Planet Enterprise 2.0

I got a chance to talk to Oracle yesterday about how they plan to integrate the BEA middleware assets they picked up in their acquisition into their own middleware portfolio.  Oracle let it be known that - no surprise - Oracle strategy is constant and BEA integrates into it.  Fusion Middleware is the brand and it’s all about Fusion in this integration strategy.  Dictionary.com defines fusion as “a nuclear reaction in which nuclei combine to form more massive nuclei with the simultaneous release of energy.”  That seems to be what is happening at Oracle these days as the nucleus of Oracle and the nucleus of BEA (which had already combined with the nucleus from Plumtree) combine to form something pretty massive.  And there is certainly a lot of energy being released, so that definition certainly applies. 

Still, Oracle assures BEA customers that all products continue under “existing BEA support lifetimes”, there’s no forced migration, and license costs are grandfathered for existing customers. In fact, some support costs may come down since Oracle policy is to price support as a percentage of net price rather than list, but others could increase or decrease a bit since Tuxedo’s pricing tiers get remapped to CPUs.

I won’t comment much on development since that isn’t my coverage area.  I will say that JDeveloper is still the flagship development platform for Oracle.  BEA Beehive is just in maintenance and Workshop is a freebie in the Eclipse Pack. 

And now, the answer to the portal conundrum I wrote about in my “Four Portals of the Apocalypse” posting when Oracle announced its intention to acquire BEA.  For portals, as expected, the winner is WebCenter.  It’s not that the others are dead, but WebCenter is the “hot” product they want to talk about first, connect everything to, and anoint with all the cool, buzzword-compliant enhancements.  Users of the other portals (Oracle Portal, BEA WebLogic Portal, AquaLogic User Interaction aka Plumtree) need to figure out how soon a rewrite is going to be in their future since those products are in the “continue and converge” category (C&C).  A C&C portal will keep going forward for existing customers for quite a while (Thomas Kurian publicly stated the lifecycle would be about 9 years), but will not have new customers steered towards it and will eventually be merged into WebCenter. 

So, here’s my recommended strategy based on which Oracle portal product you’re using based on what I know so far. I’ve been told that more detailed migration plans will probably come out in 2-3 months:

• Oracle WebCenter: You lucky dog!  You picked the winner.  It’s a rosy future for you, full of the best piece parts from other portal products, new Enterprise 2.0 functionality, and you’ll meet lots of new friends at each annual WebCenter user’s group meeting.  For a new portal project being planned, WebCenter is the only reasonable choice in the Oracle portfolio unless you’re into planned obsolescence. 
• Oracle Portal or BEA WebLogic Portal: You’re probably OK coasting along as is unless you fall into one of a few categories.  If you’re really thinking of adding the newest functionality (Enterprise 2.0) and architectural standards (REST, RIA) you’ll want to start thinking about migration soon, although Oracle intends to have some WebCenter services plug into WebLogic Portal, Oracle Portal, and ALUI to be leveragable without migrating.  And if you are in the rare situation of having a strategic portal with a long lifespan expected ahead of it (5+ years), you’ll have to make a reminder for yourself in 2010 or so to start thinking about migration. 
• AquaLogic User Interaction: The picture for ALUI users is pretty similar to that of Oracle Portal and BEA WebLogic Portal – it’s in the C&C category so expect it to be supported for quite a while. Still, it’s my personal opinion that Oracle will have a harder time with ALUI since it will be chopped up into more pieces and there are lots of legacy installations with deep customization. Also, ALUI has a .NET side to its heritage. In the Plumtree days they had spent quite a bit of effort on building out .NET support. For example, the Enterprise Web Development Kit (EDK) could be installed with either a Java or .NET (C#) development and there was a .NET version of the EDK is available as a dynamic link library (DLL).  The .NET portlet creation capabilities are going to be rebranded as the Oracle WebCenter .Net Application Accelerator.

Oracle is rolling out a few new SKUs (packages) that will help portal owners. 

• WebCenter Services combines the WebCenter Framework with some Oracle pieces (BPEL Worklist, their portlet bridge and JSR 168 container) and sprinkles some ALUI and WebLogic Portal pieces in.  Ensemble is renamed Oracle Ensemble and put into services SKU and Analytics gets Oracle branding. 
• WebCenter Suite has everything in WebCenter services as well as restricted licenses for content, Oracle Presence, BPEL Process Manager, and search.  ALUI is renamed WebCenter Interaction and goes in the suite for now, although as of 11g there’s nothing in ALUI that they’d recommend for new deployments. AL Collaboration is renamed WebCenter Collaboration and goes in the suite until they can roll out new collaboration in WebCenter 11g.

I was a fan of the BEA Pages and Pathways products, both of which will melt into Fusion Middleware.  Pages melts into the WebCenter Framework. It will be part of WebCenter Composer for users to create mashups and its wiki and blog capabilities go into WebCenter Services in the 11g timeframe.  Pathways melts into two separate places.  Its social search merges into secure enterprise search and the social tagging merges into the 11g foundation.

All in all, this roadmap is pretty complete and as good as owners of Oracle Portal or BEA WebLogic Portal could have hoped for.  Owners of complex, customized ALUI portals need to see the writing on the wall and plan to migrate to the new WebCenter model (method TBD by Oracle) or re-architect off the Oracle platform entirely.  But one more telling statement about nuclear fusion may shed light on Oracle’s strategy of unifying all its pieces under the Fusion umbrella.  Wikipedia notes that “Artificial fusion in human enterprises has also been achieved, although not yet completely controlled.” Ah, yes, how true.  We still have to see how well this bit of fusion winds up being under control over the next few years.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

I’m here at our Catalyst Conference in San Diego and just saw a great presentation from Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans.  Alan is a community organizer and, through a stunning set of photos from his city, showed the challenges that New Orleans faced after Hurricane Katrina and how social software in every possible form helped to provide informal, emergent connectivity between people when the formal, centralized organizations had failed.  One particularly poignant photo showed a road sign that had read “deaf child area” defaced to read “deaf government area”.

