///^\\\ = Martin's Fulcrum Musings

Engaging Content. Whether to Embed or Link?

2011-11-21T14:44:00.001-05:00

Showing a collection of PowerPoint slides pulled from anOpenText Content Server was the subject of a recent post. At that time, I used presentations from ourContent World Users' conference of a year ago to show how a collection of related materials from a secure enterprise repository could be embedded in the post using OpenText Widget Services (OTWS).

Last week wasthe latest Content World 2011 conference, which provided me with a rich set ofnew materials to show Widget Services' capabilities. Note: All of these presentations are already available individually from OpenText Online Communities (login required)

Full screen collection – In my previous post thecollection was embedded within the post. You could expand it if you chose. Butthere are times when you want to show full-screen off-the-bat. So here are acollection of presentations related to our eDOCS offering:

Just click on thislink to view the collection

Select one, get details, view it in a player,download it, or get the embed code to use elsewhere.

Collection embedded – Frankly I find the full screen version above more compelling, but there are times when you need to embed in context, much as you might embed a video from OpenText Video Services. So here is the same collectionembedded here to illustrate that:

A single presentation in a player – In contrast, here is asingle presentation, this time about Widget Services, opened in a viewer when you click this link.

Video at Work - Video Services for Content Server

2011-11-15T12:33:00.001-05:00

I’m a big fan of video for work applications. It’s the best way to get information to staff quickly. As such I’ve been using the OpenText Video Service (OTVS) for some time. In fact, we recently developed a ‘Success Story’ about our own use of the service that will be out soon. We already have over 600 internal videos for staff running on OTVS, mostly made in the last year.

But while OTVS is easy to use, it really isn’t practical to train everyone in an organization to use it.

What they need is a simple addition to something they already use, such as OpenText Content Server (f.k.a. Livelink). That’s why I’m so interested in the forthcoming release of a module for OpenText Content Server.If you’d like a sneak peak, watch this detailed, and somewhat lengthy video (running on the OTVS service):

Engaging, Syndicated Content Collections

2011-11-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

Sometimes providing someone with a simple list of choices is not effective because they'll find it boring. Users may have been spoiled by the newer, more immersive online experiences. You need to create a more engaging experience.

At other times you want to package up content you have in source or original repository and provide it to users through some other website, wiki or blog.

These two scenarios are common ones that the OpenText Widget Services (OTWS) solution was designed to address. It also gives control of where the content is used, and more importantly, you don't have to renounce ownership rights based on an agreement with service provider.

A small code snippet is created to be embedded anywhere - much as users have learned for videos with YouTube (and Open Text Video Services) and presentations with SlideShare. But OTWS supports many formats of content, even in one collection assembled from more than one repository if required. In some ways it is like a dynamic, immersive portal.

There's nothing like an example, so here is a collection of four keynote presentations given at last year's Content World 2010 - the OpenText global users' conference. The original files happen to be in PDF converted from PowerPoint, but a wide variety of formats are supported by OTWS as I mentioned. There are a number of different style widget templates - I picked a simple one here.

If you've never seen this before, here are a few instructions:

For the Player

Scroll through the presentation collection using the arrow tabs on the left and right of the player frame
You can go to full screen mode in the widget through the icon on the lower right of the player. Frankly it's much better when you do that as I only put a small player here
Also on the lower right is a share icon (two heads) to download the embed code to be used elsewhere

For a Presentation in the Player

If you click on a presentation you can open it in your browser

There are then controls on the bottom to advance slides/pages, as well as to change the size and fit on your screen

You can download a specific presentation by clicking on the 'down-arrow' icon
You can see metadata of that presentation by clicking on the 'circling arrow' icon at the top left of the initial view

Next week there will be another Content World event. I'll be providing presentations from that event through widgets to supplement the traditional channel OpenText has provided. I'll use another widget template as well as a thumbnail feature to provide more easily read slide titles.

The player here is based on Flash, but HTML5 is supported in the OTWS version to be released in a few weeks.

The Future of Work

2011-10-28T14:58:00.000-04:00

"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is,
in fact, a return to the idealised past."
Robertson Davies, "A Voice from the Attic", 1960

I've been thinking about the nature of work. Can there be any doubt that:

The nature of WORK is changing rapidly
WHERE you do it
WHEN you do it
HOW you do it
WITH whom you do it
The SPEED at which you do it
What you have to KNOW
What you have to do
And the DECISIONS you have to make

...all the while working to meet the demands and expectations of your organization.

So it has been interesting to review some of the recent future workplace concepts from RIM and Microsoft. The technology and interfaces are certainly very cool. But in large measure most of the depicted activities are things we already do.

I think I could have predicted the developments in mobility we see today 10 years ago. I've been wanting the ability to link my smartphone to local devices and to create virtual interfaces exactly as shown in these videos for some time.

What is missing are new styles of work. Those things are much harder to predict and they are what will matter far more.

I would not have been able to predict social networking as we know it now 10 years ago. Especially as it has affected B2C and B2B activities.

This customer service concept from RIM shows how an idealized version of today's social networking can be used to detect power outages:

BlackBerry Future Visions 1 from Evan Blass on Vimeo.

There are many elements in this Microsoft Office conceptual video, but there is a certain irony that one of these (near the end of the video) is how to use a computer to manage cooking recipes - this was one of the first proposed uses for home computers in the 60's when people could not conceive of the uses we have since discovered.

Playing to its strengths in security RIM demonstrates in this video how automated provisioning and de-provisioning could work:

BlackBerry Future Visions 2 from Evan Blass on Vimeo

I must admit that omniscient IT guy is a little scary. Maybe that's just my perception although I do like how he can provision personal devices to work in an enterprise.

So while I like these concepts, I'm pretty sure they are missing the killer application that will be the biggest driver of change. I don't know what that will be, but I'm confident there will be one.

So I'll close with another quotation:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay

It still comes down to user adoption

2011-10-19T13:48:00.000-04:00

Recently our business process management group (OpenText Global 360) released a survey of SharePoint adoption. It's actually the third in a series and so some very interesting and clear trends have emerged (see the SlideShare presentation below). It's worth a look whether you use SharePoint or not, as the results are very similar for other ECM systems.

The importance of business process management solutions to add to many of these SharePoint sites is documented (slide 29).

But what caught my eye are the results of the `What are the challenges question - the largest single challenge is user adoption (slide 16; 25% of respondents) closely followed by strategy (16%), and yet 44% of respondents have no training program! It should come as no surprise then that 63% describe the user experience as only `Somewhat adequate - requires in-house redesign` (slide 25). To me that sounds like a technologists response - if users are having trouble, then redesign the interface rather than training them! That said, most respondents describe their systems as being in the early stages of maturation (slide 49), although I suspect they believe that maturity will come with customization not user training or strategy.

ECM veterans will not be surprised by this - it is true of most implementations, irrespective of the underlying software. But one does wonder why we never seem to learn.

Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey Results

View more presentations from OpenText Global 360

You can read more on the finding of this survey here

Content Decision Fatigue

2011-09-09T12:57:00.001-04:00

If something of value is in short supply you will tend to conserve it. That turns out to be true of your capacity to deal with alternatives, make decisions and even to sustain your efforts at tasks.These finding have profound implications for enterprise content management (ECM).

Psychologists have recently described the phenomenon of Decision Fatigue. A recent New York Times article by John Tierney titled, "Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?" gave an excellent overview which I will quote extensively here.

The more you make decisions, the less capacity you have to make additional ones in a given period. And these decisions do not have to be hard to deplete your capacity — in fact they can be quite trivial. Once you have depleted that capacity, you generally respond in one of two ways: you make impulsive decisions or pick the default; or you delay making any decision.

The biology behind this process is beginning to be understood. It turns out that making decisions takes energy; in fact regions of your brain actually use glucose to fuel decision making. If the glucose becomes depleted it needs to be restored — typically by taking a break and having a snack. Until that happens, these brain regions, especially those involved in impulse control, have lowered activity.

However, overall use of glucose by the brain does not change, because other regions of the brain, including those involved in seeking reward, become more active.

An increased tendency to make impulsive decisions is also associated with a reduction in willpower. People become more easily distracted and less likely to complete tasks, including completing a series of decisions required of them. Alternatively, they make take the easy way out by picking a default.

What does this have to do with enterprise content management? I think it is very important. Let's consider two examples:

Consumer behaviour on a business website — a web content management (WCM) example
Staff execution of work — a business process management (BPM) example

Website Consumers

One of the studies cited in the New York Times article compared the degree of decision-making required of online consumers and the consequences:

"...Kathleen Vohs, ...now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far."

Very clearly then the online purchasing process required a series of decisions that online consumers found fatiguing, and which reduced their motivation or self control.

The tiresome nature of the process could cause some consumers to abandon the website without purchasing the computer, defeating Dell's aim of selling a computer.

But those consumers who complete the process became more susceptible to impulse purchases. This is illustrated in another study:

"Levav... put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer."

These findings could be used to improve the effectiveness of a website to help consumers make the best decisions to meet their needs, or to make the most lucrative, near-term decisions to the benefit of the vendor.

They also point to the importance of reducing the number of decisions that are being asked, asking the most important ones first, and providing default options that ideally are matched to the specific, expected needs of a given online consumer.

Business Processes

Many business processes are quire automated, but typically depend on staff to provide input. This input usually takes the form of decisions, whether those are to interpret handwriting entries on faxes or to approve a purchase order.

A design goal for most automated business processes is to process more items while employing fewer staff. Little consideration is usually given to the decision-making capacities of the staff, or the consequences of decision fatigue that will lead to poorer or delayed decisions.

A study of Israeli judges reviewing parole application cited in the NT Times article illustrate this very clearly:

"Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time."

Those are astounding numbers. The effects of glucose were clearly illustrated:

"In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance."

The safest, default decision for a judge is clearly to not grant parole. They take the 'easy way out' when decision fatigued.

Summary

In my last post I talked about the 'disjunction effect' and how users may fail to correctly use the categorizations you designed in your content management system. In a similar manner, the elucidation of 'decision fatigue' has clear implications on the potential for success of a wide range of content management solutions.

Fuzzy Content for Fuzzy People

2011-09-06T20:45:00.000-04:00

Suppose you asked someone to classify some objects such as an ashtray, a painting and a sink, as either "furniture" or "home furnishing". That would seem to be a straightforward task.

If you also asked them whether the same objects belong in a single group comprised of both "furniture and home furnishings," you would expect that any object that they classified as either one or the other would belong in the combined or parent group. A logical disjunction.

Such assignment tasks are very much like those that we require of enterprise content management system (ECM) users to assign metadata about a content (i.e. digital files) they are adding. Such metadata helps subsequent retrieval through searching and browsing, and potentially supporting dependent business processes (e.g. a triggered workflow).

There's a problem though. Often people will not make the classification you expect. They may place an object in one of the original categories, but not the larger or parent one if it is the only choice they have! There is a tendency for people to delay making a decision if there might be an outcome they don't know. Apparently this phenomenon has been documented over two decades by psychologists and is referred to as the 'disjunction effect'.

I learned about this in a New Scientist article posted yesterday (5 September 2011): Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks.

The article describes one of the first observations of the disjunction effect:

"In the early 1990s, for example, psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir of Princeton University tested the idea in a simple gambling experiment. Players were told they had an even chance of winning $200 or losing $100, and were then asked to choose whether or not to play the same gamble a second time. When told they had won the first gamble (situation A), 69 per cent of the participants chose to play again. If told they had lost (situation B), only 59 per cent wanted to play again. That's not surprising. But when they were not told the outcome of the first gamble (situation A or B), only 36 per cent wanted to play again."

Traditionally in ECM we have held that it is difficult to get users to add metadata to describe the content they are adding; in essence that users are lazy. We have not considered that the choices presented to users, and any concurrent information presented, will actually change whether they provide the necessary data, when they provide the data, or indeed the actual values they choose.

ECM taxonomies are built on the assumption that users can make logical decisions to correctly describe content. Typically we present mutually exclusive choices, often organized in hierarchical (parent-child) fashion. But as the New Scientist article notes, people employ a kind of quantum logic that allows for something to be a bit of two exclusive alternatives, and for the context of the classification (the measurement in quantum terms) to affect the outcome. As a result their content classifications are fuzzier then we expect or perhaps need.

Content is often described as unstructured information. Metadata schemes are commonly applied to impart a structured framework to manage that unstructured content, but the fuzziness of human logic may make this doomed to failure.

What is Content? & Why Does it Matter?

2011-07-18T14:52:00.000-04:00

One of the problems with the term 'Content' is that few people outside of the self-designated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) field understand what it means. Ironically most end users have more personal experience with the types of Unstructured or Semi-structured Information that we designate as Content - namely electronic documents, email, pictures and videos - than they do with Structured Information in databases. They create data by their actions (e.g. buying shoes online) but have little sense of what is happening 'under the covers.'

With the recent growth of OpenText into the adjacent market of Business Process Management and Analysis software through the acquisitions of Metastorm and Global360, I have found myself having to explain the term 'Content' as well as why it matters to organizations. For that reason this new video is very timely:

Of course you can go into more detail, and specifically you have to talk about how content plays a role in most business processes. I did that last week in my talk to Knowledge Managers in Toronto.

News on OpenText Online - a new journey blog

2011-07-07T09:56:00.003-04:00

Some time ago we started to use OpenText Online as an umbrella description for a number of external Open Text sites: http://online.opentext.com/. While that name stuck for Communities, it didn’t for the Knowledge Center, My Tickets (Customer Self Serve or CSS), and Solutions Central (since been retired).

I’m glad to say the pace has picked up again. Now we’ll be merging the Communities and the Knowledge Center sites, and linking them more tightly with our WWW site. You may have seen the new look of the My Tickets site if you have a support account.

There are many ‘moving parts’ to this project. One of these is to merge user accounts and convert the usernames to email addresses.

The first phase of this work, linking download rights from WWW to Communities accounts, has already been completed
Soon the Knowledge Center accounts will be merged as well

From that point on you should only have one account with OpenText.

There’s lots more that will be happening and we thought you’d like to follow along. You’ll be able to get the best out of the sites when you understand what’s happening. You may also learn a few content management tricks along our journey ;-)

So we created a new blog:

The OpenText Online Blog

Presently you can find it here: http://blogs.opentext.com/blogslist/resolver.vcarp/blog/1.11.722/OpenText_Online#, but it will soon be syndicated elsewhere.

There will be many contributors and content will be added on a regular basis.

Oh – there’ll be lots of videos. I think you’ll enjoy the first one from my colleagues Karen Weir in her first post:

The Blog To End All Blogs

Making Connections in an Enterprise

2011-06-03T10:09:00.001-04:00

The value of social media to an enterprise is still being proven in many organizations. Since most such 2.0 technologies employ a 'pull' or 'opt-in model', getting staff engaged can be a challenge at first.

I recently developed a 10-step approach to effective enterprise social networking specifically to use within OpenText.

The first step is to add a picture of yourself, not an avatar or the default icon.
The second step is to add information to your profile.

In support of these two steps I developed the following two-minute video which we have deployed on the login page of our Intranet systems.

It isn't supposed to be super-professional as we are also encouraging staff to make more videos - if they think they need professional production for every video they'll never get started.

Anyway, here's the video. It shows screen shots of our internal Content Server system called Ollie, and specifically some of the features of the Pulse social networking offering.

Pulse combines the style of microblogging or status posts made famous by twitter, together with Content Updates. Comments associated with newly added content (digital files) are shown in a 'stream' and other users can add additional comments or 'like' the item.

How Coupons led to Social Commerce

2011-05-05T11:30:00.010-04:00

A colleague asked me for my take on Social Commerce. This seemed like a good reason to delve into very a hot area.

I decided to look from a historic perspective – what preceded modern social commerce? A very good case can be made that social commerce had its origin with the first coupons. The story involves both technological changes in how content is presented, as well as how various types of social interactions are enabled. There are fascinating parallels with the rise Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and the interplay between push and pull models of distribution. I’ll likely make several more posts on these topics.

First the historic perspective.

Coupons Appear for Physical Stores

The vast majority of today’s coupons are paper and therefore distributed by print media and mass mailings, typically by manufacturers of consumer packaged goods and by retailers. Asa Griggs Candler who acquired Coca-Cola (Coke) in 1888, is credited with the invention of the modern coupon. In its first year, only nine glasses of Coke were sold on average each day. By 1913, Coca-Cola had redeemed 8.5 million “free drink” coupons.

Coupons are a way for manufacturers and retailers to selectively offer discounts to price sensitive shoppers who might otherwise go elsewhere. Price sensitive shoppers are those most likely to make an extra effort to receive a discount. The distribution of coupons also enables the list price, which will be paid by less price-sensitive shoppers, to be increased! It is sobering to realize that if you don’t use coupons then on average your purchase costs will be higher because you have been identified as someone prepared to pay more!

Coupons also enable various forms of market research and segmentation.

The ubiquity of coupons today is demonstrated by Extreme Couponing, a popular television series that profiles people who manage to pyramid coupons to acquire merchandise with little or no cash outlay.

Distribution

Initially all coupons were distributed in paper form, typically in periodicals and mass mailings. The Internet created a new distribution channel enabling the downloading and printing of electronic coupons to paper. From that point on though the printed coupon is treated in the same way as any other paper coupon and taken to the physical point of purchase.

With the recent widespread adoption of mobile devices, it has become possible to carry an electronic image of a coupon to the point of sale and have that scanned, obviating the need for paper coupons. For this to be effective, widespread ownership of mobile devices such as smart phones, even among price-sensitive shopper, is obviously required.

Tying Coupons to Commerce Systems in Stores

Whether in paper form or electronic images, coupons to be used in physical stores are tied to electronic commerce systems by scanned bar codes. Products have UPC bar codes, as do the coupons that can provide discounts. Product and coupon UPC bar codes are similar, but not identical. At the time of purchase the point-of-sale (POS) computer decodes a product family code from the coupon bar code and matches it to any item purchased from that product family (identified by the product bar code), derives a value and sends a discount amount to the cash register (details).

Internet Coupons for Online Stores

When the point of sale is not a physical environment, but rather an online store, then an alternate approach is commonly used – Internet coupons. These are typically numeric or text strings entered by the customer in a web form at the time of sale. They are referred to by a variety of names such as “promotional codes”, “discount codes”, “key codes” or something similar. In this case the electronic commerce system is an integral part of the online store.

Once coupons and coupon codes became available online, an opportunity was created to consolidate them on coupon services sites like Coupon Craze (video overview). The top ten coupon services sites have recently been reviewed. Couponers can see a very large variety of available printable coupons and/or online coupon codes from many stores, pick up the necessary coupon code and be redirected to the appropriate online store. These sites are generally centered on individual consumers, but do have limited social support – for example by providing a link to send an offer to friends by traditional email or social networks.

Social/Collaboration

At times there have been attempts to limit the trading of coupons, but these have generally failed. Since coupons have inherent value to those prepared to go to extra effort, and this value can be exchanged or traded, people committed to using coupons (i.e. "couponers") have formed coupon exchange clubs – typically meeting in residences, churches, club facilities, etc. to exchange physical coupons. These coupon clubs are prevalent in geographic regions where coupons are especially heavily distributed and build off existing in-person, social networks. They also have the potential to create new social relationships based on shared goals.

The differences between societies often manifest themselves in online social communities. For example, Tuangou, is a shopping strategy that originated in China. People connect over the Internet in order to haggle with a vendor as a group. They benefit from group leverage to get a larger discount and the vendor increases their volume. Haggling is of course a Chinese shopping tradition. There is no intermediary in the transaction and the social bartering groups have to organize themselves, typically using online forums.

In contrast, in Europe and North America, where consumers expect most prices are fixed (with the notable exception of automobiles and houses) unless a coupon can be used, intermediaries are the norm. The group-buy, or “deal a day” leaders are Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe. In essence a special price is offered for a limited time on one product or service to an entire group in a given geographic location. While deals are distributed by RSS feeds and email, an essential social element of these sites is the targeted use of online forums which encourage consumers the share their questions, opinions and experiences with the product or service on offer.

While services like Groupon were preceded by other deal-a-day sites, such as Woot, those only supported online transactions. The newer sites appeal to a much wider range of merchants as they are able to offer deals for any type of product or service (i.e. not just consumer packaged goods), especially tailored to specific geographies. They are of interest to smaller merchants and local services like restaurants, sports activities and spas. It should be noted that group members actually purchase a coupon or voucher that is redeemable with the merchant, typically at a physical location (i.e. not usually online). Deal sharing using email and social media outside the subscribed group is actively encouraged, and there are direct benefits for assisting in recruiting others (i.e. referral rewards).

