TakingAIIM

Context is King and ECM-based BI is the Keys to the Kingdom

Yesterday I tweeted (@carlfrappaolo) about a Boston Globe article on ECM search company, Endeca. I was going to let it go at that, but then this morning, serendipitously I heard a story on NPR about the dramatically changing world of television watching and the impact that is having on the services provided by Nielsen. ECM is at the foundation of great new opportunities and challenges for organizations. Read on

Making Blogs More Transparent Angers Bloggers - Huh?

An article in today's Boston Globe, reports that a new regulation will compel bloggers to disclose any affiliations or gifts they have received. What makes this article especially  interesting to me is the reaction of bloggers. Bloggers are reportedly  "unhappy" with this ruling that makes their sites even more transparent. Find out why.

Nothing Virtual About Virtual Distance

Today I had the great fortune to attend the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) program at Babson College.  I almost didn’t go – having just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was feeling a bit “full” of talk on collaboration and technology. But luckily three things coerced me into attending.

So I decided to go. WOW – OMG am I glad I did.

Find out why ...

IT meets KM meets E2.0 meets Innovation in the Boston Subway

Yesterday I was preparing for an Innovation Management training session I will be doing later this week. The sponsor, after reviewing my credentials asked “How you make the leap from information and knowledge management to coaching/developing innovation
skills?  … Your background seems to be IT.”

I provided what I hope was not too lengthy a response. In essence it stated that I view Innovation management as a fully ingrained component of KM, and IT as a strategic facilitator of both. Its interesting, but to many friends, family and colleagues my background appears disjointed. To me it is completely synergistic and intertwined.

Well, this morning I saw an article that pulled it all together. (read on and access the article.)

Enterprise 2.0 - Like Fine Wine Gets Better With Age

In 2008, Dan Keldsen and I published on behalf of AIIM, a groundbreaking report on Enterprise 2.0. One of the more startling and fundamental facts that we uncovered was that age did not matter as much as folks thought, as it relates to the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. In fact it really didn't matter at all, and in some situations the exact opposite of what most believed (that with youth came wider adoption and use) was the case. The findings were startling and insightful enough that we were invited to present them at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in 2008 (video).

Well, despite that, some still believe that Enterprise 2.0 belongs to the young. Earlier this year AIIM published another report on Enterprise 2.0. In it they claim that Millenniums are more apt to use Web 2.0. Huh – could the market have changed so quickly? No, not really. This research, like many individuals that spoke at the Enterprise 2.0 2009 show in Boston did, confuses or interchanges Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. This naïve misunderstanding often leads to market confusion, and great frustration amongst market analysts and practitioners, (See earlier post which includes further in-sites from Ron Miller on this issue.) Although based on the same basic technologies, Enterprise 2.0 is fundamentally different than Web 2.0 in its audience, purpose, goals, and challenges. This is something that is all too painful to anyone that has implemented these technologies inside the firewall. (More on this below.)

But why am I bringing this up now? Two important reasons. (Find out)

I've Looked at Crowds From Both Sides Now

Thanks to the generosity of Randy Corke of Chaordix, this Wednesday I had the opportunity to go to a meeting of the Ad Club. The Ad Club is the trade organization for marketing, advertising and communications in New England. A different crowd for me. So why was I invited?  Why did I go?  The topic was crowd sourcing - an Enterprise 2.0 subject near and dear to me. The speakers were Edward Boches and John Winsor.

The event was most interesting, mainly because it allowed me to see Enterprise 2.0 from a different perspective - that of the advertising professional (e.g. copy writer, illustrator, designer, layout artists, creative director, etc.).  

Read on ...

Collaboration - If It Were Easy We Would all do it (Well)

I have said it before, as have many others, Enterprise 2.0 is not just about technology. As I have commented on, this was a common theme at this year's Enterprise 2.0 conference. Indeed, if web-based collaboration were only about the technology, then any organization with even a modest IT budget would be doing it and doing it well.  But this is not the case.

As stated over and over,  its not about the technology - its about culture.  But perhaps we stuff far too many issues into that "box" labeled culture.  What exactly does it mean when we say Enterprise 2.0 is mostly about culture?

As you might expect it means many things. Culture is not only fundamental to but a multi-faceted aspect of Enterprise 2.0 execution. This post focuses on one of the aspects of culture - the basic approach used by a community to collaborate (e.g. networking, communication style, establishing trust and knowledge exchange). This aspect of culture is particularly relevant to Enterprise 2.0, because, as I have blogged about before, one of the primary end games of Enterprise 2.0 is collaboration. Thus, like Enterprise 2.0, collaboration is not just about technology.  If it were, we would all be doing it  - well. While Enterprise 2.0 technology can facilitate and support collaboration, the underlying collaborative environment has to be managed.  The degree of management is partially dependent on other aspects of culture - but I digress.  Back to collaboration itself.