When necessary, open publishing of information enabled the shaming of local politicians and developers into often doing the right thing.  Information sharing was essential for putting together the individual pieces that formed a larger pattern.  For example, Alan described some shifty deals where a string of perfectly good homes along a street that developers probably wanted to freshen wound up being declared a health threat . Alan: “It’s hard to get local press, but we can get national press and then we get local press and then something gets done.”

Alan described how the idea of community that feeds much of Web 2.0 is a natural fit for New Orleans.  As Alan said, “This is a city that is familiar with community … Mardis Gras isn’t created by the chamber of commerce - it’s created by krewes that pool together to create a float.”

Much of Alan’s work has been around trying to ensure that the rebuilding of New Orleans doesn’t form an excuse for gentrification that replaces the communities in the city with generic, upscale suburbia that displaces existing residence.  Alan: “Life takes place outside in New Orleans … this is a 19th century city and we want to know the city we’re rebuilding is the city we lost; that we’re not building over it.”

Social software - including groups, wikis, blogs, and extensive use of Flickr - provided a way for disenfranchised residents to exchange information, note patterns, and organize to address them when required.  For example, in one case social software was used to pull together a rally of 5,000 citizens to protest a rash of violence . But, as Alan said, the use of these technologies was not just useful but necessary: “If you’re used to meeting people in your community in the coffee shop and if your coffee shop is now gone, you use these technologies because you’re compelled to”.  Today, “In New Orleans, being a citizen means being a knowledge worker”.

Yesterday I posted up a set of interruption models.  I mentioned in that post that I’d write another entry on how they can be used to test interruption study methodologies.  I know that sounds pretty arcane - mostly of interest to people doing interruption studies or interpreting their findings.  That may not sound like too many of you, but one survey in particular, from Basex, has gotten into a lot of popular press for its easy-to-digest dollar amount for “unnecessary” interruptions in the U.S. ($650,000,000,000).  It’s used by pop press journalists whenever they write about a fuzzy info-stress topic, but want to show this is really important and add a drop of academic-sounding data.  Any of them wanting to delve deeper can select from hundreds of academic papers on interruption, attention, and human-computer interface (interruptions.net has a great list), but none of those have a big dollar figure to quote.

My attempts to determine the methodology of the Basex study have been unsuccessful so far.  The way I would evaluate its legitimacy is the same way I’d evaluate any interruption study’s legitimacy - by lining it up against the models I’ve presented to see how accurately it would count them.  Clearly not all interruptions are “bad” or “unnecessary” - many of the interruption models I listed have a positive net closed-loop benefit.  A seemingly valid methodology that simply asks people how often they were interrupted (or observes them and records interruptions) and how much time they lost can provide a very inaccurate conclusion.  Each model I list (except maybe the jerk model and blast model) could be easily miscounted by a poor survey methodology.

For example, I believe the Help-me model to be a large proportion of interruptions.  This is where one person needs a little bit of someone’s time to provide a good deal of benefit to them.  A study that just counts interruptions and their cost would only count the costs and not the benefits to the interrupter which is often many multiple higher than the cost.  Only net closed-loop benefit analysis would hunt down the person that interrupted them and determine the value to them and add it back in.  That’s difficult to do in a survey, but essential for an accurate estimate.  Alternately a survey could ask how often you interrupted other people and how much benefit you got.

As another example, the Help-you model is common as well.  This is where someone is interrupted to be told they should stop or modify what they’re doing, perhaps due to new information that’s just come in.  But a methodology that only asks about the cost in time of each interruption in negative terms may miss the positive value the interruptee places on the interruption.

One more example: The Interaction model would throw any survey off if it doesn’t properly define “interruption” versus the simple act of collaboration.  I defined interactions as interruptions that take place within the task the person is currently working on.  Many people wouldn’t even consider this really an interruption.  Survey takers may randomly include interactions fitting this model as interruptions, possibly incorrectly counting each positive benefit as a negative.

Well, we’ve gone quickly through the cycle of seasons here in Chicago, passing from winter to spring to construction.  When working in my home office I’m now faced with a random barrage of interruptions from beeping trucks, pile drivers, and loud workmen that can’t afford walkie-talkies.  Living in a part of Chicago that was fully built 50 years ago, many feel the need to tear down perfectly good houses and erect new ones to match the current style (the “large brick block covering every allowable inch in 3 dimensions” school of architecture).  I think this inspired me to develop a list of interruption models that I posted over at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.  I figure I should post them here as well for greater input. These are still open for debate - so your comments and feedback are welcome.

Each has an example of how it would apply, followed with a sample numerical calculation based on the dollars gained or lost by the organization based on the interruption (assume this is $ based on time x fully loaded pay rate).

• Help-me model: Bill needs a moment of Stu’s time to proceed with his work
  • Value to interrupter (80) + value to interruptee (-20) = Net closed-loop benefit (60)
• Help-you model: Bill takes the time to let Stu know he needs to change his task approach
  • Value to interrupter (-10) + value to interruptee (50) = Net closed-loop benefit (40)
• Jerk model: Mick is an jerk that likes bugging other people about fantasy football, hurting both their productivity
  • Value to interrupter (-20) + value to interruptee (-30) = Net closed-loop benefit (-50)
• Machine interrupt model: Stu’s PC crashes. This distrubs Stu and has no benefit to the PC
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (-50) = Net closed-loop benefit (-50)
• Break model: Bill’s thinking has been getting less effective and he finds himself spinning on a simple task, so he interrupts himself and decides he needs a mental break.  He returns to work more refreshed and effective
  • Value to interrupter & interruptee (5) = Net closed-loop benefit (5)
• Interaction model: Stu and Bill are working on a task together, expecting each other’s input, and neither would really consider this an “interruption”
  • Value to interrupter (5) + value to interruptee (5) = Net closed-loop benefit (10)
• Alert model: A fire alarm goes off while Stu is working, interrupting him and saving his life
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (100) = Net closed-loop benefit (100)
• Scheduled interruption model: Stu is working hard on a task that requires concentration, but has to stop at 10:00 for a scheduled meeting, which interrupts his train of thought and will require recovery time upon resuming.  For this example, it is assumed the meeting is a project update for another project that Stu doesn’t get much out of but is obligated to attend
  • Value to interrupter (0) + value to interruptee (-10) = Net closed-loop benefit (-10)
• Lazy model: Mick could figure out his task alone if he applied some time and effort, but it just seems easier to ask his smarter colleague Stu. Too bad Mick will never learn to help himself and will keep bothering Stu
  • Value to interrupter (5) + value to interruptee (-7) = Net closed-loop benefit (-2)
• Training model: Bill is stuck in his task and needs to ask his smarter colleague Stu for information.  Bill learns a valuable lesson that can be immediately applied and Bill is now that much better at his job
  • Value to interrupter (10) + value to interruptee (-7) = Net closed-loop benefit (3)
• Blast model: Mick shouts out to the room to see if anyone wants to go to lunch.  No one wants to because Mick is a jerk, so they are annoyed
  • Value to interrupter (1) + value to interruptees (-50) = Net closed-loop benefit (-49)