The success of Groupon has both attracted suitors to buy the company at elevated prices of up to $6 billion (e.g. Yahoo! and Google), as well as motivating existing major Internet players to replicate it – notably Google offers and Facebook Deals.

Parallels to Enterprise Content Management

Content – In many ways coupons have followed the same historical path as more classical content types such as documents, moving from paper form to electronic – first on PCs and later on mobile devices. However, whereas documents are key elements in business-to-business (B2B) commercial transactions, coupons support business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions, where the business party may be a manufacturer or retailer, as already noted.

Collaboration/Social – In a similar fashion, for much of their history, the primary coupon-related interactions were pushes from the vendor or manufacturer to individual consumers - much as business have interacted with employees (B2E - see an earlier post). But consumers have discovered that they can realize greater benefits if they work together using both generic social tools as well as purpose-built tools. Given the flood of coupon and discount opportunities consumers have also started to favour pull instead of push mechanisms - which are increasingly perceived as spam.

The tipping point for social and push technologies in the enterprise

2011-04-26T14:21:00.000-04:00

"I don't have time for social media at work!" A colleague made that comment to me recently.

My response was: "You have to replace something you already do. It isn't about squeezing yet more time out of an already busy work day, but of finding when a social media tool better suits some task you are already performing."

Some people have suggested that one or more social media tools will replace email in the workplace. Unfortunately a direct one-for-one technology exchange is not always possible. This becomes clear when you consider the range of use cases for which an existing technology is used.

Here's a common business use case:

You want to share an interesting webpage or video that you have found with colleagues. It may be about a competitor, a market trend, a new technology, a new regulation, etc. and you expect that it may be useful to the recipients.

In recent years a typical approach would have been to email a link (or even an attachment) to the six people you think might be interested. Likely you will forget three others who would have been interested, and maybe there are a couple of others you didn't know would be interested. So the approach would always have been flawed since you could not or did not completely predict who would value the information.

In addition, another problem has grown in recent years: namely email overload and developing user resistance. In the above example, of the six actual recipients, maybe two will resent the intrusion and consider your email spam. The issue here with email is that it is a Push technology - recipients get it whether they want to or not - and it also has a narrow reach, going initially only to those people you define.

So if the original solution always had a limitation, and over time is becoming less effective, is there a better alternative? Currently the best technological alternative for this example use is a Pull technology. You post the information and users decide whether they want to follow you and/or a specific topic.

A good example of a Pull approach is social bookmarking. To share an interesting website, you could instead have used a bookmarklet installed in your browser to automatically post the link and your comments to an internal collaboration site.

While this approach is effective in reducing the perception of span, it is limited because others might not be aware that you are someone they should follow, or may not yet have learned and adopted the technology.

Pull technologies have an inherent entry barrier that limits their usefulness and can be hard to overcome. Most social media are pull technologies. This is a critical problem for organizations looking to use social media tools effectively.

In the above use case there is an expectation of benefit if the information is shared widely, but it is seldom critical. What if the aim is circulate 'critical' information to the widest possible audience?

In most current enterprises, if the organization wants everyone to be informed about something they will send an email to 'all staff' on the assumption that it will reach everyone and be read. In reality this assumption is increasingly false for a growing proportion of staff - they don't bother to read, don't have time or have even set email filters so they don't see such emails! An alternative is to post the same information to a stream that users can watch, but in most organizations usage has not yet achieved a level that the post will reach most staff.

So email pushes are increasingly ineffective, while social pulls have yet to achieve sufficient adoption to take their place as workplace tools. It seems there is a growing communications chasm which will create a tipping point to drive adoption of social media in enterprises at some time in the future.

Where is the concept of Employee-to-Employee (E2E)?

2011-04-20T15:37:00.004-04:00

Organizations are struggling to understand the relevance of social networking tools internally. You can see the lack of maturity in this field by looking up E2E on Wikipedia; of the several interpretations of E2E, none refer to Employee-to-Employee.

Other X2X concepts are better documented:

B2B - Business-to-Business
B2C - Business-to-Consumer
B2G - Business-to-Government

These three all have aspects of commerce for the provision of products or services between different parties.

A more recent, fourth X2X entry is B2E - Business-to-Employee, recognizing what goes on within a given organization rather than its external interactions. As the Wikipedia entry notes (2011-04-20):

"Business-to-employee (B2E) electronic commerce uses an intrabusiness network which allows companies to provide products and/or services to their employees. Typically, companies use B2E networks to automate employee-related corporate processes.

Examples of B2E applications include:
Online insurance policy management
Corporate announcement dissemination
Online supply requests
Special employee offers
Employee benefits reporting
401(k) Management"

The traditional 1.0-style of Intranet is one of the tools used by businesses to provide information to their employees, so it can be regarded as a B2E platform. Typically the provision of information is controlled in a top-down manner.

With the newer 2.0-style of Intranets, employees are able to contribute, either by adding documents and other forms of content, or by participating socially. But B2E tools are ineffective at supporting social interactions. It isn't about what a business tells its employees, but rather what the employees tell each other.

Social interactions within an organization typically enable the execution of a wide range of critical business processes that aid commerce. Workers requesting input on a task, or notifying the next performer that they are finished, engage in social interactions that increasingly use mediating technologies such as email, instant messaging, telephone, fax, workflow, online discussion, videoconferencing, online web meeting, etc. Seen in that light the more recently available social tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs, communities, ideation sites, expertise location, etc. just provide more choices to increase the effectiveness and timeliness of those critical, internal social interactions in support of commerce.

E2E seems overdue for recognition.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

The Implicit Value of Content is Realized Through Business Process

2011-03-07T12:14:00.000-05:00

As I have noted before, much of the historic discussion in the document management field has concerned the cost of producing content, or the cost of finding existing content.

But the value of a document, or any other piece of content, is seldom the same as its cost of production.

I was chatting about this the other day with my colleague James Latham. He used an invoice as an example of a piece of content that may be managed by an enterprise content management (ECM) system. James noted that, 'There is inherent or explicit value in an invoice'. In fact the value of an invoice is fairly tightly linked to the cash it represents.

A $10 bill has an explicit value of $10. Likewise a delivered invoice for $10 has a value of about $10 to an organization. Arguably it is not quite as valuable as $10 cash given the delay and perhaps uncertainty of payment, but it is close enough in most cases and will be treated as such in an accounting system.

There is a case where a $10 bill is worth much more: if it is a rare, old $10 bill, it may have a lot of implicit value (e.g. to collectors it may be worth hundreds of dollars) above its explicit value of $10.

Tangible value (explicit plus implicit) is established by sale of the item itself or the recent valuations of comparable items. But it is hard to think of invoices, especially electronic invoices (i.e. digital content), as having any implicit value.

Are there other kinds of enterprise content besides invoices that clearly have implicit value? I think so. Here's a good example: documents that support a patent application for a product with large market potential may have huge implicit value that greatly exceeds their cost of production and their explicit value at a given moment. This implicit value may become more explicit over time with the issue of a patent, together with product and market advances. At some point an intellectual property sale could attribute very significant tangible value to the documentation.

In this patent documentation example, the application of process over time helps to create tangible value. In ECM discussions we often speak of the context of content as helping to give it meaning, but clearly we also need to consider how process can give it value.

Enterprise Content Architecture - my take on the Metastorm acquisition

2011-02-18T14:45:00.001-05:00

I'm particularly excited by today's announcement acquisition of Metastorm by OpenText, but not perhaps for the same reasons as many others.

What excites me is the potential of Metastorm's strengths in Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA). As noted in the release:

"Metastorm is a leader in both BPA and EA as recognized by Gartner in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis Tools, published February 22, 2010 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, published October 28, 2010."

These capabilities play to both the 'Enterprise' and 'Content' in Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Organizations depend on a growing proportion of knowledge workers as I discussed in a previous post (Value for Knowledge Workers), but as noted in the McKinsey study I covered (Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers), most organizations do not understand how to boost the productivity of knowledge workers or indeed the barriers to that productivity. As I noted:

"What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is not clear what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management."

Content is the currency of knowledge work. It supports the exchange of knowledge during business processes, and is very often the work product of such processes (e.g. a market analysis report, an engineering drawing or a website page). Too often in the past discussion of the value of content has centered on either reducing the unit cost of producing, finding or using content, or mitigating compliance risks created by poor content management.

This is not a new theme for me, indeed last August I expressed my enthusiasm for why Content Matters. I noted:

"It's no surprise to people that you can understand a business by 'following the money' or 'following the customer' and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems. On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that 'following the content' is just as important, so while we've talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business."

The potential to apply Metastorm's ProVision tool set to elucidate and illustrate the critical role of Content to the achievement of Enterprise Goals is an exciting one which offers new value to our customers.

Blocked Community Arteries

2011-02-11T13:03:00.001-05:00

Online communities can form around many different technologies. But once they have formed, they can be very difficult to update, convert or move. The problem is not one of technology conversion, but rather user habits and preferences, which seem to become more solidified the longer the community has existed.

I've been reminded of this as I started to get involved with some online automotive forums. Recently I purchased an old car that I am refurbishing as a hobby. There are now fantastic online resources, with detailed illustrated procedures that are far better than the factory manuals.

You can also ask for help and people respond almost immediately, provided you don't violate the many customs and expectations. The most important of which is that you must have searched first. Since the forum I use has been around for a decade and the cars it covers are from 16 to more than 30 years old, most issues have already been covered in previous posts, often many times. This also means the veterans are intolerant of people asking the same old questions. So I search really carefully first and only if I don't find what I'm looking for make an apologetic posts along the lines of: "I have searched, but can't seem to find out how to..."

The community is very centered on classic, threaded discussions and search. Just how centered was recently illustrated by a post by a brake vendor offering to provide free brake pads to the person who posted the best explanation of why they should get free brakes, as judged by 'like' votes on Facebook. The resulting furor was really fascinating to watch.

There were a succession of 'Fail' posts. The first started:

"I don't have a facebook account so can't enter. Don't you have your own business website?"

Others chimed in with incrementing posts; very quickly 18 negative votes were posted. The comment about a business website certainly illustrated that the poster has missed out on current trends. Other anti-Facebook comments included:

"Rarely use the FB. Don't Like"
"What's a facebook?"
"I have no plans on signing up for facebook at all, ever"
"C'mon, without FB how am I going to check out all the girls that wouldn't date me in 1985 and feel better now about the bullet(s) that I unknowingly dodged?"
"I don't "do" facebook either, and it might be a long, long time before I find a reason to sign up for it."
"I have some semblance of a life..."
"I am worthy of getting the brake pads for the simple fact that I don't use facebook."
"No interest in joining MyFace or any of the other ones. I'm waiting for the 'winner' to emerge. This one is probably just another fad like parachute pants and jackets with zippers all over them. Boy am I glad I passed on those."
"News feature today mentioned employers and now banks using FB and twitter to help evaluate the qualifications of business/job/loan candidates."

One poster was particularly incensed that the vendor had posted on more than one such site (which is a typical social marketing approach):

"When he posted this I went to his FB page and was pretty put out that it looked like they spammed every car forum out there with the same offer. Needless to say, I didn't "Like" this."

After this tirade, there was a tentative response from a few Facebook users. I was one of the first to point out that there was a Facebook page dedicated to this particular car, but supposed they would not be using it, which was quickly answered with an, "uhhhh... no." There were actually a couple of positive posts:

"I actually love facebook. It is a very useful way for me to stay in contact with many friends that I would have otherwise lost due to lack of free time. I have re-connected with old friends and use it to schedule real life get togethers. It's actually a pretty amazing site."
"Wasn't saying anything negative about FB, I'm on there entirely tooooooo much."

One of the final posts directed to the vendor was spot on (if sexist):

"Don't worry (not that you were) about the crotchety old hags on this forum somehow connecting your company to the terror threat of FB. Its just new and different, and not many here are early adopters."

And the last one:

"I found this funny on a forum dedicated to owners of 16-34 year old cars."

So they are not open to change. Which is a pity because there are newer technologies that would actually help the community:

The illustrated procedures would be far better in a wiki format that could be refined over time, rather than depending on original posts with some threaded discussion additions that are hard to follow
Likewise, some of the threads are really just social conversations that have little to do with the subject car. A microblogging application would be far more suitable

This well-entrenched community is very much wed to a traditional, content-centric model (threaded posts and search) and most members don't understand the people-centered, social model of collaboration. Although comprised of technically-savvy people, their preferred technology is old, as are their cars. I don't think this community is ready to change.

Attacking ECM complexity

2010-09-21T15:34:00.000-04:00

In my last post I discussed the inherent complexity that develops as ECM systems are used for an increasing range of business applications, and more importantly, as they are shaped by growing numbers of users and groups with differing perspectives. Another source of complexity is technology itself.

The term ‘Enterprise Content Management’ was developed to try to describe the result of the convergence of a wide range of previously distinct technologies – document scanning, records management, document management, workflow, collaboration, archiving, etc. This convergence was a result of technology and market maturation, and the fact that these technologies generally addressed common business needs and dealt with the key digital files (i.e. content) that have value to enterprises.

Enterprises need to treat content in standard ways and make it available to their users irrespective of technology. Since all of the component technologies cannot realistically be re-written, they must be made to work together. This need was the genesis of the Open Text ECM Suite released today.

On the face of it, adding more features increases complexity. However, sharing resources and services counters that. Making available a better tool also reduces the necessity of warping a simpler application to serve a requirement for which it is not suited.

ECM Suite not only provides a wider range of capabilities, but also updates the interfaces of some core elements, especially including the new version of Open Text Content Server – version 10. This version (of a product once called Livelink) includes a modernized interface, which is simpler. When you are trying to drive user adoption, simpler interfaces are better if they enable users to learn how to use a system quicker. But simplification can remove things that veteran users have come to rely on, and you need to guide them through the changes as I discussed previously.

I’m looking forward to the new things that are now enabled with the Suite. I’ll be embracing reduced technical complexity while accepting potentially greater operational complexity. Other people have other perspectives (video).

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Content Managment Systems as Cities - I feel like a Mayor!

2010-09-20T10:40:00.000-04:00

I recently realized that large enterprise content management (ECM) systems are like a city, but most ECM practices treat them as if they were a building. There’s a big difference in complexity that impacts the operation of an ECM system.

Architects can design a building to suit its intended purpose and building management can maintain it. In the same manner an ECM expert can design a system to manage digital content in support of particular business processes. Much of the ECM literature talks of the benefits of clear system architecture and good governance.

As an ECM system is deployed across an organization the breadth and number of applications grows rapidly – often into the hundreds – with many different business sponsors and champions! It becomes increasingly hard for any one person to understand all of the different ways that a system is being used, and to exert any effective control. The flexibility accorded users through collaborative, social tools further increases the heterogeneity of an ECM system.

Not all ECM application deployments meet with equal success or longevity. In many ways the applications in an ECM system resemble buildings in a city – different sizes, different ages, different investments and different degrees of success. Some buildings are abandoned and some never get off the drawing board!

No one designs cities – they are just too complex. Sure there are examples of attempts to do this – the initial design of Brasilia or the redesign of the center of Paris by Haussmann – but over time the efforts and activities of many other people determine how a city develops. In fact cities are very much an expression of human behaviour, culture and society.

Overall city management falls to the Mayor and City Council, and their most important tools are Building Regulations and Permits, Ordnances, etc. While you can’t and shouldn’t control everything in a city, you can nevertheless provide some direction and minimal standards. The architects of the many buildings need to get approval for their plans before a building is constructed, and the building operators need to comply with other standards.

When ECM was a new concept, the focus was on how to best design and operate a first application for the new system – a new ‘building’ standing in a ‘green field’ if you will. As ECM matures we need to think about how to operate large, multi-application systems. For me a better role analogy for the person with overall system responsibility is Mayor, not Architect. It’s not that we don’t need ECM Architects – in fact we need many of them – but we also need a Mayor and Council to provide a framework for oversight and long-term strategy. And we have to accept at least a degree of disorder that results from the activities of many different people that are only loosely coordinated – Mayors are necessarily politicians, unlike Architects!

Value for Knowledge Workers

2010-09-16T17:01:00.001-04:00

Demonstrable value goes a long way to supporting the deployment of new software tools.

For structured business processes, return on investment (r.o.i.) is comparatively easy to estimate. Where unstructured or semi-structured digital content items (e.g. documents, spreadsheets, faxes, etc.) enable a given structured process (e.g. accounts receivable) their contribution to the overall value created is also typically quantifiable.

Where the process itself is unstructured the measurement of value is much harder. Perhaps the largest class of unstructured processes in a company fall in the category of knowledge work. The difficulties organizations have in understanding knowledge work is highlighted in an article just published in the McKinsey Quarterly entitled: "Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers".

Aside: Unfortunately a subscription is required to read the full article – hopefully you have one.

The article starts with the proposition that few senior executives can answer the question: "Are you doing all that you can to enhance the productivity of your knowledge workers?" This is unfortunate because, "Organizations around the world struggle to crack the code for improving the effectiveness of managers, salespeople, scientists, and others whose jobs consist primarily of interactions—with other employees, customers, and suppliers—and complex decision making based on knowledge and judgment."

The authors, Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak, describe five common barriers that hinder knowledge workers in more than half of the interactions in surveyed companies:

Physical
Technical
Social or Cultural
Contextual, and
Temporal

Physical barriers include geographic and time zone separation between workers, and are typically linked to Technical challenges – where workers lack the necessary tools to overcome the physical barriers that separate them. As the article notes, there are a many software tools available that can help – these would include the various collaborative and social media tools, as well as the more classic document management applications that are encompassed in the broadest definitions of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Of course the availability of software tools does not guarantee that users will use them effectively; indeed, Social (e.g. organizational restrictions, opposing incentives and motivations) and Contextual barriers (e.g. not knowing who to consult or to trust) play a large part in hindering adoption.

The fifth barrier is Temporal. Time, or rather the perceived lack of it, is also a critical factor. In my experience knowledge workers do not consider time spent using social media and collaborative tools as important as other activities. Under time pressure they will stop using these tools if they need to spend more time on other activities they perceive as "real work".

What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is clear that what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains is not clear. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management.

Job One in the upgrade of a major ECM system

2010-09-08T16:44:00.001-04:00

"Upgrade it and they will run away!" is a risk scenario with any major upgrade of a business-critical, enterprise system, including an enterprise content management (ECM) system.

Often the people promoting an upgrade are technologists who are almost always 'early adopters', but many staff just want to get their job done and will often be confused by, resent or even resist changes – telling typical users that they will get a whole bunch of 'cool, new features' isn't likely to make them enthusiasts.

Here's a typical persona of such a user:

Doesn't read corporate communications (newsletters, emails, etc.)
Doesn't like technology
Couldn't care less about the product or site provided it 'works'
Just wants to 'do their job' without external disruption

One of the big challenges is to ensure that when such a persona comes to work on the Monday after a major upgrade that they don't say, "What the *#% happened to the site," especially when the interface has changed.

I'm struggling with these issues in advance of a major ECM system upgrade. The system is called Ollie and has been in production for 15 years. It now has over 5.5 million objects and 4,000 users – 93% of whom use the system every month. It's actually the main internal Enterprise Library of Open Text and is pretty much an un-customized version of the product we sell now called Content Server.

Content Server version 10 is just about to be released. It is the latest iteration of a product first called Livelink, and provides the underlying shared services of the Open Text ECM Suite.

Without doubt the newer version provides a better, more modern interface that will be preferred by most users – once they learn what's different and how to use it. I know most users will prefer it as it has undergone extensive usability testing – but I also know that you can't please all of the people all of the time and most people don't like surprises at work.

So 'job one' is to create a short, effective video that overcomes the shock of the unexpected, since no matter how good our communications strategy is, many people will be surprised. The video also has to smooth the way for further change, because while some of the benefits of the new version will be available on Day One, others depend on subsequent work by knowledge managers using new capabilities that become available after the upgrade.

Content Matters

2010-08-12T13:31:00.001-04:00

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday and he related how he interviews people to join our company. We quickly dropped into role playing – with me as the job candidate. He had a compelling proposition, but as I told him, he was missing the thing that excited me = Content Matters!

As I started to tell him why content matters I found myself getting excited. I realized I'm actually quite passionate about it! Not content itself, but what it enables and how it's used.

Content matters to companies in a way that changes how they work, how they create value and whether they succeed. It matters whether they recognize that fact or not.

