TakingAIIM

Putting a Net Around Social Networks

Sophos recently posted an interesting study which showed that 50% of workers are blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers.  A bit surprising to begin with.  But when I saw this statistic my first  reaction was, yes of course, for the same reason some companies did not provide internet access in the early days, it is a distraction from "real" work, decreases productivity, its too socially oriented. I was a bit surprised when I read on and learned that the primary motivation was fear that access to Facebook posed a content security threat.  In fact, the poll showed that 66 percent of workers were concerned that their colleagues were sharing too much information on Facebook, which could lead to identity theft and targeted phishing attacks against the company.  I was selfishly pleased.  Why?

First, this finding somewhat vindicated me.  In a blog entry I made to the FastForward blog entitled Web 2.0 The Dark Side, I expressed great concern over Web and Enterprise 2.0 zealots that go on about the powers of the social networking capabilities of these tools, without simultaneously addressing content security and knowledge management issues.  My motivation in authoring that post was founded in a session at the FAST Search 2007 user conference, focused on Enterprise 2.0.  When I raised the security concern in the discussion, a contingent of attendees attacked me, one blurting out "Your problem is that you just don't trust your colleagues to do the right thing." Apparently its not just  "my problem."  I was struck that day by the naiveness of that comment.  Whether done deliberately, negligently or through pure accident, people will break content security protocol.  We need to be concerned with this and establish policies and systems to proactively monitor content and keep inappropriate "sharing" from occurring. The proliferation of content electronically is too easy, too viral, not to be so concerned.  That leads me to reason 2 for my selfish pleasure.   

I am so passionate about this topic, that along with my AIIM Market Intelligence colleague, Dan Keldsen,  we decided to target Content Security as the focus of our first AIIM Market IQ report (scheduled for publication in October.)  It was nice to learn that our focus is timely and relevant.  In the Market IQ we are going to address securing content way beyond just that within social networking, for clearly, controlling access to online content has to be holistically on and intelligently.  Not out of paranoia but out of responsibility and in recognition of the potentially viral nature of online content.

Getting Explicit About Tacit Knowledge

Earlier this week, on his blog, James Taylor quoted from my book (see his earlier review of the book).  He referenced my introduction to what I call implicit knowledge, knowledge that is tacit (i.e. not captured), but only because no one has ever taken the time and energy to codify and capture the knowledge. 

Taylor goes on to cite another blog, (anecdote).  This blog is actually part of a corporate website (anecdote is a consulting company focused on tacit knowledge.)  Those interested in the tacit aspect of knowledge management are encouraged to visit this blog.  There is some valuable insight and discussion there. 

The particular post referenced by Taylor, offers the classic iceberg graphic as an example of tacit versus explicit knowledge.  You know, the iceberg seen (10%), is the explicit knowledge.  The iceberg lurking underwater (90%), is the tacit knowledge.  The tacit knowledge, as depicted in this graphic is stratified.  I like that idea – as Taylor points out it is much related to my concept of implicit knowledge.  I am not, however, in full agreement with the labels and arrangements of the layers in the diagram. 

A extensive debate on each layer would be entertaining and valuable, but perhaps too lengthy and complex for this blog.  So I’ll focus on a few points.  Just under the water line there is tacit knowledge that is easily turned to explicit, just as soon as someone records it (e.g. we just hired a new employee.  We know it, but until it is posted somewhere (a memo, a database record) it is tacit knowledge).  Agreed.  Below that is knowledge that will never be recorded (e.g. a decision has been made never to capture it.)  In certain security-related concerns I have seen this. 

The next layer is tacit knowledge that requires too much work to capture.  Ah – here I begin to see things a bit differently.  This is not a black and white issue.  One has to ask just how much time and effort would it take to capture the knowledge (assuming it is even doable or does not cause a breach in security policy), and weigh that against the value (long and short term) in being able to leverage the knowledge as an explicit resource.  For organizations that are concerned with the brain drain issue associated with the graying of the baby boomer work force and/or the nomad mentality of the generation Xers, this is indeed a serious question to ask.  Would you be willing to invest several days time to capture the know-how of a researcher in your R&D group, beyond what has already been captured, or that of a senior customer service rep?  When there is an inclination to invest the effort to capture the knowledge, then a clear strategy or methodology for doing so must be leveraged.  This is where story telling could be used (although I am not a big fan.)   More structured approach are available and worth exploring, such as those provided by Larry Todd Wilson and his company, Knowledge Harvesting, Inc. 

The next two layers, "everyone knows it/taken for granted", and "individuals do not know but groups do", I just do not agree with.  That is to say, that even in these cases, a case MIGHT be made for being able to capture the tacit and make it explicit.  Again, the value of doing so needs to be evaluated.

Finally, the bottom most layer is that knowledge that simply cannot be recorded.  Call it art, call it instinct, experience – call it what you will, you cannot capture it, at least not yet, no matter the value proposition.

ECM – Did You Hear That?

Last month I posted on the advent of digiscent content within the world of ECM.  I positioned this subject within the broader topic of digital content - the power and fun in being able to leverage multiple forms of data (text, pictures, audio, video, smell taste). 

In that same vein, I want to draw attention to the upcoming SpeechTEK show.  Though not as edgy as digital odor or “tasty inks”, speech processing and speech recognition nonetheless represents another form of content and functionality for ECM.  Whether as front-end/interface to content capture and content retrieval, interface to workflow/BPM, integrated personalized training/warnings in content or as part of a content security strategy,  digital audio content and speech technology  need to be explored and appreciated by the ECMer.   

I am sad to say I will not be attending the show, and that, unfortunately, from my perspective, SpeechTEK is a bit heavy on the automated customer service side of speech technology application.  But the show does provide a forum at which to become exposed to the latest underlying technology and features of this form of digital content.  What you do with that knowledge and functionality is up to you.  Like I said in the earlier post “God I love ECM – its so cool.”

aiimALERT: Search Market Yin & Yang Continues

Last week I posted two aiimALERTs regarding individual search solution provider’s performance in the search market – FAST in Q2 and Autonomy in Q1 & 2.   While FAST’s numbers were “disappointing”, to quote  CEO John Lervik, Autonomy had a record breaking first half of the year.  One of the points of the second blog was to offer a perspective on the growth of the search market overall.   FAST had no one to blame but themselves for poor performance.  The market was ripe with opportunity for search solution providers in the first half of this year.  This observation was further fortified by the announcement of yet another search solution provider, Endeca, who achieved record revenues with 83 % year-over-year revenue growth in Q2. This was Endeca’s 18th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth. 

Bottom line, the search market is hot (which is why AIIM Market Intelligence has targeted search – findability – for our 2008 Q1 Market IQ report). Despite FAST's poor performance of late, this is actually good news for FAST, in that as they get their house in order, the market is actively ready to respond.  Indeed, today FAST announced the results of its internal operational review and detailed plans to streamline operations in order to achieve profitable performance.

Part of this plan is to target vertical markets, namely financial services, retail, government, media/entertainment and communications. (OK - no applauds for this move FAST.  You only left out Healthcare it seems - hardly a "highly focused" vertical market campaign.)  The more aggressive and potentially fruitful part of the plan is a hard look and restructuring of internal processes - promised to yield a $12 million reduction in costs.  This included a reduction in headcount, in the end shrinking the company to approximately 730 - ouch.

E-mail Management - Fuggedaboutit

I am getting a bit perplexed (at best), a bit aggravated (at worst) by all the attention being paid to e-mail management of late. Why do people/companies believe that e-mail requires management, skills and training separate and distinct from the rest of enterprise content?  If all your organization is worried about is its e-mail management, then fuggedaboutit, you're in better shape than most.  I am not proposing that this is not an important business issue.  But, if e-mail is the only form of business content that you do not have well managed, then sit back and relax.  Bringing e-mail into control won't take much.

Whether viewing e-mail management from a compliance or knowledge sharing perspective, realize that the issue is larger than e-mail.  The media/format of e-mail is not "special" enough to warrant specific approaches to management. (You may consider corporate guidelines for how/when to use e-mail. But that is a separate and distinct topic.)  E-mail is nothing more than another form of business content, and, as such, should be subject to a common approach to content management – all business content, whether an e-mail message, Word file, PDF file, blog entry, wiki page, paper-based mail, file sent by FTP or recorded phone conversation.  If there is no records management policy within your organization, no corporate compliance initiative, no enterprise search strategy, no content sharing/collaboration environment, than addressing these issues only for e-mail is way too little too late.  If on the other hand your organization has a well-defined practice with regards to records, compliance, search and collaboration, then extending these to include content authored and/or stored in e-mail is fairly straightforward.

Consider two clients of mine, for whom I developed Enterprise Content Management strategies, which included e-mail.  In one case, e-mail was poorly administered to begin with.  Most e-mail was stored on C: drives, not subject to official back-up and recovery.  Many were printing e-mails and storing them in paper files.  When I asked how this compared to the approach used to manage paper files I was told that that did not matter, management was specifically concerned with e-mail.  I pushed a bit harder and learned that the approach to e-mail was symptomatic of the organization's approach to controlling any form of content.  Records management was a guideline, not a policy.  Their e-mail project quickly grew in complexity and stature.

The other client also felt they needed to establish an e-mail management practice.  In this case, there was a records management group that exercised control over many forms of content.  Established policies were in place and enforced that governed things such as retention.  Their solution was as simple as incorporating the e-mail files to the existing rules and review processes.  But that realization did not come easily.  When I first proposed that they take existing records policies and extend them to e-mail they looked at me as if I was crazy.  "This is e-mail" they said.  "No, this is business content" I retorted,  Courts and regulators do not hold e-mail to a  higher or lesser degree of scrutiny than any other form of content.  It’s the subject matter of the content and its business purpose that governs the approach to management and control, not format or media. 

Organizations can be easily confused.  Some technology providers purport e-mail management solutions that address the situation singularly.  While these products may work as a standalone solution, they create yet another stovepipe in the organization.  Seek out solutions that can be leveraged throughout the organization and bring e-mail into compliance with the policies and procedures of the organization as a whole.  Content filtering, security, search/retrieval and records retention should be deployed across media types and controlled by a centralized policy.  If you take the myopic view, not only are you not establishing a centralized approach, but you leave yourself vulnerable to the next insurgence of electronic communication.

So if you believe you have to manage your e-mail take this as a wake-up call and take a broader view.  If you find that your electronic content is in disarray then set up a system to address all content.  But if you find it is truly just e-mail that you have to bring under control, then quit your whining, you are in better shape than you thought, and better than most other organizations.

And that is precisely why you will not see AIIM Market Intelligence covering e-mail and its management as a separate and distinct topic.  Email will be covered, tangentially in many upcoming whitepapers and Market IQs (such as the Content Security IQ due for release in October 2007), but we will not focus on it exclusively only to lead misguided business and technology leaders further down the wrong path.

In Search of Search - Screaming Louder

This week my colleague, Dan Keldsen, in his blog posted his views on enterprise search and the confusion in the market.  In it he discusses a blog entitled Search 2.0.   I will not restate what Dan stated (he did a fine job of making his case), but reiterate the frustration felt by folks like Dan and me, when we see “experts” make statements such as “Numerous usability studies have shown that the Vivisimo clustering interface and underlying technology is confusing to users and actually hurts in task completion as a distraction. Better to go with a powerful enterprise search solution like the Google Search Appliance or Google Mini.” 
First – what usability studies? 
Second – how can anyone say that the Vivisimo approach to search is confusing to (all) users and causes distraction?  What business environment and content library is this in reference to – all? 
Third – Google Enterprise – a powerful enterprise search tool?  Come on. 

I just cannot keep quiet on this.  In an earlier posting (In Search of Search - How Loud Must We Scream?) – I ranted about the complexity and sophistication of enterprise search.  As I stated in this earlier posting,  too many users believe that search is only about Boolean-based word query with perhaps a natural language front end.  On the vendor end, each vendor would have us believe that enterprise search is only about their respective product.  Both are way off base.  Let me praise Google for raising the general public’s awareness of the power and need for search.  But let me blast them, or anyone else, that tries to convince an enterprise that Google search appliance is “the solution”  for enterprise search. 

I agree with Ravi Govil.  In his post on the Search 2.0 blog, he states: “If I need to suggest a tool that would solve the research organization's search problem, first I would try to understand their business and user needs.”  How true Ravi.  Search is NOT a one size fits all.  It is technology/functionality rich in features, approaches and interfaces, not to mention add on features such as clustering, taxonomy integration, relevancy rankings, etc.  (I was therefore surprised when Ravi, in his post stated that relevancy, summary extraction, metadata indexing and crawling are generic.  In this regard, I cannot disagree more.  Indeed, one of the aspects that makes Google inappropriate for enterprise search is its handling of many of these so called "generic" features.  What works on the web, does not work in any/all enterprise settings.)

To repeat myself:  Search is not search is not search.  If you really want to get the bang for your buck when it comes to search, take the time to investigate the approaches available and match the one that comes closest to getting at your content in the most powerful manner (as that manner is described by you.) 

At last count there were some 50 some odd enterprise search tools in the market.  There is reason for that - one size does not fit all.   Search is a  complex function to master for both man and machine.  Unfortunately, we like to think that any problem can be solved with "the right tool."  But, in the case of search, that tool is dependent on the situation (content, context and community/users). In any  enterprise, there are likely  several combinations of these  factors, and therefore perhaps a need for many approaches to search. 

In the 20+ years that I have been covering the search industry, I can recall at least 3 major milestones - plateaus of platitudes if you will, which declared "the solution", or the "final story" on enterprise search (My favorite was the myth that search was dead as a standalone function and was a feature to be embedded in business applications - popular in the late 1990s.)  I have never held to any of these.  I agree with Nicholas Hoover, who wrote recently, "Yet search innovations keep coming - driven largely by necessity." 

Oh the insanity – when will it end?  Perhaps never.  That is the beauty and curse of enterprise search.

aiimALERT: Autonomy & FAST - Yin & Yang

Yesterday I posted an aiimALERT  on the performance (lack thereof) of FAST in Q2.  Subsequent to that, I discovered that in the same relative time frame in which FAST posted its numbers, Autonomy posted its Q1 & Q2 results.  This is worth noting as Autonomy had its  most successful first half of the year posting in its 11-year history.” Apparently FAST’s yin was Autonomy’s yang.  Indeed, whereas at the end of July, FAST stock fell 30%, Autonomy's share price has risen 58% since January. 

While Autonomy has a wider portfolio of functionality, to which some of this success can be attributed, Autonomy is still clearly a player in the enterprise search space.  I point this out because it underscores the message I stated in yesterday's post, that FAST only has themselves to blame for its poor performance.  As indicated by Autonomy, the market for enterprise search itself is/was quite strong.

aiimALERT: FAST Slows Down

This week FAST posted a 2007 Q2 pretax loss of US$36.2 million, down from last year's Q2 US$4.9 million profit, an even poorer performance than that forecasted earlier.   

It was with great understatement that FAST President John Lervik stated, “We are disappointed by the numbers...” in the live announcement. Disappointed? Perhaps devastated would be a bit more accurate.

FAST has no one but themselves to blame.  Despite decreased sales, the poor overall performance is due more to poor management and accounting practices. FAST suffered from an apparent vestige of ego and enthusiasm from the dot com era.  Anxious to drive top-line growth FAST undertook aggressive payment terms and “declining quality of revenue.”  Lervik stated that DSOs (days sales outstanding) surged to 265 days during the second quarter, from 143 days last year and 188 days in the first quarter. This coupled with ever increasing expenses to fund aggressive marketing and untethered R&D (a classic innovation [mis]management problem) led to the “disappointing numbers” more than poor sales performance or market conditions.

I cannot help but recall this year’s FASTForward user group – an event that kept industry analysts buzzing for weeks regarding its opulence and extravagance.   Bottom line: Operating expenses were out of sync with revenue.  It is a shame that FAST did not take a lesson from history (aka dot bomb), that reckless spending and overly aggressive revenue payment terms lead to poor performance. The cart outran the horse significantly here.

FAST shareholders have suffered for this. Stock value has lost two thirds of its value in one and a half years.  At the end of July, FAST fell 30% after it issued warnings of “disappointing numbers.”

But all is not lost.  This was a wake-up call to FAST management- “slow down, you move too fast!” Time to manage growth carefully, not let it run wild, only to spin out of control.  Many changes have already been announced including a discontinuance of MoUs (memorandums of understanding), which are promises of future revenue/payments. Efforts are being made to 'realign the business to the new revenue base' and to tighten operational processes and controls.  Lervik claims that the new policies on payment terms have already brought the average payment schedule for second quarter deals to less than 130 days.

With US$195 million in cash and no net debt, an arsenal of technology and a culture of innovation (targeting enterprise issues), FAST is still a formidable contender in the enterprise search space and cannot, by any stretch of the imagination be written off yet.   So Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo et. al need not circle like vultures, and FAST users need not scramble for the life boats... quite yet.

Distributed Capture Tightly Tied to Transactional Processes

Last week I announced the latest AIIM study on Distributed Capture (Download  study).  In that post, I  commented on the fact that the top two benefits associated with distributed capture installations were process-oriented (i.e. increased process).

On the heels of this finding, a clear trend emerged from the survey data: the identification of transaction-intensive processes as the most popular targets for distributed capture.  These included invoice processing, expense reporting, personnel actions, new hire processing, order processing and new account setup.

Processes that lend themselves more to an ad hoc and customized process, (e.g. custom quote request and customer care) were less likely to be significantly impacted by simple capture and perhaps more readily lend themselves to benefit from online collaboration and more knowledge-oriented technologies.

It logically followed  that when asked to identify the departments in which distributed capture is used, Finance and Administration were a clear front runner, with 59% of the responses.

ECM - Special Delivery

If a document is written and no one is there to read it, does it exist?

This is how I started an article, which will appear in an upcoming edition of E-Doc Magazine.  The focus of the article is a particular aspect of ECM – content delivery. 

We at AIIM define ECM as “. . . the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and DELIVER content . . .” (emphasis added).  Unfortunately, far too many ECMers pay little attention to the delivery aspect of ECM.  ECM should not be focused only on capture, storage and retention.  Retrieval and access are critical components of an ECM strategy, and, in that regard, content delivery (i.e. how content is physically retrieved and presented) is fundamentally important.  Often, far too little attention is paid to  delivery mechanics and effectiveness.  The more fortunate ECMers may be teamed with a marketing team that will influence some aspects of content delivery (e.g. colors, layout).  But we in the ECM community should take a more proactive role and understand that there is far more to content delivery.

Content delivery is the pinnacle of our profession. Leveraging myriad forms of content in myriad formats and medias, we can create compelling one-on-one communication. In his book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeir states that “The standard communication model is an antique. “ I could not agree more.  ECM technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity and capability to not only create content, but deliver it in clever and compelling ways.  Today content delivery is highly adaptable and flexible and in that capability lies a great ROI for ECM – see my previous blog on that subject.)

For those that think this is only for the world of web-based communication, think again. Paper has great appeal to many from a legacy/comfort perspective.  It is also highly portable, and can, in some cases, rise above the noise of the other forms of media. (Those who want to learn more about effective use of paper-based print should visit the EDSF resource center).

The integration of e-based content with print-on-demand (POD) can make production and distribution of paper documents (e.g. brochures, training manuals, reference guides) that are customized and individually tailored to the nth degree not only possible, but practical and cost effective.

Of course, for those who are leveraging their content strictly in an on-line environment, the options and possibilities are virtually endless (see my earlier blog on Digiscent technology).  In this environment, to accept or play by the old rules of delivery is just lazy and ignorant.

Content delivery is a very powerful tool for the communicator.  It can provide points of control over the audience.  From relevancy ranking to media selection, content delivery needs to be addressed head on in every ECM implementation because it has a direct impact on the effectiveness of content, which can be directly tied to bottom line benefit.