Planet Enterprise 2.0

O'Reilly Radar reports that Google has added Google Suggest to their homepage:

"When Google suggest first-launched Buster McLeod (AKA Erik Benson) checked the suggested term for each letter to create the Google Alphabet, 2004 edition."

"In honor of Google Suggest graduating from labs", Brady Forrest has provided the annotated Google Alphabet, 2008 edition. Notable for a Swede like me is that IKEA owns the letter "I". A former (american) business partner of mine provided the following analysis:

"The exact method Google uses to choose the default "Suggestion" is not publicly known. It's actually not based only on the quantity of searches. In any case, Google thinks it's more valuable to users to show IKEA first."

"Interestingly Walmart, one of only two traditional retailers whose website has more traffic than IKEA, didn't get the 'W' (because Google thinks Wikipedia is more relevant)."

Hyperlinks connect content with content.

Social networks connect people with people.

RSS feeds connect people with content.

Together, these technologies can be used to make information flow between people in an organization almost like water flows in a metropolitan water system. They can help people find other people with knowledge, information or ideas that when intersecting with their own spawn new knowledge, value and innovations.

If virtually all information would be allowed to flow freely through these networks in an organization, the organization could actually become the sum of all its parts. It could potentially use and benefit from the collective intelligence of all its people.

How come then that many organizations are still not seizing this opportunity as fast as they possibly can? I believe a that major part of the answer is quite simple; the people who build their power on keeping information for themselves feel threatened. They might have built their current positions on hoarding information instead of sharing it. It is obvious that they won't let go of the information if they do not get something in return that makes them feel safe in their positions.

Threats to existing power structures in organizations must be handled very carefully, but they should not be allowed to hinder the democratization of information. It is the responsibility of top management to understand and act according to this insight.

Not doing anything is a deadly strategy. No organization can put the genie back in the bottle. People have already gotten used to freely expressing themselves and sharing and consuming information and experiences on the web. We must remind ourselves that these are the same people who go to work and feel that the IT department is - passively or actively - hindering them to do the same things at work, the same people that either will give up and loose their motivation or quit to start working for a competitor that actually tries to empower its employees instead of hindering them.

The point here is that any organization needs to create a strategy that addresses how to make use of these new opportunities to improve communication and collaboration and how leverage any ongoing grass-root initiatives instead of hindering them. But this strategy also needs to address how to deal with barriers to change such as existing power structures that might be threatened by the change, counteractive attitudes and behaviours among coworkers, and a complex and inflexible IT legacy.

Stewart Mader has written an article for the Website Magazine called "5 Effective Wiki Uses and How Companies Benefit From Them":

"...a wiki is one of the most versatile tools you can use. But what keeps people coming back is its simplicity. In a very short time, people can learn how to use the wiki and put any one of these examples into practice. Once they do so, they will wonder how they got along without it."

"50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business" by Chris Brogan:

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

"What exactly is Wiki? Wiki is not a software, not a website, but a concept. And why Wiki is powerful a concept" by Trần Tuấn Tài:

Friend: “Hey Tai, what is wiki? Is it a software or a website?”

TaiTran: “Neither. Wiki is a concept. It refers to a content which everyone and anyone can edit.”

Friend: “What? You’re confusing me!”

"140 characters to knowledge share" by John Tropea:

There are many times when colleagues at work discover something in our office, but are too busy to blog about it, this is when micro-blogs comes into the picture. People may find blog posting takes up too much time because they treat it as formal publishing, and fair enough (I covered this in my KM 2.0 Culture post). We have tried to overcome this with posting to a blog by email, making it feel very informal, now you can “flick a blog post”, just like you “flick an email”.

Anyway I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness. Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget.

We have now uploaded a presentation to slideshare.net which is sort of a teaser for our upcoming "Web 2.0 på jobbet" ("Web 2.0 at work") seminars in Gothenburg and Stockholm in September 2008.

Democratization of CommunicationView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rss collaboration)If you have the possibility to attend any of these seminars which will be held by us, Henrik Gustafsson and Oscar Berg, please register here:

• Gothenburg 2008-09-11 08:30-12:00
• Stockholm 2008-09-16 08:30-12:00

If you want to know more about Acando, please visit Acando's homepage.