• Social interruption model: Stu stops by his co-worker Bill’s desk and interrupts him to find out how his daughter is feeling after she got out of the hospital
  • Value to interrupter (?) + value to interruptees (?) = Net closed-loop benefit (positive?)

I talked this over with Mike Gotta, who brought up the point of reciprocity.  One enters into an implicit social contract that they will be gracious about interruptions in exchange for getting to interrupt others when needed.  The Help-me model should be encouraged as it has a net benefit for the organization, but it can also have a net benefit for Stu if he gets some of Bill’s time the next time he needs it.  He also pointed out that interruptions tied to communities can be worthwhile as people search for expert opinions and information.

For individuals feeling stressed and overloaded this list of models could help guide some introspection about the degree to which interruptions are causing the stress and which models need to be reduced. 

For the owner of an attention management project, surveying information workers for the types of interruptions they are experiencing can help optimize the communication flows and interruptions. 

For anyone presented with an interruption study (particularly those showing extremely high negative impact by interruptions) it provides a firetest of the study’s assumptions.  These models can be run through the methodology of the study to see how accurately it would count the net closed-loop benefit.  I’ll post more on this later.

It’s been a while since my last blog post as I’ve been kept running all over Europe lately doing speaking and visiting current and potential clients in Munich, Copenhagen, Vienna, and London.  My presentation on social computing for the Domino Notes Users Group in Bremen went fine except for my PC getting possessed and flipping slides around on me while presenting.

Now that I’m home I’m decompressing and reflecting on what I was hearing from the corporate and government organizations I talked to about collaboration and portals. 

• I found a great deal of interest in social software, but the dozen or so organizations I spoke with seemed a bit further behind the U.S. in terms of awareness and piloting.
• There was quite a bit of SharePoint work going on, but generally in a more controlled fashion than I’ve seen in the U.S.  SharePoint was being stripped down to fit into the rest of the environment, being used as just a web file store in one case and as a low-end content management system in another.  I prefer this approach to the whole-hog implementation that steps on the toes of other installed infrastructure that I see too often.
• Portals were a hot topic, with most organizations I visited using them, sometimes many of them.  In fact, portal consolidation and governance is as big an issue as it was in my last few visits to Europe.
• Enterprise virtual worlds came up twice, without much prompting from me.  One governmental agency was very interested in its use for rehearsal and disaster preparedness.

Now I’m off to work on the Mother of All Expense Reports.  

Well, that headline is what I’d like to write anyways.  But, of course, solving email addiction is beyond the capabilities of a mere software behemoth.  Still, Google took a humorously kitschy attempt in some new lab features for Gmail just released. 

By going into Gmail settings (the “Labs” tab) and enabling the “Email Addict” feature, you get a “Take a break” link added to your email:

Then, whenever you click on it, your screen blanks out and you get the following message:

At least until you reload the page and get back to your email. 

Cute.  Even though it’s just for fun, it does acknowledge that email addiction is on people’s minds.  Maybe not those of Google or the programmers themselves, as they may have meant this as a satiric swipe at their users who think this is a problem.  After all - why would they want its users to reduce their usage of email and IM when they seem to thrive on more and more personal information from users being stored on their servers?  Google needs bytes to live.  <zombie voice> “More bytes …” </zombie voice>.

Well, in any case, it’s a nice email addiction / information overload / attention management joke.  And it plays off the idea that people who are addicted to something have little ability to help themselves anymore and need external help. 

If Google really wanted to help these users I think there are some real features they could have added:

• Mail arrival schedules (hourly, morning/noon/evening, morning/night, daily): Remember waiting by the (real) mail box for the postman to arrive?  Unless you are expecting something to act on today, why not do that again and break the unconscious habit the rest of the day of checking for it?  You could set it for the frequency (for example, every hour on the hour) and create a whitelist of certain people or messages that get “express” delivery without waiting.
• Measurement capabilities.  Like many behavioral changes, measurement is often a key starting point and more.  This feature would provide measurements on the number of times email is checked and useful stats on frequency (per day, per hour) and graph when checking was done over time.  Granted this is a bit difficult when it’s just left open, so maybe this feature would have to be enabled and would turn off automatic refreshes.  Once people really see how much they check email reflexively they will be surprised and may do more to curb it if they think this is a problem.
• Slow delivery.  I find myself checking mail more often when I’ve just sent a bunch of emails because I am now waiting on the responses.  This creates an echo effect then where, for example, 20 emails sent out prompt 12 emails back (some quick, some slow, like clapping in a large cathedral).  I then respond to 8 of those, 5 people then respond back, etc until the echo dies away.  If the emails aren’t very urgent, using slow delivery (they go out in a bundle the next morning for example) would take a burden off for response checking and possibly enable some reflection that would have you change or rescind the messages before they are sent.  The “slow design” movement and slowmail have been advocating an approach like this for some time.  I think you’d turn this feature on as a default and then only flag messages individually if they need instant delivery.
• Tokens.  What if you only had a certain number of tokens per day or week to spend on checking email?  Maybe you start with 10 tokens in the morning and it costs you one each time you check email.  If administrators are having trouble with load, they could raise the cost to 2 tokens first thing in the morning or right after lunch.  You’d start noticing how often you’re really checking (see measurement above) and start planning out your checking better throughout the day.  I would recommend that extra tokens can carry over to the next day so you’re not encouraged to do a bunch of frantic checking at the end of the day.  Similar attempts to putting a price on email activity have been made for sending email (see Serios from Seriosity).
• A free e-book on Zen.  OK, this one is a bit out there.  Maybe it’s just me, but while email is ostensibly about communication and human connection, so often it seems to be all about one person and controlling.  Someone checks because they want to see if someone found the joke they sent out was funny, if they got someone else to finally admit they were right or agree to do what they said, if everyone else in the group agreed to their restaurant choice.  What does it mean about me if people don’t respond to me, listen to me, include me?  If my email/IM/message board posting/blog posting falls in the internet forest and no one responds, am I silent and irrelevant?  Like sound, does my message only matter if it causes something to resonate in someone’s head?  A reminder now and then to “be the water, not the rock” and “let things be and take what comes” may be all that some people need.

