infoarch

For some time now I've been following the mobile web with fascination. How quickly this market has grown and is still growing! I can remember getting my first (Prepaid!) mobile phone about 9 years ago. Even then a mobile phone was something not everyone had. Some people were even very irritated by "all the people calling in public (on the street) and sitting in the train". I don't hear that complaint very often anymore... Then slowly but steadily the mobile web popped up. Actually it was already there but just way too expensive for mainstream use. I don't think the mobile web is mainstream now, but it definitely is getting there. Recently I bought an iPhone 3GS (I know I'm slow...) and now have my own real experiences with it. And I must say I was impressed without having a smartphone. But I'm even more surprised and fascinated by it now. Like with many technologies, after you start using it, you really feel it. You suddenly actually experience the ...

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...

Thanks to one of Dion Hinchcliffe 's tweets I found an interesting post about 'Social Network and Product Development' on the Cadalyst blog . It was written by Tom Shoemaker. To me product development is a deeply social activity. People develop product. They have ideas, write them down, share them, design what has been specified, model it, build it, sell and service it. What I see in the IT world in general and specifically in the world of tools for product development and resource planning , is a big abstraction from reality. There seems to be no 'social' in their stories. Product development, to stay with that topic, is a mechanical process you can automate in big, formal, heavy and expensive tools and you're all set. I find, the whole Web 2.0 movement is teaching us this is wrong. People are (usually...) social. Information is social. Processes are social. To me that's the big reason why blogs, wiki's, etc are so popular: they connect with re...

Read this nice interview with Clayton Christensen in MIT Sloan Management Review (Spring 2009). The article, 'Good days for Disruptors', has some really interesting quotes. I was thinking, what they imply for instance for product lifecycle management, knowledge management or enterprise 2.0 projects in the company I work for. "The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited." "The model of disruption say that a company's direction of innovation is always driven by where the margins are ..." "Every disruption has three components to it: a technological enabler, a business model innovation and a new commercial ecosystem." "In general, cost is driven by overhead, which is driven by complexity." "While cost is driven by complexity, quality is driven by integration. It's when we don't integrate things correctly that problems fall through the cracks." Now not all projects ha...

Some time ago I started thinking about how long product data should be archived? I'm not finding clear answers. I've heard people say: "Store it forever". That's the easy way to 'solve' this issue. Other say: "Store it for (about) 20 years." This sounds more realistic. But then I wonder when to start counting. Is this after the data have been created? Or is this after the product has been released to the customer? Someone else said: "Well, you should keep the product data as long as you have to service the customer's product." Good approach, but how long does the law require me to service a product? Finally, I found there are differences between types of product data. Product data from medical machines is different from software code of a text editor, for instance. This made me wonder: Are there different archiving rules for different types of product data? Is there anyone who can help me answer this question? The standards t...

Yesterday, I blogged about the statement: Information is the lifeblood of enterprises. Today I'd like to use this metaphor to explain why structured and unstructured information should be managed under architecture. Or in an integral way. I've been thinking and posting about this topic for some time now - it's basically the core of my job. To point to a few posts. Just recently I posted about 'PLM (product lifecycle management) and enterprise 2.0' . And longer ago about managing unstructured and structured information under architecture . As I've said before: I distinguish between unstructured and structured information in organizations. But they are not distinct. Regrettably this is common practice in most companies. You have people working on Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Resource Planning on the one hand. On other you have those that are implementing the intranet, rolling out wiki's and blogs, building document management systems and...

'Information: Lifeblood of Enterprise' is an interesting thesis. It's an interesting way to look at how the company runs too. I don't think many managers and employees in companies would agree with this thesis though. Those that agree are in information management, IT and communications. And this rings a bell with the 'process people' in organizations as well. But I do find this to be true, for all or most companies. A consultant once said to me: If this thesis isn't true, then what are all those employees doing behind their computers? What are they working on? Indeed, what they are doing is processing information of different types, amounts and abstractions. Employees gets emails, with or without links and attachments. These emails contain assignments and tasks. Information from the emails and documents is used to create new information. Then it is shared on a wiki, blog or a collaboration tool. This information is sometimes related to product and/or r...

In my role as an information architect I move between several very different worlds. For one I try to connect business and IT together by speaking their language and translating. Secondly I also move between the more formal systems and informal tooling. Formal systems, strictly related to defined and described business and information processes, seen as harnesses by knowledge workers, but essential to manage product and resource information. On the other hand you have all the 'good stuff' for knowledge workers: email, wiki's, blogs, social networking, bookmarking, etc. They usually love this part! What I find very strange is the fact that you pay millions for the more formal systems, define big projects to implement them and knowledge workers still find them 'hard to use', 'not encouraging creativity and innovation', etc. On the other hand social media are usually free or very cheap, easy to use, etc. What going on here? And isn't there something funda...

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...