Hope to see you there!

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

About Blog Action Day:

"Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion."

Michael Sampson shares Some Thoughts on "Collaboration":

To be collaborative means that you embrace a certain way of life and work ... an openness to the ideas of other people, and in particular to how their ideas and perspectives may mold, change and transform your ideas. The heart of collaboration is openness to the ideas to others, and a stated and acted upon willingness to explore those ideas, rather than assuming that everything you think is right and correct from the get-go. To be collaborative then, is in essence a human process, that plays out over whatever modality of interaction you use with other people, be that face-to-face, email, a wiki or any other "collaborative technology".

"Social Media And US Business Familiarity, Usage And Adoption: A Research Study Of The Inc. 500" by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson:

In early 2007 the results of a groundbreaking study into the adoption of social media within the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States, were released.

Now, approximately one year later, that same group was studied again in an effort to look at longitudinal change in the adoption of these digital communication tools. The companies who responded were asked the same detailed questions concerning their familiarity with, usage of and measurement of social media.

...

Not only is this widespread adoption being driven by strong familiarity but also from the recognized critical role of social media to a company's future success in today’s online world. When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. It is clear that this group of fast-growing companies considers the use of social media as a central part of its strategic plan.

"Assessing Organizational Readiness for Communities" by Rachel Happe:

All the hype as well as the overwhelming focus on using social media for outbound marketing can distract companies from really understanding how communities fit into their business processes and operations - and the considerations organizations need to account for before they decide to employ a community strategy.

Here at Mzinga, we have a couple of different assessment frameworks. The first is a framework for understanding culture and communication styles - this is really to understand how 'WE' a company is at the individual level. We have a second model too - a WE Corporate Assessment framework that lays out six operational components that will determine where on organizational maturity scale a company is.

"Social Networking at Ford: Community Is Job One" by Rob Salkowitz:

Signs that Enterprise 2.0 has gone mainstream are everywhere, and this point was driven home to me last week in an interview I did with Scott Monty, the new head of digital communications and social networking for Ford Motors.

While Ford may seem like the quintessential “old economy” company, its approach to social computing, both from the business and the IT perspective, is as far-sighted and strategic as any I’ve encountered. I was interviewing Monty primarily to discuss the relationship between social computing technology and efforts to recruit a next-generation workforce, but surprisingly (to me, at least), that element was not very high on his radar. He and his management are sold on social networking purely on the business value.

“One of the reasons for having a social media strategy is because we have so many different constituencies,” he explains. “We’ve obviously got customers -- that’s the outward facing portion. We’ve got employees for the inward facing [portion]. But we also have shareholders, we have our dealership network, we’ve got unions, we’ve got retirees -- a huge alumni population of Ford retirees. So there are many different aspects to take into account, which is why a well crafted and well thought out strategy should be able to address all of those.”

Until Google recently released a feature which enabled users to share RSS feed items with others, Google Reader had only enabled hoarding of information. To be able to share interesting items with others before this feature was launched, you had to leave Google Reader and navigate to the source web page, copy the link in the address bar and then send it via e-mail if you wanted to reach specific individuals, or post it on your blog or another "hub" if you wanted to reach a wider audience.

The feature that allowed users to share (and comment) RSS items with your Google Talk contacts provided the first step to encourage sharing by making it easier. Now the Google Reader team have released a new feature which makes it possible to share a little bit more selectively:

"We've been working hard to create a more flexible way to let you choose who to share with; you can now manage a Friends list within Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts."

"...you can choose to either continue sharing with all of your chat buddies or create a custom Friends list with those that you hand-select."

This is definately a step forward. But I would still like to see is the ability to - just as with e-mail - select individual friends or groups of friends that I would like to share a certain item with. Which can be different for different items.

I have already addressed this wish in a post I published in May called "Getting more out of RSS and Google Reader":

I would like to be able to share items with specific friend instead of all of them. I want to be able to share items that I know a specific friend is interested in and which other friends might not be. I also would like my friends to have the possibility to share items with me that they believe I would be interested in . Right now, this feature is a little egocentric. It is more "I find this information interesting so I'll share it with all my friends" than "I believe my friend X could interested in this information so I'll share it with him".