I’m just putting the final touches on my presentation on social software at the Domino Notes Users Group conference “Social Collaboration for the Enterprise” in Bremen, Germany and ran across a great posting from Gia Lyons (until recently of IBM Lotus, now at Jive Software).  Her description of what Connections does is a good description of the role of social networking in an enterprise environment in general.  An excerpt (full posting here):

Lotus Connections helps you:

• Find the ‘good’ people with whom to collaborate, whether they’ve filled out their profile or not.
• Find information that your trusted colleagues think is good, without relying on unsatisfactory search solutions.
• Find the knowledge “crowds” that are locked up and hidden away in your company, so that you can lurk-n-learn, or connect-n-collaborate.

This posting got me thinking about how social networking fits with collaboration.  The conclusion I came to was that it can be useful before or after collaboration:

• As a prelude to collaboration: After finding and tracking people with whom you share interests, like, or respect, a situation may naturally arise where you wish to connect to achieve a shared goal.  This may take place this afternoon or in ten years, but once the process of growing connections becomes second nature, the harvesting does too.
• To maintain social links after collaboration: Sometimes collaboration triggers a desire to network rather than the other way around.  In this instance, collaborating on a project with someone lets you get to know them and their skills.  Adding those you have learned to respect to your network leaves the door open to mutually beneficial collaboration or sharing of additional network ties in the future.

If you’re going to be in Bremen, be sure to see my keynote address on “Sharing, Collaborating, and Networking in the Social Enterprise” on Friday and stop by afterwards to say hello.

I’m waiting for the “Enterprise 2.0 presentation” v2.0.  I’ve already heard enough times about how web 2.0 is important and can be applied to the enterprise, how Wikipedia is a new paradigm, how information flow is important, the importance of social networks, a walk-through each technology (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, …), relevant surveys and studies, etc.  The first few times were fine since even the converted sometimes need to hear a better way to evangelize others and have materials (presentations) to show their bosses to prove it’s not just them saying it’s important.  And there are still lots of people who are hearing this for the first time.  But the number of first-timers decreases each month thanks to evangelism from all sides (vendors, press, industry analysts, conferences, academia, books) and it’s about time to think about what kind of presentation one can give to an audience who already knows how participatory interactions and networks are important, buys into the value, and knows their technologies and terms.

At BEA Participate there were a few Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) presentations from BEA folks, although the best was from Andrew McAfee.  It was really the archetypical Enterprise 2.0 presentation.  That’s fine - he created the archetype and suffice it to say that if you haven’t heard him speak before, he’s a great speaker and is very good at conveying what he means by Enterprise 2.0 and possesses a wide variety of surveys, academic references, case studies, and anecdotes to support his case.  He’s the Lexus of next-generation information worker speakers.  Having heard this type of information literally dozens of times before from many sources (and I’ll be doing this same type of presentation myself at DNUG in June), I’d like to hear the next version.  Since Mr. McAfee is a professor, I’d say that by now I was expecting the “201″ presentation in college terms, or maybe “501″ for grad school.

Note: I’m not asking for an enterprise 3.0 presentation.  I’m not saying “OK, enterprise 2.0 - I got it. What’s the next big thing?”  I’m not looking for a whole new set of technologies beyond the E2.0 ones.  I buy into the E2.0 set and want to continue following their evolution and absorption into the enterprise.

Some thoughts off the top of my head on what goes into “The Next Enterprise 2.0 Presentation”:

• Tracking statistics:  E2.0 presentations all tend to use snapshots of stats demonstrating pain points or E2.0 adoption.  By now we should be starting to get tracking stats that show how they are increasing or decreasing over time.  Note: I’m a stickler for proper survey technique, so you can’t just compare separate surveys that happen to be a year apart to deduce trends.  It would have to be the same surveyors who would then word the questions the same and weight the respondents according to the same demographics (industry, geography, company size) for the results to mean anything
• Top 5 observed blocking factors: Unless you’re ready to hold up a “mission accomplished” banner on E2.0 in the enterprise, you should know by now what’s holding E2.0 back in many cases.  Not just what one could assume (cultural barriers, incentive barriers, control issues, immature directory infrastructure, etc.), but from actual observations
• Models: We should have seen enough uses of these technologies by now that certain patterns start to emerge.  My colleague Mike Gotta has been doing a good job of teasing out patterns in areas like blogging
• Architecture: Again, with more actual implementation experience there should now be guidance emerging on conceptual and physical architectures.  Showing how identity management systems integrate with E2.0 systems, how to include extranet partners in the E2.0 topology, and how centralized and decentralized (with syncing) models can be architected would be of particular interest
• Deflating the bubble: There has been a lot - perhaps too much - excitement and too high of expectations on E2.0 (to say nothing of some revolutionary rhetoric).  OK, you got people’s attention and made points by being a bit extreme - now you can bring it back down to Earth a bit.  Now is the inevitable time to step back and admit where old technologies have proved resilient, where the new technologies aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and build a bridge between the two worlds on how they can blend together
• Roadmap: You may not be ready to hold up the “mission accomplished” sign yet, but can you now see where we’re headed?  Where are we today, where are we trying to get to (maybe a choice of multiple points depending on the enterprise), and what are some milestones to look for on the road there?  I think an obvious input into this roadmap is standards, so which standards will be needed to get to the destination and what is their status?