One of the things we have to realize is that there are many ways to collaborate. Even if you are fortunate enough to have a supportive culture in place, you must determine what needs to be shared through collaboration, and what the goal or focus of the collaborative effort is.

We at Innovation Architected, believe that there are three basic types of collaboration (Interpersonal, content, and procedural), and 5 basic models or goals (COP/I, content, process, project and goal-oriented).  I provided a web-based lecture on this several months ago, sponsored by Google. You can view that presentation here.

Collaborate to Compete

View more documents from Carl Frappaolo.

These ideas are further discussed in a great article in the December Harvard Business Review entitled, "Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for You?."  You can download a free copy of the article.  One of my favorite insights in the article is the strong case it makes that collaboration can occur in a closed environment, in spite of the  "open transparency" mantra of Enterprise 2.0 zealots. The article addresses the need for incentives to attract collaborators - another favorite topic of mine, one steeped in the Knowledge Management best practices.

In another Harvard Business School paper,  best practices in orchestrating and managing collaboration in an outsourced, or extended enterprise setting are provided. The bottom line of this article, for me anyway, is that collaboration needs to be deliberately designed and managed in order to maximize effectiveness and the value of the outcome. 

In my own work as a knowledge management and innovation management consultant,  I know that there is not only corporate culture to consider, but also the personal approaches or personality types of the individuals in the community, to creative problem solving. Yes, there are many different personality types or inclinations to collaboration and innovation. One is not better than another, they are just different.  In fact, the different approaches are symbiotic and complementary. Best practices in innovation management indicate that as part of the management of collaboration you should ensure that a range of "collaboration personalities" are deliberately brought together to achieve higher quality output.

So while it is nice to think that Enterpirse 2.0 and collaboration are all about viral and organic growth, research and experience indicate that there is ample room for some control and management of the processes and systems used, as well as teh knowledge and content captured in the process. In deed we have built entire practices around services for innovation management, effective collaboration and knowledge management.

It Ain't the Medium Its the Message or - Its the Content that Counts

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase " The medium is the message."  I have often quoted McLuhan in my writings and presentations, in agreement.  But, I fear far too many take his message the wrong way, which can and has lead to serious repercussions.

Yesterday I was watching a video podcast interview between two colleagues.  Both will remain anonymous.  Who they are is not important.  Their posture and what they said are important. Both are noted industry advocates in the ECM and Enterprise 2.0 space. Both provide advice to the market, which is what concerns me. One of them made a statement that was simply naive and misleading, and the other one did not correct or modify it.

My angst is grounded in the further worry that history will repeat itself, and not in a positive way. The interview was focused on the use of collaborative social technologies in an Enterprise 2.0 setting. The comment made that caused my concern - and I paraphrase - was that many enterprise users are using tools such as Twitter (Twitter was specifically mentioned in the discussion),  without any real thought as to the management of the content created.

There were two distinct points made that were misleading - possibly downright wrong.

1. My colleagues casually pondered who will "own' the content and if indeed it will be considered subject to discovery. I believe that the courts, at least in the United States, have already ruled on this. As I stated in an earlier blog post, in a class action suit regarding patient/individual privacy rights, the courts ruled that content in "FaceBook, MySpace, instant-messaging threads, blog posts and whatever else the plaintiffs might have done online" was discoverable. The plaintiffs' objection that this violated the plaintiffs’ privacy was shot down. These tools and their content were viewed as public, not on a private network, but the public world wide web. Who "owns" the content.  Apparently Twitter, in the example given by my colleagues, and, Twitter content is "public" content and therefore discoverable.  There should be no speculation about this. 

I believe part of the reason these individuals got it wrong was that they confused Web 2.0 tools with Enterprise 2.0 tools.  This is an issue that also caused frustration for me and Ron Miller during the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, an issue we both blogged about.

2. The second statement that caused angst was the more serious one.  In further discussing how and why organizations should take a proactive approach to managing Twitter content (again - I am being liberal here in accepting their example of Twitter as an Enterprise 2.0 tool, my commentary is more focused on Enterprise 2.0 content - not public-based Web 2.0 content),  a statement was made that organizations need to take a specific look at the Enterprise 2.0 content and develop a management strategy specific to it.  A comment was made along the lines of "You should not want to apply the same rules and policies to the Twitter threads that you do your contracts."  WRONG.  As stated in the title of this blog post, it ain't the medium it's the message.

This perspective and advice was the same naive opinion that got too many organizations in trouble with e-mail.  You should not have a different management policy for e-mail, or blogs, or microblogs. The medium or format should not dictate policy (other than acceptable use of the tool of course). It is the content that matters no matter what format or tool it was created in.  My two colleagues made somewhat light reference to "Twitter streams" as if they could not really contain any mission critical content.  This was the same way many felt decades ago when e-mail was emerging as an "unofficial and casual" means of communication.  If commentary regarding contract terms (sticking with their example) are made in a Twitter stream then they should most definitely be subjected to the same policy and scrutiny as the contract - just as any relevant and related e-mail is now subjected to e-discovery.

Do not trivialize Twitter or any other form of Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 created content.  The tools used do not determine the value of or discoverability of the content - the content does.

Enterprise 2.0 – It all came down to CIT

Last week the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference was once again held in my home town, Boston. Of course I attended. How could I not; hot topic, personal and professional interest, and the show was within walking distance from Information Architected headquarters.

Like thousands of my colleagues, I came, I saw, I commented. 

So, why has it taken me so long to blog about it? Well, in addition to the usual – “I have been busy” excuses (truthful as they are), I also am learning how to balance microblogging and blogging. My more prolific than usual use of Twitter while at the conference kept the burning need to post an entire blog entry at bay. I am beginning to learn the complementary nature between Twitter and blogging. But more on that later.

Let me start by stating that some excellent commentary and insights have already been posted via Twitter. If you missed them you can retrieve them via the tag #e2conf. Additionally, there have been some very insightful blog posts form friends and colleagues such as Larry Hawes, Doug Cornelius, Oliver Marks , Stowe Boyd, Ron Miller and Bill Ives.

So the purpose of this post is not to rehash the comments I made in Twitter, or to restate (most) of what has already been documented in the blogs I listed above. Here, I share a very high level summation of the event.  I have pondered in retrospect what it all came down to, for me and can summarize it in an acronym – CTI.

CTI? - read on

ECM Writers Summit Looks at Web 2.0, Text Analytics, SharePoint, Cloud Computing and e-Discovery

I have Twittered about it, as have many others in attendance - but now its time for the "beyond the 140 words-at-a-time" input.

Last week I had the distinct honor of moderating the 2nd Annual Content
Management & Archiving Writers Summit (#ECMWriters), sponsored by EMC Documentum.  (I was also the moderator of last year's Summit.)

Over 30 industry analysts, consultants and practitioners assembled in New York City to discuss the current state of:

• Content Management in the Cloud
• Text Analytics
• Web 2.0
• SharePoint
• e-Discovery.

Those in attendance included Ralph Losey, Ron Miller, Bryant Duhon, Dan Woods, Jerome Wendt, Fern Halper, Gabe Acevedo, Virginia Backaitis, Geoffrey Bock, John Webster, Annette Weller-Collison, Theodora Blanchfield, Kemal Carr,  Vincent Berdot, Leonid Chernyak, Yuval Dror, Fred Van Der Molen, Philippe Niewbourg, Marta Oldani, Markus Gross, and Daniel Alguacil.

Additionally, the group was rounded out by several EMC strategists and leaders:  Mark Lewis, Whitney Tidmarsh, Razmik Abnous,  Matt Coblentz, and Marko Sillanpaa.  (I apologize for the inevitable omission of others who were there, whose name I fail to recall.)

With such a crowd, you can imagine the activity level. The room never went silent. The day was structured around the 5 topics listed above, each initiated by a formal but short presentation, and followed by open discussion and debate.

There was a subtle difference from last year, with discussion much more focused on business - less on technology, per se. With few exceptions, the discussion focused on real world business applications and case studies.  In this regard, the group often concurred that the change in the market has been subtle and more evolutionary of late.  Many of the technologies we focused on, from text analytics to SharePoint (soem even argued that the cloud was the latest iteration of time-sharing/ondemand/SaaS), have been available for several years, but the group felt that it was within the last year or so that their application within a business setting was being realized and appreciated beyond IT.  We agreed this was a positive sign of market maturity - though there is still a ways to go.

A major exception was Cloud computing, which we agreed is still a technical value proposition, but one whose value can be appealing to the business manager (in terms of greater agility, lower costs, and greener processing)

Razmik Abnous led this part of the discussion, and he continuously brought the conversation back to the business impact Cloud computing could have on ECM.  The group concurred that there is an erroneous preponderance of thought in the market that cloud computing is an all-or-nothing situation.  Razmik felt it was important to appreciate that in reality ECM can be deployed flexibly in a cloud, supporting many different architectures. The underlying ECM application, for example,  could reside in the cloud but the content may not.  Ron Miller shared an example of the US Military who is aggressively using cloud computing to enable dynamic creation of collaborative ECM sites around the globe, in an agile AND secure manner. (Miller learned of the program "from the horse's mouth - Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, at the recent MIT CIO Symposium).  Perhaps the strongest value statement discussed for ECM in the cloud was its potential as a connector, a means to provide transparent access across repositories and applications. 

