of information deciding when enough is enough has become easier for me. But it's hard for me to describe when I stop taking in information. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model has helped me in this sense. (By the way Snowden is currently summarizing the Cynefin model/approach/concept in several posts . The Cynefin model basically says: look at cause and effect. Is the cause and/or effect clear? Is the relationship between both clear? Depending on your answer different 'next steps' should be taken. For instance if the relationship between cause and effect is completely unclear. This is the complex domain. Probing is the thing to do. Don't go a read volumes of books and articles. Probe and see what happens, then act, etc. Even though ...

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 .

Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation . ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? View more presentations from Chris Messina . I went through it several times. And I think I'll do so in the coming days. Really great stuff!! Activity Streams: what are they, how can we collect and understand them? This presentation focuses on public streams, mostly on the internet. But does this story also extend to the streams behind the firewall, inside organization? I think it should, but I'm thinking about how this should work. Of course the firewalls are coming down. But companies will still be protecting their information to a certain extent. My thesis is: These streams will be most useful if the distinction between protected and public information is mixed. What do you think? And how do you think one stream of internal and external information can be devised? I'd love to hear your thoughts. (No...

As you may have notice in my tweet behavior I attended Intranet 2010 this week. Just like last year , it was a great ride! Great location, interesting keynotes, interesting participants, good food, etc. I haven't been to many conferences that are so well organized and are simply great from beginning to end. Jan van Veen , my colleague who is manager Internal Communications, and I also gave a breakout session. It was titled 'Social Media for Internal Communications'. I inserted the slides below. I would like to thank the Entopic organization for organizing this conference again! And to all participants: We enjoyed your questions, compliments and interactions! Pres Oce social media for internal communications intranet 2010 congres View more presentations from Samuel Driessen .

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...

Recently I was honored to co-write a paper with Olha Bondarenko and Ruud Janssen . It is titled: ''Requirements for the Design of a Personal Document-Management System" and was published in JASIST . I think Olha's work in general and this paper in particular is very valuable for the whole information, content and document management industry.  Because it truly tries to understand how knowledge workers use information and documents. That knowledge is translated into requirements/principles for a document management system. But you decide if Olha/we succeeded! I hope you like it. This paper was written in the context of Olha's PhD research - which was finalized recently! - about personal information management. Her PhD defense will be on February 11 (at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands). I hope to be there and will blog/tweet about it. Tags van Technorati: information management , knowledge management , document management

Oof! I've been wanting to write about this for some time... There's always been debate on how to define 'knowledge management'. Dave Snowden is one of the big thinkers in this area. He has always been critical of the old-skool knowledge management approaches and definitions. Interestingly the social Internet is showing he has been pretty right all along. Snowden came up with a definition not too long ago . (I'm not sure it's his first attempt, as Luis Suarez says. At least Snowden implicitly defined what KM is here , for instance.) Here's his definition: The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes. The following guiding principles will be applied All proj...

Does your company share and manage process information centrally? And, if so, where is that information share/stored? I usually make a general distinction when thinking about enterprise information. I distinguish four types of information: process information: information describing the processes of the company, the way of working and best practices, the document templates, etc. product information: information about products, such as designs, requirements, parts descriptions, product structure(s), etc. project information: information used to manage a project, like minutes, task lists, progress reports, customer visit reports, etc. departmental information: information about resources, monthly reports about the department, presentations given to the department, etc. In many companies process information is shared and stored all over the place. Part of the information can be found on the intranet. I think most process info is shared here. Some process information...

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC . A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters , wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.) His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever. This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness. He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you ...

A colleague of mine kindly pointed me to an interesting report: "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite. How executives locate and filter business information'. It's a Forbes Insight report, sponsored by Google. To be clear, this report is about how executives look for and process external information. Information that is on the web. It would be very interesting to read a comparable report on how execs do the same for internal information. I think it's the case for many execs they're too busy to follow and look for external trends anyway. Surprisingly more than 60% of the execs said they accessed the Internet for business intelligence on a daily basis. Another interesting part of the report is how execs use web 2.0. For the 50+ category 80% or more didn't maintain a blog or tweet. Only 26% of the 'under 40' category didn't tweet. RSS is not used much at all over all categories. Only 40% of the 'under 40' category for instance. Which regrett...