Information at Work

Calling for a few 8 things authors -- especially end users and analyst types

Use social media to improve efficiency Improve collaborate across departments / silos Capture, share and retain knowledge within an organization Learn from the “wisdom of the crowd” Achieve the virtual office 

via aiim.typepad.com

AIIM prez John Mancini is looking for a few good 8 Things contributions for Social Media/Enterprise 2.0 issues. Know how to get the most of social media for collaboration? Have some tips and strategies that you'd like to share?

Head over to John's blog, Digital Landfill, and let him know.

Bryant

Change Management

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with Maria Darby, Senior VP at Booz Allen Hamilton and Dr. Brooks Holtom, Associate Professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. Their institutions are teaming up and launching an interesting program around creating a career path for change management.

I'm interviewing both of them in the next few days to get a better perspective of what they're thinking around change management is. Stay tuned. Until then, here are the highlights of the conversation.

Both Brooks and Maria see the term "change management"--over and over--broadly interpreted and narrowly delivered. Change management needs to be delivered holistically, by a practitioner who has experience (preferably) in the organization. Both see the need to create a set of criteria that equals a standard for change management.

Brooks made an interesting point about Google Earth. You can take a holistic look at the globe and see some of the connections. Change management is also a set of interlocking and dependent events: one change leads to a change in another." To make change happen, and stick, someone driving change management needs to understand the jigsaw puzzle of an organization. You need to understand a variety of dimensions: the organization, the technology, the policy and how people are going to be affected; how business processes are going to change; how the culture will help or hinder these changes, etc.

An important element often overlooked is that all change is personal. Sure, as an organization, you are changing so that the organization, basically, makes more money. To get there, don't forget the people. You need them to make that happen.

We are all too aware of IT departments driving forward with rolling out technology without any concern for how that technology is going to be received by the business units it's intended for. Big clash.

A change facilitator will get in there early. Dive in and make the user part of the process. Not only part of the process, partners in the process.

You also need to institutionalize change so that it becomes the norm and that people don't go back to the old ways of doing things.

Brooks and Maria both noted that while this isn't the first such effort with change management, they do think it's the most comprehensive. Also that it's the first professional certification that they're away of.

Final thought: neither used the word "user" when talking about change. They always said "people." To me, that's a key switch in thinking and one that everyone needs to make as they attempt change in organization.

To paraphrase fellow Louisianan James Carville, "It's the people, stupid."

Thanks for reading,

Bryant

Content/Text Analysis: Unexamined content is a wasted opportunity

Just doing a bit of poking around to get a sense of content analysis as a potential editorial topic to cover. Here are a few resources I found on the topic, along with a few quick thoughts on the matter.

I think the subhead from Forrester's Leslie Owens report, Text Analytics takes business insight to new depths, sums up why text analytics is a good thing extremely well:

Unexamined Content is a Wasted Opportunity.

Off and on over my years as editor, I've had a fair number of meetings with text analytics vendors (not counting IBM). These companies tried/continue to try to solve the problem of trying to extract meaning from unstructured content and present it in a useful way so that decisions can be made based on something other than gut feel, it looks like technologically at least, we're getting close to that becoming a reality. (I also always enjoyed asking them for references. A look would always come over the CEO/Pres/Marketing guy's face and then a joke would be made, always some variation of "I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you." Yes, I get it. Intelligence agencies dig this kind of tool.) The technology is pretty cool stuff too as it has to deal with semantics and meaning either through some sort of semantic engine (trying to identify meaning) which is the approach Xerox took at one point (if memory of a years-gone meeting with a research scientists at Xerox PARC serves) or through brute force mathematic probability. OK, that's the extent of my technical "expertise" on the topic.

The uses of content/text analysis are potentially extremely good for companies:

• Improving decision-making
• Competitive analysis
• Figuring out what your customers are saying about you by searching your call logs, twitter, blogs, etc. (which will inform the two points just above)
• Matching structured and unstructured content to provide a 360 view (or as much a one as possible) into what is really going on in a company
• help to address the never-ending ediscovery issues. If you can limit the number of documents your corporate legal team needs to review, I don't know an exact figure, but the term "boat load" of savings springs to mind. 

First off, Fern Halper's blog is a good resource on the topic; Data makes the world go round. (I've also had the pleasure of meeting her).

IBM offers tools to do this stuff.(question: Why call it content analysis, IBM, when everyone else calls the same stuff text analysis?)

Brooke Aker of Expert Systems wrote a short article for me recently, What Works: Is Semantic Intelligence the New Business Intelligence?

From the Apache UMI (an open source effort): Unstructured Information Management (UMI)applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at.

Text Analytics Small but growing market, according to IDC

In Business Intelligence Polishes Its Crystal Ball, Forrester analysts James G. Kobielus, Boris Evelson, Leslie Owens opine that advanced analytics (see definition at bottom of post), when combined with traditional business intelligence tools will allow/provide: predictive and prescriptive insight, unlock information in unstructured data, act on streaming information in real time, and discover patterns in non-modeled data.

Advanced analytics (from Forrester): Any solution that supports the identification of meaningful patterns and correlations among variables in complex, structured and unstructured, historical and potential future data sets for the purposes of predicting future events and assessing the attractiveness of various courses of action. Advanced analytics typically incorporate such functionality as data mining, descriptive modeling, econometrics, forecasting, operations research, optimization, predictive modeling, simulation, statistics, and text analytics.

There's Life Beyond SharePoint (I think)

Something's been bugging me for a while.

Periodically, I've been dinged for being pro-Microsoft because of the amount of coverage/attention SharePoint gets in Infonomics Weekly and the AIIM Webinar program (I provide the content for both). While this is absolutely NOT the case, I can understand how someone could get that impression. We do cover SharePoint, and the issues of compliance, MORE content silos, etc. SharePoint trails in its wake quite a bit. I will state unequivocably that I (nor is AIIM) am not in the business of promoting SharePoint.* We DO consider it an important editorial topic to cover though. I've bounced the kudzu** analogy off of people before, and no one has disagreed -- SharePoint is all over the place. As an editor, you've got to cover the issues confronting your readers. We have to cover it as a topic.

That said, I consider the "old" topics of capture and workflow and document management  and records management (the basic blocking and tackling topics in the ECM industry) as, or even more, important. Judging by reader feedback, I don't think I'm out of step.

Yet, I find myself in a conundrum. SharePoint titles generally are read at a higher rate than a more "boring" piece on scanning or records management or even ediscovery at times. Is SharePoint some sort of catnip for the IT crowd? So, to draw attention to the newsletter, and the "other" content in it, I often use SharePoint to suck folks in.

We'll continue covering SharePoint within the confines of the enterprise content management industry (a pretty big confine) and providing you with great information on the basic blocking and tackling building blocks of this industry too.

But, here's what I'm curious about -- if scanning/capture (which is still under-implemented and under used everywhere; see the AIIM INdustry Report on Capture); ediscovery, email management, etc. are just as important as SharePoint, why don't those articles get read more avidly? What are you looking for? What's going to draw you in? Maybe SharePoint, as the new issue on the block is more wide open so taht everything written about it is new. Maybe I'm covering too much of the same ground in other topics. Help an editor attempt to pin point what you need to know. Otherwise, I'm just going to name every webinar "Getting the Most from SharePoint" and every Infonomics Weekly subject line will read "SharePointpalooza" 

Just kidding about that last point. Sort of. :)

*Beyond using the topic "SharePoint" to draw eyeballs to the newsletter, of course.

**For you non-southerners out there, Kudzu is a vine that grows over EVERYTHING that doesn't move. used to be only in the deep south, but I saw it as far north as Virginia driving to Louisiana over Christmas break.

THanks for reading,

Bryant

What do you think of "Enterprise 2.0"?

I've read a few articles/blog posts today that discussed whether or not Enterprise 2.0 was a load o' crap versus the contrary point of view. I think there's the beginning of something brewing, though I think that the technology is too often the focus when in fact the tools enable us to basically do what folks have been doing since we painted on cave walls (talk, BS, tell stories) just a LOT faster. We need to be focusing on what that speed means more, both for our sanity and ability to track lots of pieces of information coming at us at light speed and so that those tools can be used to make organizations better/faster/smarter. A bit simplified there, but, hey, it's Monday.

Links to two of those articles follow:

Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock -- a Panel Discussion

And, the column the inspired the above panel: Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock.

And, since I was playing around with Poll Daddy to create polls for a pending website redesign, I thought I'd write a short note and see if I could successfully create a poll (that part's easy) and then add a link (sometimes an issue for me, I think I accumulated bad technology karma in a past life by being rude to an abacus).

Share Your Capture Experience; Win a Samsung Netbook

Your scanning and capture experiences are needed for the latest AIIM Industry Watch survey.

Per Doug Miles, AIIM's director of Research:

We want to dig deep into motivations, issues and ROI for scanning and capture investments. What do you scan? Which processes work best? Outsourced vs centralized vs distributed? We need your input. The resulting Industry Watch report will be free for participants to download. You could also win a cool Samsung N130 netbook. www.aiimhost.com/survey. [Note: I linked to the official Samsung page, this might not be the exact netbook you could win. Still, it's a pretty good piece of equipment.]

Take a look at previous capture research, published in December 2008; Content Creation and Delivery: The On-Ramps and Off-Ramps of ECM.

Thanks for reading,

Bryant

SharePoint 2010 Roundup

Details of SharePoint 2010 were announced last week. Here's a roundup of (some) commentary of the latest from Microsoft.

The official SharePoint 2010 site from Microsoft. Requires Silverlight, which is a bit annoying, but good resource.

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference 2009 -- Just concluded, but a number of resources available. You can listen to Steve Ballmer say some variation of "Cloud" 8 billion times.

http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

Questions from a webinar on preparing for SharePoint 2010 by SharePoint Joel.

http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=249

Mark Bower, official SharePoint 2010 blogs. Links to 10 of them, records management, etc.

http://markbower.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/official-sharepoint-2010-and-office-2010-blogs/

The Burton Group's Mike Gotta takes notes on the first day of the Conference (from Oct 19)

http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collaboration_and_content/2009/10/sharepoint-2009-conference-morning-keynotes.html

CMS Watch's Tony Byrne shares some thoughts on the SharePoint 2010 Conference (and kudos to Tony for best new word, "Sharegasm.")

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1721-SharePoint-Conference-Wrap-Up

Your Scariest ECM Moment: Video Challenge

On the theory that we should strike while the iron is hot, here's another video challenge for everyone: Your Scariest ECM Moment [imagine blood-red script now :)].

The ground rules are simple:

1.       Explain/talk about/terrify us with your Scariest ECM Moment. We mean one of those moments that felt as if your stomache dropped to the floor and your heart started beating fast from the extra adrenaline.

2.       Keep it clean.

3.    3 minutes.

3.       The sound quality is the most important element.

4.       The video could be as straightforward as a webcam clip of you, describing in excruciating detail, how a client/boss/co-worker totally messed up your world by screwing up your enterprise content management project. You could reenact the scene with sock puppets (or your daughter's Barbies/son's GI Joes -- extra points for Star Wars figures, kidding, kidding). You could do a script reading around a table with friends playing the parts of those who terrified you. Be as creative as you want -- judging by the results of the ECM in 60 Seconds videos, that won't be a problem for all of you ;)

5.       Commercials touting the wonders of your product/company/approach will not be considered.

      Send your video to [email protected] with "Scary video” in the subject line.

9.       Due to the whims of various mail servers, send a second email alerting me to the fact that you have sent in your video. Just in case.

      Use any of the major video formats.

10.   Videos will be posted to our Infonomics Weekly channel on YouTube (watch the "ECM in 60 Seconds or Less" videos here.)

11.   Due date: Close of business, Friday, October 23.

The crackerjack staff of Infonomics Weekly, along with AIIM president John Mancini and Infonomics editor-in-chief Ben Herring, will select five videos for all of you to vote on.

Winner gets a big prize (well something, maybe an AIIM hoodie) and bragging rights.

I look forward to seeing what ya'll come up with -- again.

Happy Recording,

Bryant

ECM in 60 Seconds -- Watch the videos

In case you've missed them elsewhere, take a look at the seven ECM in 60 Seconds or Less videos.

It's 7 minutes well-spent.

I wish I could pick a favorite, but as I tell my two girls -- I love my children equally.

Enjoy,

Bryant

ECM on the radio

As I was sitting on my new commute yesterday, stuck in traffic (ooooo, everyone slow down, it's foggy!), I wasn't quite ready to be reminded of work while listening to NPR. Yet, there it was. A company called Hudson Consulting, which resells Ektron, had a radio spot about WCM.

That was more jarring than, on the weekends, seeing an Iron Mountain van on the Beltway and being reminded of my webinar program.

Maybe this ECM stuff is really starting to seep out into the wider world.

Bryant