I interpret the new feature as Google Reader is moving in this direction.

A good thing with Google is how they encourage feedback. You can post any feedback you have about their products in different groups in Google Reader. I have used this possibility a few times and will use it also for giving feedback on the sharing feature.

By the way, the Blogger Dashboard looked differently today - it has been equipped with a new look & feel. Better, I think. It provides a better overview than before, partly by removing visual clutter.

This post comes directly from the exercise bike at the gym (written and sent to Blogger from my smartphone)...the best place to develop a random thought. Here it goes...

To become better at communicating and deal with the over-use of e-mail as communication tool, organizations need not only create a collaborative environment and provide a collaboration platform with a diversity of easy-to-use, easy-to-access and reliable collaboration tools that fit the work styles of the employees. They must also encourage their employees to question and change their own habits, mindsets and ways of working.

As an employee it is easy to blame inefficient communication and collaboration on, say, bad management, lack of tools and the existence of a non-collaborative culture (management not trusting employees, a command-and-control culture, lack of job rotation, excessive fear of making mistakes, and so on). It is easy to make fun of all those inefficient meetings taking place in every corner of the organization, to complain about over-flooded inboxes, and to curse that we need to wait for someone to answer a certain e-mail in order to continue doing what we are supposed to do. But maybe we shouldn't blame that guy in the other end?

We cannot neglect the fact that a change needs to start somewhere. A spark needs to be ignited. It won't happen by itself.

As employees we are members of an organization and (well, maybe not formally but definitely morally) responsible for its results. Therefore we are all also responsible for making necessary changes happen. We also need to take initiatives to make improvements on an individual level. We need to take a look at ourselves and how we think and behave. Maybe we are following the same attitudes and behaviors that we are condemning others for? Probably we are.

Changing how we think and behave as individuals can be as easy as asking ourselves a few question before we choose how to communicate with others. Wait a minute...which options do I have? Besides e-mail or picking up the phone? Which option is the most efficient for what I want to achieve? If we spend a minute of thought before starting a communication process then we will for sure gain that time many times over later on than if we don't think before we act. Why such a hurry? This should be pretty obvious, but probably it so obvious that we do not care to occupy our stressed out minds with it.

Maybe things will go faster if we call someone than if we send an e-mail? Maybe we can hook up on IM and interact more spontaneously with each other and thereby avoid leaving voice messages since we know when the other person is present or not? Maybe we can reduce lead-times and make better decisions if we choose a means of communication which enables frequent but shorter interactions than the weekly meetings which are scheduled but not particularly structured and definitely not on-demand? Think about it. A lot of scheduled meetings will suddenly disappear from our calendars.

I personally think it would be great with less scheduled meetings with a standing agenda but sometimes no content and thus no meaning. To satisfy our social needs, we could meet by the coffee station instead if we just stop feeling guilty because our chat is not taking place under cover of a "work" meeting.

My point is that if we all as employees can help to spread a mindset and build a culture from grass-root level where we all constantly reflect on and question our own ways of thinking and working, such as how we communicate with others, then we could for sure identify and implement so many micro-improvements in our daily work environments that they will by far outnumber any big corporate improvement efforts in terms of increases in efficiency, productivity and quality, and ultimately increased profit. Don't you think?

Now it is time to get off the exercise bike...

If you are new to this blog, you might have missed out on the posts below. They will hopefull give you a sense of what this blog is about:

Information Management Principle #1: Information cannot be managed

Information Management Principle #2: Information is a means to an end

Information Management Principle #3: Information needs to flow

Information centric or information eccentric?

Information is like water - essential to our survival

Virtual meetings are easier to facilitate than semi-virtual meetings

The value of Enterprise RSS

Being close makes a difference

Collaboration and SOA - more than just buzzwords

Can you tell the difference between EIM and ECM? Really?

Consider social software when crafting your EIM strategy

Before your next face-to-face meeting, consider these questions...

