infoarch

We need more people that reach out to others. As people are social beings, you would expect 'reaching out' would come naturally. The strange thing is about the time we are living in, is that we learn (again) that this doesn't come naturally. Just look at the state of politics in this world, especially the uprising of the populist movement. And the web, deliberately made as a platform for connections and building bridges, shows this as well. We've all heard of being 'alone together' on the web and the 'filter bubbles' we all like to live in. The web often looks like more of a shouting-at-each-other platform, than a platform for connecting and networking. I see this inside organizations as well. I've worked for quite some organizations and one thing that strikes me is how small the number of connectors is in organizations. People that bridge gaps between individuals, teams, department, business units, office locations and the outside world. The int...

I enjoyed reading this HBR post  Focus on Your Customer's Customer by Kerry Bodine . But I wondered, isn't social media also pushing this and making this easier (and more important) than ever? In the past B2B companies hardly knew what the actual users/customers of their products thought of them. The Sales reps of B2B talked with DMU's (decision making units), not customers. Now via social media B2B sales can look past the DMU's and listen to the actual users/customers and use the data for product innovation, better customer service, different sales, etc. Kerry replied to my comment and I'm happy to say she agrees! Do you agree? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

It's public! And I'm really excited about it! Océ is setting up the Document Services Valley. Here's (part of) the press release : Océ N.V., a prominent global leader in professional printing and document management, today launched Document Services Valley in its Dutch home town of Venlo. Document Services Valley will focus on the research and development of document related services. In this new Valley , Océ intends to join forces with authoritative business partners and is currently in discussion with several. Partnership is key to develop the new services and test them in the market as quickly as possible. Effective 2008, some 50 experts will be employed by Document Services Valley . Demand for a document management resource such as the Valley has risen considerably and is attributable to various business trends such as new corporate governance legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley . UPDATE Oct. 15, 2010: Please refer to the Document Service Valley website for more informa...

Yesterday I listened to two long and interesting podcasts by IT Conversations . One is an interview with John Newton , one of the founders of Documentum and now running Alfresco . The other is an interview with Robert Glushko about 'Document Engineering' . The interview with Newton is interesting for several reason. For one, Newton was at the beginning of content management software and gives a nice overview of the history of this world. Furthermore he also talks about the future of this market and why Alfresco (open source ECM) is and will be a player in that field. He also talks about "the end of enterprise software". Finally, not to mention more, he also gets into handling structured and unstructured information in a unified way (time: 59:00). Something that most vendors don't address. The talk with Glushko is interesting too. It's interesting to hear him talk about documents (12:00) and his shift from a technology approach to documents, to a more user/se...