Connection was a major theme of the day.  In fact, Mark Lewis kicked-off the day by stating connection was the single biggest challenge for ECM today. While the issue of content and application silos is not new, Mark proposed that other facets of ECM are fairly stable, and focus for both solution providers and business users needs to turn to connectivity.   While the group agreed, the message took on additional meaning (beyond bridging access to content silos), as the day proceeded.  As we proceeded through the various topics du jour, the degree to which these technologies need to be connected  in order to reach their full potential became apparent.  (The most powerful example of this was the role that text analytics can play within e-discovery.)

Fern Halper, who kicked-off the discussion on text analytics had just been at the Text Analytics Summit in Boston a week earlier.  Her presentation was peppered with real-world examples, garnered from the summit. Though some in our group started from a perspective that text analytics was still not practical, Fern's anecdotes, as well as those from others in the group, dispelled that sentiment.

Dan Woods provided a  review of the success of Web 2.0 and how it is ushering in Enterprise 2.0.  It was interesting for me to observe how some in the room (a room of ECM industry analysts and consultants), were still somewhat unclear on the role and value of Enterprise 2.0, separate and distinct from Web 2.0.   Dan's main message, which many, including myself concurred with is that although Web 2.0 has been somewhat successful in accelerating adoption of Enterprise 2.0, there is often a tendency for enterprise adopters to adopt not only the underlying technologies, but also metaphors, models, techniques and strategies. This often leads to failure. The subtle differences between communities, goals and objectives inside the firewall require a targeted fresh look at how technologies such as wikis, blogs and mashups should most effectively be used, and what it takes to foster user adoption.

There was much agreement among the participants concerning the state of SharePoint.  Bryant Duhon shared with the group a wealth of data regarding current SharePoint market trends.  Most users leverage SharePoint as a front-end to a larger ECM deployments. Nonetheless, given the extent of penetration across organizations, SharePoint is viewed as a near ubiquitous component of ECM platforms within organizations. While we agreed that SharePoint still lacked much functionality that keeps it from being an all encompassing ECM system,  we also agreed that Microsoft is likely to continue adding functionality, both through acquisition and development. There was much speculation regarding how far it might go, and how quickly. Some felt current utilization of FAST search indicated a poor understanding of search within Microsoft.  Others felt that Microsoft's roots and strengths are in consumer-oriented, small scale applications, and as such, SharePoint would remain a "good enough for the masses", "not good enough for the enterprise"  player in the market.  (This attitude of "good enough" is supported by the findings of a study I did on SharePoint on behalf of Oracle earlier this year.)  It was interesting to watch the body language and listen to the comments from the EMC Documentum folk in the room.  There were moments of defensiveness and squirming, but there were also moments of confidence and a clear strategy for how to complement SharePoint, and leverage the fact that it is raising the business community's awareness of ECM - albeit at a elementary level.  Perhaps it was Ralph Losey (an attorney and our e-Discovery discussion leader) who exhibited the greatest frustration with SharePoint providing a "good enough" approach to ECM.

Though SharePoint is not fully to blame, Losey felt that far too many organizations  under estimate what good content management is really all about, and that lack of adequate management leads to impractical, and perhaps unnecessary challenges for e-discovery. Ralph quipped that when it comes to ECM - most organizations have the "E" and "C" (there are Enterprises and they certainly know how to create Content), but there is little "M" (too few have solid management practices.) Losey challenged records management proponents in the room, stating that a good records practice is simply no longer enough.  In the electronic world - everything is potentially discoverable - record or not, and thus good management must apply to all content.  Ralph boldly proposed that the rising costs associated with e-Discovery are killing the American judicial system, but that this can change if technology (and practices) were properly leveraged.  Here, he challenged not the business users, however, but the technology providers. In his opinion, solution providers do a terrible job in educating legal and management executives on the benefits of ECM, and as a result technology goes much under utilized.

The discussion that ensued on e-Discovery was a great culmination of the day. E-discovery most obviously related to all the other topics of the day. E-discovery is most certainly more about business than IT.  Tools such as SharePoint and Web/Enterprise 2.0 are accelerating user command and speed of content creation, but offer little to nothing in the way of management.  The virtualization of ECM in the cloud is also an issue that needs careful scrutiny from a discovery standpoint before adoption. The power of text analytics within a e-Discovery system was recognized by everyone, but again some felt that there was more promise than results.  Most concurred that the big ECM solution providers do a poor job of incorporating text analytics techniques into their systems.

Someone (I forget who) shared how the field of ECM has become more exciting.  Following discussion on text analytics in particular,  it was observed "Library services and document management is boring, but  this, this is sexy." Yeah baby.

On a final note, it is highly likely that next year's ECM Writers Summit will focus much more on Documentum's upcoming CentreStage.  Both EMC and non-EMC participants several times alluded to CentreStage as a product that will have a significant impact on redefining state-of-the-industry, and will likely incorporate much of the technologies discussed throughout the day. So stay tuned - we'll see.