Of course there can also be updates to information in the 101 presentation, such as new case studies, new surveys, new products or websites, clarifications of terms (there are constant battles about terminology being fought by the digerati that result in slight changes to definitions), and more depth (like more detail on how wikis work).  But I’m really holding out for the next E2.0 presentation that moves the concept forward, not just goes deeper or jumps on to a new set of technologies.

I know I’m just dreaming here - all this is just a wish list.  But I think it’s one that’s within reach for the next iteration of E2.0 presentations.

I have been speaking on web and portal governance for 5 years now, and I find it difficult to provide clients with actual examples.  It’s not that they aren’t out there, but that presenting on governance involves airing dirty laundry and most organizations don’t want to do that.  I recruited a speaker that gave a case study on their portal governance for a conference a few years ago, and it took a lot of searching to find that example (they were a public utility which helped).  That’s what made the portal governance presentation I saw at BEA Participate especially rare. 

The speaker was Jackie Jajdzik, team lead at Weyerhaeuser.  I would like to be able to claim I helped her with her governance strategy, but we’ve never spoken and yet she’s done pretty much all of what I recommend a governance process consist of (hear my podcast on portal governance here).  This includes deploying incrementally, putting it into a concise document, making the governance easy to find on the website, gathering and using metrics, and creating feedback loops. 

I’ll boil down the approach here.  I apologize for any incorrect paraphrasing - these are my categories not hers.  But these categories are what I tend to listen for from a client when discussing governance and Jackie had good answers to all of them - I was quite impressed.

Problem statement: 1600 websites, 500mm web pages accessed by 30,000+ users, no common access point, no governance and search indexed everything (for example, “benefits” returned myriad hits, confidential information would show up like resumes and disciplinary actions).  Anyone could customize and there were a few standard portlets and communities. Users had total freedom and no standards to tie them down, and yet were unhappy.   Key messages (safety being the most important to them) were lost, liability was an issue since everything was searchable and could show up on a home page, and support costs were growing.

Goals: Reflect unified company, manageable number of sites and communities, decrease management costs, easy to navigate, increased productivity.  It was obvious from the presentation that these goals were derived from actual pain points and created with buy-in, not just picked from a list from some paper on how to do governance.  She talked about how they received executive buy-in that was useful when they had to clamp down on formerly ungoverned sites.  Also, they needed to borrow some staff from the business to trim the sites.

What they did: The homepage was reorganized based on usability studies and analytics. Deleted 400 sites, applied navigation to 120 sites, put limits on search.  Their governance includes a concept she called “zoning”.  Zoning determines which technology to use from 3 options (community/project, conventional website, SharePoint). For example, if you want it indexed by search or have more than 200mb of storage you don’t use SharePoint.

Organizational structure: Executive sponsor, public affairs / intranet mgr, standards and operating committee with operational support from IT and their library (taxonomy, search engine hinting) + task teams.  Governance is looser for sites with smaller scope and tighter for enterprisewide sites.

Metrics and feedback loops: They do regular audits and have a site registry to track sites and classify them. There are quarterly meetings of the standards and operating committee. Satisfaction surveys track what users like and dislike, request features (biggest request is for social computing like blogs, wikis, and RSS), and how often they use it (don’t trust weblogs alone for this information).

Outcome:  Resulted in more root site usage, less complaints about finding information, less conflict with the business, information is more current.

Now if I can just find those public examples of written governance documents I get asked for too …

I had many good conversations at the BEA Participate conference, but the one I had with Paul Tominsky of the March of Dimes was truly heartwarming.  Medical conditions have driven some of the most vibrant communities and are accordingly driving usage of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis.  I’ve been following Beth Kanter’s blog for a while now to see great examples of how participatory, web-based technology can be used to support non-profit goals.

But one example I hadn’t noticed was the March of Dimes.  Paul told me how they had created the Share Your Story blog for parents to open up about issues following premature births or those requiring time in a neonatal intensive care unit.  Really it’s a set of blogs since a parent can write a single entry in a topical blog or create their own blog to describe their story over time. 

To attract traffic to the site, they arranged a national tour with a bus that was equipped with gear to record video of stories and post the information to the blog.  They persuaded celebrities to participate and arranged for local PR at each stop, making the blog a big hit.  The blog shows 24,490 members today and is still going strong.  What a wonderful use of technology that leverages the natural desire of people to learn, commiserate, and share.

This is the first of several posts I’ll be doing about the BEA Participate conference that happened this week. For my first subject, I’ll focus on the biggest issue for me this week: What light does this conference shed on how BEA and Oracle will mix?

This was a strange time for a BEA conference, coming on the 2 week anniversary of the closing of their acquisition by Oracle. There weren’t a lot of balloons or cake to celebrate the acquisition - it was very quiet (as required by law and quarterly reporting deadlines). For example, Mark Carges (EVP Products and GM, BEA) kicked things off and didn’t quite seem up to referring to BEA and Oracle as “we” yet. There was simply a dry reference at the beginning to “Our new owners, who you will meet later”. After the one quick reference, the rest of the presentation was BEA business-as-usual.

The second presenter was indeed “the new owners” in the form of Hasan Rizvi, VP of Fusion middleware at Oracle. He showed a chart of all their middleware products and saying (I’m paraphrasing here) they are “best of breed, but of course BEA also has best of breed products in all these categories so that’s why this is such a good combination”. He said they will be doing “Welcome BEA Customers” events at 25 cities in the US/Canada and 25 in EMEA.

He introduced the BEA crowd to Oracle Fusion middleware and their tools. The crowd didn’t seem very partisan, was attentive and soaked in the information. From my 7 years (on and off) of going to BEA conferences I can say that, like past BEA conferences, the vibe is one of a mature, techie environment. While JavaOne may have techies lounging on beanbags, playing videogames, and eating kiddie snacks while challenging each other to coding duels, the BEA conference attendees are mature programmers, in the second or third decade of their careers, confident in their abilities, who tend to understand the value of well architected systems. They like BEA although they don’t need expensively produced videos making fun of their competition and they don’t paint their hair in the company colors (both of which I’ve seen at other vendor conferences).