If you want to understand what drives a company look at their value chain – how they create value – and how they are organized to execute each stage in the value chain. Within each stage there are typically many processes, each with many steps. At almost every step there is some content that is created, reviewed, followed or otherwise used; how well this is done makes a difference to effectiveness.

It's no surprise to people that you can understand a business by 'following the money' or 'following the customer' and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems.

On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that 'following the content' is just as important, so while we've talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business.

The Myth of Real-time Collaborative Authoring

2010-08-05T15:19:00.001-04:00

In the document management field there has been a succession of products designed to support users working on a document at the same time, even if they are in different locations. These products have failed. They have failed because people don't work on documents together very often.

I wonder where the belief in concurrent creation of documents came from. In the physical world you seldom see people saying, "Come to my office and we'll write a document together," so why expect users to want to do it virtually?

Documents may well be created to summarize a brainstorming session or record the minutes of a general meeting, but the designated author usually 'goes away' to somewhere quiet to write the first draft.

Even in the review phase, reviewers independently make comments, suggestions and edits at different times. The author then pulls these together to make a revised version. Email is no different, especially since emails of any length are essentially documents.

Sure the stepwise, asynchronous approach to content authoring and review takes place over a longer period, but it actually makes best use of each participant's time, and is therefore more efficient overall.

I started to think about this again with yesterday's announcement that Google Wave will not be further developed (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html). As the blog post says, Google Wave was, "...a web app for real time communication and collaboration". For the purposes of this discussion let's consider both collaboration and communication independently.

Collaboration in Authoring

A technical tour-de-force, Wave enabled users to see others changing content as they themselves changed it. Very cool, but actually disconcerting. I wouldn't have wanted you to have watched me author this blog post, for several reasons:

I'm easily distracted and need to concentrate to develop some cohesive thoughts
While writing I jump around adding sections, changing others, moving text blocks – it would be hard to follow and I'd have to explain what I was doing which would further slow me down and distract me
I'm the World's worst typist

I'm probably no different than most people, at least regarding the first two points. And perhaps more lethal to the concept of concurrent authoring:

You'd get bored – it takes far longer to author a document than read it, and you'd probably want to be doing something else while I work, preferring to comment on my finished work

And that's the crux of the matter – most people are busy, with many demands on their time, and collaborative authoring is just too inefficient.

Communication Delays are Good

While Wave was designed for collaboration, it was also intended for communication (see quotation above). Essentially email and instant messaging rolled into one. But I think there is a problem there too – most people actually don't want to use real-time communication!!

Many commentators have remarked on the tendency for young people to use their mobile phones for text messaging far more than as telephones. You'd think it would be easier to engage in a conversation by talk rather than typing, so why is texting preferred?

I think people prefer texting because it allows them to be engaged in many, independent conversations with different people. For this to work they need to be able to send and receive messages in real time, but also need an agreed expectation that replies may take several minutes. Awkward silences of several minutes on a phone aren't agreeable, and since voice isn't cached locally like a text message you have to listen to each voice channel concurrently – which isn't practical.

Interestingly while they are short, both mobile text messages and instant messages (IM) are generally only sent when they are completed. It is usually enough to see that the recipient is typing (i.e. with Instant Messaging) or to just assume that they are (i.e. with texting). All stumbles, pauses, and corrections are not sent – but they were with Google Wave.

Summary

With small pieces of content: true real-time communication is often undesirable, with near real-time being better.

With larger pieces of content: collaborative authoring is best done asynchronously.

Collaborative authoring seems to be something that IT professionals believe will lead to greater efficiencies, while end users don't have the time for it!

Considering the Cost & Value of Digital Content for an Enterprise

2010-06-11T14:11:00.002-04:00

The way that the value of digital content changes over time, and how an enterprise content management (ECM) system might help to realize and/or retain greater value was the subject of my last post (http://martin-fulcrum.blogspot.com/2010/06/calculating-value-of-content-in-ecm.html).

Lee Dallas retweeted that post, but also referenced a very interesting earlier blog post (2008) by fellow member of 'Big Men on Content' Marko Sillanpää
on the cost of content (link). Sillanpää considered content lifecycle costs as follows:

Cost of Content = (Annual Authoring Costs + Annual Review Costs) / New Objects per Author

Content authoring and review are not the only activities that incur cost – there are costs associated with each step in its lifecycle, notably including the costs of distribution, storage and ultimate destruction. Effective content distribution is becoming increasingly important to the realization of value.

Cost and value are of course different concepts. The cost of an item does not necessarily reflect its value, as anyone who has watched the TV show "Antiques Roadshow" knows!

In business, where there is an emphasis on the bottom line, the value of content ought on average to exceed its cost, or it should not have been created. But for a given piece of content, its cost is generally related to size and complexity, not what it enables. On the other hand, value is tied to enablement and varies over time – often declining gradually or precipitously, but sometimes increasing!

It can be hard to explain to people how managing content benefits a business. However, I have found that identifying its 'enterprise value' is powerful. A good top-down approach is to reference the value chain of a business, using Michael Porter's original simple model.

People understand that enterprises take input from suppliers and partners and, through a series of steps, add value that can be realized in a final sale to customers. Clearly the effective execution of those steps adds to efficiency. When challenged, most people can identify content that contributes or is even essential to the completion of each of those value steps and their constituent processes. For example, an Engineering Department must create, review and approve engineering drawings, and then pass them on to the Manufacturing Department (see E, C & O value chain).

In my experience, taking a value perspective is generally more attractive, especially in growth industries, than a cost and cost avoidance perspective – which has classically been the basis for return-on-investment (R.O.I.) approaches to software justification.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Calculating the Value of Content in ECM

2010-06-04T09:47:00.002-04:00

It's only worth expending effort to manage something if it has value – usually positive, but sometimes negative. So the concept of content value is implicit in enterprise content management (ECM).

On the other hand, the value of a given content object (i.e. digital file) such as an email or document generally declines over time – or at least this is the common wisdom. I have seen graphs drawn mapping 'value' over 'time', with a smooth decline of value tending to zero. However, such a representation is clearly an average of value across many types of enterprise content.

If you look at individual pieces of content, then you'll find different profiles:

In compliance, a piece of content may retain 100% of its value for a defined period of years and then abruptly drop to having no value, or even having negative value (liability) that should trigger its destruction

In knowledge management, a piece of content may have declining value over time, but then because of some new event may suddenly have increased value

But this perspective is of the Inherent or Independent Value of a piece of content – the value is assessed entirely based on the information contained in the object. But it seems to me that there are at least two other factors that impact value:

Context – when correctly combined with other prices of content a given piece of content may have greater value. For example a specifications document is more valuable together with the associated requirements document. Value can often be realized by the way in which context is presented between content items – how they are grouped, ordered or ranked.

Impairment – Ironically, the value of a piece of content may be impaired by efforts to manage content. If you mix valuable pieces of content with large amounts of irrelevant materials, that should have been destroyed, you reduce the chances that the valuable content can be found and its value realized. Keeping everything is usually a bad idea. And often users impair value when they misclassify content.

So the available value of a piece of content to an organization may be expressed as follows:

Available Value = Inherent Value x Context / Impairment

What this says is that content management efforts can be beneficial, but if not done well can actually be destructive.

Taking the Pulse of your Business Content with microblogging

2010-05-14T11:29:00.000-04:00

When many users first encounter microblogging they don't 'get it'.

Twitter is of course the classic and most widely known microblogging site, and its style has been taken up by many others such as Facebook in a broader set of social media approaches. A common initial reaction is something to the effect: "I don't care if your cat just threw up – in fact, I'd rather NOT know!!"

Once people start to microblog, they find many different ways that it can provide value, beyond answering the question: "What's happening?" that twitter poses. Commentators have described endless ways of using twitter such as: 5 marketing approaches, 10 diverse applications, 50 different topics, etc.

But how does microblogging add value within an organization? Most of the discussions about business value have been on better ways to reach outside an organization to customers and partners by breaking down barriers, increasing transparency and the like.

At first blush making the case for microblogging in the workplace might seem to be hard. People often comment that they are too busy to engage in 'chit-chat' while at work. But over the last couple of years the use cases that have real business value have become clearer.

For me there are two general styles of internal business microblogging:

User status updates – close to the twitter model, but with a distinctly different topic set

Content status updates – fairly unique to business and keyed to the fact that many work processes produce and manage content (i.e. documents and other business files as understood in content management)

At Open Text we recently released the Pulse module for Livelink 9.7.1 that adds microblogging capabilities to support both styles (available for free to customers from the Knowledge Center).

Status updates are pretty much what you'd expect – you can make a post about anything, although some of the most useful ones are:

"I'm looking for..."

"Anyone interested in..."

"Have we..."

These have value because they help people to be more effective through better networking in an organization.

You can select specific users to follow and you can follow the stream from all users. We have a very similar Pulse capability in Open Text Social Workplace.

BUT, I think the real advance in Livelink/Content Server Pulse is to follow the status of content irrespective of location in a range of very powerful and comprehensive ways.

Sure you can post a link to content in twitter, and many microblogging services allow you to attach documents or other kinds of files to your posts. But the advance here is to have the act of adding or changing a piece of content anywhere in an ECM system create a status post. The feed is reporting a content action by another person. If I'm following Joe and he adds a new sales presentation anywhere I can see it in the status stream – provided of course I have permission in the repository to see the added content. All of the important support for compliance is maintained.

There are many ways to slice-and-dice: by following specific people or all people, and following changes in user status, content or both.

You can also 'pulse' specific content objects, so all changes and all comments about a piece of content are seen in the unique Pulse stream of that object. It's like a filtered window into the stream looking at just one object, even if the ECM system contains millions of documents.

And Pulsing is not just limited to files/documents, but is applied to containers like folders and places such as project workspaces and communities. You can imagine the power of an accumulated stream of all content and status activity related to a project!

Livelink has had a notification capability for many years, but it requires users to first identify existing documents and containers that they would like to follow. Pulse adds the human dimension – you can be notified of changes based on the people you follow and what they do with the content.

To honest I'm still 'figuring out' all of the ramifications and power of Livelink/Content Server Pulse but I'm very excited!

If you'd like to learn more:

Initial description in the May 2010 issue of NewsLink

Free Webinar Thursday 3 June 2010

Software and documentation in the Knowledge Center

And if you are an Open Text Online Communities member you'll be able to use Pulse very shortly (announcement)

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Social collaboration for productivity and problem solving

2010-05-04T12:35:00.001-04:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation from my colleague Deb Lavoy, covering the Open Text Social Workplace (OTSW) offering. Just this week we put an OTSW system dubbed 'Hub' into full production use for Open Text staff (now over 4,000 users).

Social collaboration for productivity and problem solving

View more presentations from dllavoy.

What’s in a name? Or do you mean what I think you do? Implications for enterprise content culture

2010-04-06T21:04:00.002-04:00

Most people love a good rant, especially when it is well-founded, and I'm no different.

And so it was that I really enjoyed Laurence Hart's recent, self-admitted rant (http://wordofpie.com/2010/03/04/a-rant-against-cms/). In his Word-of-Pie blog, Laurence railed against his perceived miss-use of the term 'Content Management Systems' or CMS. It was topical, well-informed, and most importantly to me, resonated on several fronts.

In brief, Laurence's position is that:

"...All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn't belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM [Enterprise Content Management]. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term..."

His issue is that while web content management (WCM) is a valid description, it is too often abbreviated to content management (CMS), even though there are a wide range of content types beyond web pages. The common use of CMS is much narrower than is implied. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was coined in part to describe all content that an enterprise might have.

I'm not interested in the semantic debate about what each term means and what is the correct term to use.

I am interested in what this discussion says about culture and the difficulty getting people in an enterprise to take a broad view of content.

There seem to be at least 'two solitudes' in content management – ECM and CMS.

It is interesting how specific technology applications shape and restrict expectations.

Last year my employer, Open Text, acquired Vignette (history), one of the oldest and most established CMS vendors. Most of Open Text heritage is from document and record management (Livelink and Hummingbird eDOCS for example), process management (IXOS) and collaboration; in other words ECM. We published a trilogy of books on ECM in 2003-2005. While some staff came from acquisitions prior to Vignette that had expertise in WCM (notably RedDot), they represented a comparatively small portion of the Company. The Vignette acquisition brought a much larger group of CMS-oriented staff to Open Text.

I think Open Text is richer for the breadth of perspectives, but we have had to work through the challenge to merge the different cultures. Note I'm not talking corporate cultures, as indeed the companies were quite similar, but rather the application culture of how best to manage content to meet all the needs of our enterprise customers. Each of us has tended to think mostly of some content types, some approaches to content management, and some business needs.

Take Open Text's own Intranet as an example. Open Text has been running an Intranet called 'Ollie' on Livelink technology since 1996. Fundamentally the Livelink model is one of web folders containing 'documents' of any type. This model works really well when individual and team work products to be shared are typically documents – so it's great in supporting teams and managing records. However, linked webpages are a much better vehicle to support the dissemination of centrally managed content, especially information from an organization to its staff. So last year we broadened our Intranet Systems to include a true WCM capability in parallel.

For some in Open Text, the internal use of WCM came none too soon, while for others it was a surprise! I had to make a video to 'educate' staff on why we had both approaches and how to choose the best system for their specific needs. It turned out to be easiest to provide context by talking about the parallel evolution of ECM and WCM technologies over the course of the last 15 to 20 years.

The application of social media in an enterprise has also challenged cultural expectations.

Those with a WCM background have generally talked about the advantages of working closely with customers through external websites. Most of their value propositions of breaking down barriers and being more transparent are absolute anathemas to those ECM practitioners who have focussed on internal process and records management for compliance.

Traditional document management approaches provide another example of cultural expectations nurtured by specific technology experiences.

As I mentioned above, Livelink used a web folder paradigm to organize content. It also had rich metadata capabilities, but users tend to think of these as supplementary or optional ways of organizing content. It is fair to say that most users tend to think first and foremost of folders – so it can be a challenge to collect metadata from them. In contrast, with our eDOCS content management system (from Hummingbird) there are no folders – everything is organized through metadata. eDOCS users find browsing folders can be frustrating. Going forward these alternate approaches are merged in our Open Text Content Server 2010 under our ECM Suite.

Defining effective taxonomies to organize content can be one of the biggest challenges for an enterprise.

Generally people in specific departments, and using specific systems, tend to define taxonomies that meet their immediate needs, but the taxonomies they create are generally too limited for wider use. Similarly, other groups create incompatible taxonomies often to address similar needs. These limitations ultimately contribute to failure. Creating new taxonomies seems to be a recurring theme in many enterprises as most are never broad enough, scalable or robust.

Ironically then, what a person means by 'content', the 'content taxonomy' they think is required for their organization, and their perception of the critical features of a 'content management system' are all highly subjective!

Predicting Sentiment in Advance

2010-03-02T20:27:00.001-05:00

There are now a number of tools that monitor social networks looking at:

Sentiment analysis – General sentiments related organizations and their brands
Topic trend analysis – the relative frequency that topics are mentioned over time

Therefore, if I make blog post or tweet, my topic and sentiments will be captured by automated systems, analyzed and reported. There are some pretty sophisticated tools being used by Marketers, and while some are free, others are quite expensive. However, as a recent blog post noted: "A technology glitch demonstrates how fragile marketing measurement technology really is." That said, let's assume they'll get better or this Technorati glitch was atypical.

I can also manually get some trend information using Google trends for example looking at 'ECM' over time: http://trends.google.com/trends?q=%22ecm%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0. However, the information on ECM is too sparse, and there is too much 'contamination' with other definitions of ECM, such as Engine Control Management.

But I have to admit I don't use these tools. So I need a tool like all great advances that caters to laziness – or increased efficiency as I might prefer to characterize it! I need help. I need push rather than pull technology. It occurs to me that I wouldn't mind knowing how my proposed post relates to other posts already made. I'd get a report something like:

"Your post on 'ECM' would be the 47^th post on this topic so far this year. This topic is declining in frequency."

"Your 'negative' post on 'content system metadata' would align with 19% negative, 25% neutral and 63% positive posts on this topic."

Besides putting my proposed post in context, I wouldn't mind getting a sample of the most relevant posts so that I could potentially revise my post, add links, references, rebuttals, etc.

At some level this would be a form of assisted authoring. It wouldn't have to be limited to blog posts. I'd like to do the same for content authored in an enterprise context. The reality that many reports, white papers and similar work products of knowledge workers duplicate things already available, but people generally don't look. It's easier to start typing, imagining your work to be original, than to look first if it's already been done or if there is something close than you can build on.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Google’s impact on enterprise content management

2010-02-23T12:54:00.001-05:00

Without a doubt Google has had a huge impact on the enterprise perspective on content management (ECM).

The pluses and negatives were highlighted by two blog posts yesterday:

On the plus side, John Mancini of AIIM listed three, "fundamental assumptions about information management that affect the ECM industry," in his "Googlization of Content" post:

"Ease of use. The simple search box has become the central metaphor for how difficult we think it ought to be to find information, regardless of whether we are in the consumer world or behind the firewall. This has changed the expectations of how we expect ECM solutions to work and how difficult they are to learn.
Most everything they do is free...
They have changed how we think about the "cloud." Google has changed the nature of how we think about applications and how we think about where we store the information created by those applications. Sure, there are all sorts of security and retention and reliability issues to consider..."

On the negative side, Alan Pelz-Sharpe made a post today in CMS Watch titled, "Google – unsuitable for the enterprise". Alan introduced his piece by saying:

"For years now Google has played fast and loose with information confidentiality and privacy issues. As if further proof were needed, the PR disaster that is Buzz should be enough to firmly conclude that Google is not suitable for enterprise use-cases." He went on to say, "It is inconceivable that enterprise-focused vendors... would ever contemplate the reckless move that Google undertook in deliberately exposing customers' private information to all and sundry with Buzz."

Google is a hugely successful company, and they are extremely profitable. However, they are not a software company. Fundamentally they are an advertising placement company and everything they do is motivated by maximizing advertising revenue, whether directly or indirectly. 99% of their revenue comes from advertising that pays for every cool project they do and every service they offer.

While Google services to consumers have no monetary charge, they are not free:

You agree to accept the presentation of advertisements when you use Google products and services; most people believe these to be easily ignored despite the evidence of their effectiveness.
More importantly, you agree to offer provide information about your interests, friends, browsing and search habits as payment-in-kind. Mostly people sort of know this, but don't think about it. If you ask them whether they are concerned that Google has a record of every search they have ever performed, they start to get uncomfortable. I expect most of us have searched on terms, which taken out of context, would take a lot to 'explain.'

While most consumers in democracies are currently cavalier about issues of their own privacy, enterprises most certainly are not. Indeed, the need for careful management of intellectual property, agreements, revenue analyses and a host of other enterprise activities captured in content is precisely why they buy ECM systems.

The furor over Buzz points out that Google did things first and foremost to further its own corporate goals, which clash with those of other enterprises.

In contrast, Google's goals require it to align with user needs, especially for good interfaces. An easy-to-use interface encourages and sustains use. That ought to be obvious to everyone, but when the effects of the interface on usage are easily measureable and directly tied to revenue (as in the case of Google Search), it becomes blatantly and immediately evident. In contrast, the development of an interface for an enterprise software product may take place months or even years before the product is released. Even if detailed usability research is done with test users, and in-depth beta programs are employed, the quality and immediacy of the feedback is less.

Besides easy interfaces, enterprise content management users expect 'Google-like' search, and are disappointed. There are generally two reasons for this:

Search results have to be further processed to determine if a user can be presented with each 'hit' based on their permissions
- Typically 70-90% of the total computational time for enterprise search is taken up by permission checking
Enterprises don't invest as much in search infrastructure as they should if the rapid delivery of search results was seen as critical

The second point is probably more important than people admit. In my experience significant computational resources are not allocated to Search by IT departments. I suspect that they look at average resource utilization, not peak performance and the time to deliver results to users. To deliver the typical half second or less response that Google considers to be essential, hundreds of servers may be involved. I am not aware of any Enterprise that allocates even the same order of magnitude of resources to content searching, so inevitably users experience dramatically slower response times.

In summary, the alignment of optimal user experiences with Google's need to place advertisements has advanced the standards of user interfaces and provided many 'free' services, but the clash of Google's corporate goals with the goals of other corporations has shown that the enterprise content has value that is not likely to be traded.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

The ‘Second Coming’ of Renditions - Video

2010-02-07T21:27:00.003-05:00

Long time ECM veterans will remember the concept of document rendition – a transformed alternative. I think we'll see renditions again.