Master Data Management Maturity

Coach and communicate according to maturity

Checklist for reducing CO2 emissions (beta version)

You might think that it sounds quite pretentious for someone to call oneself Enterprise Architect (at least if you don't see yourself as one of them). Well, I don't blame you if you do. The term Enterprise Architect easily leads one's thoughts to someone who architects an entire enterprise from scratch or who orchestrates every wink and turn of an enterprise as a sort of puppy master. Such a conception is course wrong. The Enterprise Architects are cogs in the enterprise wheel just as all others - they are only different in the sense that they have been assigned the responsibility to observe the complete machinery and keep track of the different parts and how they relate to each other. But also to envision how new or changing requirements and constraints - big or small, few or many, dramatic or subtle - will need to change the enterprise and its different but yet often very tightly related parts.

The key word here is "related". An enterprise consists of a lot of different parts, ranging from business models, strategies, processes and people to information resources and IT systems (in turn made up by applications and content stores and running on an underlying IT infrastructure).

Today we all know that one cannot change business models, strategies or even small parts of business processes without changing or at least considering how the change will affect other business processes, people, information resources and IT systems. And vice versa.

To avoid that changes have unpredicted and unwanted (side-)effects, this complex environment of interrelated parts must in some way or another be managed, and to be able to manage it, the different parts and how they relate to each other must be known and understood by all who needs to know about it and understand it. That is why there are some people in your organization who officially or unofficially call themselves Enterprise Architecture. They try to build and communicate this knowledge and understanding to others. "Enterprise Architects" who hide in their offices without talking to people - who are more concerned with creating perfect representations of the architecture of the enterprise - should not be taken seriously.

To be able to "eat the elephant", an Enterprise Architect needs to slice it up into a number of more manageable dimensions and look at it at different levels of abstraction. An Enterprise Architect that tries to do that with anything bigger than a very small enterprise soon realizes that he or she cannot do this alone. Specialization and a team that brings the different specialties together are needed. Together, the members of the team might be able to create, maintain and communicate an understandable model (or actually a number of models) of the most important dimensions of the enterprise and how they relate. They can then be advised when there are new or changed requirements or constraints that call for changes somewhere in the enterprise. They can try to envision what consequences the change will have and guide any implementation initiatives along the way of change.

Enterprise Architecture is about caring about the big picture, the sum of all parts, and every little corner of the enterprise at the same time. It is about being able and willing to (fore)see and care about the consequences of a change - regardless of where these occur in the enterprise - and make sure that someone is appointed to manage them.

Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager at Google makes a good sales pitch for the latest Google Search Appliance in the post "Tackling information overload, 10 million documents at a time":

We think that searching for the myriad of business information that helps you do your job should be as easy as searching for information on Google.com -- regardless of how much content your organization has, or where it resides. And since the volume of documents, customer contacts, presentations and other data flowing into your office is probably not going to shrink any time soon, giving your IT organization access to a high-capacity single appliance (instead of the dozens that come with typical enterprise search implementations) might save your company expense and administrative hours while making it that much easier for you to find the exact piece of information you need to close that sales deal -- 10 million documents at a time.

Steward Mader explains some of the main differences between Wikipedia and enterprise wikis in the post"5 Differences between Wikipedia & Enterprise Wikis". It is a good introduction to enterprise wikis, but what caught my interest was Mader's answer to a reader who had commented the post and asked whether or not it is possible to trust wiki content when there is no approval process:

A wiki should be used for activities that don’t need levels of approval before publishing, and to influence a change to practices that require fewer approvals. Here’s how:

Get your team to produce content together from the start. In this model, you don’t need approvals because people agree to be involved and provide constant input throughout the process, instead of only getting involved at a late stage to review and approve what others have produced.

The notion of approvals has been created as a response to the practice where someone (usually a manager) is not involved in content production because they’re usually busy attending meetings. When an organization chooses to adjust the way they work at all levels, including better meeting management using a wiki, managers and others who would traditionally only approve content can now get more involved at that earlier stage, which reduces the need for the approval process.