It’s appropriate that the Oracle and BEA colors are within a few Pantone shades of the same red since the company colors don’t represent a religious issue like it would be in some other acquisitions (the blue and purple devotees of Microsoft and Yahoo! wouldn’t have mixed as easily). However, the BEA audience is technically adept and will require practical reasons and detailed roadmaps if they are going to buy into new Oracle+BEA solutions rather than shifting their development platforms, application server, portal, and BPM to IBM or open source. I can’t wait to see these roadmaps, particularly in my area of portals, since there are many overlaps that will require sacrifices to resolve. The sacrifices will take the form of placing some products and customers on the sacrificial altar or placing profits on the alter due to the long-term inefficiencies of maintaining redundant products.

And, just to prove that in the end some people always stay loyal, I counted about 300 people in the packed “What’s new with AquaLogic User Interaction” session. When the announcer asked “how many of you still call ALUI Plumtree?” about 75% of the audience raised their hands.

Michael Sampson pointed to an interesting article in the Venture Chronicles on The Future of RSS which hones in on a fault of RSS (or “opportunity” depending on if you’re a glass half-full kinda person).  According to Jeff Nolan:

Basically the entire RSS market has been built around a use mode of subscribe-then-read, and that is likely to continue as an exclusive model for many users or in parallel to other use modes. The weakness in this approach is that you only know what you know, as in you have know about a feed before you can subscribe to it… and I generally work off the approach that it’s far more likely that the best content on any keyword is not necessarily found in my OPML.

There are an increasing array of companies that are working on a next generation of feed consumption use model, built not around the explicit subscribing of feeds and chronological consumption of content. In order for RSS to get to the next level of mainstreaming we have to think in terms of behavioral filtering of content and discovery of new content sources based on explicit preferences or inferred preferences derived from behaviors.

I’ll second that.  While I think RSS can (although not always) be better than manual methods for reading through a lot of information, it’s not the silver bullet for attention management.  I often use it as an example of something that can fall out of an enterprise attention management gap analysis, but it’s just one example and piece of a much larger puzzle.

People can use RSS readers to narrow down their view of what news channels they will pay attention to and ignore the rest.  Even if someone follows 200 feeds, at some point that list will become stale.  While you’d probably notice something outside of your feed set due to the magic of linking (someone you follow must be smart enough to notice things outside your periphery, especially people that do link and quote-heavy blogs), at some point new centers of gravity can emerge that go unnoticed for too long.  It’s like picking your set of friends and then never going to parties to meet new ones.  Or just listening to music your friends recommend without ever listening to the radio to see if you’re missing anything. 

I like the idea of leveraging more of the EAM architecture by adding rules, filtering, profiles, and proactive discovery to the RSS model rather than using it “as-is”.  I hope lots of vendors and users start experimenting with this and working the kinks out (decreasing type I and type II errors) so that in five years or so even late adopting organizations can start benefiting from this technology.

In interviewing for the open position on my team, I’ve had four conversations so far with people who were not applying immediately, but thought being an analyst sounded like a nice job and wanted to know how to position themselves for an analyst role in the future.  Here’s the advice I gave.

Of course, I first gave them a realistic view (warning?) of what the job entails.  When I first got an entry-level job as an analyst at Meta Group, I gave a good description of the job to one of my friends at the financial services firm I worked at previously.  She listened intently, nodded her head, and when I’d finished said “I’d rather have someone put a hot poker in my eye than do that job.”  It’s not what everyone would enjoy, and that’s fine.  I’d estimate there are only about 2,000-2,500 technology industry analysts in the U.S., so it’s pretty much a niche occupation.

Then, I described what I would (and did) do to position myself for an industry analyst position, whether it’s at Burton Group or any of the other technology research advisory firms as well.  I’m assuming here that you work in IT in a firm that uses (rather than sells) software.  It needs a few twists to be applied to people working at a vendor or consulting firm as well.  I’m also assuming you are not trying to get a “blank slate” analyst job (such as just out of college or total career change) since most analyst positions require experience.  There aren’t many intern or first-job analyst spots (at Burton Group it’s none - we require at least 5 years of experience for analyst hires, and the average on my team is actually about 15 years experience).

Start creating a portfolio of vendorless research positions

Analysts have to be unbiased towards any vendor, but if you’re coming from an enterprise or vendor you may have deep knowledge about the product you use (and specifically the capabilities that you’ve enabled) but none about the products and capabilities you don’t.  Rather than jumping into researching competing products, I’d first focus on creating frameworks, best practices, market segmentation, organizational structure recommendations, maturity models, and evaluation criteria that don’t even mention a vendor.  These exercise your capacity to think at a higher level of abstraction and then those frameworks can be applied across a slew of vendors using an analytical method of your creation rather than a self-serving one from each vendor.

Seek out speaking and writing opportunities

Depending on the analyst firm you go to, writing or presenting are a big part of the job.  Your current job may not require much in-depth writing or offer many chances for large presentations.  That’s when you have to take initiative to find opportunities, such as presenting case studies at a conference or speaking for local user groups or at universities. If someone really wanted a job with a lot of writing and speaking, wouldn’t you expect they’d have gone to extra effort to find writing and speaking opportunities for themselves in their current position?  For example, I had selected a special master’s thesis project (which wasn’t required) that involved developing a type of knowledge management and business intelligence methodology and wrote a paper on it.  I also proactively searched and found speaking opportunities at my two alma maters with professors I’d taken classes from.  These days it’s easy to set up a blog and start typing away.  Even if it doesn’t become a big hit, a potential employer can look at it for examples of writing skill, analysis, and long-term commitment to writing.

Get involved in some product evaluations

Try to line yourself up to be involved in some product evaluations.  The type of software doesn’t matter as much as the comprehensive analytical model you can demonstrate in making your selection.