A rendition is essentially another form of a specific version of a document. There are two common types of renditions based on format and content:

The same information content as the original document, but a different file format

For example, a spreadsheet file can be renditioned as a PDF

The same file format as the original document, but different content

For example, a MS PowerPoint Document written in English can have a rendition that is also a PowerPoint file, but whose content has been translated into French

Renditions for limited bandwidth in the 90's

In the 1990's, one of the common use cases was to deal with the limited bandwidth available at the time. It often took a long time to download and open a document just to see if it contained what you were looking for. Accordingly, Open Text Livelink automatically made HTML renditions of many common formats such as MS Word that were much smaller files and so could be downloaded much faster for quick review.

I remember presenting the use case to customers: "If you want to look quickly at a file without opening the full thing..." Back then bandwidth was so limited it made sense. Now it seldom does, although there are specific use-cases like renditions that contain added content like secured signatures that still have value.

Bandwidth issues are back

Bandwidth is becoming limiting again – not for 'simple' text documents, but for rich media files such as videos. In fact bandwidth issues are so acute that the shape of the Internet has changed radically in the last few years. The explosive growth of video sharing has lead to the rise of Content Delivery or Distribution Networks (CDN) such as Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks and Amazon CloudFront to enable effective distribution.

Akamai recently claimed they handle around 20% or the Internet traffic by volume – most of this traffic is rich media which must be delivered very quickly as users expect pages to load extremely quickly even if they contain a video. A recent Forrester report says the expected threshold to load has become two seconds.

For video files to be useful to end users they have to start to play almost instantly. This is usually achieved by:

Locating a copy in close network proximity to the end user

CDNs use many distributed sites around the 'edge of the Cloud' to ensure that is at least one site close to an end user preloaded with files that are expected to be required

Reducing the size of the video through transcoding and compression

Streaming – starting to play before all of the content is received

The increasing use of mobile devices with narrow and unstable bandwidth connections, and different format requirements creates further hurdles to serving users rapidly.

Enterprise needs

So what about the enterprise or corporate user? Trained by the web, he/she expects to click on a link and have a video start playing within two seconds. But most internal ECM systems (e.g. for document management) are designed to download a complete file before it is available to the end user.

A story – Here's a scenario I experienced recently. A Finance department prepared a new expense form. To show staff how to use it they prepared a five minute video. The trouble was that their WMV format video was over 300MB. For most staff in a global company, especially remote staff, downloading a 300MB file to view it is just not practical. What Finance needed was to be able to upload the video, and have the system take care of making a rendition that was transcoded and compressed, made stream-able and hosted on a CDN.

There are just too many manual steps and too many options for most newcomers to video creation. Systems should take care of most of those steps. And one excellent way to execute several steps is to have the ECM system create a rendition of a deposited video that contains embed code to start a player and stream video from a CDN. The consumer users can then simply click on the object name in their ECM system and a streamed video starts to play almost instantly – as they have come to expect with sites such as YouTube.

So renditions have a place in the new enterprise again to deal with bandwidth limitations!

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Really looking forward to Virtual Content World - other ways to be 'virtual'

2010-01-14T14:57:00.001-05:00

You've probably heard about the first Open Text Virtual Content World (www.opentext.com/virtualcw) on Tuesday 19 January 2010. Hopefully you can attend. I'll certainly be there in a virtual sense. It's not too late to register, and if you attended Content World 2008 you'll have received a code promotional code for free registration.

For those who can't attend, there is an even 'more virtual' and dare I say free option – watch the many postings on twitter and Facebook.

The twitter hashtag is #otvcw.

If you go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23otvcw you can get a listing of all of the posts
If you use a twitter client like TweetDeck you can of course set a standing search

The volume of tweets will really pickup on Tuesday if the Content World 2009 experience is any guide, not just from the 'official' event twitter account (@OTContentWorld) but of course from other OT staff like me, and most importantly, customers.

It should be a great event. There as certainly been a lot of organizational activity. Colleagues have told me this virtual event has been as much work as an in-person one.

'See' you there!

Twitter: @MartinSS

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Customer Community Success Metrics for 2009

2009-12-18T14:28:00.002-05:00

Customer communities are all the rage nowadays, but it is not always clear what works and indeed how to measure success.

As 2009 draws to a close we have been reviewing how Open Text customer communities have been doing.

Background: For those not familiar with Open Text, we are a vendor of enterprise-class software to manage digital files (called content). The term enterprise indicates that we sell to organizations not consumers. We have relatively few customer organizations, but they are often typically some of the biggest organizations in business and government. We estimate that at least 1 in 3 Internet users visit sites that run our software! The software we use for our own communities is the same as we sell.

The Sites

For historic reasons, we run three primary community sites (requiring membership) in addition to our typical corporate websites. The community sites are:

Open Text Knowledge Centre (KC)
- Primarily for system administrators of the software we sell
Open Text Developer Network (OTDN) which is housed on the KC
- Primarily for developers using Open Text APIs
Open Text Online Communities
- Primarily for business champions and power users

Site Metrics

The Knowledge Centre is by far the oldest community, dating back to 1996! As you'd expect, it has the most members and the most ongoing activity. Every day approximately 4,000 users access the site, and between 150,000-200,000 documents downloads are performed every month!
OTDN just completed its first full year during which just over 3,200 unique users participated over the past year
Online Communities got started in its present form in 2005. This last year 10,600 members collectively visited 118,000 times over the year

These numbers only measure direct participation. As you might expect, many community members participate through email-mediated discussions.

Convergence

Multiple systems have traditionally meant that there are multiple, disconnected silos of information. As a result, users don't know where to look and administrators have to duplicate critical content between systems.

A better approach is to deploy a single, 'enterprise library' of digital files (content) which contains all of the files, but just one active copy of each. The three sites above will soon converge to use the same enterprise library, which will also be used by our corporate website that is open to the general public.

One single repository can make user navigation harder unless the most relevant content is presented and organized in a fashion that best meets the needs of each type of user (i.e. persona). Communities of users with similar interests or jobs are one approach to organizing content, but of course there are others, including personalization based on the activities and preferences of specific users.

Measuring 2010 success

These communities will continue to develop, but the latest social networking approaches provide new ways to surface important content. As we deploy more social networking approaches during 2010 we'll have a solid base of community metrics from 2009 to judge progress. As you might expect, activities on external sites like twitter, YouTube and facebook are becoming increasingly important.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

The biggest changes sneak up on you

2009-11-17T10:20:00.002-05:00

Content management (ECM) systems can track everything that a user does. Usually this capability is seen in the context of compliance – you can answer the 'who did what' and 'when did they do it' questions. You can also track changes in what users did over time. And so it is that a colleague was able to track how my behaviour has been changing without me noticing it by reporting on how many documents I deposit.

A bit of background: I use a number of Open Text Content Server systems. One of these, nicknamed Ollie, is used to support to support content-centric business processes within Open Text. I have authored many documents, mostly in MS Office formats over the course of my nine years with the company.

The 'aha' moment: So when my colleague made a social networking post that he had found that I had deposited almost 700 documents in Ollie, I wasn't surprise. I was surprised though when he pointed out that I hadn't added any documents in the last month! Zero! None!

This of course got me to think: "What had I been doing?"

He asked if I'd mostly moved to social networking-style tools. But no, I've been using collaborative tools of one form or another fairly consistently, and indeed heavily, over the last decade. What I realized as that I have almost entirely shifted to using wikis in place of documents.

A bit more explanation is in order. Content Server (formerly Livelink) is a full-featured ECM system. You can add documents of any type, including of course MS Office files. You can also directly author in wikis. On the collaborative/social networking side you can also post to a range of collaborative tools such as forums, discussions, news channels, blogs, etc., and with more recent additions instant messages, status posts, etc. So a user has a range of content and social tools in the same system to use – they can select whatever they feel most suited to the business task at hand. Given these choices you can then track user preference changes over time by analyzing audited events.

On further reflection it shouldn't have been surprising. Once I used to have the Word and PowerPoint applications open all the time. I would typically send documents to colleagues as email attachments or via links to copies in Ollie.

Now I create wiki pages and then rely on automated notifications and RSS for others to learn about them, and of course push awareness by targeted emails. I very seldom open Word to author content, and when I do I get frustrated because all of the embedded code makes it hard for me to reuse the content (unless I force Word to the blog posting mode as I'm doing now).

That's another thing – I repurpose content to multiple channels much more than I used to. I don't simply author 'free-standing' documents and then deposit and email them. I often use the same content in several blogs and/or wikis.

And now I'm starting to create short videos where once I'd have authored a document...

None of this is surprising in an abstract sense. Pundits have been saying that there are huge changes underway and as someone who works in a company at the forefront of how content is managed in organizations, I've been aware of it and promoted it. I just hadn't realized how much my own behaviour has changed; otherwise I wouldn't have been surprised that I didn't deposit a single document in Ollie last month!

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Some Thoughts on Effective Enterprise Taxonomies for Content

2009-10-27T23:36:00.003-04:00

While discussions of content management are usually referred to in the context of the needs of enterprises (i.e. Enterprise Content Management, ECM) in reality most ECM deployments start at the departmental level. This is not bad – on the contrary departmental deployments typically address specific business needs thereby sharpening their focus to improve their chances of success. However, over time as an enterprise begins to deploy ECM technologies in many departments, the benefits of an enterprise strategy to support cross-enterprise deployment become apparent.

At Open Text we have recognized that there are a number of essential elements without which transitions from departmental to enterprise-wide deployments tend to fall into a 'chasm.' It may seem obvious, but it essential to treat enterprises differently than individual departments, especially since:

Enterprise deployments inherently connect departmental deployments rather than replace them
- If your aim is to facilitate the timely, process-dependent flow of content between departments then you have to accommodate varied work cultures, processes, content types, taxonomies and technologies already in place in order to make the necessary connections as part of a clear enterprise-level content architecture. Wholesale replacement is seldom a realistic option, but supplementing and amending can be effective.
Enterprise deployments can also create additional value by enabling new, enterprise-spanning, content-centric processes and perspectives that cannot be achieved solely by connecting departmental deployments

One element to successfully implementing enterprise-level content management is an effective enterprise taxonomy.

Enterprise or corporate taxonomies (see Wikipedia definition) are becoming increasingly critical to classify, save, access, reuse and report on growing volumes of information within an enterprise
Enterprise taxonomies are particularly important for Content Management and Knowledge Management, but the needs of each of these disciplines are not exactly the same

While the principals of taxonomy development are relatively well understood, there are particular challenges associated with effective enterprise taxonomies. In my discussions with colleagues several recommendations have emerged:

Externally derived and validated taxonomies should be adopted whenever possible – this can be especially critical when you are faced with multiple, overlapping taxonomies that were adopted and typically custom built to suit the needs of specific departments
If you adopt an external taxonomy (#1 above) it is most likely that you should only implement a simplified subset – aim for 'just enough' detail
Natural language taxonomies are preferable to numeric or other code-type taxonomies to support user adoption
The appropriate taxonomy type or structure should be chosen before implementation is started, i.e. flat, hierarchical, network or faceted
Each taxonomy you deploy at the enterprise level should be orthogonal to any other

Typically enterprise taxonomy discussions begin when staff become frustrated because they cannot access the information, and especially content, they need from one location. In such cases an enterprise taxonomy may be seen as an access enabler (e.g. through a portal) where the focus is on information presentation.

Another driver may be the need to manage key records to meet regulatory demands. In this case an enterprise taxonomy is expected to support storage of all relevant content and effective retrieval on demand by a small set of users. Such taxonomies often don't serve the general needs of all staff.

A third scenario is becoming more common: ensuring that appropriate content items are presented in the context of business processes that already rely on structured data (e.g. in ERP or CRM systems). In effect metadata applied to content can be the effective bridge between structured data and unstructured content.

The recent application of social networking technologies within enterprises has brought with it demands to classify unprecedented volumes of small content items where much of the meaning depends on the context of discussions and may not be captured within the content itself. In this case we need to consider deriving social metadata.

These are some initial thoughts on the topic of enterprise content taxonomies. It is a rich topic that I expect to explore in greater detail in future posts, especially looking at reconciling nor only classic, mandated taxonomies, but also the more recent emerged user-managed cloud taxonomies.
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The tale of two coffees – or why altruism doesn’t work in ECM

2009-10-13T22:09:00.001-04:00

Our facilities management has been changing how coffee is provided, and judging by the posts on our internal social network, they have been failing miserably.

On the face of it, the new system should be much better – freshly brewed coffee in a range of blends and flavours. It replaced a system using single pouches of reconstituted, dried coffee that most people felt was tolerable at best.

So where's the problem? The new system depends on altruism. The coffee must first be brewed in several large batches that are then saved in thermal carafes to hold the brewed coffee without burning it. There are five or six blends, and therefore an equal number of carafes in every small office kitchen.

In the ideal use case, a 'user' comes to a kitchen, selects the blend they would like and dispenses a steaming mug-full. If they see that a given carafe is almost empty they set it under the coffee machine, select the right blend, push various buttons and then ideally wait ten minutes until it is completely brewed, or at least expect another colleague to finish the process and move the carafe back to its stand.

Of course anyone reading this knows what actually happens. You come to get a coffee, find several carafes empty, take some coffee from one of the only carafes with some left, and then find it is lukewarm. To rectify this situation you would need to brew up at least three or four large carafes, but you're already in a foul mood so you just walk away in disgust. After all, you have an important business meeting in one minute and the company isn't paying you to make coffee for everyone!

There have been attempts to rectify this. I've seen helpful Post-it notes saying, "Brewed at 1:35pm" – which at 4:00pm tells me I don't want to even try the half-empty carafe! Packages of the correct blend are kept next to the carafes to make sure people can find the right one – as if that was the only reason they hadn't re-filled an empty carafe before!

So it's pretty clear un-recognized altruism doesn't work in the workplace. That's as true for coffee-making as it is for managing content.

ECM implementations that depend on users to do more than they need to do to discharge a task don't work. Enforcement efforts only work until people find an alternative, which is becoming increasingly easy to do with the availability of free Cloud resources.

But self-promotion works, which is recognized in successful social networking implementations. So look to social networking as a way to get people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do in your ECM systems! After all, why else would I be writing this piece on my personal time?!

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Instant Messaging: dating or working?

2009-10-08T15:07:00.002-04:00

Instant Messaging (IM) is becoming more common in enterprises, although the latest statistics I have seen suggest not as much yet as some people expect.

Personally I use IM in a work context almost every day. I hadn't given much thought on how I use it, other than realizing:

I am a lousy typist who needs an autocorrect feature in my IM client, and
Often IM is a preamble to a telephone call as I mostly work in a home office. My IM posts often go as follows: "hi > are you free? > can I call?"

So when I saw the results of a survey on the right and the wrong way of using IM in dating, it made me reconsider how I use IM at work.

The OKCupid.com survey results were published in my local newspaper, The Globe and Mail – in case you were thinking I've been using that dating service!

The worst greetings are "hi", "hey" or "hello" – I mostly say "hi"...

Far better are questions such as "how's it going?", "what's up?", or even "hola"!

In a dating context I can see how a question would more likely lead to a follow-up. But in a business context, would it be better to say, "How's it going?", "Are you busy?" or "Can you spare a minute?" than opening with a "hi?" Maybe "hi" is fine if you've established a working relationship already, i.e. got past first contact.

Interestingly in dating use of netspeak (e.g. lol, bfn, imo, etc.) is not a good idea on first contact. The recommendation is to, "ditch the slang" for the proper language and to make sure you proofread, since it suggests that you consider the interaction important.

I think that same care very much speaks to being 'professional' at work as well, although with close colleagues with whom you chat a lot netspeak almost becomes a way to indicate that you are an expert IM user, not just a work-only user.

Mini-IM essays are a turn-off in dating, and I think likewise in work chats.

Your personal picture is critical in dating IM of course. I think it's even true for work IM. I see a larger proportion of people using real pictures of themselves in work IM settings rather than the cartoons, avatars or seemingly random graphics typically used in consumer IM and social networks. At work it's very important for people to recognize you so they can link their online perceptions of you with what they find when you meet face-to-face.

In my experience when you first interact with a colleague through telephone and conference calls with no pictures, you build a mental image of them that often conflicts dramatically with the reality you find when you first meet them in person.

There are a lot of parallels to being an effective IM user in the workplace and when dating, but of course you do have to be careful not to be seen as flirting when you compose a work instant message!! The content of the messages is what makes the difference, but both work and dating are more serious than some other social situations, so share some common rules.

Rethinking the focus of ECM

2009-10-06T10:45:00.001-04:00

I find using the term ECM directs discussion and thought along predictable paths having to do with the management of content in the enterprise in a way that misses some key elements.

So yesterday I proposed a thought experiment:

Could you work without using electronic technology at work ("My electron free work diet")?

It really asks, "What is the nature of work in the modern workplace and how is it valued?"

Electronic tools are now essential for most staff. In analysis, if you first focus on the individual, then you have to ask what makes a staff member more effective in getting their job done. That job probably involves the creation of content in its broadest definition, so easier creation of better content is obviously critical. But the business or enterprise value of that content then depends on how effectively it is used within and sometimes outside an enterprise. Promotion of content to create value requires collaboration as we used to refer to it, but is now more commonly referred to as social networking.

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

My electron-free work diet

2009-10-05T18:36:00.001-04:00

People complain about email at work: "I'm drowning in email! It takes me two hours to clear my email before I can get to work!" they say.

Some people have even declared that they are giving up email for good.

But I think they are cheating – they are not really giving up the activities for which they use email, they are just finding another 'technology drug' – something newer, better and arguably more effective. After all people need to do their jobs. The proportion of knowledge workers is increasing steadily, and you just can't be a knowledge worker without using electronic aids. Whether they admit it or not, email (or some other electronic technology) is now essential to executing their job if they prioritize email activities according to business value.

I would hazard a guess that hardly anyone who has given up email has gone back to writing or typing their business correspondence. They are using instant messaging, social networking, video conferencing, shared blogs or something I've yet to hear of to do what they used to do in email.

But working in business there is a risk in adopting a new technology before your colleagues – no one may listen to you and you will become irrelevant, and in business it is never a good idea to be irrelevant! It's good to be seen a trail blazer as long as you are also seen to be more effective.

I was stuck by this the other day when I needed to contact a colleague who is the most active user an internal social network in our company. I sent him an email, just as I would do for anyone else in our company, but just for good measure I sent him a direct message on the social network, asking him to check his email. He replied to say it was a good thing that I had messaged him, as his email client was turned off!

So if you were really serious you would swear off all electronic technologies to conduct work. Martin's electron free-diet declares that:

"If it plugs in for electricity or to send information, you can't use it!"

I allow for artificial lighting where required, as long as it doesn't plug in for power or to send information. The same goes for heating and elevators.

I have no intention of adopting this diet as long as I want to keep a paying job.

Really this is a thought experiment to define what we consider to be content in the context of enterprise content management (ECM).

I think Content is what knowledge workers create using the electronic tools so vital to the conduct of modern business. Content is the currency of business processes.

The traditional ECM perspectives have document management origins that tend to make most content descriptions document-centric, and even when the scope is expanded to include a much wider range of file types, there is still a focus on lifecycle management from capture to archiving. I was struck by this reviewing the entries in the recent Infonomics Weekly
ECM in Sixty Seconds Video Challenge. There were great entries that said very much what I would have said if I had my act together in time to enter.

Now I'm beginning to feel that the trouble with enterprise content management as a description is that it emphasizes content, the enterprise and management too much!

I'm leaning towards thinking ECM is more about helping workers be more efficient at doing their work and ensuring that their work product has value because it makes a difference.

The Pushmi-Pullyu of Enterprise 2.0 Social Networking

2009-07-17T15:55:00.001-04:00

The new software segment of social networking for enterprises developed because organizations, especially companies and government, recognize that their staff may want to use tools like Facebook and twitter, but are concerned about the associated security and compliance risks.

It is strange then that most of these Enterprise 2.0 social networking applications have subsequently developed integrations with those same consumer Web 2.0 tools that were of concern in the first place!

I wonder why this is?

One explanation is that developers of enterprise social network tools are getting caught up emulating what is going on with consumer tools:

Each is trying to be the preferred site by enabling users to do everything from their site. As consumers 'flit' between social networking services looking for the next big thing, it's hard to keep them without adding new features – either by building analogs to proven tools, or partnering and integrating with the leaders. Meanwhile, aggregation services allow users to post to many social sites at once, or the receive feeds from many sites – thereby allowing users to avoid visiting the sites at all. Watching this it must be hard not to do the same!

But aren't enterprise 2.0 software vendors missing the point? Enterprises that buy into the value proposition of 'social networking without the risks,' are not likely to open their door to the tools they rejected, even just to help their staff unidirectionally monitor the latest external posts.

On the flip side, in most cases there can be no surety that staff are not finding a way to use those consumer tools at work, despite whatever policy or technology-blocking approaches are taken. There are just too many sites, too many tools available and such rapid change, and outright bans lead to circumvention. Then of course staff will be using the tools in their personal lives.

So where does this leave us?

At some level much of the new style of social networking is an effort to replace email as a communications medium. For some time email management tools have been available to help companies achieve compliance. These tools usually capture and index all enterprise communications in a manner that supports both controlled destruction and future discovery.

Email management for compliance is an outgrowth of traditional content management for compliance. In many ways emails are special content types – usually with less content, more versions (especially including multiple branches or threads) and fewer controls on access (especially because of email forwarding).

In the same manner, social networking tools allow users to create even larger numbers of smaller pieces of content, often with more versioning, and with especially complex relationships that define context and therefore meaning.

For example what I say in through IM or microblogs can only be understood in context, whereas emails and especially documents are larger, more complete and often able to be understood largely in isolation.

While organizations once blocked staff from using email to mitigate risks, email access is now nearly universal in the workplace – but it is managed. Certain tools are selected and sanctioned and staff must use those.

I believe that in the same manner, enterprises will inevitably permit selected social networking tools (some enterprise and some consumer) once appropriate control technologies are applied to assure lifecycle management for compliance.

So Enterprise 2.0 vendors don't need to enable interface integration with consumer web 2.0 tools, but rather capture and control integration with enterprise records repositories.

Official vs. unofficial social networks and their impact on user adoption

2009-07-14T11:14:00.005-04:00

Guest post from my colleague Agnes Kolkiewicz originally posted to Open Text Online Communities Metrics community (Metrics Blog).

In my last post, we looked at the correlation between the success of collaborative systems and user adoption. Many of you struggle to obtain user adoption within your organizations for communities of practice (CoP). We mentioned that staged deployments are usually recommended by analysts and that the resultant 'success stories' can then be showcased within the company to further promote user adoption and justify the investment. But where can you find a good initial 'use case' within your company that is likely to succeed?

Consider the following excerpt here from a post by Etienne Wenger, an internationally recognized expert in the field of learning theory:

"A community of practice is different from a team in that the shared learning and interest of its members are what keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than by task, and exists because participation has value to its members. A community of practice's life cycle is determined by the value it provides to its members, not by an institutional schedule. It does not appear the minute a project is started and does not disappear with the end of a task. It takes a while to come into being and may live long after a project is completed or an official team has disbanded." (http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml)

It has long been observed that unofficial networks exist within a company. People join these because they see value in participation. Knowledge is being exchanged within those networks outside of any organizational structure, crossing information silos. When designing an information system that supports communities of practice and collaboration, the challenge of an administrator may very well lie then with initially identifying what unofficial networks already exist within the organization and designing systems that will support these networks.

You can start by asking yourself the following questions:

What is important to our employees?
Where do they find value?

What might follow then is that a community of practice should not be imposed on a group of people according to organizational structures – rather, it should serve as support for unofficial networks that have already been created within the company. The value to the organization exists then because the knowledge that is already being exchanged through informal discussions, IMs, or email is now being captured and archived within a community of practice, and is then easily searchable by newcomers to the organization or people outside of the specific community that also have an interest in the subjects being discussed. This type of exchange is much more difficult to recreate when establishing a community of practice based on official organizational structures.

This is not say that communities of practice should not adhere to organizational principles further down the line, but chances are that by identifying such unofficial networks within a company, and supporting then using social media, you might stumble upon an initial 'success story' that could be then used to promote the technology throughout the organization.

Meeting the needs of both the enterprise and staff

2009-07-07T12:49:00.002-04:00

It seems that for many people the enterprise goal of corporate compliance is seen to be at odds with the goals of users. I think that's wrong!

This was brought home to me by the surprised reaction of observers at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to Open Text's new Social Media offering.

In recent years the primary driver for implementation of enterprise content management (ECM) systems in organizations has been regulatory compliance. Organizations need to manage critical records in a consistent manner over time, as required by relevant laws and regulations.

Ensuring that staff (the 'users' of enterprise systems) are aware of requirements and use the implemented systems is often a challenge. Well designed ECM systems can ensure organizational compliance while requiring little change in behaviour as users create and deposit content – but it can take real effort.

As Web 2.0 has shown, users want simple applications, that can be learned quickly, and work smoothly. Increasingly they want these applications to be available for mobile devices as well as desktop computers.

Staff want to interact effectively with their colleagues. Social networking tools are seen as a way to achieve this in enterprises. As I described in an earlier post, this approach is, "people-centered not document-centered." It is also becoming independent of device and therefore location.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise to some observers that Open Text, as one of the largest ECM vendors, with a long history of content management, would come out with a people-centered application that runs on mobile devices like Blackberries and iPhones, in addition to the expected personal computers. And most importantly, this application enables users to exchange content with established content repositories.

In commenting on the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Gil Yehuda, for example, said:

"Open Text impressed many people with their new enterprise social media and collaboration tools. With a solid enterprise-class suite of tools, Open Text was one of the few ECM/Portal players to make a showing and a splash at the conference. Whereas many E2.0 vendors target low-tech SMBs, only some vendors have the depth of credentials to handle Enterprise 2.0 (with a capital "E") with its many hairy concerns."

Nice sentiments – my thanks to Gil – but I think we would all agree that technical integration supporting both enterprise-driven content-centricity, and user needs for mobile networking, is but a first step as we rebalance the needs of enterprises and their staff. I expect we'll soon see considerable advances in implementation practices.

There has been much discussion about how compliance requires that all communications by staff be managed as potential corporate records, but a recent AIIM study has shown that most organizations have yet to tackle the problem. It seems that many assume that the way to do so is to 'stuff' transactions from email, IM, social networking, etc. into a content store. The problem is that these people-centered communications will generally not map to content-centric hierarchies. In some cases the only indexing field that can be used is the date of creation. As a result it is necessary to rely on full text search for later discovery, which is then followed with painful, manual recreation of context. Imagine trying to determine who said what and when – from a collection of stored emails that mention a specified term! And email is relatively easy compared to instant messages (IM) and 140 character tweets, since email communications are generally more comprehensive and richer in derivable context.

If you accept that social networking has its own, distinct organizational principles, then compliance applied to social networking must take a different tack. How users interact with each other and the network of communication links that they establish are the most important contextual elements – the medium is the message. Helping users make the connections easily automatically creates context. That context must then be preserved if the saved communications are to be reliable and meaningful from a compliance perspective.

So enabling users to network more effectively actually supports compliance in a developing paradigm!

Immature Complexity

2009-07-03T17:14:00.001-04:00

I'm working with a colleague on a project that integrates structured content and processes (in SFA/CRM and ERP) with unstructured content (ECM).

We are coming at this unified need from very different perspectives – he from a background in telecom process support (what Geoffrey Moore in 'Dealing with Darwin' would describe as a Volume Operations model), and me from content management in a software company (what Moore would describe as a Complex Systems).

As always, such interactions serve to challenge your assumptions, helping you to broaden your perspective.

He understood that we need to capture content created during interactions with customers and had made provision for it in his plans.

I kept saying, "But unstructured content represents more than 80-90% of the information," as most of ECM practioners routinely claim – I don't think he believed me in a tangible way…

Then I shared some research I did four years ago. I looked at how many pieces of content we typically collect before a first sale to a customer. At that time (2005), the number was an average of 88 objects. Since that time we've gotten better – we collect more. As part of the same research I also looked at content associated with customers of many years standing – in the case of one conglomerate we had over 28,000 content objects! Again, that has continued to grow.

And it's not just content volume, but a growing variety of formats and subjects.

I believe my colleague was stunned, which of course led to a discussion of how we can best manage such volumes. I can go one for some time about best practices in ECM deployment – content architecture, governance, user training, permissions, controls, etc.

But I came away from this discussion with a reinforced feeling that ECM is hard. If it was easy this software sector would be more advanced – it would be like ERP is, not as it was 15-20 years ago. The enterprise content management sector is relatively immature because it is tackling a harder problem – unstructured is more of a problem to manage than structured – and there's more of it.

Although some content types are becoming at least semi-structured, and so are arguably easier to manage, the growth in completely unstructured and diverse content types far outpaces it.

So the immaturity of ECM is a reflection of its complexity. Meanwhile the value of ECM continues to grow, but we still have a way to go before all information professionals really understand it, although with maturity comes understanding…

Nothing original, but I enjoyed re-examining my assumptions and testing them against the perspectives of others from a different background.

Will the real Gen Y please stand up?

2009-06-29T15:11:00.002-04:00

Much of the discussion about social media in the enterprise posits that the incoming generation will demand the new technology tools that they have learned to depend on.

However, In working with some old ECM systems I have been surprised at times how new, young staff have just accepted them, rather than 'demanding' something better.

So will in coming workers 'demand' change or meekly accept the status quo?

An article called, "After the recession, the fallout will be lasting," in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail this weekend suggests an answer. The theme of this article is that the recession has had a profound and sobering effect on career expectations:

"…many young people I talk to have significantly, and resentfully, lowered their expectations. They didn't imagine themselves in this situation in their wildest dreams."

The article goes on to say this change is affecting workers of all ages:

"This hard-line attitude will leave a bad taste in many workers' mouths. Some will develop a lasting cynicism and suspicion of organizational motives. They will not expect anything good of their employers. Others will be traumatized. Whatever cockiness employers have accused Gen Yers of having, for instance, will be knocked out of some."

So it is not hard to see why some workers simply put up with bad systems at work.

On the other hand, others are more likely to seek alternatives:

"Others will develop a healthier self-reliance. They will understand that organizations will not necessarily look after them and they will have to look after themselves." I think it is these people that are more likely to 'go around' what their employer provides to find the cloud-based, social networking tools they want.

So the current recession has polarized the response of Gen Y in the workplace. On the one hand some staff will resentfully use old technology, while others will be more likely to seek alternatives, with less concern for the risks to their employers.

Obtaining and Using Key User Adoption Metrics for Enterprise Communities

2009-06-24T14:41:00.001-04:00

Online communities are an appealing but challenging topic for enterprises. Most organizations feel they will increasingly use social networking tools, but are uncertain how best to proceed.

Proving business benefit and responding to deployment challenges can be a difficult, but these activities must be grounded on objective data, so obtaining key metrics is essential. However, often community and social networking applications intended for enterprise deployment lack the necessary query and reporting tools to support business champions and system administrators.

Recently we launched a Success Metrics community on Open Text Online Communities for those who have deployed Open Text Communities of Practice (CoP). Members of that community have access to reporting tools and templates specifically designed to provide community metrics.

My colleague Agnes Kolkiewicz just made the following blog post in that community (see Metrics Blog):

Many of you have mentioned that you are struggling with user adoption within your communities. As I believe that the success of any software project (and particularly where document management and collaboration are concerned) is largely dependent on user adoption, I believe it would be within the scope of this community to include some best practices on user adoption. To support this, I will start a "user adoption best practices" wiki in the community with the hope that all of you can add to it as we progress.

Metrics and user adoption, especially in the case of collaborative or social media software go hand-in-hand. The more that substantive content is added and the higher the participation and log-in rates, the more value your system will bring to the organization, but you need to be able to measure that progress and growth in participation:

Measuring log-in and participation ratios will enable you to determine how your efforts to improve user adoption are progressing. These ratios will also enable you to identify "peak times" in participation - this way you can likely pinpoint what had caused the surge in participation and aim to recreate the event. By measuring these ratios on a regular basis, you will also be able to demonstrate at a later date how the system has improved over time and set a foundation on which the overall value of the system can be determined.
Metrics are applicable throughout a project lifecycle. This applies to any software project but it can easily get out of hand where large enterprise deployments are concerned. This is why most analysts recommend that you start off with smaller deployments and apply metrics to measure progress. Once successfully deployed, you can then use the success of this project, and any ROI realized, to champion the solution as a "success story" throughout your enterprise to further promote user adoption in subsequent projects.
You should start looking at metrics in the pre-project phase taking into consideration what your objectives are for the software project at hand: these objectives will help you identify metrics as well as KPIs for the deployment. The developed metrics should then be measured throughout the lifecycle of your software deployment until the software is no longer used by your organization.
In many cases, the same metrics that were used to evaluate the overall health of your system will also form the foundation for any later cost-benefit or ROI calculation. Where no metrics are kept during deployment, it is much more difficult to "go back in time" and determine how the project has progressed over time and identify realized improvements as there is no benchmark for comparison. We have tried to overcome this obstacle by creating some reports that allow you to measure certain aspects of your deployment at a specified date, but that hasn't been always possible. A rule of thumb here is to start thinking of metrics as an integral part of any project you undertake.

I would encourage everyone to use metrics throughout your project lifecycles – please keep in mind that metrics not only help you prove an ROI, but also help guide your project as it progresses by enabling you to measure progress and identify areas that work well and those that need improvement. In the case of document management or collaborative software, user adoption goes a long way in helping ensure the "success" of your project.

Don’t interrupt, I’m writing a new business document

2009-06-15T10:24:00.002-04:00

Bud Porter-Roth posted an article (The SharePoint Myth) which describes why technology solutions to address enterprise content management (ECM) often fail. He points out that if you don't understand the role of People and Process, then any new Technology (he cites SharePoint as an example) is bound to fail for the same reasons as similar technologies before it have.

Bud gives three reasons why people don't use document systems:

1. Employees create their own file structure that they only use for their work because they don't like the way the team file share is organized.

2. Workers recreate in whole or part many documents they know exist, but couldn't find.

3. Nobody trusts the information they do find on the file share because they can't tell if it is the latest version of that information.

But I think there is a fourth reason, somewhat related to #2. People routinely prefer to repeat work. Often this is not because they can't find past work, they simply don't look for it – they are unaware, uninterested, or believe it would have no value. They are confident they can do something better and more current!

I see people starting new projects and initiatives to address old issues over and over. While some staff are aware of similar past efforts which are often well documented, even if those documents are stored and readily available, people seldom review them for lessons learned.

Could you be a culprit? If your boss asks you to write a report, do you look to see what was done before, or just hit Google and start writing? This seems like a common People issue in all companies to me.

People can work for days writing and reviewing a report or similar document. Despite this effort, the final product may be read, or even just scanned, by one or just a few people. The effort devoted to production is many times greater than the effort others devote to comprehension. Despite this, report writing is seen by many as 'real work' – something that traditional email, and more especially modern social network tools, simply interrupt and frustrate.

When you do something at work you want it to be effective – it needs to make a difference to have worth. In any given situation, do people consider first if writing new documents is always the most important or effective at impacting an organization? And if documents are so effective, why don't others accord them enduring value and read them, when they are first finished or some time later?

Your Major Life Milestones – But Not in Years

2009-06-09T15:46:00.001-04:00

We're wed to using years, and especially decades, as units to measure major milestones in our lives.

For birthdays each passing decade is noted: "My God I'm 40 years old," and so on. The 65^th birthday is often a biggie, as are 16, 18 and 21.

Correspondingly, besides the decades of marriage, we especially note 25, 50 and 60 years of marriage.

But why only years? With Wolfram Alpha it's now easy to check when you reach milestones in other units of time like days, hours and minutes. To get started, simply enter your date of birth and Wolfram Alpha will tell you how long ago that date was in various time units.

In units of days here are some to think about:

10,000 days = 27.4 years
20,000 days = 54.79 years
25,000 days = 69.49 years

Those seem like worthy milestones of celebration to me.

Average life expectancy is around 30,000 days!! Try asking people at a party how many days they think they still have to live. A 55 year-old has an expectancy of around another 10,000 days. Most people guess a lot more than this.

Some noteworthy units of hours:

200,000 hours = 22.85 years
500,000 hours = 57.08 years

Almost no one has reached 1 million hours (114.2 years) – just two or three currently alive (reference).

The good news is than most people will get near the 40 million minutes and 2.5 billion seconds milestones.

“Walking in someone else's moccasins”

2009-06-02T13:33:00.001-04:00

There are some clear technology trends that don't show any sign of changing; among these are:

Increasing bandwidth and close to zero cost
Always on and always available (i.e. mobile)
Global access to an increasing proportion of the World's population

Social networking and rich media have become prominently recently because they have become practical for widespread use. But these are only steps of a continuing journey.

Where might all this be leading and how will it impact people?

Here's a 'thought experiment':

"What if you could see, hear and smell in rich detail indistinguishable from personal experience, everything anyone else in the world is experiencing whenever you choose and whenever they let you"

That sounds like science fiction, and currently it is, but if the above noted trends continue it could become feasible, and anything that becomes feasible usually happens. Even if it doesn't happen completely, we'll certainly get much closer to this scenario. Consider how you perceptions might change if you had such close interactions with another person:

• How would you feel about them?

• Could you take over from them? In their work, in their culture

• How would this change your choice of country, job, language, culture, political affiliation, religion?

The sharing of information globally challenges national identity.

Traditionally Canada has been defined by geographic proximity. I'm a Canadian because I live in Canada. Most people that I interact with, and those that I interact most closely with, are also Canadians. The sum of our interactions has helped define the culture of Canada.

But now, I can interact with people around the globe, and the richness of those interactions is growing rapidly. Will I feel as Canadian in the future as I do now?

These are the kinds of issues that the Canada 3.0 Forum will be grappling with next week in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.

On being our own worst enemy

2009-05-28T16:13:00.003-04:00

Sometimes you know you need something different and you ask for it. Then when you get it, you ask why it isn't like what you expected – based on your experience with what you already had…

I'm seeing this in new enterprise content management (ECM) products, especially around social media applied to Enterprise 2.0 concepts.

While ECM now covers a wide range of technologies, at its core many of the concepts come from document management. Those concepts are mature and consequently well-embedded.

Many, but not all ECM systems follow a 'folder' paradigm – Livelink is one such ECM system – and of course Windows and Mac OS has used folders for many years. Most people just expect folders.

In the case of Livelink, as collaborative tools like Forums, Blogs, Wikis, etc. were added it was 'logical' that these be offered in the context of folders (and other Livelink folder-like container types like Workspaces and Communities). In Livelink you can add a Blog to any Folder for example, if you have the appropriate rights.

This approach works well when the collaborative discussion is centered on related content.

For example, a set of product specification documents are reasonably grouped with a product discussion in a Project workspace.

In fact traditional knowledge management (KM) approaches emphasised the importance of providing context to documents – grouping the documents and the related discussions about them while they are used and when they are subsequently archived achieves this.

While Livelink collaborative objects must be placed in Folders, tools are also provided to find them irrespective of location. You can list all Blogs, Communities, etc. on one page, but in my experience almost no one uses these features – the expectation and habit of navigation to a folder location is just too strong! And when you give users a range of different approaches, they generally only follow one well worn path.

Social media comes at the problem very differently – it is people-centered
not
document-centered. You listen to what people are saying, and then create a social network based on who you want to listen to and the discussion topics you want to hear about. So users and topics become the organizing elements instead of folders. Topics are often multi-faceted and un-predictable, so are quite different from the parent-child taxonomy type of classic folders.

Sure you can add documents to the discussion, and you can link to other documents, but fundamentally you are saying, "I'm talking about this document," irrespective of its location. In fact a document is still best managed according to a document management paradigm in a repository.

Very shortly Open Text will be releasing Open Text Social Media – a solution designed to support social networks in an enterprise, both internally in the social workplace, as well as externally in the social marketplace of a company's partners and customers. The user interface is simplified in a 2.0 style, and focuses on what a user needs to network socially. It does not have the full set of document-centric options – and therein lays the rub.

Most people who have seen Open Text Social Media love it! It's easy to learn and easy to use. The key to that ease is simplicity – that means there can't be too many options and the ones that there are revolve around social network activities.

So it's interesting to watch people start asking for folders/hierarchical classification and a whole raft of document management features – they love the new stuff, but want the familiar as well. If we gave them what they asked for, then they'd loose the initial benefits.

But we haven't forgotten the document management world. Open Text Social Media allows you to talk about documents in other repositories like Livelink, while they remain where they are in an organized hierarchy, with appropriate permissions, lifecycle controls, metadata, records management, etc.

In the real world of the business or government enterprise, it's necessary to balance the what you want of 'candy' with the what's good for you of 'aspirin' (see video below).

Two paradigms. Two approaches. Designed co-existence!

Is there a Permissions 2.0 future for ECM?

2009-05-19T15:09:00.002-04:00

ECM permissions

Users who either fail to use a system or use it incorrectly present the biggest challenges to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system deployment.

Ironically, one of the core value propositions of an ECM system is the easily configurable, highly granular control of permissions – who can do what and when to each piece of content – and it is this feature that leads to the greatest misuse in my experience.

Some ECM installations exist solely to manage critical corporate records alone, and these typically have tightly controlled, rules and governance for the management of content, including the correct application of permissions.

There are specific business processes that require such controls. And they can be further extended based on retention and archiving requirements (Records Management = RM). Regulatory demands make ECM essential for many enterprises.

But most ECM systems serve the needs of several groups or departments, typically for a range of different purposes. Often some of these purposes do not require most permission options – in fact I would argue they often don’t need any! This is especially true when the main aim is to share and collaborate with content.

Easily configured permission actions play to most people’s natural tendency to be secretive, especially at work. Watch a user set up a location in an ECM systems to ‘share’ content with colleagues. Often the first thing they will do is to decide who they think should have permission to access the content, and their thinking is usually very narrow:

Who needs to see this?

Thinking about only current staff and current needs as they know them
Typically forgetting someone who has a legitimate right or even need to see the content
No thought about future needs of current or future staff, or the wider range of content that might subsequently be added

Then you give them additional control granularity, leading them to decide:

If a user can see this content, what rights should they have to do anything to it beyond seeing it?

Mature ECM systems have 8 or more permission levels such as: See, See Contents, Modify, Edit Attributes, Reserve, Delete Versions, Delete, Edit Permissions; each of which can be set down to the level of an individual user level
Further restrict rights to make any changes to a small subset of the people who can even see the content
Think of current not future needs

So, fundamentally ECM permissions provide options to restrict the useful sharing of information, and most users habitually overuse them when there is no need.

Collaborative transparency

The conjunction of ‘2.0’ to terms like ‘Web’, ‘Enterprise’, etc. is overused, but it has established certain patterns and expectations.

If something is ‘2.0’ it often includes new technology, but more importantly includes new, typically simpler ways of doing things.

Many 1.0 tools have failed in deployment because they were just too hard – people needed training that they often did not take, or quickly forgot.

Unfortunately traditional ECM tools often face this challenge.

It is a characteristic of 2.0 tools to be much simpler – often to the extent that no training is required – users find them intuitively obvious because they follow established UI models and the options are obvious.

Typically new collaborative tools have very limited permissioning options: permissions are restricted to granting users ‘membership’ in a community, and sometimes other predefined roles to which permissions have been preset. This is easy for people to understand and mostly keeps them out of trouble (Aside: It does tend to lead to community proliferation).

While this approach improves usability and through it user adoption, it does not support more rigorous, records-oriented needs where a full ECM permission model is essential.

As a result, we see 2.0-style collaborative tools adopted in many parts of less regulated organizations, but being summarily rejected where tighter controls are actually required.

We see the establishment of yet more unconnected systems.

If we don’t recognize this trend and address it effectively, there will be yet another round of content repository proliferation; some people will enthusiastically adopt the newer collaborative tools, using them to share content, while some cannot, even within the same organization.

There is a certain irony that 2.0-style approaches to collaboration that preach information transparency, will actually lead to less transparency across an enterprise!

What I think is emerging is a model that supports the consolidated management of organizational content, which absolutely requires the rigorous, permission management characteristics of ECM systems, coupled with collaborative tools that are easy to use and apply situational-specific, simple permissions.

In some way there is nothing new to some of this – in the past email was the easy-to-use, collaborative vehicle where initial permissions were simply set through the act of addressing the email to specific recipients. The issue was that there was typically no coupling between the ECM system and the email system and no lifecycle consideration. The newer collaborative tools seek to replace e-mail as the system of choice, but by default are not coupled to ECM systems; therein lays the danger.

Interim conclusion

As new collaborative modes emerge to replace or extend email, there is a need to insure the appropriate connection to an underlying ECM system is designed in from the outset! And appropriate permission management will be a key element to ensure appropriate, enterprise-wide and longitudinal transparency.

Social Networking in the Enterprise - Part 2

2009-04-09T15:38:00.001-04:00

In my first post on this topic I described using by Twitter account (MartinSS) to meet specific enterprise or business objectives.

Clearly in this case I’m working in the social marketplace of the web trying to achieve enterprise objectives. I have other activities in the social workplace that I’ll discuss another time.

As I mentioned last time, I didn’t score highly as a Twitter user. Clearly if you are going to use Twitter to meet specific objectives you should do it well or not bother. Last week I embarked on a program to use it better.

Motivation

My orientation is to use Twitter as a brand development tool.

My posts or tweets now revolve around the topics of my work interests – enterprise content management (ECM, #ecm, #cm). I tend to watch related topics such as social networking and tweet or re-tweet (essentially resending someone else’s tweet that you find interesting). And I make posts to my four work-related blogs (including this one).

Let’s be frank – I certainly want to support the brand of the company I work for = Open Text. But in doing so I can’t help but impact my own brand (hopefully positively). I also spent quite a bit of time at this – both work time and personal time – but as many blog posts have noted recently, work and personal time merge in the new world.

Metrics

And the results? Without Metrics you can’t know if you’ve been successful. Fortunately with Twitter there are many third-party tools available. Here’s how I rate:

Twittergrader (takes a moment to execute) – today’s rating is 93, it was 90 10 days ago. I moved from 145,422 out of 1,828,061 to 112,249 out of 1,952,297

Tweetwasters – tells me I spent a total of 2.68 hours since I started posting, based on 30 seconds a post. Methinks it was a little more, but then I actually look for ‘good stuff’ and read it, rather than talking about walking my dog. At least I rank 27,739, but I’m not sure out of what.

TweetStats – shows my posts have really picked up

But arguably the most important metric is how the number of followers I have has changed. Last Monday I had 132 and today I broke 250. You can see the changed velocity in this nice graph from twiitercounter.com, although the numbers it uses seem to lag a bit.

So the effort worked. The results are not stunning, but then I am focusing on a niche topic area = ECM – I’m sure I could get thousands of followers talking about other things in other ways. But that’s not my intent.

In my next post I’ll talk about WHAT I did to achieve these results, including using several other applications to handle some tasks and manage the incoming flood.

Is this all?

Twitter allows you to have multiple accounts. I might already have a completely different account based on another identity, doing very different things and getting other results… or I might not! I’m not telling! ;-)

Closing the Enterprise 2.0 Expectations Gap

2009-04-03T13:46:00.002-04:00

This week I’ve been asked several times to talk about challenges to deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies within Enterprises, which is personal interest of mine.

In brief here's my current perspective:-

Most early Web 2.0 adopters were young consumers, drawn by ease of use, immediacy and social reach.

Recent data have shown growing adoption by older consumers, especially those with well established careers, leading to pressure for comparable tools within organizations.

Enterprises have been slow to understand the applicability of these technologies and to develop a balanced analysis of benefit vs. risk.

Recent changes in the Economy introduced new factors to this analysis:

Benefit – Specific 2.0-style technologies applied in a focused manner promise organizations very welcome operational savings

Risk – The longevity of many of these technologies is questionable as many small venture-backed startups offering similar tools are acutely, financially challenged

Creating mashups from several such technologies greatly increases operational risk

Enterprises have requirements which run counter to user experiences with consumer Web 2.0, including:

A need to control information sharing, especially in heavily regulated industries

Much Web 2.0 literature talks about the value of sharing information openly

A preference to only deploy relatively small toolsets and to try to limit silos

On the consumer web users are used to trying many similar sites and technologies, flitting to the next ‘hot’ site

Long deployment cycles, especially with current economic considerations

A need to consider long-term information preservation in a recoverable form

At least my predicted contraction and retrenchment in the number of Web 2.0 choices on the consumer web, and perhaps fewer free-to-end user services , may narrow the gap in user expectations… or not…

Social Networking in the Enterprise - Part 1

2009-03-30T21:49:00.001-04:00

I’ve immersed myself in social networking over the last few months. I’m not particularly interested in gaining online ‘friends’, but I do want to understand the potential of the new tools to meet specific objectives, especially those of enterprises and their staff.

Take Twitter as an example.

BTW, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter check here: http://twitter.com/martinss. - follow me and I’ll automatically follow you by way of SocialToo.com).

If you look at my score on various Twitter sites I don’t currently score very highly, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned from Twitter ;-)

Originally Twitter’s model was one of personal status updates: “MartinSS is walking the dog”, or some such. And for many purists it should still be that way. There is certainly value in that – I’ve learnt things about colleagues that I would never have done otherwise, and maybe we interact better as a result. In the end though I think there is a limit to how many people I want to know in detail. Interestingly this was reinforced by a recent study that showed humans have an enlarged brain center that is predicted to allow them to follow about 165 people and all of the interactions between those people in detail. That number seems about right to me, or perhaps in my case a bit high ;-)

Twitter is just a tool – it’s how you use and the benefit that you derive that matter most. There is no right way to use Twitter any more than a right way to use a telephone. As another blogger expressed it recently, why should he have to justify using Twitter when he doesn’t have to justify using a phone?

At the other end of the spectrum from the social update users, are people epitomized by Guy Kawasaki. He unabashedly uses Twitter as the most powerful marketing tool he knows. As a result he is one of the most followed individual Twitter users, but he is also one of the most reviled but unapologetic. I find value in his posts. Recently there was a controversy when it was revealed that he uses ‘ghosts’ – other people who make posts for him – which is hardly surprising given the volume of his posts and the nature of his effort. Since his posting formula is quite clear, there is nothing wrong IMO with others following his formula under his direction.

When you start using Twitter you can be overwhelmed with the flow of information. You can select a few people to follow and keep the volume down, but inevitably over time the volume builds. One of the first things you have to learn is to, ‘let it go’. If you don’t read a feed for a period you don’t have to go back and read everything you missed – it isn’t email where people have been conditioned to try and read everything (although that’s breaking down nowadays, but that’s another topic). There is an ongoing ‘conversation’ and if you aren’t ‘in the room’, then you’ll miss it, but you have other things to do, so don’t worry.

Next you have to learn how to filter and manage the flow. There are tools to look only at replies targeted to you, posts related to specific key words, etc.

Kawasaki is using Twitter as a Social Marketplace tool. My interest is more in how tools like it can work in the Social Workplace – do they help people in an enterprise get their jobs done better or faster? And if they do, which tools are best, what features must they have and what other tools must they be connected with?

Currently within Open Text we are working on an enterprise, social networking tool currently codenamed “BlueField”. I’ve used it a lot and really like it, and I think the ways to use it best are becoming clearer.

Social Networks for the Enterprise

2009-02-23T08:18:00.002-05:00

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer gave an interesting interview recently on Yammer approach to providing hosted social networking for enterprises. We are in the early day of understanding how social networking is best configured for organizations where information privacy and security are so important, and where staff need to be able to show that they are more productive if the use such tools.

2009-02-06T20:49:00.001-05:00

Downloaded IE8 RC1 - underwhelmed...

2009-02-05T13:11:00.001-05:00

Awesome Wall of Sound - Naturally Seven: http://ping.fm/465Vh

2009-02-02T15:37:00.001-05:00

MS vs. Google spat - "My app's better than your site" http://ping.fm/Iil38

2009-02-02T08:46:00.001-05:00

SAP has good results "while a challenging economy ... nearly eliminated any purchases by first-time buyers" http://ping.fm/uB7sS

2009-01-27T18:03:00.001-05:00

The Product Information group recently launched a customer survey about the Open Text documentation http://ping.fm/4FT93

2009-01-22T15:01:00.001-05:00

"Autonomy... mighty task... take many years to complete" http://ping.fm/mp05j

2009-01-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

Autonomy buys Interwoven: http://ping.fm/238os

2009-01-08T16:54:00.001-05:00

The 451 group talks about OT as the Content Experts http://ping.fm/PPgtt

2009-01-06T08:35:00.001-05:00

Gartner CIO NY resolutions http://ping.fm/8xk72

2009-01-05T08:27:00.001-05:00

realizing I've been here before when my Word auto-correct replaces HNY with Happy New Year

2008-12-31T14:08:00.001-05:00

is looking at fuel prices in Canada: http://ping.fm/AJR4j

2008-12-31T13:43:00.001-05:00

is learning about passive solar water heating from neat compnay: http://ping.fm/7EVHx

2008-11-25T16:09:00.001-05:00

Top sites about EC listed: http://ping.fm/5jqkJ

2008-11-23T18:36:00.001-05:00

Loving Easeus Partition Mgr after ignoring IT. Now I have space on C: again! No more dire warnings of full drive

2008-11-19T09:13:00.001-05:00

Check out today's awesome new Open Text website look: http://opentext.com/

2008-11-18T15:02:00.001-05:00

First Content World podcast posted: http://ping.fm/DBn8Z

2008-11-13T09:28:00.001-05:00

Content World 365 for Open Text customers - events schedule: http://ping.fm/DwON5

2008-11-11T21:41:00.001-05:00

Profits 2.0: http://ping.fm/vj54P

Profits 2.0

2008-11-11T21:32:00.003-05:00

Having lived through the craziness of the dot com boom and bust as the CEO of a venture-backed start-up (Base4) this video commentary on the Web 2.o Conference really sounded like deja vu. It was all about grabbing market share in those days, at any cost, and it seems much the same again, albeit with the variant, 'We've got market share so we'll be able to make money at some point.'

Mobile GPS Phones to Track Traffic

2008-11-11T21:16:00.002-05:00

In the third world more people have mobile phones than landlines or TVs - so mobile replaces fixed infrastructure, or more accurately, makes it unnecessary to ever build. In the same vein, I was taken by this UC Berkley experiment to use the GPS functions of phones in cars to measure traffic patterns.

2008-11-11T20:56:00.001-05:00

Latest Open Text Content World 365 Newsletter: http://ping.fm/34YzK

2008-11-11T20:30:00.001-05:00

The mathematical genome appeals to my genome background: http://ping.fm/GPsJA

2008-11-10T20:28:00.001-05:00

Posted comment about Yammer vs. Livelink and within less than one hour I get a notice from Google that a new page has been found with my watched term 'Livelink' - my Blogger page!

2008-11-10T14:28:00.001-05:00

Yammer vs Livelink Subscriptions social network experiment results: http://ping.fm/brZhB

2008-11-08T21:39:00.001-05:00

Wikipedia raising money: http://ping.fm/tnfDo

2008-11-04T11:08:00.001-05:00

test - Posting to many places @ once from Ping.fm

ECM Vendors Practicing What They Preach – Not!!

2006-04-28T13:28:00.000-04:00

So here’s as interesting blog post about Microsoft’s ECM stated strategy of, “Integrated user-oriented ECM systems,” and the fact Microsoft apparently fails to practice what they preach. In summary an error was found by a reporter on a public Microsoft website, a senior Microsoft guy said he’d get it fixed right away, and it wasn’t fixed by the next day – the blogging reporter saw this as a failure!

Having been involved in the new Open Text website project I can say it generally takes us several weeks to get new content up even though we use Livelink WCM. To qualify that, in my experience blatant errors get fixed by the web team very quickly, but significant changes take much longer. At it’s not really because of the software, but the processes around controlling and structuring what we put on the website.

Maybe it’s because of ‘old think’ combined with specific software. I can get new content on the web in seconds when I do it myself through a blog or forum in Open Text Online Communities. And if you wanted, so could you. Our corporate (www) site is a classic website that like practically that of every other company is seen as a formally published and tightly controlled. The businesses processes around this require time.

In contrast, tools like Livelink as a classic Intranet (even if used externally) provide much more flexibility, but interestingly in order to support this flexibility they require user membership and authentication.

So it seems that in practice, at least for corporations, “Integrated user-oriented ECM systems,” require user management for both contributors and consumers, and this is not a characteristic of corporate websites. In contrast, in the consumer web the authentication of content consumers is not required. Witness this blog I cited – rapid posting and response by others while Microsoft still hasn’t fixed the issue. I don’t think businesses are ready for “Business at the speed of thought” as Bill Gates once called it.

I Guess I Didn't Really Get Wikis

2006-03-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

I'm familiar with Wikis; in fact I've used them -- I've made modest postings to Wikipedia for example.

But it turns out I really didn't get it.

Anton Huenermann and colleagues in Open Text have developed a Livelink Wiki feature. It would be easy to see Wikis as yet another Livelink collaborative feature along with Discussion Groups, Forums, Task List, News Channels, etc. Easy, but Wrong!

Wikis, as you may know, are a way to edit documents that appear as a webpage. One of the ideas is that documents develop by consensus. In the aforementioned Wikipedia, people write encyclopedia articles that appear as webpages, and then others amend and add material. Over time the richness and accuracy of individual articles, relationships between them and the overall collection size and quality improve. Previous versions are kept and it is possible to rollback if someone makes bad changes. Group consensus rules over time.

You could argue that the online editor feature of Livelink Enterprise Server, combined with open permissions could allow users to have this kind of a wiki experience -- easy editing by anyone with version control and rollback capabilities. What is different is that users would be editing a document (Word, text, html) that they would see as an object on a Livelink page but would have to open. In the case of a wiki, the document is the webpage.

There is a very fundamental paradigm at the core of Livelink ES and that is the representation of a list of documents in a folder/container hierarchy. As many have commented, Livelink appears as a web-based file system with a lot of other features.

Over time there have been many refinements to the appearance of a Livelink ES page, but the fundamental idea of a file list remains. We have even created modules like Appearance and Expressions that change the layout of Livelink pages -- change everything but the file listing in the center.

The other thing that is different about Wikis is the easy way to make links between different documents/pages. In fact it is so easy there is no visible hierarchy of content objects since such a hierarchy makes no sense. Any page may refer to any other page for any of a range of reasons related to context or meaning. To be accurate, in the case of the Livelink Wiki, a breadcrumb trail can be shown, but it is not usually relevant to user navigation.

So for the first time in Livelink ES, there is no file listing on pages and your position in a hierarchy is not apparent.

Content Management Systems Are Second Class Systems for the Rich

2006-01-03T09:37:00.000-05:00

Actually the article I'm going to mention is called, "Databases Are So 20th Century" by Dave Kellogg in CMS Watch. I found it an interesting read for the start of a new year.

Kellogg's basic thesis is that database systems can never handle content well, and that the current efforts to manage content as XML in databases is now the fourth attempt to address the problem and is doomed to failure. As he says:

"First, you need to abandon the notion that content is a special case of data. Indeed, it's the other way around; data is a special case of content that happens be highly regular in structure."

What of content management systems? Kellogg says:

"Just as poor countries have rich residents, there is an upper class of content that gets to live in databases (e.g., corporate web content, aircraft repair manuals, new drug applications). Typically, this is accomplished through enterprise content management (ECM) systems that both break the content into bite-sized morsels that fit into relational "square tables" and track metadata about it (e.g., author, version, check-in status, required approvals).

So while upper-class content enjoys life in a database, the great irony is that ECM typically treats the content itself as opaque -- because of the limitations in the underlying database system. That is, while ECM tracks and manages a lot of information about the content, it actually does relatively little to help get inside content. Despite its middle name, ECM today isn't really about content. It's about metadata."

Since it doesn't appear that Kellogg's ideal system is likely to appear anytime soon, I guess we can go on selling and using ECM systems for some time! Happy New Year!

Giving Thanks

2005-10-17T22:36:00.000-04:00

The weekend before last was Thanksgiving in Canada. I had a good weekend, but not as good as this last weekend. On Saturday afternoon there was a rain shower, and then the sky mostly cleared. I decided to go for a walk as the trees are at showing their peak Fall colours. Fortunately I remembered to take my camera with me.

It was one of those magical times: the low angle of the sun, raindrops sparkling, the Fall colours… I found myself almost ravenously running from one spot to the next to get as many pictures as I could before the light failed. Short of taking a picture of my foot, it was almost impossible not to get a good shot.

When the light and my camera battery finally failed, I came home exhilarated and truly thankful.

- Happy Thanksgivings to you all, whenever you actually celebrate!!

DIY satellites reinvent the space race

2005-09-14T13:46:00.000-04:00

I love the idea of enabling something then seeing what people make of it. The following quotation says it best:

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get something into space," said Bob Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford

But, whereas the quotation references hobbyist computer hardware, the article is about miniature satellites!!

I love it.

NPS Pharmaceuticals: Medical Journal Reports Teduglutide Improves Intestinal Function in Patients With Short Bowel Syndrome

2005-08-24T16:56:00.000-04:00

In a much earlier posting in April 2004 I wrote about my work years ago with Dr. Dan Drucker to develop a derivative of the human hormone GLP-2 to treat short bowel syndrome. NPS Pharmaceuticals, the acquirer of Allelix, my employer at the time, just released this news release about the positive results of a Phase 2 study and that they have now initiated a Phase 3 study. Yeah!!