This is a different way of thinking about work, but it’s much more efficient for people at all levels. Inside an organization, you really shouldn’t have to worry about trust as much as you would on a public wiki. People are there to do their jobs, and an environment with a high level of trust is conducive to high quality work.

David Linthicum says that "A good enterprise architect should see blurry" since "the line where the enterprise begins and the web starts blirring":

...there are two types of enterprise architects out there: those who embrace the value of the Web and have learned how to leverage it, and those who do not see the value, and have drawn a pretty bold line around the enterprise.

The former is much more innovative and creates an infrastructure that's much more cost effective. They consider the value that information and application services that you neither own nor host can bring to your enterprise systems -- systems that are starving for new functionality, content, and data. It's just a matter of adjusting your thinking, and finding the resources you need to leverage.

In the nineties the Internet was a one-way publishing platform that gave people with an Internet connection access to a lot of information for free.

Then, just at the turn of the millenium, the Internet became a market place for physical goods.

During the last few years the Internet has also become a market place for services. Most of the services, just as the majority of the content we find on the net, is "free". We pay for it indirectly by buying physical goods from companies which just happen advertise at the places where we go to look for "free" content and services. This is the most successful business model in The Content Economy so far. But just so far. We know something else will come but are just not sure about what it will be. That is because we are in the middle of a revolution.

This commercial development of the Internet was quite easy to foresee as it was simply an extension of the "old" economy. It was less easy to forsee when people were ready for it. Some of us were just too eager to think people were ready to buy things over the Internet or misunderstood which things they could think of buying. Now the dotcom crash has qualified as one of the great financial crises in modern history.

Nowadays I prefer to see the Internet primarily as a great public park where people can - and do - meet and share information and experiences with each other. Anyone (well, not in countries like China and North Korea where the governments still try to keep people from accessing the Internet) in the developed world can access and choose to visit to have a picnic at any time. They go there to consume, create and exchange information and experiences which they or someone else have encoded into some type of content (text, photes, video...). I call this phenomenon The Great Content Picnic, and it is setting new rules for The Content Economy. Rules that we are inventing and setting together and which the businesses born in the "old" economy have to adjust to.

Here's a nice illustration of the different stages of information seeking that I came across in an article in the Journal of Digital Information ("Designing the User Interface for the Físchlár Digital Video Library" by Hyowon Lee and Alan F. Smeaton").

In a post on the FASTForward blog called "If the US State Department Can Use Wikis and Blogs Effectively, So Can Your Organization?", John Husband refers to an article in The New York Times about the use of wikis and blogs within the US State Department, an organization that he describes as having "interest in controlling its messages AND in understanding better how to use information, knowledge and brainpower to be effective".

It is a very interesting article that addresses the value and concerns with wikis in a very clear and practical manner. Here are some of the highlights:

It’s grass-roots technology in a top-down organization,” said Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy in Washington, who recently gave a talk about Diplopedia at Wikipedia’s annual conference in Alexandria, Egypt.

He pointed out that unlike Wikipedia, Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down. He then observed, “There are plenty of ways to commit career suicide; wikis are just the newest one.”

The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. “This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference,”...

With globalization and the offering of products and services to multiple markets comes a need for localization. To reach a global audience, you have to respect their differences. You have to learn about how they expect to be treated and then try your best to treat them in that way. Differences in culture, language, legislation and other things need to be taken into consideration.

In web site and content development, localization should be a key part of any strategy aiming to reach a global audience. Web site localization usually translates into basic things such as talking to an audience in their own language. However, there are many more factors to consider and much more to it than translating text. I find it usable to view the localization challenge in three different dimensions:

1. Information Architecture - how a site is conceptually structured and how the structure and building elements (pages, page components, buttons etc) are labeled

2. Content - text, images, video and so on that need to be translated and in other ways adjusted to local requirements.

3. Templates - The containers of the content must be able to hold and display localized content. You should strive to be able to use the same page design for all markets and the only feasible way to achieve this reuse is to design page templates which can automatically be adjusted to local needs.

Web site localization is a very challenging job, not the least since you have to balance user experience design against the localization needs. The interaction design and visual design will inevitably be compromised for the sake of meeting up with localization needs.

Currently, I am hired as consultant by a global company with a large number of sites in 20+ different languages. I am leading pre-studies for new development and localization is always a key requirement that we need to consider. I am going to share some of my own experiences on localization with you in this and a few following posts, starting with two fundamental things to do in any localization project.

First of all, you need to identify the localization requirements and bring these as input to the design process. You need to identify and analyze ALL possible localization requirements, not just those having to do with languages; currencies, addresses, measurements, use of imagery, reading direction, symbolic meaning of colors, different legal and cultural requirements... For example, in Europe some countries might be changing currency to the Euro, so your design might have to support dual currencies. If you forget to think about this from the start, then you might get into serious problems later on.

Secondly, you need to define how the localization process should work. You should do this before designing the web site. Who should do the translations, where, when and how?

If you start out with these two things and work iteratively on refining the localization requirements and localization process throughout the project, the localization challenges coming ahead will be much easier to manage. I'll tell you more about those challenges in coming posts.

As it is high time for me to execise my Swedish language-muscle, I have now opened a blog in Swedish called "Skapa nytta med IT".

I came across a working paper called "Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization" by Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, and Michael L. Tushman from Harward Business School via Mike Gotta's Collaborative Thinking blog. Here are some glimpses from the paper:

The basic question we explore asks, what is the role of observable (to us) boundaries between individuals in structuring communications inside the firm?

...we find that women, mid- to highlevel executives, and members of the executive management, sales and marketing functions aremost likely to participate in cross-group communications. In effect, these individuals bridge the lacunae between distant groups in the company‘s social structure.

When we invert our perspective to focus on those who span the densely interacting groups within the firm, we were surprised to discover that women at BigCo are more likely to bridge the communication silos in the company. The available evidence suggests that this finding is neither an artifact of gendered sorting by job function, nor is it indicative of a gender difference in preference for communication media.

...one of our most surprising findings is the modest role that the firm‘s most senior executives seem to play in coordinating the activities of the enterprise.

You can download the full working paper here.

From James Dellow's blog I came across the article "10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud" by Stacey Higginbotham:

Cloud computing could become as ubiquitous as personal computing, networked campuses or other big innovations in the way we work, but it’s not there yet...//...Here are 10 reasons enterprises aren’t ready to trust the cloud:

1. It’s not secure.
2. It can’t be logged.
3. It’s not platform agnostic.
4. Reliability is still an issue.
5. Portability isn’t seamless.
6. It’s not environmentally sustainable.
7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers.
8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms.
9. Large companies already have an internal cloud.
10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans.

A press release from HP:

The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.

McKinsey have just published the article "Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results". Here is what they see coming:

Almost 60 percent of the respondents satisfied with Web 2.0 initiatives (but only 42 percent of other respondents) see them as a driver of competitive advantage. Expect these companies to become more aggressive in the marketplace against rivals that are slower to get on board.

Satisfied or not, all companies plan to spend more on Web 2.0 tools—an opportunity for software developers.

There are few differences in size, region, or even tool use between companies that are satisfied with their Web 2.0 experience and those that are not. This suggests that today’s seemingly insurmountable barriers could be overcome through the adoption of managerial methods that satisfied companies use.

Successful companies already use Web 2.0 for business applications such as communicating with customers and suppliers; soon they may use it to drive innovation.

Finally, here's an interesting presentation by James Robertson at Step Two Designs "talking through a range of practical ideas for getting the most out of collaboration tools, while avoiding common pitfalls":
Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration [+ audio]view presentation (tags: blogs sharepoint wikis

The second principle of Information Management says as follows:

There is no value in information which is not – sooner or later – being used. Information that might be of use sooner or later holds a potential value, but that value is not realized until it is actually used for something. Simply put, information is just a means to an end.

To realize this value potential, the information needs to flow. It needs to flow to the people who needs it to achieve their goals. It needs to flow to them whenever they need it and wherever they are.

If information does not flow good enough, the potential value of the information is not realized in full. In a sense, information is like water; it needs to flow to those who need it. And like water, it must flow also to keep fresh and usable.

Making information flow is about making sure that people who need it have access to it and that they easily can find it, make sense of it and use it. But it is not enough to make people access, find and use information that has already been encoded into some content. Since information and knowledge exist only in our own heads, we need to make sure that information flows between people. The information must flow from senders to receiver. This means that it must be easy to encode the information in content, find receivers and make the content accessible to those receivers for the sender. Thus, three key words when it comes to making information flow is accessibility, findability and ease-of-use.

Although I have tried to stay away from blogging during the past couple of weeks, I've been watching the feeds I subscribe to in Google Reader. Here are excepts from some of the more interesting posts I have encountered:

"As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual" by Steve Lohr, New York Times:

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

The results can be seen not only in the expensive new telepresence systems like those from Cisco Systems or Hewlett-Packard, but also in more mainstream collaboration technologies — Web conferencing, online document sharing, wikis and Internet telephony.

“Only in the last two years has the technology gotten to point where it really makes sense to use it,” said Alan Minton, vice president for marketing at Cornerstone Information Systems, a 60-person business software company in Bloomington, Ind. With his sales force doing many product demonstrations online, Mr. Minton estimates the group’s travel costs of have been cut by 60 percent and the average time to close a new sale has been reduced by 30 percent.

"Freeing Yourself from Email" by Betsy Carroll:

A common problem that office workers face today is email overload. For some, email has taken over their work life and it is damaging, rather than improving, their productivity...//...A major reason for email’s negative effect on productivity is its injudicious use. Because of its accessibility and convenience, email tends to get used for purposes it was not designed or best suited.

Last week, I saw an article in New York Times about an IBM employee, Luis Suarez, who has freed himself from email’s grip...//...He was able to cut down the incoming emails by 80% in a single week. Suarez still uses email but he uses it judiciously, such as when he has to discuss private and confidential matters.

Suarez suggests that people have an array of technologies available for communication and collaboration, and that those options should be chosen depending on how well they are suited to the task at hand. Suarez uses wikis, instant messaging, emails, phone calls, blogs, and social networking each for different purposes. Here we outline the situations or purposes for which the technologies that Suarez is using are likely to be suitable.

"Social Media is not Community" by Rachel Happe:

I'm finding that there is a lot of confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Social media can help foster communities but social media can be limited to allowing a conversation around content...which is *not* community.

There are two opportunities for enterprises then. 1 - to use social media to enable conversations and get a better idea of how constituents respond to specific content, initiatives, goals. This is much easier both to understand and implement. 2 - to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.

Communities have enormous strategic benefits to companies but require considerable investment (in resources, time, and tools) and are difficult to implement because they have a significant impact on business processes.

"Objection #3: Control of Information" by Kevin D. Jones:

By implementing a social learning solution you sit on the control fence. Control to much and it won’t be used. But not controlling it at all is unwise. There needs to be a balance - enough structure and processes to give guidance yet enough freedom to allow the users to do what they want.

"P2P & the Limits of Cloud Computing" by Mike Karp:

In the business world, some data is highly valuable, some less so. And some (the accounting department's football pool, for example) may be of no value to the company at all. This is an important concept, because these different categories of data are entitled to different classes of service. Less valuable data -- an example might be archived data, "less valuable" in the sense that it is rarely, if ever, accessed because it exists elsewhere on local, high-performance storage systems -- would seem to be particularly suitable for Web-based storage. Storing data that is involved in business-critical transaction processing would not be. If you like this logic and are thinking about Web-based storage, and if you understand the value of your various data sets, it's likely that offering Web-based services to your less valuable data will offer the greatest utility.

"Overload, Schmoverload: The Myth Of Personal Productivity" by Stowe Boyd:

As we have moved from hierarchical, top-down, centralized work -- think Henry Ford's assembly lines or the pre-Internet global corporation -- to networked, bottom-up, edgewise work personal productivity has been trumped by network productivity. Network productivity is the effectiveness of a person's entire network: contacts, contacts of contacts, and so on.

Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity.

"The tacitness of wikis" by John Tropea:

Stewart Mader from Grow Your Wiki is guest posting on Wikinomics and his lastest post is on the effectiveness of wikis enabling tacit sharing.

Documents that are open and dynamic allow people to evolve the documents by direct editing or leaving comments…ie. people are sharing their experience and what they know can add to the richness of the document.

Right away I thought of the How-To Guides I’m writing for our Communities of Practice (CoP) at work.

If my guides are on a wiki rather than PDF, people who use the guides can leave comments, or people with permissions can edit the page itself or a new page to add what they know.

This way they can help me evolve the document, even though it’s finished. Well, that’s the idea, it’s never finished…I may miss a feature, and I can’t experience every context, so there’s stuff that happens when people use Communities that I may not know up front. eg. a new way to use blogs, a workaround (exception to procedure) page for Document Control as each client has different needs.

"Interesting Report on IT depts role in value creation" by Bertrand Duperrin:

The CIGREF (french big companies CIO club) issued and interesting report co-written with McKinsey. Although it’s written in French, I would like to share
some points with you. And, if ever you know someone who can make a quick
translation for you I think it’s really worth.

- IT doesn’t impact directly value creation

- value doesn’t reside in tools but in their use

- as a result, IT depts don’t have to provide people with tools, hoping it will meet their needs and they’ll manage to do something efficient with it, but have to fulfill people’s needs.

- IT depts can’t create value by themselves and on their own, they have to co-create it with business managers.

- by the way, IT’s impact on value creation has to be measured by business indicators and not by IT ones.

I recently posted the following question in the ECM group at InformationZen.org, "AIIM's online network for education, research, and best practices to help organizations optimize their information":

I would like to get your view on the convergence between enterprise data and content management. Is there such a convergence going on and how does it show? What are the major challenges you see for such a convergence to happen? Can it even be done? Should it be done (what are the main benefits of such a convergence)?

I also provided one of my own graphics (see below) to illustrate what I see as the main differences between data and content. The point with the graphic is that data, as it is more structured than content, provides less context than content.



Billy Cripe, Director of Product Management for Oracle Enterprise Content Management Products, responded as follows:

This is a great question. I believe there is a convergence going on. I think that as unstructured information (content) becomes increasingly transportable (think XML) and reference-able (think micro formatting, semantic structures, etc) it becomes more and more data like.

Furthermore, I think there is increasing demand for context around data that is produced by, stored in, and leveraged by fairly sophisticated data management systems (e.g. databased, data warehouses, transactional systems). In the BI community there is a growing awareness that the contexts provided by content flavors the analysis / results that is easy to produce on/for structured data. That awareness is breeding calls for a convergence of the information (structured and unstructured) to provide a complete picture.

As organizations boot-strap themselves with home grown systems that bring together content and data for specific purposes, they see the clearer, sharper, stronger results.

The convergence of unstructured and structured data management into what some analysts have called Enterprise Information Management structures is the mechanism by which the enterprise data picture goes from blurry to sharp.

He continued the discussion on his own blog where he developed his answer to my question further. I believe that Billy Cripe's reasoning is very much aligned with my own view on Enterprise Information Management (EIM) as a "unifying" discipline. ECM has done a good job at unifying various disciplines that deal with different aspects of managing unstructured content of various types and formats (Records Management, Document Management, Content Management, Digital Asset Management...), but I don't see how ECM could also bring Data Management under its umbrella. Instead, this role is tailor-made for EIM.



EIM focuses on information needs and how information assets need to be described, structured and organized in order to support these needs - regardless of how (structure, format, type) they have been encoded or what technologies are required to capture, manage and deliver them. Separating data and content only makes sense from a management perspective, but not from a usage perspective. My fellow blogger Henrik has expressed this nicely in his post "Bridging Data And Content For Enterprise Information Management (EIM)":

Information assets are based on data and content which means that successful EIM needs to bridge the traditionally separated areas of Data Management and Content Management. Both areas have been oriented to the production side of data and content including techniques for creation, integration, administration, access and delivery. Data and Content Management also work with e.g. security, quality assurance and consolidation into master sources.

I would be happy if you would share your own thoughts and opinions on this subjects, so please don't hesitate to post a comment.