Move into an R&D role

Many organizations have an internal group that researches new technologies and writes recommendations on if/how/when they should be applied to the business.  Both myself and another analyst on my team came from internal R&D groups (mine was called “advanced technology”) from within financial services and manufacturing companies.  These jobs are fun!  Plus they expose you to analysts, get you used to rapidly changing technologies, and providing opportunities for describing recommendations in writing and presentations.  An architecture team involved with product evaluations would be a good choice as well.

Read papers from the firms you’re interested in

Start learning their analytical style and applying it to your current projects.  Most of the firms have a rotating set of free research available on their sites or occasionally republish articles through partners. Burton Group’s free papers are here.

Determine which analyst firms are best for you based on what you like to do

Each analyst firm has a different mix of emphasis on quantitative research (like surveys), qualitative research (such as speaking with vendors and users, reading books/white papers, and searching), financial analysis, writing, presenting, advising clients, vendor consulting (marketing strategy), end user consulting (applying analytical and architectural frameworks), speaking to the press, and travel.  Ask yourself what you enjoy most and learn which firms emphasize those activities.

When interview time comes, do your research

Unlike applying for most internal positions, analyst firms, by nature, are easily findable.  As easy as it is to do a Google search there’s no excuse not to know what they cover, what positions they’ve been taking lately, and what kind of research they do.  An analyst is supposed to be a good researcher, so this is a good time to prove it.  Hint: all the analysts I know love to debate, so come in with an angle you think they’re missing or a position you think they’re wrong about and (gently) show you can find holes and defend a position.

A couple of questions came up in my EAM presentation on Monday night:

Q. It seems that the EAM conceptual architecture is all about the receivers and not the senders or messages.

A. First, I need to mention that by “Enterprise” I mean intra- and inter-enterprise.  In otherwords, it doesn’t apply to companies trying to grab the attention of consumers.  That issue has its own fields of study: advertising and marketing.  My intent here is not to help advertisers scream louder or to help create more pointed messages to surgically skewer personalized targets. I’m trying to help organizations improve the effectiveness of their own information workers by examining how to enable them with attentional technologies and capabilities to pull important messages closer and push less important messages further back.

That said, in reviewing my materials I have to agree that I spend more time talking about how to help receivers of messages than senders.  Most of my research in creating my EAM architecture and the questions I have received from larger enterprises are about the information worker trying to sort through information, handle their inbox, and deal with interruptions.  Outside of consumer advertising you just don’t see a lot of studies on the other side of the coin: how people send messages or store content.  I think this is because a decade ago we shifted from an age of information scarcity to information abundance, as my colleague Guy Creese has written and as is well catalogued in David Shenk’s book Data Smog.

Most of the technologies, capabilities, and processes used by creators of information to make their information easier to find are more in the knowledge management (and, more specifically information management) domain than EAM.  These include use of content metadata, versioning, aging policies, use of taxonomy and ontology, navigation, and content repository architectural design.

What I do talk about is how enterprises can provide an appropriate set of communication and collaboration mechanisms for senders, provide guidance to senders on which channels and workspaces to use and how to use them, and put monitoring in place to be alerted to explosive trends.

Q. If this is about what enterprises as a whole can do, how come my examples are about what individuals can do (for example, setting email rules)?

As I quoted from Gary Masada of Chevron in my posting on Cornering the Corner Office about Information Overload: “Technology can be an enabler that helps people do this.  But in the end an individual will have to do it.”

I am not recommending that CIOs and owners of attentional technologies figure out how to organize the time and workloads of their information workers or start setting up filters for them.  There’s a level of indirection here - the owners deploy technologies and processes that information workers can then use to help themselves.

For those of you in Chicago (who don’t plan to watch the Cubs-Reds game on May 5th) I wanted to let you know I’ll be speaking at the Technology Management Association of Chicago on Enterprise Attention Management in Arlington Heights, IL. Reception starts at 5pm, dinner at 6, and the presentation at 7. 

I’ve attached the description of my presentation below.  You can find out more and register at http://www.technologymanagementchicago.org/.

Enterprise Attention Management:  Addressing Info-Stress and Information Overload

May 5th, 2008

Each beneficial new communication and collaboration technology, from wikis to blogs, brings with it the burden of one more channel that information workers, already suffering from information overload, must pay attention to. This presentation describes how attention overload is afflicting businesses and how enterprises can create an Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) strategy encompassing technology, policy, and culture to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of information workers.
Issues this presentation will address include:

• How attention fatigue is a gating factor for collaboration and communication projects.
• How “Attention Management” acts as a lens to understand and address these effects on information workers.

• How to define an EAM conceptual architecture to provide a unified view across attentional technologies.

I was having breakfast this morning before going to work to prepare for my telebriefing tomorrow on The Role of Enterprise Content Management in Content Globalization/Localization when I opened my Wall St. Journal (4/28/08 page A1; link) to read that nationalism may be thwarting globalization.  The article by Bob Davis points out that while globalization was supposed to be inevitable (hence the WSJ’s reference to Thomas Friedman’s famous globalization manifesto), nationalism and protectionism seem to be on the rise.

Trade talks are shelved.  Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restriction is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

So what do I say tomorrow about the need for IT organizations to get involved in content globalization and localization efforts?  I think I’m still on track in saying that there is a sharp increase in content globalization occurring and that IT can help.  It’s possible that some expansion plans in industries that could be brought under state control (energy and foodstuffs in particular) could be put on hold.  But for other industries, the drivers of IT involvement in globalization efforts that I discuss in my telebriefing are still very relevant.  These include:

• Containing or reducing costs: Whatever degree of globalization occurs, there will be a need to contain globalization costs
• Clarification of central and local control through governance: If power shifts are occurring and barriers are rising between central and local branches, governance takes on increasing importance
• Timing/responsiveness: The uncertainty of the globalization landscape places even more emphasis on an organizations ability to react quickly to changes
• Safeguarding brand image: Increased nationalism means increased attention must be paid to local culture and customs, so proper translation and QA processes become more important for a deeper swath of content
• Improving consistency: As with safeguarding brand image, inconsistent translations will have increased risk of harming the brand
• Need to handle increased complexity: Potential increases in regulation will increase the need for complex workflow that can handle documents based upon content typing

I’m not a politician or economist, so I’m (way) out of my element in predicting what effecting nationalism, protectionism, and a global backlash may have on international relations.  The article isn’t saying the slowdown is definite, but a possibility when certain threads in the news are connected.  But from an enterprise content management perspective I think the globalization storm is looking even more vicious than before.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog

I have a telebriefing coming up on content globalization next week that I wanted to alert you to.  I’m focusing mostly on the role of enterprise content management in globalization and have put in a slide on Web 2.0 impacts on globalization.  It’s for clients only, but non-clients can get an introduction through my podcast series on this topic.