///Martin\\\

2005-07-29T14:08:00.000-04:00

Here's my favorite search engine: ///Martin\\\ Actually it is most people's favorite search engine, but thanks to the good folks at Google, Logogle lets one dream!

Crabby Lady

2005-07-29T13:52:00.000-04:00

Customer help with a wrinkle, and a wink? That's 'The Crabby Office Lady' from Microsoft. Here's a sample:

'Let's get right to it: To clear up any preconceived notions you may have about the author of the Crabby Office Lady columns:
� I am not a man (at least last time I checked).
� I am not a group of writers.
� I don't believe that the character of Crabby is offensive to women, to persons of a certain age, or to crabs.
There, I've said it. And frankly, that's a load off my chest. Because, you see, I've received more than a few e-mails and pieces of feedback insisting that I personify one or more of the above, and it's about time to set the record straight. So, who am I? Why a 'crabby' office lady? What do our customers think? And finally, why would the world's leading software company with a reputation to uphold (you can stop your snickering now) let a fictionalized character (of all things) talk to its customers in a way, well, in a way that I sometimes do?'

I like the part about not snickering about upholding the reputation of the world's leading software company!

Crabby is a MS columnist (actually Annik Stahl) who writes about and answers questions on MS Office topics. She has written around 100 columns, and recorded 10 videos. Take a peak at the video on 'The Out of Office Assistant' for a good sample.

It a fun way to connect with users that seems to have developed a following. And yes, even Crabby allows RSS notification of her new postings!"

Web Fads!

2005-07-25T09:12:00.000-04:00

I remember the Hampsterdance (unfortunately), All your Base are Belong, Dancing Baby and (that poor) Star Wars Kid as fads. Friendster and Blogger, and to some extent Jibjab, are commercial sites - some people made money off these ones. Mahir, Ellen Feiss and Hot or Not seem to have passed me by.

What am I talking about? The list of 'Top 10 Web Fads' on C-Net. Good for a few minutes distraction on a Monday morning before you put your head down.

The Worst Thing About Best Practices

2005-06-21T15:14:00.000-04:00

The Worst Thing About Best Practices

I’ve been reviewing how we currently do some things and how we can improve. People ask, “Have you reviewed best practices?” which I have been doing. So I had to chuckle when I saw a marketing article called, “The Worst Thing About Best Practices”.
The author makes these points:
1. They rarely work
2. It's a follower's strategy
3. Change comes from within
4. They don't come with a manual

'Making IT Work' Article Finally Published

2005-06-11T08:58:00.000-04:00

The article I posted in draft earlier has now been published in 'Pharmaceutical Formulation and Quality' here.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Standard

2005-05-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

Another bylined article I've submitted, which talks about how adoption of a global standard in an industry sector disrupts the market for supporting software:

Sometimes the consequences of a course of action lead to unexpected events, especially when different, apparently independent market forces and trends converge. Take the new regulatory submission standards for example. There has been a fascinating interplay of business and process requirements, human factors, new technologies and software market forces, which unfortunately, has made the implementation of submission management systems a considerable challenge.

Traditionally every regulator has had their own unique requirements for submission content and format, and often these regional requirements differed significantly according to product type (drug, device, diagnostics, etc.) and stage of development. The efforts of the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) to develop a common submission structure applicable to applications at different stages have therefore been welcome. While there are still regional differences in organizational detail and required content, the resulting ICH Common Technical Document (CTD) format is a great advance that enables extensive document reuse and global process coordination in companies.

So what else happened? Why can’t companies immediately benefit from the ICH’s efforts? The development of the CTD came at a time when there was also considerable pressure to move from paper to electronic formats. Sponsors sought the efficiency benefits of internal electronic processes in submission assembly, review and approval, and regulators concluded that the continuing growth in the size of submission would ultimately render paper submissions impractical. In the case of the FDA this has become especially critical as the reviewers are moving to new facilities with a smaller not larger, paper document room!

As the CTD was developed, another ICH group followed immediately with specifications for the electronic form – the eCTD. While the CTD is relatively specific, the electronic form is more specific in its requirements. Basically submission managers have more discretionary choices in assembling a CTD that they do with an eCTD. The greater specificity of the eCTD is a consequence of both design and technology choice.

The eCTD working group chose an emerging technology, XML, to describe how eCTD submissions should be formatted. XML is a relatively new and powerful tool that is being widely deployed in many industries as a way to describe information and transfer it between systems. XML is extremely flexible, but can also be used to create hierarchical formats with strict controls. The eCTD’s Document Type Definition (DTD) essentially requires that electronic submissions follow a specific format based on the CTD, but with strict requirements at each level, i.e. only certain documents with specific names can go in certain folders. Software can be developed that automatically follows the DTD specifications, making sure that users can only add the right documents in the right places, and also to automatically validating assembled, electronic submissions.

The key point about a standard like the eCTD is that it does not matter what software product is used to assemble a submission, the resulting electronic submission is exactly the same, since it must comply with the standard. Open standards are disruptive to software markets. In the case of the eCTD, it is enabling separation of the submission management process into discrete steps.

A submission might be prepared with one tool but could be viewed with another. As a result, a number of vendors provide free eCTD viewers. Here we see that one aspect of the overall submission process, namely viewing, has become a commodity. Vendors can no longer include viewing as part of the value proposition of their product. But this commoditization of submission management is occurring at more than the viewing step.

The eCTD is designed as a standard submission format to ensure that the submission sent by a sponsor is exactly recreated at the regulator. But submission transfer is not restricted to a completed submission. Parts of draft submissions can be prepared in different locations within a company, or even by partners and service organizations, and then sent electronically to another system for final assembly. Again, each of these submission sections could be prepared and then assembled using different software products from different vendors, since what is being transferred must conform to the same standard (i.e. the eCTD). An open standard levels the playing field in a way that provides flexibility to end users, but it also presents big challenges to commercial software vendors.

A third example of the mixing-and-matching of submission products is the use of a submission assembler from one vendor and a validator from another. Yet another example relates to printing. While the eCTD is an electronic format, since it is based on the CTD, paper submissions can be printed from electronic submissions. Since regulatory authorities in Europe currently require that paper copies be submitted with each eCTD, this is an important requirement. Some software vendors now provide standalone eCTD printing products – again these products can print any valid eCTD prepared by software from other vendors, not just submissions prepared in a specific system.

When submissions were only paper, the available software products were monolithic, end-to-end systems that were required to do everything. Their proprietary nature made it very difficult for users to use other software tools during submission assembly and publishing. Now as we have seen, users can mix-and-match different tools to suite their needs.

Clearly the transition to electronic submissions in an eCTD format has created a technological discontinuity in the software marketplace. Not only can aspects of the process be performed by standalone tools, the traditional, established submission publishing products are not suitable – the new requirements need a new approach. Just a few years ago, before the eCTD was completed, there were two primary vendors in a mature, stable marketplace. At the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) North American December 2004 eCTD/CTD meeting six vendors presented their eCTD solutions, and at the February 2005 document management meeting 10 vendors presented eCTD tools in a submission workshop. The DIA organized these events to help life sciences companies that are facing difficult decisions.

While the growing number of vendors and products suggests users have a wider choice, the increased market competition has resulted in tremendous price erosion. The long-term viability of these specialty vendors is now in question since the number of customer companies has not dramatically increased to compensate for the lower product prices, i.e. the customer base remains the same and while the market size measure by total revenue is decreasing. In addition, this market is being divided between many more vendors, each selling products for far less. The current situation is reminiscent of the dot com era, but on a much smaller scale – small, venture-backed, startup companies are desperately competing to buy market share in a market that cannot sustain them.

Another technological trend is also emerging to disrupt the submission publishing business – the continuing development of powerful document management systems. Traditional paper submissions in life sciences had very specialized requirements for managing large document collections beyond the capabilities of early document management systems. In essence, the submission market developed because the available document management systems were inadequate. In the same manner, paper submission production required unique features to manage large print jobs on production printers, and both paper and early electronic submission formats before the eCTD required complex PDF manipulation at a time when PDF technology was relatively new.

The standard, corporate submission management system configuration is usually a hybrid. A document management system is used to manage the lifecycle of all components, electronic documents, and these are then ‘sent’ to a submission publishing system for assembly, manipulation and printing. These two systems have traditionally been sourced from different vendors, so synchronization between the two has typically been a problem for users, especially as document management systems were often highly and uniquely customized in each company.

Nowadays document management systems are far more sophisticated – indeed they are merging into a new category called enterprise content management (ECM). Modern ECM systems have many tools to support large collections of documents, as well as a range of collaborative process-support, tracking and reporting tools, and given the simplified, XML-based requirements of the eCTD, do not require much extension to manage the entire submission process, packaging and exporting the electronic documents that they already hold. There is significant benefit in using one, primary software product for the entire process.

There are clearly conflicting market forces in play. On the one hand we see ECM systems being capable of handling more of the submission process, and on the hand other specific steps of the submission process can be handled by purpose-build tools from several vendors. It may be that ECM systems will come to manage the overall process and be supplemented by specialty eCTD tools for specific steps in the process, e.g. validation and printing.

In summary, the development of a relatively standard, open format for electronic submissions in all regions, which should have made submission management a much easier process for life sciences companies, has created new challenges by disrupting the market for the necessary software support tools. Users are faced with a dilemma of choosing between a wide range of new and often incompletely developed tools from many different vendors, and are concerned both about the features they require and the long-term support for those tools (i.e. vendor viability). In some cases companies have simply resorted to building their own submission management software, at least in the interim. As history has shown however, pharmaceutical companies often build software for their own immediate needs, but ultimately they have to transition to commercially available products.

As with all markets, after this current period of uncertainty created by significant change, there will be maturation and stabilization. Already the ICH eCTD and the regional standards have stabilized after a period of rapid evolution, and the FDA for example, has committed not to make further major changes without two years notice. This provides a firm base for the impending market shakeout. The resulting balance between ECM/document management systems, submission management solutions and specialty software tools for specific submission tasks is as yet unknown.

A new corporate blog type: Stolen A3

2005-05-12T21:28:00.000-04:00

Stolen A3

Here's a new one for me. Audi are introducing their new A3 car. But to develop interest, they have an ongoing story about how a specific car was stolen from them. To quote from the site, it is “a fun, interactive, fictional story sponsored by Audi. This campaign is similar to what's known as "Alternate Reality Gaming," in which a community of users become a part of the story, interact with its characters, and help each other unravel its mysteries along the way. If you'd like to immerse yourself in this entertaining, challenging experience, you can check out the "In A Nutshell" links on the right for a summary of the story so far...then be sure to visit the discussion forum and join in the fun!”

The story is presented in the form of a blog, with some movies, a discussion forum, RSS feed, links, etc. -- cool!

Works for Me: A blog by any name - CNET reviews

2005-05-10T22:10:00.000-04:00

Works for Me: A blog by any name - CNET reviews
Rafe Needleman of CNET posted a review of blogs today. It’s interesting how many times the same thinks come up – I guess most of us don’t do much original research. He starts with an intro based on the recent BusinessWeek article on blogs, which has recognized blogging as a trend that will "change your business. He then moves into a listing of his blog taxonomy. I’ve quoted liberally below.

With my involvement in the forthcoming ECM (Enterprise Content Management Blog) sponsored by Open Text, I’ve been looking into blogs, as noted in earlier posts. Needleman’s taxonomy would accommodate what we are doing is a blend of a traditional ‘diary’ blog, with elements of a group-grope blog. As a vendor of ECM software, we already sell a number of project and collaboration support tools. Needleman’s describes wikis as, “extremely powerful new tools for business collaboration.” We don’t yet include wikis in our collaboration suite, but we do have blogs in our Community of Practice software. Needleman mentions Socailtext as a vendor of commercial wiki. We do have a function tha is awfully close – a web based text file editor (also does Word formats) that allows people to edit and post new versions (provided they have permissions ot do so).

The diary blog
“This is the original blog type, in which one or a very small number of authors frequently post comments or thoughts on a site, with the newest posts at the top of the page and the older ones getting pushed down.” The usual mention is Robert Scoble, who writes the Scobleizer. Needleman mention the “…recruiting bloggers to pitch your product, which Microsoft is also doing, undermines the positive power of blogging” and the “…character blog, sometimes called the fake blog. These are attributed to fictional people. For example, see the the Lincoln Fry blog that was part of McDonalds Super Bowl ad program, and the Captain Morgan Spiced Rum blog, by the captain himself. Think of these as commercials in blog form.”

The project blog
“Many small software companies are starting blogs based on their products. If you're running a growing business, a project blog is a great way to keep your most loyal customers up to speed with your progress. For examples, see Intuit's blog and FeedBurner's blog.”

The grok blog
“This is a blog that points to, and comments on, media stories. I call it a grok because this was the format of Media Grok, the ongoing critique of the media launched by the Industry Standard in the Internet bubble.” He mentions “…popular gadget blogs Engadget and Gizmodo, for example. Both were built on the grok model, although they are doing more original reporting as they mature.”

The group-grope blog
“All industries are small. In any industry, there is a cadre of thought leaders who are inquisitive and outspoken and who become smarter the more they interact with others. Blogs that multiple people post can serve as an ongoing trade conference. One example is AlwaysOn...”

The wiki
“A wiki is collaborative Web site. It is not, strictly speaking, a blog at all, but wikis have bloglike elements: they are easy to update, and most are written in an informal style. Wikis are also extremely powerful new tools for business collaboration. You can get a bunch of people up and running on wiki in a fraction of the time it would take to set up almost any other groupware application, and wiki users can organize their online work spaces in the ways that make sense to them--not to some harried IT staff.

Wikis can tend to become rather disorganized after a while, but for keeping teams up-to-date on active projects, they really can't be beat. (I'm using one my own editorial and product management team, and I think it's great so far.)

The most famous wiki is the collaborative encyclopedia, the Wikipedia. For collaborative work spaces, there are several companies you can turn to, including the pioneer Socialte

The Evolution of Electronic and Digital Signatures in the Pharmaceutical Industry

2005-05-05T12:58:00.000-04:00

I get asked about electronic and digital signatures and the difference between them a lot. In the pharmaceutical industry there is a defined difference based on the US Food and Drug Administrations's (FDA) regulations.

The FDA distinguishes between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems. A ‘closed’ system is one where a given company has tight control over system access and always ‘knows’ who is accessing the system – this is typical of important, internal, corporate systems to manage records. In contrast, an ‘open’ system is one where outside users, who may not be known or at least not controlled, may access the system (e.g. staff from a collaborating company). Closed systems depend on system integrity to manage record integrity, whereas in the case of open systems there needs to be more control at the individual record level.

We can see how this works by the type of signatures that are acceptable in the case of closed or open systems. The FDA distinguishes between electronic signatures vs. digital signatures in their 21 CFR Part 11 regulations that cover the management of electronic records and the signatures that may be applied to them.

Electronic signatures, as defined by the FDA, in essence are a record of a users signing action in the audit trail of the system. A user took an action that they know would result in a signing action (e.g. pushing a ‘Sign’ button) and then reconfirmed their identity by responding to a username/password challenge. In order that someone else knows that the document has been signed, there is also a requirement that the same metadata be embedded in the document in a form that is human readable and cannot be separated from the document – typically this requires systems to produce a secure PDF version of the document with the signature ‘manifestation’ added in a defined area or on an extra page. So, the signature is verifiable in the audit trail of a closed system which is controlled by the company. The company can continue to manage this information as records are moved from active use to archives. Open Text’s eSign product provides for electronic signatures to electronic records in Livelink systems.

Digital signatures, as defined by the FDA, usually use PKI technology. Typically the signature is contained within the signed document, rather than simply being a manifestation of system records. The advantage of this approach is that in theory a record can be sent to people outside the originating system but still be verifiable. However, such verification depends on access to certificate information. If certificate management is only within a given company then users outside cannot verify signatures. In addition, there are many proprietary permutations of PKI technology, so two companies may not have compatible systems that support mutual verification. This has significantly impaired the implementation of digital signatures in the pharmaceutical industry; in essence the question is, “What is the point of incurring the extra expense of implementing digital signatures if they can only be used internally, when electronic signatures are sufficient according to the regulations?”

To address these concerns a number of leading pharma and life sciences companies have formed a consortium to develop an industry-wide open standard for the secure, trusted exchange of signed documents. You can read more about it here: http://www.opentext.com/pharmaceutical/safe.html (see especially the link to the News Release and the SAFE website at the bottom of the page). Open Text Livelink was used as the technology demonstration platform and Open Text now sells a SAFE-complaint PKI solution. SAFE depends on established certificate management networks – in the first instance on the Identrus network already widely used and supported in the financial services and banking industries. The long term integrity and availability of these networks is required for archiving.

The Growing Scope of Records Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry

2005-04-26T13:29:00.000-04:00

Here's an bylined article I worte that was submitted last week:

Records management is hardly new to the pharmaceutical industry. But what is new is the breadth of records that must now be kept, the increasing proportion of electronic records (especially e-mail), and the impact of additional, new regulations from beyond the life sciences sphere (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). These changes have in turn created awareness of records management in a larger audience within companies, but a number of recent survey have found considerable confusion and uncertainty about the subject. An overview of the subject may be of use at this time.

What is a record? Very simply, a record is the final output of a business, managerial or administrative transaction. It is important to emphasize the word ‘final’ as it places records management in the context of information lifecycle. Take for example a standard operating procedure (SOP); we understand that in creation a SOP would have gone through a typical lifecycle from initial authoring, review and amendment, approval and then release. The released SOP, which is the form that is actually used in the business to guide actions, is the final form and therefore the record. Earlier draft versions are not records, and indeed in many companies procedures are established to ensure that drafts are destroyed, along with any supporting information such a comments made during review.

In the case of electronic documents, the initial lifecycle would likely have been managed by an electronic document management system that tracked different versions, the status of those versions, managed a defined workflow and controlled user access at each stage. Typically though, most document management systems were initially designed to address the needs of document creation through to approval, release and distribution, but they do not provide tools to further manage final documents as records.

So what is records management and what tools do we need to support a good records management program? Records management is a process for the systematic management of all records and the information or data that they contain. A records management program provides for the regular review and controlled retention or destruction of records, and aims to ensure that records are kept as long as necessary and then destroyed as required or allowed by regulations and statutes. In the SOP example, if it is a manufacturing record under FDA oversight then it will need to be retained in accordance with 21 CFR Part 210-211, and if it is an electronic record it must also be managed according to 21 CFR Part 11.

When records management software programs were first created, they were typically electronic tracking systems that helped to manage paper records. They enabled managers to track where a record was – typically in a specific file, in a given box, on a shelf, in a specific storage facility. They also provided disposition management, notifying a manager when it was time review a given record for possible destruction.

As electronic records grew in prominence, records management software was extended to manage both physical as well as electronic records. However, it is not always easy to determine if a given record is electronic or paper. Since typewriters are now almost extinct, practically every paper document is created using a word processor and so exist in electronic form first, before being printed. If the document requires signing before it is in final form (and therefore a record) and if the signature is applied in ink form to paper, then it is a paper record. Very often though, a paper record with ink signature is scanned into an electronic system for long term maintenance, becoming purely electronic again. It is necessary with such ‘hybrid’ systems to clearly define which form is the ‘official’ record and to confirm that its retention management meets all regulatory requirements.

Hybrid paper/electronic system are always problematic, and indeed in the history of the FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 regulations, there were a series of guidance documents intended to bring clarity to the issue of what constitutes an electronic record – but these were subsequently withdrawn as they were seen as too onerous.

It is inevitable that eventually purely electronic systems, with no paper intermediate or final forms, will come to dominate. For this to be achieved though, there must be no business processes that require a paper form of a record, which is more difficult than it might at first seem. For example, under 21 CFR Part 11, an electronic signature applied to a document in a closed system is basically a metadata record in the system’s audit trail of a signing event. However, if it is necessary to exchange a document with another company or regulator that cannot access the system where the signature information is kept, then the electronic signature cannot be confidently validated. This fact has contributed to a delay in wide adoption of electronic signatures. Advances in joint industry-regulator efforts to develop standards for digital signatures, such as SAFE, are enabling purely electronic records to be exchanged and validated beyond a given company’s system. The important distinction is that signature information is contained within the digitally-signed document and remains with it, rather than in the system that contained in when it was signed. However, even digital signatures depend on external systems for validation, which can create problems in maintaining the verifiability of signatures in records that must be maintained for decades.

On the technology side, we have also seen a convergence of document management and records management software – most records management vendors have been acquired by document management vendors and their products integrated into software platforms that are now more often described as enterprise content management systems (ECM). ECM systems are also incorporating archiving technologies such as computer output to laser disc (COLD) or microfiche (COM), document imaging and digital asset management (DAM) for complex images and videos. This means that the full lifecycle of electronic documents, other electronic files and resulting records can now be managed in one system, which can also manage legacy paper records.

Another benefit of emerging ECM systems is e-mail archiving. In the past e-mail was seldom considered to contain important corporate records, but this has changed significantly, both because of broadened regulatory controls as well as the changing ways in which e-mail systems are employed by company staff.

In its early days e-mail was a simple communication medium with limited text. Then it became possible to attach documents to e-mails, but usually this was just a way to exchange copies of official records. Now however, e-mail applications like Microsoft Outlook are tightly integrated with word-processing applications. As e-mail increasingly supports more phases of document lifecycle, it is quite possible that a an e-mail may contain an official record. For example, a fully reviewed document may be e-mailed to a manager for signing – the first instance of the signed document may then be in a return e-mail. Another example of an official record in e-mail form is a simple text e-mail, with no document attachment, from a manager or executive which is an authorization for a business action.

At the moment in most companies, document management and e-mail systems are only weakly coupled, so it is hard to find where an official record is. Staff often assume that a given record is in a document management system, but that is not always the case, or it may not be the official record, as we have seen. Strictly controlled procedures are generally used to address this issue, but technological approaches to identify identical documents in different repositories (e.g. document management and e-mail systems) are beginning to be deployed, and importantly, the capture of content from across different systems into a single archive, where records management can be applied, is now emerging in integrated ECM systems.

In records management systems records follow a simple lifecycle path. Records are identified as to type and state. When first tracked records are usually in a ‘current’ state – that is they are the latest, effective version of a record. At some point however, a review process will identify that a record should move to a non-current state, for example if a more recent version is created. Subsequently a second review will determine if a record is to be archived or destroyed. The review process is greatly simplified if criteria can be applied to identify the type of record, and if there are standard retention periods pre-assigned to each record type. Developing a list of all record types and the policies associated with them can be a daunting task.

Record retention periods can vary from a few months, to years or even decades, and the period is often defined by legislation or regulations. Financial records are typically required to be maintained for seven years, whereas pharmaceutical product records may have to be maintained for a period of years after the final sale of a drug which may be expected to be in the market for many decades. Since records may be required to be provided in support of activities such as legal proceedings, regulatory review or defense of intellectual property, records management systems allow ‘holds’ to be applied to records to override the normal advance of a record according to predefined lifecycle rules. Only when all holds have been removed can a record resume its normal lifecycle.

The breadth of reasons why records must be managed has increased dramatically. These include regulatory requirements for pharmaceutical products, patient privacy, health and safety, environmental protection, contractual regulations, corporate governance, data protection, defense of inventorship, patents, copyright, trademarks, etc. The range of file types that are considered records has also dramatically increased, but without doubt, the largest category is e-mail.

Pharmaceutical companies are finding they must apply a records management strategy to all of their e-mails. Traditionally companies had general policies whereby all e-mails were disposed of after a period such as 90 days, unless a staff member made a deliberate disposition decision. However, given the distribution list of many e-mails, in practice a significant portion e-mails were saved by at least one employee, often by copying them to their local computer, making a CD, floppy disk or USB stick copy, or even printing them out. Once opposing counsels in legal proceedings determined that there was a good chance that a copy of an e-mail still existed somewhere in a company, even after the defined destruction periods, they started to demand detailed searches, which of course are extremely expensive. Recently I was told by and IT staffer at a major pharmaceutical company that his company spent $10 million searching for and retrieving such e-mails in one case alone!

A few years ago companies were only concerned with backing up e-mails for disaster recovery. Then in a number of highly publicized cases it was discovered that backup tapes containing e-mails had been kept after the designated destruction period. Companies implemented procedures to destroy backup tapes, but now they are being required to recognize that a certain portion of e-mails are in fact corporate records that must be retained for defined, and often long, periods of time. Given the huge volume of e-mails, it is technically impractical to keep all e-mails. Therefore systems are being established which classify e-mails and automatically apply retention policies based on the record type. In other words records management is being applied to e-mail.

In summary, whereas records management was once a back office activity of limited visibility, it has moved up significantly on corporate agendas as companies struggle to comply with a broad range of regulatory, legislative and other requirements. Supporting technologies for records management and archiving are now integrated in an emerging class of enterprise content management applications in a manner that promises to enable the management of records in any format, wherever they are, and by whatever method they were exchanged. However, the shear volume of records, especially coming from e-mail exchange, promises to make comprehensive records management programs extremely challenging, and necessitate the application of risk-benefit analysis to optimize program efficiencies.

Robert Paterson's Weblog: Nothing works like taking it off the table - ePortfolio at York

2005-04-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

When someone says something nice about your daughter in a blog you are bound to blog it yourself! Thanks Robert Paterson!

Robert Paterson's Weblog: Nothing works like taking it off the table - ePortfolio at York

A blog like application: phpMyFAQ - open source FAQ system

2005-04-15T08:28:00.000-04:00

A colleague recommended Dropload as an internet tool to exchange large files. When I clicked on the FAQ for the Dropload site a new window opened up which looked very much like a blog, with a reverse ordered, dated listing, as well as listings of the most recent 5 questions and the 10 most popular. At first I thought it was an innovative use of Blogging software until I noticed that it was powered by phpMyFAQ – which turns out to be an open source FAQ system related to php. Interesting.

phpMyFAQ - open source FAQ system for PHP and MySQL | welcome

Blog censorship survey - What it says about blog 'penetration'

2005-04-14T10:22:00.000-04:00

CNET News had this interesting item today about a survey by web hosting company Hostaway. What I found most interesting was the information about blogs; namely these excerpts:

"However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves"

And this from people who are presumably somewhat web-savy. It is clearly 'early days' for blogs, and expectations as to their benefits in terms of corporate blogs must be tempered. Of course it also makes you wonder what the situation will look like one and five years from now.

Blog censorship gains support | CNET News.com

To Blog Corporately Or Not??

2005-04-06T16:05:00.000-04:00

(Warning: This posting has lots of visible hyperlinks - I did that on purpose since syntax is important to this disucssion).

I’ve been looking a corporate blogs because my employer, Open Text, is considering sponsoring a blogging activity. What I’ve found is that there is quite bit written about corporate or business blogs, but in fact there are not as many corporate blogs as you might expect (using Google as the arbiter for that determination with “corporate blogs” and “business blogs” as search terms).

You can categorize corporate blogs in different ways. For example, is the corporate blog a showcase for senior management, or even just the CEO? A good example would be the GM blog, which highlights mostly Bob Lutz, Vice-Chairman and styling guru. Posts occur every few days and they generate a couple of dozen comments (or more) and a few trackbacks – not bad, but not as much as you might expect for the world’s largest (for the moment at least) automobile maker. Interestingly the site has a “GM Blogs” icon on the right, but I couldn’t see any pointer to them from Fastlane. Noticing that the URL was http://fastlane.gmblogs.com, I tried http://www.fastlane.com and sure enough got a complete listing of the two GM blogs (i.e. there was one other on small block V8s)…
GM: http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/

A far worse example in the same sector is Ford website; they used to be number two so they tried harder, now they’ve slipped so I guess they don’t try as hard… The site name would appear to suggest that this is a Ford blog, but when you go there, its just a blog for the Mustang, and guess what (?), it hasn’t been updated since August last year (!) – they should be embarrassed..
Ford: http://blog.ford.com/

The other kind of blogs are employee-managed blogs; Sun is a really good example (http://blog.sun.com/roller/main.do).

I found these further sub-categorized in a blog posting (http://www.cmomagazine.com/read/030105/blog_future.html):

1. One group of these blogs is tied directly to existing Sun products
2. A second category of employee blogging is not about current products but, among other things, the R&D paths under way at Sun
3. Many of the rest of the employee blogs are on subjects of general interest—albeit to a technical audience

When you got there the site aggregates all of the recent postings, and a blogroll lists them individually. I like it. Posting is restricted to current employees of Sun, but of course it is publicly viewable. There is a ‘Terms of Use’ policy displayed on the site: http://www.sun.com/share/text/termsofuse.html

Much has been written about how employee corporate blogs put a human face on an organization. I particularly liked the comment by Ruud here: http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=22556; namely:

“The project blogs of MS make pretty good reading. You get to know MS from a different side - although you also have to realize they don't represent company policy.

With company blogs I'm not really interested in dialogue. I want an inside view. A human view. A non-marketing blog. Feedback and conversations about the company's products belong in a forum: much better suited for that purpose than the comment section of a blog.

As for tone... Microsoft is starting to get it. Yahoo isn't doing bad. Google is painfully awful. The best one however has to be Ask's Ask Jeeves Blog. Their latest entry is titled "Confessions of a Backyard Orchardist", written by one of their web developers. And when is the last time you heard a senior VP talk in this voice?!”

This conforms with some of my other investigations of example technology Corporate Blogs:
Google: http://www.google.com/googleblog/
Ask Jeeves: http://blog.ask.com/
Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/

Interestingly, Webmail.us: http://www.webmail.us/company-blogs has both kinds of blogs, one for their CEO and a collection from the team (i.e. employee blogs).

Monster is another company with corporate blogs, but they also host a discussion on their website about their blogs.
Blog: http://monster.typepad.com/
Discussion about their Blog: http://discussion.monster.com/articles/aboutblog/

“Integrated richness”, I’m inclined to call it, and definitely the future in my mind. Too often blogs hang out of context of other web content and strategies.

You might think that each of these technology companies would write their own software, or at least host the site themselves using commercially licensed or open source software; but this is not always the case. Note how the Monster site is hosted by TypePad. Another example is eBay (now there’s a company that could host if they wanted to!).
eBay: http://ebaydeveloper.typepad.com/

In a similar vein, consider that when Microsoft decided to support corporate blogs, long after employees started their own blogs on other sites, they decided to host it on MSDN – the Microsoft Development Network. Are blogs really only for geeks? Does MS get it yet?

In looking what else was hosted by Type Pad I founds the CEO Bloggers’ Club: http://prplanet.typepad.com/ceobloggers/. Several dozen CEOs who blog regularly.

Similarly, there is a listing of European Corporate Blogs at another site:
http://www.corporateblogging.info/europe/.

So to review, there are senior management blogs and there are employee blogs; some companies host their own and some use dedicated blog provider sites. Integration with other web content is just beginning, but should grow, and in my opinion will be very beneficial to companies at least. In other posts I’ve also noted that all of the standard rules about getting your website noticed and elevated in rankings apply to weblogs as well. At this point hardly anyone reads my blog here, but I don’t care because I’m using it as a notepad/commentary for myself. But you’d better believe that if Open Text sponsors one or more blog activities it will expect a return on investment (ROI).

So do corporate blogs provide benefit? I found an interesting set of quotations on metrics on the Big Blog Company site in an article by Jackie Danicki here: http://bigblogcompany.net/archives/000469.html. This comment towards the end of the post is particularly telling:

“Not every company needs a blog, but every company needs the support of a network. Some companies make the mistake of thinking that their node is strong enough to circumvent or even topple the network - just think back to AOL's 'walled garden' delusions only a few years ago. They thought that their content could supplant or compete with the entire internet.”

I think there is a spectrum. A classic corporate website is a marketing tool – everything is about the company and its products in the most favorable light. A corporate weblog attached to that is in the form of blogs.mycompany.com or www.mycompany.com/blogs, or if an outside company hosts something like mycompany.typepad.com. The site puts a human face on the corporation, especially if the blogs are by staff. This encourages user participation, but certainly doesn’t ensure it.

It is also a competitive intelligence challenge – I think that deserves a whole other posting as another topic.

At the other end of the spectrum would be personal blogs that have no agenda other than that set by the posters.

There is a middle ground though; here’s an example: Open Text sells software that falls into the category of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). This is an emerging category that is in turn maturing – there is considerable vendor consolidation underway. A new market category needs explaining. Accordingly, our CEO wrote first one, but soon to be three, books on the topic (http://www.opentext.com/corporate/ecm-book.html?ref=othome).

It/they have been very successful. Now the other large, specialty vendors in this space all have ‘ECM’ explained on their sites:

Open Text:
• From a link saying “The market leader in providing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. Find out more.>”
http://www.opentext.com/products/enterprise-content-management/index.html

Documentum:
• From a button saying “What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?”
http://www.documentum.com/solutions/ecm/ecm.htm

FileNET:
• From a “Defining ECM” link: http://www.filenet.com/English/Defining_ECM/index.asp

Hummingbird:
• From a “Enterprise Content Management Solutions” link:
http://www.hummingbird.com/products/enterprise/index.html

We might host a blog on ECM. We could do this on our website, or we could broaden the conversation on a dedicated site open to more than just our employees. And that is an important point: the classic corporate blogs are for staff only (e.g. see Sun’s policy as noted above).

If we’d like to invite others a dedicated ECM site that supports blogs makes more sense. Will others participate? Maybe, if we make the site open and clearly describe that policy of openness, and of course stick to it. Would we accept a blog from an Documentum employee – we’d better or the site looses its validity. Would a Documentum employee want to post (?); well that remains to be seen…

Perhaps, first we could expect others interested in ECM to participate, whether by posting or just monitoring. This might include users of other ECM products as they exchange best practices around ECM in general. It might also include consultants and industry analysts. We’ll see… Is there a need to describe ECM in other forums than corporate web sites (ours or our competitors) – I think so.

A final point. Would having two sites be twice as much work? Not necessarily. First, we have to remember that it is easy to cross-post to more than one weblog at once. One wouldn’t always do this, but quite often one might. Also, two sites can have different but complementary objectives, working synergistically.

Making IT (Information Technology) Work

2005-04-06T14:19:00.000-04:00

Here's an article I recently wrote on strategies for successful implementation of software in the pharmaceutical industry that will be published in a print magazine soon; meanwhile here it is:-

If a system does not benefit you and your colleagues, it will fail

Here’s a typical scenario. A software vendor is coming in to demonstrate its particular product. Staff members either volunteer or are ‘volunteered’ to come and hear the pitch, but they could probably write the script for the first 10 minutes themselves. An earnest sale representative starts to introduce his/her company: “We are the leading vendor of software that will make you more efficient, will save you money, get you to market faster and make sure you comply to the FDA’s regulations.” The audience smiles with fixed smiles and pretend to pay attention – they’ve heard it all before.

After a while, the presentation moves to the demonstration phase, probably given by a sales engineer who really knows the product. At that point the audience divides between those who try to follow along and those who have more information than they want.

In the end, pharmaceutical companies will buy some of the software that they see. Attempts will be made to use most of what they buy, but not all systems will ever be rolled out, and many of those systems that are will meet considerable user resistance, leading to deployment failure.

You could almost say that software and information technology are over-hyped and doomed to fail, but in fact, the right systems for the right purposes can be indispensable. I used a word processor to author this article and I’ll use e-mail to submit it; but I’m old enough to remember the time before such things existed. Things we really use become ‘part of the furniture.’

Just like drugs, most software candidates will fail, but the few successful, ‘blockbuster deployments’ will support everything else. So the problem is very similar: can we predict the blockbuster IT implementations, or at least make better decisions earlier to optimize our chances of success? Yes. In fact, IT project managers have developed some standard approaches to improving the chances of deployment success. Looking at such approaches as a potential end user on the business side, what contributions are going to be asked of you, and more importantly, can you have a role influencing future success while minimizing unproductive use of your time?

Success Criteria
We need to distinguish between software for single individuals working largely alone, departmental software for groups of people and enterprise software that is intended for most or all of an organization. If you are the end user of a single-user system, you are best able to determine if it is going to benefit you. But group software assessment is much harder – approximately in proportion to the number and types of users.

As I’ve described, software vendors usually talk about operational efficiency benefits, which is a message that appeals to management. In fact, experience has shown that end users of group systems are far more concerned about whether a given piece of software makes their job easier, than the overall benefits to their company. If it doesn’t make their jobs easier, they will usually resist efforts to implement it, which means that neither management nor staff will achieve the purported benefits. The more different users from different departments there are, the greater the challenge to successful deployment.

IT project managers are told to make sure that a proposed product will meet the needs of business users – that it will solve a critical business problem – that’s why software vendors now describe their products as solutions to problems rather than extolling the technology.

Validation Pains
Software used in the pharmaceutical industry must be validated if it is applied in critical applications that might put patient health or business continuity at risk. Readers may well be familiar with this approach either as quality managers or as they have seen it is used for control systems, but now it is applied more broadly to include most critical business software. The aim of validation is to ensure that the software and associated systems perform as required and that risks are identified and mitigated.

A first step in validation is to collect and document user requirements to produce a user requirement specification (URS). IT project managers will solicit your input. This information is incredibly important and is used as a basis to select software vendors and products in the early stages and ultimately to test the performance of the implemented system (performance qualification; PQ).

URS documents can vary widely in quality. Sometimes they are clearly the result of asking very different groups for their input and then making a master list with little integration. In worst-case situations, some individual requirements may be contradictory or even mutually exclusive! Thought should be given to better processes that might be enabled or optimal system design as URS documents are reviewed and finalized.

Often users give their input based on past experience and assumptions and do not know of alternatives. If you can, take the time to educate yourself about alternative technologies and other options, most importantly, consider whether a proposed software system will provide incremental benefit to a current process, or possibly a different and better process. Will the design of a proposed system force you to do things differently and if so will that be an improvement? Ideally an organization will recognize the importance of bringing all participating users up-to-speed before embarking on developing a URS.

There’s one warning: Often I see companies using validation expense and complexity as an excuse to maintain the status quo or justify slow roll-outs. User enthusiasm and support rapidly wane. Ultimately an inflexible or infrequently updated but validated system may become invalid as it fails to address evolving business and regulatory requirements. A validated, but unused, system may even encourage non-compliant user behaviors.

Successful Deployment
If you are asked about a new software system, make sure you give it proper consideration early on – if a given product is not going to unambiguously help you and your colleagues, say so. Later on, you’ll likely be asked to participate in a pilot implementation project. If you never really believed in the product then it will be a waste of your time to be trained and participate in the pilot only to report that the product was of no benefit when you suspected that all along.

If a pilot software project goes well, then IT managers will look for ‘power’ or ‘angel’ users to help roll it out to their colleagues. This is a proven approach to optimize user adoption: I am far more likely to listen to a colleague who has found genuine benefit in a product than to an IT manager.

On the other hand, if a given product makes your job easier and your efforts more productive, do you really want to spend a lot of time promoting it to your colleagues? Fortunately, for software deployment, many users enjoy the challenges and different experiences that promoting a new system can give – make sure you’re likely to be one of them before you get heavily into a new software project. Effective IT project managers are trying to address end user resistance and reduce the fear of failure, while looking for visionaries who can see the long-term benefits while accepting the near-term workload.

Executive sponsorship is essential. Nowadays IT project managers will look to get a senior business executive as a sponsor who can help overcome internal hurdles and encourage adoption. Also a steering or oversight committee will be formed and meet on a regular, but not necessarily, frequent basis.

Without such sponsorship, ultimate project success is much less likely, no matter how much enthusiasm there is among potential business end users. Before volunteering valuable time with a proposed software project, make sure the internal assessment and implementation efforts are well run.

Software Configuration and Customization
While sometimes a software product, touted as a “complete solution,” can do everything required to meet your needs, often it cannot. Simple configuration or customization may be required or software products may need to be acquired and integrated to achieve the required functionalities – so called “best-of-breed” systems. There are many options and forces at play.

In mature software sectors, an out-of-the-box product may fit your needs perfectly. Often some simple configuration options serve to optimize the software. But in less mature sectors, and in specialty applications, further customization may be required.

Here we have to strike a balance. Too often, one or more constituencies demand changes in a proposed software product, but will the proposed changes really produce a business benefit? The downside of any software customization is that it costs more money upfront, and continues to cost more money downstream, while making maintenance updates harder or often impossible. People realize this based on past failed projects or because the burden of validating systems increases dramatically with customization. Nowadays astute IT project managers choose to minimize customization to key features that are going to increase user acceptance and business benefit in a very tangible and measurable way.

As a business end user, you are the most important player in software assessment and deployment because in the end, if a system does not benefit you and your colleagues it will fail. You should lever that position to maximize the most effective use of your time while supporting efforts that will bring real benefits to your company.