The Role of Enterprise Content Management in Content Globalization/Localization
Globalization is profound, it’s irrefutable, and it’s irreversible.” These words, spoken by General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt, are a clear signal that the business world acknowledges a globalization wave that is unlikely to subside. But how has this wave impacted information technology (IT)? The authors and owners of content have often been insulated from this storm, but a stark increase in globalization demands is pulling IT in. In this TeleBriefing, Service Director Craig Roth describes how enterprise content management (ECM) processes and technology, from authoring to analytics, can reduce the cost, cycle times, and inconsistencies of localization efforts.

4/29/2008 at 2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT / 18:00 UTC/GMT / 20:00 CEST
OR
4/30/2008 at 9:00 AM EDT / 6:00 AM PDT / 13:00 UTC/GMT / 15:00 CEST

Here’s the link to register for this TeleBriefing.

Ever since I’ve had my radar up on attention management issues, I’ve noticed many interesting techniques that people use to manage their time and attention.  While I’m generally focused on how entire enterprises can address information overload (what I call Enterprise Attention Management), I’m always on the lookout for what individuals do to help manage their time as well (personal attention management).  For anyone looking for an executive level view of personal attention management, I’d recommend listening to the first few minutes of this Channel 9 interview with Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft

Ray was asked how he balances the need to span a vast spectrum of activities and the need to go deep as well.  He said (rough quotes here since I am not that skilled at transcription)

Attention management is biggest challenge of the role; the pace is fairly brutal.  At the beginning of the year I’ll plan out how many hours I want to spend in different categories: some for high level strategic things, time with product groups, and I realized you have to create whitespace because day-to-day interruptions cause you to thrash if you just deal with incoming issues.  You have to create time to think about what’s happening in the environment.

I create whitespace by going away - international travel, “think week”, and other ways.  The best way I’ve found to clear my mind is to go to a conference that’s off the beaten path or go somewhere with my wife that’s not technology related.

When I was coding I had a four hour rule that said don’t code unless you know you’ll have four hours of contiguous time because otherwise you’re just introducing more bugs.

It’s the life management equivalent.

I wanted to alert readers to an opening for an analyst on my team here at Burton Group in the Collaboration and Content Strategies service!  I’m open on location, but it does have to be in the U.S. (Alaska and Hawaii are fine as long as you’ll pay for us to visit you for team retreats!).  I enjoy working at Burton and you’d be joining a great team we’ve assembled here.  Let me know if you have any questions (my contact info is in the About page).

You can see the full posting on the Careers portion of the Burton Group website, but here’s a quick summary.

The CCS Analyst is responsible for creating frameworks, research documents, presentations, and blog posts for Burton Group’s clientele. The Analyst will work with customers, vendors, industry leaders, and other Burton Group analysts.

Requirements:

• At least five years experience researching, writing and presenting in one or more of the following areas:
  • Architecture involving communication, collaboration, content management, or portal systems (including enterprise, logical, and/or physical architecture)
  • Collaboration and content management capabilities of major vendor platforms including Oracle, SAP, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft SharePoint
  • Enterprise content management (including document and imaging management, records management, search, web content management)
  • Enterprise e-mail systems
  • Information architecture (including taxonomies and ontologies)
  • Real-time communications (including instant messaging, presence, Web conferencing)
  • Office productivity tools including document formats (e.g., XML, PDF)

An article in yesterday’s WSJ by Lee Gomes (4/16/08, page B1, You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone; (Hit Spacebar Now)) has a tidy summary of a statement that tends to make me cringe:

The biggest drawback to the experience involves the sheer proximity of the Internet and the constant temptation it provides for the aforementioned thumb to wander away from the realm of timeless literary art toward a cheap, quick-information fix in the form of email or blogs. This is one of the cultural problems of our time and I don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions, save to nag everyone about steely self-discipline.

While Mr. Gomes is referring specifically to the itch to check email or blogs, I’ve seen the entire attention management issue framed this way as well: that information overload and info-stress are like the weather in that everyone likes to talk about it but no one ever does anything about it.  Why waste much time talking about the dangers of our always-on, go-go culture if all you can do about it is nag people to buckle down and change their behavior?

I can understand that the average information worker feels that dealing with the overabundance and addictive nature of information (just as with food) is a matter of self-discipline.  But there are a handful of people in any organization that can take action to impact the productivity and stress of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of information workers.  I’m talking about CxOs and the IT owners, stakeholders, and champions of attentional technologies.  Cornering the folks in the corner office about Information Overload can pay dividends.

Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) pulls together the various puzzle pieces involved in the information overload issue and lays them out in a conceptual architecture that provides a view (a cross-section really) of the myriad technologies and processes involved.  Once laid out in this fashion, EAM can be applied to a specific organization’s situation.  For a demo of how this works, see my entry that applies the EAM to personal attention management and then think about doing that for the organization as a whole.

If you’re one of that handful of people I mentioned, you can take real action - actually do something about information overload for scores of people in your organization.  For example, if you’re the owner of the e-mail system, you can enable filtering rules, teach people how to use them, or place them on your list of evaluation points for an email product evaluation as your situation warrants.  If you’re a CEO or head of a large division you can lead by example in how you send out and accept communications (e.g., using appropriate channels, not accepting electronic interruptions during meetings, demanding full attention for short periods of focused collaboration).  If you’re in a position to roll out RSS technology you can accelerate its entry into the organization.  These are just a few examples.  Each is only a small piece of the puzzle, which is why the EAM conceptual architecture is important for laying out how all of these pieces interconnect.  And how they apply to each organization is different.  But only when they are laid out in the context of attention management can strategic direction become evident.

(Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog)