Portals and KM

IBM Offers Analytics to Help Clients with Workforce Transformation

IBM now offers new Big Data analytics software and services solution to help organizations build and maintain their global workforce. Developed by IBM Research scientists, the software enables businesses to analyze massive amounts of data shared by employees. This can be used to uncover work-related trends that can be used to build and preserve more productive work environments and minimize attrition. One of the potential big benefits of social media is its transparency. It is nice to see capabilities to make good use of this transparency.

With IBM's new workforce analytics services, HR can gain a real-time view into thousands of data points shared by employees via corporate surveys, commonly available employee data (demographics, performance reviews, salary, years of service, etc.), as well as data shared on internal and external social media platforms. As a result, companies can read the pulse of their organization to improve retention, performance and morale. They can also use analytics to understand what drives job performance, or how employees feel about a new company policy or advertising campaign.

While this might be thought of a “big brother,” it is a capability that offers many benefits. The main issue here is trust and that applies regardless of the capabilities a company has to look at its employees.  For example, by collecting information shared by employees such as their skills and career aspirations and pairing this with HR data, companies get a more complete analysis of their workforce, how each person is connected, their influence on each other, how they work together and more. At the same time, companies also gain a more accurate view of their organization while identifying their most critical talent. Decisions will be made, why not provide the decision makers with more accurate information that heresay or content that is filtered by middle management with its own agenda.

According to IBM’s CEO Study of more than 1700 chief executive offers, 71 percent of executives surveyed cited human capital as their greatest source of sustained economic value. It is nice to see this recognition. It is human capital, not physical capital, that drives profits in today’s economy. Some of the new capabilities include the use of text and visual analytics software that can automatically extract and display over one million pieces of anonymous unstructured data derived from employee surveys, including millions of employee comments collected annually through surveys. It also scans Human Resource Information System (HRIS) data broken down by employee demographic. An easy-to-read dashboard then visualizes findings via a sentiment "heat map" of trends broken down by employee segments. This does not target individuals but looks at the workforce as a collected group.

Another capability is a data-driven approach to understanding attrition patterns within a business. The IBM solution applies predictive analytics software to enterprise HR and CRM data, and social data. Then it identifies high-attrition “hot spots” within the company. With this information it determines key drivers and specific actions to retain critical talent. If done right, this actionable data can used to make more effective and satisfied employees. 

SAP and MindTouch Work Together to Enhance Customer Experience

This week I will be looking again at new technolgies. MindTouch now has a partnership with SAP so its offering is used to complement SAP cloud solutions, including SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement, to provide customers self-service with an integrated help system that offers the latest and most relevant product information. A major area of concern for companies with large customer bases is the consistency and quality of the information a company provides.

MindTouch solutions aggregate product data from different information silos to distribute the most relevant, accurate and up-to-date product information to a wide spectrum of users, ranging from employees to customer support agents to end-user customers. For example, it can use content from Facebook, Twitter, CRM agents, websites and other communities to create a comprehensive profile of the customer’s product history. MindTouch then delivers this information through a variety of channels, including call centers, the Web and mobile devices.

This aggregation helps companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs so they are able to provide a delightful service experience while reducing response times and minimizing ticket generation. Service agents are also able to help customers take advantage of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities at the right time.

We have come a long way since I first got started in call center support work. In the 1980s, call center agents said they often learned about their companies latest offers form the customer who called after seeing them on TV or in the newspaper. Providing more effective call center support can offer significant financial benefits. In the late 1990s telecom looked at the ROI on its upgraded call center agent knowledge system. This that used it had three times the cross-sell rate, greatly reduced call escalations to managers, fewer repeat call son the same issues, and other improvements.

 

Now solutions like MindTouch’s offer multi-channel distribution of relevant and up-to-date product and customer information to both agents and customers. It also provides enhanced customer intelligence gleaned from MindTouch tools and analytics, which helps drive marketing, product and customer experience initiatives to better serve customers. This would have seemed like “Star Wars” in the 20^th century. Now we have these capabilities thanks to partnerships like the one with MindTouch and SAP.  

Three Questions About Knowledge Management

I was recently interviewed for the Simplicity 2.0 blog by Sharon Fischer and Kylie Sobel of The Economist Group.  The topic was knowledge management and I liked their questions. The results were posted on May 15 on the blog – see 3 Questions With Bill Ives About Knowledge Management. I will not repeat the post here and encourage to go to their site to see it.

The blog is dedicated to helping finding the right tools you need to simplify the way people work as well as more efficient and simpler work processes. This is an important task in today’s increasing complex work place. The good news is that there are new tools that can simplify work processes but they will only be effective it they are integrated with these processes

Process Aligned Knowledge Management and Other Trends

Here is an article in KM World, The knowledge movement: trends and opportunities, that begins with tag line, “The true success of KM is when it disappears, meaning that KM processes are embedded in workflow.”  That won my attention immediately as I have felt this for the last 20 years. Has it been that long since I first did what we “learned” was knowledge management? I will take it one step further. I have never seen a successful knowledge management effort that was not process aligned. 

This article covers the KM movement in India but it is relevant for anywhere. It covers the initial meeting of the Pune K-Community and the author, Madanmohan Rao, covers 12 trends from the session. I will not go into all of them but mention a few that I especially liked and you can view the rest through the link above.

The first one was “Mature KM initiatives address not only internal collaboration but also external collaboration.” As I have written before this is why I like the term social business used by IBM rather than enterprise 2.0. You need to align both internal and external knowledge efforts rather they are through social media or other means. Many companies have recognized the value of involved customers and external business partners in their business decision, rather it be comprehensive crowd sourcing or simple incremental improvements to a specific product. Madanmohan lists Procter & Gamble and Nike as good examples.

Another trend is “Social media are playing an increasing role as knowledge narrative, and mobile cloud is a key trend in workflow infrastructure.”  I feel social media has transformed KM in a very positive way. The first time I saw a blog I saw it as a new way to do KM.  You collect knowledge in the process of doing work so the issue for KM shifts from collection to curation. Of course mobile is huge and will transform many things from how you purchase products to knowledge capture and sharing.

It was also noted that, “gamification is a growing practice in KM, such as coding contests and competitions for best personal KM (MySite) at Unisys, as well as a best paper contest to showcase thought leadership in a field.” Gaming incentives have been around for some time. They just have more tools and the social aspects have increased their visibility and impact.

Then there was my favorite, “the true success of KM is when it "disappears," meaning that KM processes are embedded in workflow.” The author mentioned that 90 percent of the knowledge contributions in Wipro happen as part of the normal workflow and are not created via additional activities. This is where social media is a great enabler. But it does not put KM professionals out of a job as they will be needed to design and upgrade such workflow tools which is was my introduction to knowledge management in the early 90s.

Take a look at the other trends. It is a useful article.

 

Alfresco Now Offers Cloud-based Open Source Document Management

Alfresco started in 2005 and has been offering open enterprise content management (ECM) to an increasing number of clients to where they are now the largest open source content management company in the world. It contains a full set of content management features such as document and records management, workflow, version control, etc. I recently had a chance to speak with Todd Barr at Alfresco about their latest release: Alfresco Enterprise 4. This is the largest release of their content management platform in their history and contains a number of significant advancements.

In response to the changing market, they have added a cloud version to the existing on-premise offering. There are several significant aspects to this move. The cloud version (sign-up at cloud.alfresco.com) is truly Alfresco in the cloud, with the same user experience and core features as Alfresco Enterprise 4.   More importantly, though, Alfresco Enterprise 4 (on premise) and Alfresco in the cloud will be able to talk to teach other and synch content, based on company policies. There is also cloud-style scalability as they can handle hundreds of millions of documents for single organizations. They have also ungraded their UI to more consistent with rising expectations of consumers on the Web. You can see a sample screen below with a variety of features including recently modified documents, site members, calendar, activities, and more.

There is an emphasis on integration with other productivity apps. This is key today with the capabilities of open APIs. You need to be able to get applications talking with each other as I have covered several times (see for example: Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). The theme of this new release is "cloud connected content" - which is their way of saying that there are many cloud apps out there for file sharing, and there are bunch of enterprise content management platforms that do the back end work. They have to be tied together for real productivity. I would certainly agree.

Another area of significance is the support for iPhones, Android, and iPads. Work is getting increasingly mobile so this is for any business application. This is critical as more mobile devices are now sold than laptops. If you look globally many areas have skipped the laptop era and moved into the computer age through smart phones. You can see a sample iPad screen below.

Alfresco has also brought in a focused set of social features.  They are not trying to become the all inclusive social networking platform but rather Alfresco uses social features to enhance content management, a good idea. For example you can like, comment and change documents. There is an activity stream that is focused around content. While you can manually add updates like Twitter, the bulk of the activity is from auto-generated updates that allow for an ambient awareness of the related content activity within you organization.

You can also do social publishing. You can push content directly to: Flickr, SlideShare, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and even twitter. With the latter you get a tweet that links to the actual content. All of this is done within Alfresco so you do not have to get directly involved with these other tools, saving time and simplifying the task.

The ability for the cloud version to synch with the enterprise version opens up some useful possibilities. You can bring in content from consumer Web apps through the cloud version into the enterprise. They also plan to expand this connection to include the proliferation of mobile apps. Todd actually had me download a version of the cloud app and for it I was able to easily download his presentation and the screen shots you see, taking email out of the equation. I like what I see. I think the Alfresco is making all the right moves for make use of the opportunities that the trio of social, mobile, and cloud offer. 

 

KM World 2012 Call for Speakers Open

I have been attending KM World for some time, including the first three in the original venue in Santa Clara, then San Jose and now Washington DC for third year now. It is great to KM World continuing for the 16^th year. How many other management movements have that longevity?

This year the event will be back at the Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel in Washington DC October 17 – 19 with workshops on the 16^th. I will be there blogging and perhaps even more involved. The call for speakers is now open until March 9^th.  The theme for this year is Knowledge Sharing & Learning: Communication, Collaboration & Innovation. It is also co-located with Enterprise Search Summit Fall, Taxonomy Boot Camp and Sharepoint Symposium. I have always enjoyed this event and look forward to the 2012 version.

Here is a summary of my notes from the 2011 KM World. 

 

Discovering Emerging Patterns in Web Content for Better Business Decisions

My colleague at Darwineco System, Romain Goday, recently provided a nice discussion of the many areas where awareness of what is happening on the web is important. He writes that, “the immense volume of information on the Web in relation to almost any given topic requires the visualization of emerging patterns to understand what is going on.”

Romain goes on to add,” This process is analogous to meteorological forecasting. The Web is, like the data associated with the weather, extremely chaotic. When exploring unstructured data from the Web, the same principles can be applied to present Web events in understandable emerging patterns.”

This is why the Darwin Awareness Engine™ is built on the same mathematical concepts that are used to predict the weather. It lets the content self organize and thus is not subject to the influence of such practices as search optimization.  There are no external algorithms to attempt to game. I will not repeat Romain’s post and encourage you to check it out.

He makes a convincing argument for the need to for awareness in the following seven areas: marketing, PR & brand management, customer support & product management, business development, competitive intelligence, risk management, and HR & training.

These are all good choices. I would add strategic planning, supply chain management, and community management. The latter is growing area within organizations. Being aware of what is being discussed within the community, as well as what is being said on the Web about topics of interest to the community is critical for community success.

The Darwin Awareness Engine is not a replacement to search engines but a complement to them. It provides a new and missing perspective. The Darwin interface provides an intuitive, interactive ScanCloud (patent pending) that reveals correlated themes for contextual content filtering around users’ topics of interest, a BuzzTape that displays themes that have high content acceleration within the last 24 hours, and the ability to save your queries to monitor the evolution of favorite topics. 

 

Tweet Jam 2012: The State of the SharePoint Community

Yesterday I sat in on the Tweet Jam 2012: The State of the SharePoint Community (#SPJam) hosted by Mark Fidelman (harmon.ie), It was sponsored by harmon.ie. There was a group of invited panelists but anyone could participate. The panelists were:

John Anderson (Bamboo Nation)

Ant Clay (21 Apps)

Dave Coleman (SharePointEduTech Ltd)

Bjørn Furuknap (USPJ Academy)

Michael Greth (SharePointCommunity.de)

Richard Harbridge (Allin Consulting)

Scot Hillier (Scot Hillier Technical Solutions, LLC)

Mark Kashman (Microsoft)

Michael Lotter (B&R Business Solutions)

Mark Miller (Fpweb.net)

Jacob Morgan (Chess Media Group)

Joel Oleson (Church of LDS)

Veronique Palmer (Lets Collaborate)

Lee Provoost (Dachis Group)

Eric Riz (Concatenate, Inc)

Bil Simser (FortisAlberta)

Paul J. Swider (RealActivity, LLC)

Dux Raymond Sy (Innovative-e)

Marwin Tarek (SharePoint4Arabs.com)

Jeff Willinger (RightPoint Consulting)

Andrew Woodward (21 apps)

Chandima (Knowledge Cue)

Mark asked a question and everyone responded with the question identifier such as Q1 in the tweet. Here are the first four questions and what I thought were some of the more useful tweets. Since I was copying them real time you do not get the authors unless it was an RT, so apologies to them. Many were from the panelists. I thought that this was one of the better tweet sessions I have attended.

Q1 -- was whether the SharePoint community was still relevant. There were many yes answers and few if any nos. Here are some additional substantive responses beyond just yes.

Q1) One of the great things SP Community brings is the 'innovation in between.' Community makes real platform real and open. #SPJam

Q1: Absolutely! Thousands of new comers every year, the community motivates them to do better. #SPJam

@jacobm Today the community is very effective sharing tech knowledge, now the community needs to emphasize the business use case #SPJAM

@VeroniquePalmer Definitely! I'd be lost with out those willing to share their expertise #spjam

RT @jacobm: Q1 there's a difference between understanding SP as a tool vs understanding how to use it to improve business #spjam

Q2: How do we build a stronger, more effective community (bring in new leaders, speakers, etc.)? (prefix with Q2) #spjam

RT @jacobm: Q2 I think for starters it would be great to have a central community network so we know what's out there, does exist? #spjam

Q2 #SPjam Provide more unique content to the community and focus on topics

Q2 #SPJam There are natural entry points into the community (UG's, writing, forums). The community then decides what/who provides value.

Q2: One approach is specialization by customer vertical, like ShareFest2012 for pharma #SPJam #Q2

#spjam #Q2 Need to break out of our three groups methodology of Dev, Pro, User. Our community should be wider.

Would be great to have a singular location for community resources #SPJam

Q2 #spjam Decentralizing resources. If you have 'one big' resource that aint Microsoft, you get competition, clutter, noise, ego, etcetc.

Q2: Chesborough:"not all the smart people work for you, so you better go find them, connect to them, and build upon what they can do” #SPJam

Q2) #SPJam innovate in numbers and diversity. Embracing crowd sourcing leads to so many unplanned good things.

#spjam Q2 New users become participating members of the community when they see how vibrant it is & how much help ppl give each other here

Q3: What Microsoft/SharePoint developments will affect the community? prefix your (prefix your answer with Q3) #spjam

Q3) #spjam Microsoft's interjection into the community will be an issue. Indirect support of user groups and gatherings is more appropriate.

SPJam #Q3 Trend of integrating SP with other social platforms will widen the community and attract people from different backgrounds

Q3) How about using SP to promote the SP community? #SPJAM

Q3 Microsoft requesting only MVP's speak at bigger events is a community killing move. IMO #SpJam

Q3 Microsoft requesting only MVP's speak at bigger events is a community killing move. IMO #SpJam

Q3 ....having mobile connectivity to #SharePoint is a game changer, Windows 8 Tablet facilitates this! #spjam

@rharbridge Microsoft community awards is on the 'no' list of things to do... We don't need more MVP programs. #SPJAM #Q3 #SPJAMQ3

@rharbridge Microsoft community awards is on the 'no' list of things to do... We don't need more MVP programs. #SPJAM #Q3 #SPJAMQ3

Q4:How can we introduce systematic improvements 2 companies as they progress thru the SharePoint Maturity model? http://t.co/RU0TUUwu #spjam

Q4 requires you view the maturity model first if you haven't seen it already http://t.co/t9wX9B0q #spjam

Q4 #spjam An increased emphasis on training for business users.

Q4 #SPJam - many times it's just making them AWARE that there are places to evolve/mature to - #evangelism and sharing knowledge

Q4 With any maturity model governance and a plan come first before infrastructure and code. Get your house in order upfront. #SPJam

Q4 Love the maturity model, we've adopted as part of our working models with clients, its a hit #SPJam @Sadalit

Q4) Today too much focus on SP infrastructure, More focus on USER ADOPTION is required to make enterprises more successful #SPJAM

#SPJam #Q4 I've never worked in a place that neatly fit into one of the Maturity "phases" - all have had components of several levels

SPJam #Q4 maturity model like any standard -- use it as a point of reference, adopt what makes sense. it is not end all, be all

RT @conniewinch: MT @SPS2010 Wondering out loud if anyone of consequence at @Microsoft is listening to #SPJam comments <YES they are

SPJam Q4 Encourage all users to provide feedback, early and often. Listen to and act on to those users' concerns, early and often

Q4: Think more about staffing & training that will be required earlier in the process, rather than as an afterthought #spjam

understanding resistance is also crucial, community needs to know what these areas are and to help solve #spjam

Q4 A good SharePoint architect/guru/guy/gal knows when *not* to use SharePoint. Listen to them. #SPJam

#SPJam Q4: we have too much academic governance guidelines/articles/whitepapers - we need more case studies/lessons learned/stories

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 3: Analytics + Social

This is the third of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. In my last post I looked at some of the themes and features in the next release. In this post we will look at the new analytics capabilities, as well as the advantages of being able to work both inside and outside the enterprise through the same platform.

In the next major release, Connections will offer an enhanced dashboard to monitor adoption and community vitality.  It will provide key usage indicators from Connections services and page views. The metrics will look at people, participation, and content. For example, you will be able to see such items as  top contributors, number of unique visitors, new members, and much more.

There will be a starting collection of metric reports but then community managers will be able to choose more from numerous options that can be implemented by the system administrator, IBM’s Cognos is providing this capability in the background. If you want to go even deeper you can do custom work within Cognos itself, specifically Report Studio. For example, you can get further data beyond who is participating to what is their geography, department, job function, and other profile attributes specific to your organization. All of this data can help better understand how adoption is working and what needs to be done to further it. You can create custom reports or modify existing ones. You can drill down and do data slicing on time dimension, Connection component dimension or up to 3 different "filters" you can specify about a person's profile (Geo, Role, Dept being the default ones).

What is exciting here is the integration of social capabilities and analytics. For example, a marketing professional can now gain real-time access to data that highlights patterns and consumer sentiment related to marketing trends. They can adjust campaigns on the fly. But what is even more interesting is the ability with a single click, for professionals to react to these new insight by automatically creating a social network, on the fly, bringing together experts across geographical and market intelligence topics to work together and to respond to these insights.

The ability to take insights from consumer facing communities and bring them inside for internal conversation on how to respond shows one the advantages of having a platform that serves both communities inside and outside the organization. Another is the ability to align messages across these communities so employees are in step with customers and their insights. Suzanne said that the market interest in Connections  has shifted from usage dominantly inside the enterprise   to a combined focus of inside and outside the enterprise. I think this is a big advantage over single purpose platforms.

McKinsey has offered data to support this advantage of using social media both inside and outside the enterprise (see: How social technologies are extending the organization). They found extensive benefits for using social software inside the enterprise (e.g. increasing speed to access knowledge, reducing communication costs, and increasing speed to access internal experts) and outside the enterprise (increasing effectiveness of marketing, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing marketing costs). However it was the fully networked organizations, the ones who used social business both inside and outside the enterprise that gained the most. For example, the fully networked organizations had almost twice as such integration of social aspects into the employees day to day work and a greater improvement in benefits.

I see the new capabilities within Connections covered in these three posts to further support this integration of social into business. Companies that adopt these approaches should be the winners going forward.

 

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 2: Overview of Next Release

This is the second of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. After covering Connections 3.0 as I discussed in my last post, we covered aspects of the next major release.

There are three main themes addressed in this next release of Connections: the evolution of the social platform, enhanced communities for teams, and more capabilities for business to consumer use cases. The common underlying theme is the movement from Connections providing a suite of applications to becoming a comprehensive social business platform with tighter integration.

One of the enablers of this tighter integration is the use of Connections with the OpenSocial Foundation,  a standards board that IBM  and other firms such as Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and Jive collaboratively develop or utilize. Here is the list of OpenSocial adopters. The Wikipedia defines the OpenSocial Platform as a “public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based applications.” This effort is designed to give social tools the ability to work together, a wise move.

Looking more closely at the three themes, the social platform evolution is designed to address the need to streamline work, provide anytime, anywhere access, prioritize important content and filter out distractions, and offer a consistent integrated collaboration experience. The enhanced community capabilities for teams add new features to address team use cases. This includes support for the need to share and collaborate across a group of people, to support different groups with different requirements, and to develop and manage shared documents across teams. The business to consumer capabilities accommodates the need to build social communities to enhance loyalty and revenue, to understand what works and gain insight from trends, and support openness and choice. Here is a sample Connections dashboard.

One of the major advances on the social platform evolution is the enhancement of the activity stream. I really applaud this move as I see the activity stream becoming the glue that holds the social enterprise together and make it run efficiently. To this end IBM has made its Connections activity stream open to third party apps. For example, an approval request from an SAP application can be placed into the activity stream and acted upon without leaving the activity stream. This is the type of capability that will truly enable the connected enterprise. Here is a sample activity stream.

IBM has contributed this embedded experience capability into the OpenSocial Foundation so others can use it. So to be more specific you can take an item from a backend system, such as the SAP tracking order I mentioned, and place it into a side bar within a Connections activity stream. There it can be worked on and the results sent back to the backend system without the user actually having to go there. The capability has opened doors for IBM to make stronger connections with other members of Open Social such as Atlassian.

IBM wants the activity stream to become the central workplace and I fully support this concept. You can have both manual updates like Twitter or auto-generated updates such as the SAP example. It is light years ahead of email as a central workplace and you can even bring email and calendar from Exchange or Domino into Connections. You can work on emails within Connections just as you can back-office tasks like SAP. It is becoming truly capable of being the central work place of the enterprise but with a social twist.  You can even give feedback on items through the ”like” feature and follow conversation through hashtags. Because of the embedded files capability you can also display images right in the activity stream unlike in Twitter. Here is sample screen with email inside Connections.

In my next post, which will appear tomorrow, I will look more closely at the analytics that is coming with the next release of Connections

 

IBM Connections Conversations 1: Review of 3.0

This is the first of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took another detailed look. We began by discussing Connections 3.0, released in 2011, that has expanded features to support communities.

This community support includes video and photo sharing and support for idea generation, including Ideation Blogs. It also provides the means to better manage a document library for communities through integration with IBM Enterprise Content Manager and IBM FileNet.  Community moderation is offered and communities can manage their documents within Community Pages. The document library services are provided through Quickr for Websphere Portal. This allows security setting, users, and groups to be synchronized between Quickr and Connections.

Expanded mobile capabilities are provided through IBM’s Social Everywhere mission, which has been a major part of each release since Connections 1. You can upload photos and videos from your phone. Now you can get native apps as well as hybrid ones through  a mobile browser. You can access all of your Connections data from mobile browsers or through free native apps. You can download native apps from the major app stores such as iTunes, Andriod Market, and Blackberry App Worlds.

IBM created a version of Connections specifically for the iPad that takes advantage of the new capabilities that a tablet offers over a smartphone. This includes editing while maintaining the gestural navigation found in both devices.

On the Web facing side, Connections 3.0 continues to support Websphere Portal 7 and 8 beta with better integration with the portal. This enables more robust use of Connections for external communities. With this release you can have community page portlets with blogs and profiles. This gives you the option of using Websphere Portal as your website UI but with Connections capabilities built in. You can also simply use Connections as your Web interface. The Spanish Red Cross is one example of this move. Connections 3.0 is offered through the cloud and on premise.

Connections 3.0.1 can  also be used for compliance purposes. All Connections posts, comments, blogs, etc. are logged instantly and available for eDiscovery.  IBM works with their partner Actiance to provide this capability.  There is real-time content monitoring, a keyword blacklist, and granular policies to map compliance requirements by user type. Alerts can be sent when posts contain blacklisted words. Mail security can be invoked before posting to avoid such things as SEC violations.

This collection represents a solid foundation for the evolution of Connections through the next major release of Connections that I will begin to discuss in the second post in this series which will appear tomorrow.

 

 

The Value of Writing Things Down

Here is an interesting bit of research. Kevin Purdy reports in, The Pen Is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out, that “a Forrester Research survey of business professionals found that 87 percent of them supplement gadgets with paper productivity, and 47 percent thought their personal and company efficiency would improve with better note-taking.” Now I have always valued writing things down. That is why I have posting on this blog daily since May 2004. While much of my blog writing remains electronic, I also use paper a lot. I still do paper to-lists. I prefer to read paper books. While I blog events on my laptop, I take interview notes on paper.

I am a very visual person and also draw and paint so I am attracted to the feel of working with paper. The article another good point as Kevin wrote that, “The role of paper is “changing from information recording and archiving, to a more temporary role of containing transient information,” says Jenny Englert, senior cognitive engineer at Xerox, in summarizing some of the research her firm is doing on the future of work.” I find this also. When I take interview notes on paper, I transfer them to electronic form for both distribution and storage and do not keep the paper. Of course, I am careful to recycle the paper. There is also something to stroke over a completed task on my paper to do list. When it has many crossovers than undone task I usually throw it into the recycle bin and start another.

I am not sure there is a systematic reason for me to choose paper over electronic. Now electronics are required for distribution. However, I used to keep paper calendar and saved them every year. Now my calendar is electronic and I do not tend to go back in time any more. In same ways paper was better since I always had the calendar with me. Now I have to wait to confirm appointments to get back to my laptop. Of course, I should just use the calendar on my iPhone since it is usually with me. The smart phone may replace a number of paper-based tasks but it will be less likely to replace paper note taking. 

Some one should do a systematic study of paper versus electronics. Every communication medium has it strengths and limitations. The cuneiform of Sumer and Akkad used a wooden stylus on wet clay. The tablets were then baked. While lasting for millennia with no degradation, they were not very portable, and transportation was difficult. Pieces of pottery were also widely used for letters, accounts, and even homework, but they were not much good for lengthy texts.

It was not until the development of papyrus that real literary and academic works could easily be recorded and transported. This technology was used by the Greeks and Romans from the 5th century BC until the 8th or 9th century AD. It was superseded by parchment beginning in the 4th century AD. Both of these new media were easier to store and transport than the clay tablets but they were also more susceptible to the fire of invading armies.  Now we have lost hard drives, the need for electric power, and often the need for connectivity to the Web.

 

 

SpringCM Upgrades Mobile Capabilities and Offers Enhanced Support for Salesforce.com

SpringCM provides a cloud based enterprise content management platform. It was founded in 2005 and I have covered it before (see SpringCM Goes Beyond Content Management). I recently spoke with Roger Bottum of SpringCM on their latest moves. SpringCM is set up to put content into the work process. They are also putting content wherever you need it with an enhanced mobile capability that now includes a version specifically designed for the iPad. This is a smart move as mobile enterprise apps are now on the rise with tablets and smart phones passing desktops and laptops in usage. Over 15 million iPads were sold in 2010 and the numbers are increasing. 

Roger said that they did a number of things to optimize SpringCM for the iPad. These features include a simplified screen that still provides the essential components. You can see a sample iPad screen below. They extended the simplification to provide an intuitive interface that does not require any significant training, similar to many consumer Web apps. There is some self-learning material to further support the self-service approach. They also made extensive use of the touch or gesture approach to navigation. The app is built in HTML 5 to take full advantage of mobile features. Finally, the self-service approach is brought to procurement. Once your company as set up things with SpringCM, individuals simply go to the SpringCM Web site and begin using the tool.

Next we covered the new free SpringCM solution to provide enhanced content management capabilities to Salesforce.com. I like their more to integrate with the most prevalent cloud based CRM system. I have written about how the newer systems of engagement need to integrate with the older systems of record for real progress to be made. This is a great example of these complimentary capabilities.

Spring CM began with some research into the needs of Salesforce users. Top issues cited by survey respondents include: 91% - having easier ways to add, access and edit documents within Sales Cloud Accounts, Opportunities and Campaigns; 83% - making documents easier to find and secure with folders; 81% - being able to search across all documents across Accounts and Opportunities using metadata. These request make sense when you look at how Salesforce works by itself.

Roger explained that there are now two main ways to load a document into Saleforce. One is to associate it directly to an account or opportunity. However, then it is not available for access through search across the system.  You can also put a document into the central repository and then it can be accessed through search. However, there are then multiple steps to associate it with a specific account or opportunity. There is also the ability to tag a document in Salsforce but this capability does not support a controlled vocabulary so people can put in any tag they want. This results in a more of folksnomy approach rather than a taxonomy and it makes systematic retrieval more difficult. Here is a sample screen showing Saleforce integration.

The free version of Spring CM for Salesforce takes care of these limitations. When you upload a document it can be automatically associated with an account or opportunity and be searchable at the same time. A controlled vocabulary is offered through drop down lists of possible tags. This allows Salesforce to go beyond CRM capabilities to also become a useful knowledge repository, but one that is part of the workflow and not a separate system. This is a crucial difference because it puts knowledge in the form of documents right in the middle of where work happens.

The content management capabilities in SpringCM can operate in the background. For example, you can click on a Word document in Salesforce that is being managed by SpringCM and it opens directly in Word. Then when you are done it is closed back into Salesforce with any related additional metadata added behind the scenes by SpringCM.

Since both Saleforce and SpringCM are cloud apps this integrated capability can be acquired through the Web in a few minutes, bypassing expensive system integration work. If you want more capabilities such as automated workflow with approvals for contracts, then you can upgrade to the commercial version of SpringCM.  SpringCM can also integrate with other systems of record such as SharePoint in the same way so that SpringCM works behind the scenes to bring greater capabilities to these systems.

Roger also mentioned that the latest integration with Salesforce involves Salesforce Chatter, their micro-blogging tool. Chatter allows for contextual activity streams within Salesforce, as well as standalone capabilities. You can now use the metadata that SpringCM creates to have more focused activity streams within Chatter related to documents. When a document is added or updated, an alert automatically goes out to the right people who are following the related account. Below is a sample screen showing Chatter integration.

These are two strong moves. The first move makes use of the new mobile devices to bring content to where you want it. The second move brings enhanced cloud-based content management capabilities to more traditional systems of record, especially Salesforce with the free version and also SharePoint with their commercial version.  

 

Forrester on Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011

Forrester has release their report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011, by Alan Weintraub with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi. It has the subtitle, EMC, IBM, OpenText, and Oracle Lead, with Microsoft Close Behind. The are doing this thorough enhanced ECM features in SharePoint. Forrester uses 66-criteria to evaluate enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. After those above came, Hyland Software, HP, Xerox, Allen Systems Group (ASG), and Alfresco.

The report notes that organizations are continuing to “grapple with an explosion of unstructured content.” There is also an expansion in the types of content: documents, scanned images, web content, rich media, email, corporate records, blogs, wikis, e-forms, audio, and video. They note that each content type brings its own editing and workflow requirements, and usually their own regulatory and compliance issues, making managing content increasingly complex and expensive. At the same time, information workers still want simple and easy-to-use content management tools.

This complexity means that for many organizations that cannot rely on a single platform even though that is the ideal. These organizations have are moving to a more content-centric approach with different solutions for specific types of content. Forrester now divides ECM products into four types: foundational, business, transactional, and persuasive.

The foundational ECM provides basic content management functionality including library services, basic workflow, search, and records management. The business ECM supports day-to-day workplace experience with compound document management, enterprise rights management, and team collaboration. Transactional ECM supports back-office processes with imaging, document output management, and business process management form the backbone of the transactional content technologies. Finally persuasive ECM supports content addressing external audience behavior through marketing, lead generation, and customer self-service. They note that examples of persuasive ECM include web content management, digital asset management, and document output for customer communications management. This all makes sense to me.

With this diverging field a number of role players are emerging that address specific niches. Add to this mix are open source, industry specific, and cloud solutions and the field is becoming more complex rather than narrowing. Then there is whole issue of making content sharing and content workflow more social. The report goes into great detail on each of the vendors. 

 

DocuTicker Offers Tips on Knowledge Management

Free Pint Limited is a UK-based publisher serving different niches within the global information industry.  It publishes tips, articles, research and resources to help information professionals do their work. One of their groups, DocuTicker provides a professionally-curated collection of gray literature resources delivered as the DocuBase, an enewsletter, and monthly topic-specific DocuTips reports.  Gray literature is defined as “difficult to find, high quality free research from government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, and academic institutions.” My friend Michelle Manafy sent me one of their recent reports on knowledge management.

The report provides a collection of useful articles. The introduction notes that the era of KM more or less parallels that of the Internet. So there has been an increase in the use of new approaches include blogs and, increasingly during the past few years, social networks. It concludes that “The central insight of Knowledge Management is that much information is dormant or unshared, whether it be held in one person’s mind, a library, or a “silo” such as a department of a company or government that does not communicate with its peers.” Opening up this knowledge so it can be used and shared is one of the goals of knowledge management. I can agree with that.

The report contains a series of postings such as Orientations for EU ICT R&D & Innovation beyond 2013: 10 Key Recommendations (2011) and 2010 Best Practices in the Use of Information Technology in State Government. Each listing has a detailed abstract and a link to the complete document.

This is a great resource. Another useful document is Global Operating Models for Managing Knowledge Work (2008) from Deloitte. This paper describes how a structured approach for understanding the link between decision-making (how work is governed) and workflow (how work is organized) can help global businesses structure their organizations effectively for knowledge work. They propose a typology of organization models comprising two dimensions: the degree of workflow across locations and the structure of decision-making responsibilities. Several case studies are provided. 

 

My KM World 2011 Session Notes: Complete Listing

Here is the listing with links of my notes from the 2011 KM World conference. It was a very useful event and a chance to see many friends and meet new people. I am looking forward to next year’s event.

KM World Session Notes: Creating & Applying a Semantic Infrastructure Platform for Knowledge Sharing – Part One

KM World Session Notes: Creating & Applying a Semantic Infrastructure Platform for Knowledge Sharing – Part Two

KM World Session Notes: Jeremiah Owyang - Architecting a Connected Enterprise

KM World Session Notes: Intranet Strategy & Practice

KM World Session Notes: What Knowledge Workers Want

KM World Session Notes: Digital Workplace Trends

KM World Session Notes: Applying Complexity Science to KM

KM World Session Notes: Carla O’Dell on KM in a 2.0 World

KM World Session Notes: Engaging Community With Intranets & Social Media

KM World Session Notes: Employee Voices Transforming KM

KM World Session Notes: Practical Framework for KM Metrics

Enterprise Search Summit Session Notes: Getting the Best ROI From Semantics, Statistical Analysis, and Concept Searching

KM World Session Notes: KM for the Future

KM World Session Notes: Knowledge-Sharing & Enterprise Memory

 

KM World Session Notes: KM for the Future

I have been covering most of my notes from the 2011 KM World on the Darwin blog. I am also proving the keynotes here. Tomorrow I wil porivde a complete listign wiht links of my Km World 2011 notes. I attended the Thursday keynote, KM for the Future: Pioneers’ Perspectives, by Robert H. Buckman, Retired Chairman & CEO - Bulab Holdings, Patrick Lambe, Founder - Straits Knowledge, Dave Snowden, Founder & CSO - Cognitive Edge, Verna Allee, Founder - ValueNet Works and author, Value Networks & the True Nature of Collaboration. Here is the session description.

“Longtime KM practitioners and industry pioneers reflect on the key strategies that are necessary for successful knowledge-sharing and application in any organization. They are interviewed by Lambe to bring out their different perspectives and insights. They will definitely stimulate your thinking about the future of knowledge-sharing in your organization.”

Patrick led the discussion. Dave was in Darwin and on Skype and the others were on stage. I have heard all three of these people many times. Patrick first asked about the key changes in KM and where is it going. Verna said in the early days KM seemed to pull together treads form several fields, organization learning and communities of practice. The business case for knowledge came from intellectual assets and building knowledge assets.

There was an early focus on databases but that has changed. We have moved from top down databases to more diffuse knowledge sharing through social tools and search and the cloud. The focus is less on storage and more on sharing. The evolution of job titles has shifted from CKO to community of practice leader and now to more of a business focus. Also there is less focus on explicit knowledge and more on tacit knowledge sharing. There is more of a focus on collaboration and how people are sharing knowledge. There are also more role based resources and people have multiple roles. We are also rediscovering learning that was part of early KM. We are going full circle to how do people learn.  There is more learning on the job. How can you bring coaching to people at the time they need it? This is a nice summary and I certainly agree with her points.

Bob also said that the early focus was on explicit knowledge and databases. But the largest knowledge base is in the minds of employees. So the challenge is how to bring this tacit knowledge to play at the right points in the organization. You need to accelerate innovation. Communication is social networking. Collaboration is social networking around the needs to company. Innovation is social networking around the needs of the customer. Speed is key to winning.

Bob continued by saying we are now talking about metrics. We need to focus on outcomes more than activities. His grandchildren are using Skype for hours a day. They multi-task. Skype is becoming the kids’ favorite tool for social networking.  He also talked about speech recognition software and how that could be transformative.

Dave said KM is going downhill. There were multiple origins for KM. Most other movements started with a single book and guru. KM did not. With KM there was learning, intellectual capital, decision support, growth of collaborative computing, and more. Lotus Notes was dominant then. KM was strategic in the 90s. Now SharePoint has replaced Notes and it is just file management. KM is now part of IT and less strategic. However, the need for KM is still here.

People are realizing that tacit knowledge transfer is key. Best practices are really past practices. The US Army realized this and focuses on direct person-to-person collaboration and not fixed practices. Small units of information have greater flexibility. Distributed cognition is more effective. There is also a need for decision makers to be in direct contact with the data without someone in between.

Patrick said that Dave seems to imply the KM is staking claims in other areas such as HR, IT and organizational design. Patrick asked if this is over reaching Dave said no. These were the original goals of KM but other movements are picking it up. KM got distracted by managing content.

Patrick asked if KM has a better chance now. Bob said somehow this movement got labeled knowledge management by some consultants. As a result we got focused on managing knowledge and you cannot do this. Bob tried using term knowledge management and it got a turn off in his firm. When he shifted to using the term ‘knowledge sharing” people responded well. His organization doubled its speed of innovation.  We need to focus on how to move from command and control to a network organization to respond to customers quicker. We are not going to beat the competition by managing the databases.

Bob said that you need to help your managers move from be controlling to being leaders in a networked organization. Dave said the big switch in IT is from applications to architectures. If you have the right architecture then collaboration can occur. If you have an application focus then collaboration will be blocked.

Verna built on what Dave said. She said we are starting to realize the potential to for collaboration. Value networks priced the need flexibility to come beyond the tangible to model role based collaboration.  Patrick said we are moving beyond metrics to modeling. Verna said you can take the narrative from the past and present and project into the future to try out scenarios. Patrick asked who does the modeling and Verna said it is the people who do they work, not outside experts. It needs to be simple enough so the people doing the work can do the modeling.

Dave commented on the dangers of modeling as is can bean abstraction away from reality. After a group discussion, Verna said if we become more skilled at addressing our informal needs, there will be a healthier business environment. This fits with Bob’s comments on knowledge sharing. Dave was asked if KM was more like American football or association football. He said that KM has been like US football and it should be more like rugby. If play US football you always have to go forward and you can change the team. With UK football you can go forward or backward and the team has to stay the same so there is more coherence. 

Bob said we start by sharing more trivial content to establish a comfortable level. Then they become more comfortable with sharing serious stuff. He added that is a networked world be prepared to support chaos. You need to be able to get meaning form the chaos. 

 

Prescient Releases the Social Intranet Study

Prescient Digital Media will be officially releasing their report on the Social Intranet Study at the Intranet Global Forum conference in NYC, Nov 9-10. I had a chance to look at a preliminary copy and there are some interesting findings. The study examines social media use on corporate intranets, and the magnitude, use and popularity of social media by employees and executives. It is based on a survey conducted between late May and early June 2011 by Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media, in association with the IABC Research Foundation. The findings indicate that there is rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

There were over 1,401 global participants in small, medium and large organizations in all types of industries. The pool had 43% of organizations based in the United States and 28% in Canada with the rest evenly distributed elsewhere.  While the sizes of organizations varied, they all had intranet access. Most of these were mature intranets with only 7% implemented in the past year and 31% of the intranets were over 10 years old.

Blogs were the most common 2.0 or social media tool as 75% have intranet blogs; 26% have deployed blogs enterprise wide; only 4% have no plans or interest in deploying blogs. Next were discussion forums as 65% have intranet discussion forums; 26% had enterprise wide use; 7% have no plans or interest.  Other tools followed with IM at 63% on the intranet, wikis at 61%, RSS at 56%, tagging at 51%, social networking at 43%, microblogging at 42%, podcasts at 39%, content ratings at 29%, social bookmarking at 23%, and mashups at 10%. Remember these numbers refer to use through the enterprise intranet, not use on the Web.

Portal Solutions (e.g. SharePoint or WebSphere) are the most popular technology platforms at 34%, while 27% of intranets are powered by Content Management Systems (e.g. Sitecore or Ektron). Other platforms include: 20% are custom built solutions, 14% use a hybrid solution, and 4% use a social media platform.  Despite this pervasive use there is little expenditure involved for most as only 28% have spent $100,000 or more and 38% have spent less than $10,000.

The response to social media tools is mixed so far with 28% of executives rate their overall satisfaction as good or very good and 35% rate these tools as poor or very poor. Similar number hold for employees with 28% rating their overall satisfaction as good or very good and 31% rate these tools as poor or very poor. I think there may be a correlation between expenditure and satisfaction. If you are investing very little in the effort you are likely just putting something up to see if works. The ‘build it and they will come approach” will most likely lead to poor returns.  As I have written a number of times, social media needs to be integrated into work process to really be successful (see for example, Putting Social Media to Work)

This is a great study with 45 pages of rich data beyond what I provided in this summary. I recommend you take a look. 

 

Harmon.ie Announces the Top 25 Most Influential SharePoint Thought Leaders

Harmonie offers a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools.  These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. I have covered them on the AppGap (see Harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption).

Yesterday they released their list of the Top 25 Most Influential SharePoint Thought Leaders in Social Business Today. This is timely as the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint Conference runs October 3 - 6 in Anaheim.

Mark Fidelman of hamon.ie notes in his blog post that “since the demand to make SharePoint more social has increased tremendously over the past 12 months, our goal for the list was to identify the SharePoint thought leaders providing the best guidance for companies looking to increase their social and collaboration capabilities.” I am pleased and honored to be on this list.

I have been talking with a number of the software providers in the social business space.  It seems that many of them have recognized that SharePoint has a dominant and secure position in many organizations for document management. Many organizations have already invested a lot in their SharePoint implementation and will not let go of it lightly.

So these social business software providers are deciding not to compete with SharePoint but to acknowledge its presence as the document system of record. They are positioning themselves as the tool to make SharePoint more social. They are positioning themselves as an engagement layer that sits in front of SharePoint.

In my view SharePoint, and other document management systems, should be treated like other enterprise applications of record in the same way as an ERP or CRM system is being treated. At least that is how I would suggest that it be treated for firms that have already invested heavily in SharePoint or similar tools. The social tools then make these enterprise applications of record more social and increase engagement in their use. This is the goal of harmon.ie with its email integration capabilities, as I understand. I think this is a smart move. Of course, if there is no embeded document management system the field is wide open for many options.

Mark Fidelman’s post gives the details on the methodology they used to determine the list.  I think they are doing a great service with this effort. Despite being biased since I am on the list, I think it raises awareness that SharePoint can be made more social and that it should be made more social to increase engagement. I would only add that the other enterprise applications should be treated in the same way and I am encouraged to see many of vendors moving in this direction. Social tools need to be interagted into work processes to realize their potential and to avoid beconming isolated chat (see Putting Social Media to Work)

I will add in closing that we have designed the Darwin Awareness Engine™ so that it also integrates with SharePoint out of the box to provide visualizations of the conversations that are going on within SharePoint.  It can enable organizations to listen to the voice of the employee to use the term from Forrester’s Leslie Owens. It can also look at the conversations within most of the other social software tools, as well as those on the Web. You can find more about it at our web site and I will be writing more about our SharePoint connection next week. 

 

My Notes: Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011

Last week I attended Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011 and was pleased, but not surprised, to find it to be a great event. Forrester notes that in five years, almost half of US workers, about 63 million people, will be working virtually. I am already one of them. This will change everything in workplace IT support from designing workplace information strategies for collaboration, to delivering content experiences to people across channels, to engaging the next-generation workforce to serve customers better.

The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” I covered seven sessions across three different blogs so this post provides a listing of all of them in order of appearance. I will add one more based on my interview with Leslie Owens as soon as I can finish it.

Cisco on Enabling the New Collaborative Workspace

Driving Business Value Through Enterprise Social Networking

Should You Move Your Email To The Cloud?

The Natural Synergy of Mobile and Collaboration

Forrester's Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee

Creating Global Knowledge Sharing Networks at ConocoPhillips

Forrester on Benchmarking Your Mobile Readiness

 

SpringCM Moves Beyond Content Management

SpringCM Cloud provides an robust enterprise content management platform. It was founded in 2005 by some industry veterans who wanted to go beyond traditional on-premise content management. They have done this and more as I learned when I recently spoke with CEO Christopher Junker and Dick Dosen about their new capabilities.

The cloud is transforming many software apps. First, of all it eliminates the need for end users to deal with software.  You just use it.  This makes ii way faster and cheaper to get started.  If the software is intuitive then you can also bypass IT. This possibility were brought to the attention of the business user through the consumer apps they have grown accustomed to. Christopher referred to this as the consumerization of IT and it has far reaching effects.

SpringCM is built to take advantage of all of these transformative capabilities within cloud applications. It is designed so the average business user can create process aligned content management use cases. It is these process aligned content management apps that allow Spring CM to go beyond traditional content management in function, as well as ease of implementation.

Spring CM refers to this capability as dynamic adaptive case management. It is a good term as it allows customers to drive more consistent content management processes, enhance team productivity and increase management visibility by giving them the ability to more efficiently and quickly organize people, tasks and content around document-intensive, collaborative business processes. That is a lot of words but basically it allows you to build the content components of work support around the way you work and avoid confirming to the limitations of a software package. SpringCM also provides templates to ease the task of creating custom work support tools. Below you can see a sample case management dashboard.

To facilitate the use of the case management approach, SpringCM has implemented a checklist model.  They did some research on the best approach and I agree with their selection. It does not attempt to dumb down the job. Checklists are used by experts. They do not tell you how to do things but help you remember all the things that need to be done.  Here is a sample checklist in use.

They also added an activity stream. I think this is a transformative feature for content management and collaboration tools as you can easily see what is going on in an area of interest. There are auto-generated updates based on user activity and you can also manually add updates Twitter-style. Below is a sample checklist with a related activity stream.

Since it a Web-based API you can create you own interface so users are not aware they are operating within SpringCM. This places your content in a better context for your specific work tasks. You can also integrate with other applications such as SharePoint and Salesforce.com.  For example, this allows you to overcome some of the limitations of SharePoint while still using your investment in it. You can place content from SharePoint within SpringCM for more functionality and then put it back into SharePoint once your work is done.

SpringCM has also invested in support for mobile apps including iPad compatibility.  This enables organizations to put content to work for executives and knowledge workers on the go so they can get work done where and when it needs to be. Mobile content management will only increase over the next few years. Below is a sample iPad interface.

I really like what they are doing and wish I had these capabilities when I was hand building content intense process aligned applications in the 1990s.  They need a new term as Spring M goes way beyond what we think of as content management to enable some of the visions within enterprise 2.0.

 

 

Promoting Continuous Learning at Autodesk Through Smart Content Management

In February I wrote about an interesting report Making Greater Use of Smart Content in the Enterprise by Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, and Mary LaPlante. It covers XML applications that have long proven value with reusable componentized content. Here is an interesting case that came out of that effort, Managing Content for Continuous Learning at Autodesk.

Autodesk, Inc., is a design software and services company and its products address all phases of the design processes for architects and designers. These professional often need to go beyond standard practices to complete their projects. They share their practical tips and best practices through online communities. As the case notes, these “communities are the long tail of the Autodesk ecosystem, where the Internet combines the insights from many small groups into a major web presence.” At the same time the professionals like to get their content in short chucks relevant to the context of their work.  While Autodesk has long maintained a comprehensive set o manuals, it now needed to address the changing expectations.

First, they had already started modularizing their technical manuals. They now needed to build on this effort, to improve the accessed to this content.  They also needed to better leverage the content generated through online communities by capturing and curating the contributions of innovative customers.

They set up an enhanced delivery capability by adding MindTouch to their content infrastructure. I have covered MindTouch’s move into this space (see MindTouch 2010 Provides Intelligent Product and Services Documentation). MindTounch 2010 has enhanced three major areas to support this major use case. It now provides new capabilities for authoring, discovery, and curation of strategic content.

As the report notes, “a social web platform supports “community pages” for collecting and sharing user­generated content on a wide variety of topics. Once authenticated by the site, both Autodesk customers and support engineers from across the ecosystem can publish “tips and tricks” recommendations, blog on new topics, comment on posts, reference code snippets, or add links to topics covered elsewhere on the web.” Here is the answer. 

Moreover, Autodesk can track user activity across their site and the communities to determine trending topics and the emerging needs. Content curators perform this role. This tracking helps plan future releases. See yesterday’s post on The Rising Need for Content Curation Skills and Capabilities.

Since MindTouch optimizes online documentation for Web search, Autodesk now can cross sell through the educational materials, based on participants’ interest.  This turns a purely cost center activity into revenue generating one. Smart move. There is much more in the report.

 

 

Moving to a Multi-Vendor Approach to Handling Today’s More Complex Content Management Requirements.

Here is an interesting report I received from Forrester, Plan your ECM Strategy For Business, Persuasive, Transactional, And Foundational Needs by Stephen Powers and Alan Weintraub with Matthew Brown and Anjali Yakkundi. They note that enterprises are now struggling under increasing volumes of varying types of content (aka multi-channel information overload).

In the past firms have taken a product-specific approach to their enterprise content management (ECM) strategies: “document management for office docs, web content management for online content, records management for corporate records, and so on.” Now the reports argues when “developing a content strategy, they should consider persuasive, transactional, and foundational content functionality to support specific business use cases.”  They suggest taking a content centric approach rather than a tool centric approach to handle this complexity. This makes sense to me.

They discuss three types of content: transactional, business, and persuasive. Transactional content often originates outside the enterprise from customers and partners. It often relies on complex workflows or business process management to drive processes. Formats include scanned e-forms, faxes, print streams from back-office applications, and electronic records.

Business content starts within the enterprise and is part of workers daily tasks. Business content includes office documents, presentations, spreadsheets, e-forms, web content, and mobile content. Persuasive content may originate from many sources. There are many use cases including: “multichannel marketing, lead generation, eCommerce, customer self-service, in-store kiosks, and partner extranets.” Here tools such as web content management come into play.

The authors provide a useful framework that shows how foundational issues go across these three content types. They the look at how the different tool types fit into this matrix. They conclude that you need to remain flexible as you handle the increasing complexity of content types today. I found it a useful way to think beyond traditional approaches to content management that were operating when I helped implement these systems a few years back. 

 

Looking at Middle Management’s Role in Business Software Decisions

Here is a report that asks an interesting quesion. In December 2010, inlevel conducted a research on "Middle Management as Business Software Influencer."  They start with an interesting point. Software tended to be sold to senior business management and CIOs. However, because of increased access to the Web, greater use of cloud applications and simpler applications, a growing number of software purchases do not require senior level support nor need to involve IT.  So this study looked at the current role of middle managers in software purchases. They gathered responses from 210 middle managers across a variety of industries in the US.

The research found that 42% of middle managers surveyed said they are actively engaged in the enterprise software selection process and 41% said no one a cared about their views.  They want to talk with vendors about their offerings.  Asked to list obstacles to their involvement, 24% expect that IT people will be against their software ideas, 23% expect senior management to oppose them, 22% said they need a sold business case and 14% said it is hard find information about the software. Only 21% did not see any obstacles and expect that their software suggestions will be accepted. 

Their advice to vendors is enhance the role that middle managers play in the selection process by providing clear descriptions of the functions of their products, more training materials directed at business professional and make the relationship the software and their more explicit.

How do they get information on software now? The respondents said that 24% comes from industry news, 20% from their IT department, 12% from friends, 2% from social media. They largest category of responses came from the 38% who said they did not have such information.

In a related but different question, when asked about where they go to get software information, 52% said they search on the Web, 33% said they talk to their IT department, 16% said they talk directly to vendors, and 21% said they were not interested.

In another related question about their preferred ways to gather information from vendors, the largest category was the 38% who said they do not bother because they do not have purchasing authority. The next in line at about 20% each was phone, email and reading web sites. Only 4% said that never ask vendors because they do not trust them.

This tells me that that middle mangers are somewhat involved in software decisions and some would like to be more involvd and others do not seem to care.  Without a baseline from prior years, it is hard to tell if this role is increasing due to the changing market factors.  I do know that many enterprise 2.0 software firms are trying the ╥seed and expand╙ strategy. They make a very low entry point and then hope to grow the numbers. A future study would benefit from also looking at the price of software purchases as a variable.  I do think they are asking an interesting question and would like to see more work here.

 

BroadVision Offers a “Social Business Cloud” Through its Enterprise 2.0 Platform - Clearvale

Since its inception in 1993, at the start of the first wave of internet-based businesses, BroadVision has gone through a series of transitions. It began by helping companies do business on the Web and in the late 90s they were one of the firms to bring personalization to ecommerce. The firm survived the dotcom bust of the early 2000s but came out smaller. I recently spoke with their CMO, Giovanni Rodriguez, to get an update on their current efforts.

CEO, Pehong Chenwisely decided to bet on the viability of the native cloud. BroadVision then built a cloud based collaboration platform to provide social networking for the enterprise. Their offering, sometimes referred to as “Ning for the enterprise”, is built with the goal of not requiring heavy involvement from enterprise IT to set up. A future goal is to create a “network of networks”, where companies and individuals can discover new business partners, providers, and clients through transparency across networks.

Clearvale is the name for their collaboration platform and it was launched in May 2010. It contains many of the features found within the enterprise 2.0 concept such as communities, profile pages, blogs, wikis, networks, forums, RSS, and twitter integration, whichcan be customized through drag and drop editing. Here is a sample screen:

In November, they introduced Clearvale PaasPort, which enables companies to host their own installation of the Clearvale enterprise social networking solution. PaasPort hosts can sell Clearvale solutions, as well as premium services, to their own customers. Clearvale PaasPort is a platform-as-a-service solution provided to customers, who can deliver BroadVision Clearvale as part of a large package of services, or as a more specialized solution. One of the initial clients for this service is Softbank Telecom in Japan, which will provide integrated email, IM and voice through this capability. This unified communication will occur through a social network allowing you to store and save voice messages. I see great potential here.

Another major aspect of the new BroadVision Clearvale platform that I especially like is MyStreams, a personalized data stream management and filtering system. MyStreams integrates a wide variety of data streams into one easy-to-use interface. While this includes data from within the Clearvale network -- such as updates to wikis, blogs and forums -- it is also built to include external data streams, such as email, voicemail, social media, IM, as well as streams from consumer social networks. All of these data streams are integrated into MyStreams and can be accessed and managed without ever having to exit Clearvale. MyStreams also allows users to easily share specific data with other users. It generates an RSS feed and allows for filtering along with aggregation. Below is a sample screen:

Overcoming content silos is one of the necessary efforts with enterprise 2.0. We run the risk of creating new silos with unconnected wikis, blogs, forums, etc. A number of firms are looking at micro-blogging status updates that run across applications as one way to avoid this problem. MyStreams goes beyond basic micro-blogging and serves this cross-application aggregation function along with other capabilities.

I like these steps as they extend current capabilities in cross channel communication integration and exploit some of the potential that comes with making these channels; including voice, into data objects. 

 

At KM World 2010 Today: The Darwin Awareness Engine™ Receives 2010 KM Promise Award

I am very pleased to announce that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ won the 2010 KM Promise Award today at KM World.  It is a great honor. Here is the description of the award from the KM World site.

“Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of these companies will deliver on this promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering this promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are imbedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.”

We are in great company. Last year’s winner was Inmagic and the 2008 winner was Attivio.  Both are great companies that I have covered several times (for most recent see Inmagic Presto 3.5 Broadens Its Collaboration Capabilities and Attivio Aligns with Traction and Releases New Features). Here is a conversation I had this year with Probstein, Attivio CTO.

Here is a video of the award presentation made by Kurt Kragh Serenson of IntraTeam. 

 

KM World is a great event that is currently in its 14ht year. I remember going to the first three and many since then. I am now covering a number of this year’s sessions on this blog.  Here is a complete listing of my KM World 2009 Session Notes.

We have recently released a series of themed Darwin Editions™ powered by the Awareness Engine™ that focus on specific topics to better demonstrate its capabilities and as a service to our readers. These can each be accessed at no cost. You only have to go through a brief registration process and we promise you that no sales person will contact you as a result.  

Here are links to a series of posts going into more detail on the first three Darwin Editions and how to use them:

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Part One - Explanation and Instructions

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: General News

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media on the Web

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Social Media in the Enterprise

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Edition Series: Energy Sector News

We hope that you find these Darwin Editions useful and will certainly appreciate any feedback. Also look at Twortex, our business partner which offers a Twitter search tool using the Darwin Awareness Engine. Please contact us at [email protected]. We will also be happy to discussion the various business options for a fully functional Darwin edition with all administration rights.  You can create your own Darwin Editions on the topics of your choice with the target content of your selection.  There are both individual and enterprise options. 

 

 

KM World and Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Designing Social Search in the Enterprise

Here is the first in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. I attended the workshop, Designing Social Search in the Enterprise. It was led by Thomas Vander Wal, Principal - InfoCloud Solutions, Inc, someone I have been following on Twitter for some time.  So I was very interested in both the topic and the presenter. Please excuse the typos as these notes were done realtime with a quick edit. Here is the session description.

“One of the biggest problem on today's websites and intranets is findability. Even as large companies have scaled up their investment in search and intranet development, one key ingredient is missing: the people. People are social, and people leverage social strategies to find information all the time-at work, with colleagues-to solve real problems. How do we add this social element into enterprise search systems? How do we know what to look for in search tools, services to add into the mix, and or design elements that will make an impact?

Our experienced designer frames these relevant models of social search and walks though how to think through the problems to get to a more optimal solution. This will also include the potential benefits as well as the pitfalls that come along with some popular solutions (as well as how to counteract those pitfalls). You will learn to think and design through the considerations to augment findability with social search within the enterprise. He will discuss the tools necessary to understand search design, the benefits of social search, and how to work though real world problem sets interactively in the session, so those in the session will come away with the ability to apply what is learned to their work environment.”

Thomas began by saying that he avoids fuzzy terms such as community, expert, collaboration, and trust, as they are hard to define.  So I guess I will not talk about building trust within communities to enable collaboration J.  I certainly agree that these terms can lead you down blind alleys. A Google search on any of the tem shows the broad range of interpretation they can generate. I especially agree about the term expert. I generally feel that anyone who calls themselves an expert, has indicated that they are not one.  

Enterprise search is problematic. It was an issue before social tools and has the potential to only get worse now with the new silos brought by some social tools. People cannot find stuff that they believe exists.  One reason is that search often lacks the feedback element. Thomas mentioned two researchers, Marti Hearst and Bynn Evans, that have worked in social search. Thomas said he used some of their framing in his session. He now went through several types of social search.

There are several types of social search – friend/colleague filtered social search. Yahoo MyWeb 2 was an example but it is no longer available. There is a problem with this approach since personal networks may be narrow.

Social ranking is another type of social search. Digg, StumbleUpon and delicious are examples. The problem is that segmentation can be difficult.

Multi-person and collaborative search is a third example. System that support shared screens, such as Google Wave, is an example.  The problem is that tools are limited. Google Wave is another tool that is no longer supported.

A fourth example is collective search such as Google News and Twitter trends. It can be used for exploratory search but the crowd is anonymous and cannot be filtered.  There are also issues around shared vocabulary. One issue that Thomas found is fear of embarrassment because you are exposing yourself by using it.

Another example is massive scale Q&A tools such as Quora. It can be useful for handling difficult search problems but the problem now is that tools are limited, especially inside the enterprise.

Thomas discussed ways to fill in the gaps in social search. He offered four types of InfoClouds. Personal InfoClouds addresse the intranet. He used this concept to cover attracting things to your screen so they are available as you work.  Then Thomas covered the concept of a Global InfoCloud, a larger set, but still within the enterprise. Then the External InfoCloud goes outside the enterprise. The Local InfoCloud completes coverage of the gaps. Information is often structured differently in specific locations such as a packy in Mass and party store in Michigan as a place to buy beer.  The Local InfoCoud can have many components such as colleagues, social software, and portals.

As you use the other InfoClouds, you place content in your personal InfoCloud. Looking back at my days within a large consulting firm I can see how these work together. My hard drive was my personal InfoCloud.  I looked to the other three for stuff to put in it, but I largely relied on personally stored content. The trouble was it was hard to search, as well as organize.

Thomas now looked at several tools, beginning with SocialCast.  It is an enterprise micro-blogging tool that I have covered a bit (see Socialcast Adds Sharepoint and Outlook Integration, New Features, and Enhanced Metrics). They have a new tool called Reach. It drops micro-blogging streams within work tools. I like this as aligning social tools with work processes is generally a critical success factor. You can also save conversations so enterprise search can find them, another good idea.

System One is another tool. It has a semantic engine that structures the information as you type. It can fill in the gaps and bring up related information. You can search as you work, It also finds relevant people based on your content.  Your entire document becomes you entire search engine. As you work, it searches and brings things up for your use.

The System One site says: “System One Radar tracks global information sources according to the context of your most important projects. Based on broadly definable Issue Portfolios it analyzes 80.000 news sources as well as Social Media, fully automated and in real-time, showing trends, backgrounds, relations, opportunities and risks. All visualized in a way that allows insight at a glance.” They have several tools and this is describing a Web version.

They also have a collaboration version. Here is its description: “System One Collaboration recombines the essentials of social software and semantic search in a highly integrated team productivity suite. Things that are being worked on are automatically related to all relevant resources within your company and beyond. System One Collaboration is browser based, works on mobile devices as well as on paper and is available as hosted or on-premise solution.”

James Robertson commented that these tools seem to attempting to make search support pervasive and come to your work. Thomas said that the trend is bringing these components to your existing tools so you do not have to learn new systems and they fit within your existing work processes.

Knowledge Plaza started as a social search engine and they added features over time (see my early review: Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Platform from Knowledge Plaza). Thomas said he helped simplify their interface. It is a Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. It was developed by the Belgium based firm, Whatever. Nice name. There are facets, and you can search through other’s eyes.  You can easily package the results and share them but it does not easily integrate into enterprise search engines.

Thomas next covered reconfiguring search with social relevance. He began with Yahoo MyWeb2 which was a bookmarking tool like delicious. You could search on others bookmarks. Thomas found it very useful as people he knew where curating for him by their own curation activities. A down side was that he could not contextualize the people, especially when they discuss off topic topics.  Tagging could help here if people have the discipline to use tags. That is not a given. Some tools have auto-tagging that can help with this issue. Yahoo no longer seems to support MyWeb2. One reason is that Yahoo bought delicious.

Connectbeam is another example that unfortunately is not still around. I liked them (see Integrating Social Networking and Social Bookmarking with Enterprise Applications: Connectbeam). They believed that business networking begins around the sharing of ideas and information so they tightly integrated social bookmarking into their social networking platform. They also introduced the Connectbeam web services Application Programming Interface (API) that enables you to add full functionality of Connectbeam social software into your existing IT applications. Perhaps they were a bit ahead of their time.

Thomas next covered search across walled gardens. Enterprises create different levels of openness.  Search needs to take this into consideration and honor the layers of accessibility.  

Future search and follow results was the next topic. PubSub was an example of this but it is no longer around. You could get alerts on topics of interest for advanced business intelligence. Perhaps it was another company ahead of its time. 

Thomas next discussed the concept of social comfort. There are three components: social comfort with others, social comfort with tools (e.g. How far is the reach of my actions?) and social comfort with subject matter (where can I talk about certain topics?). These are issues to resolve as you use social tools. 

There was a lot of useful information and context in the session. Thomas has a depth of experience here. It seems that this is still a field that is a 'work in progress." Many of the initial tools are not around any more. Others are still being refined. One experimental tool in this space that I like is IBM Social Lens (see IBM’s Social Lens Provides Smart Content Filter).  I look forward to seeing what progress is conveyed in next year's session.

 

 

IBM’s Social Lens Provides Smart Content Filter

Here is a good idea and smart approach to content overload. In 2008 there was more content produced through the Web than the entire previous years. Then it was repeated again in 2009.  Search is a partial solution but Google’s approach was created before the huge explosion of content through social media and is subject to SEO manipulation.  We need to go beyond simply search to filter down content to find what interest us.

IBM has taken a novel approach through its experimental application, Social Lens. I recently attended a media session at IBM and got a demo of the Social Lens application among others (see 2010 Update on IBM Social Software Efforts: Part Two). The Center for Social Software has created and number of interesting apps. I recently followed up with Michael Muller and Elizabeth Daly for a more in-depth discuss of Social Lens.

Social Lens lets the user set the stage and then provides automated support that the user can continue to refine.  To set a lens, users first define people, resources, and communities that form their core interest area.  The application is currently operating with the IBM Lotus Connections environment but it appears that the concept could be applied in other contexts.  Here is a list of people.

Now that the user has set the foundation, Social Lens builds on this start by suggesting other people, resources, and communities that related to the original picks. These auto-generated selections form the second tier of content sources. The user can either promote them into the primary core of content sources or drop them altogether.  Here is a list of initial communities with an additional one.

Content from the primary core has a slightly higher ranking if the user decides to the narrow the lens. You can to cast a wide net and include all the selected sources or narrow down the focus to only get content from the primary core group.  You can also continue to fine tune the primary and secondary content sources.  Here is a sample social lens.

Content is delivered through a time ordered activity stream that shows the new stuff coming out of the selected group. You can see a sample activity stream below.

This is an experimental application and IBM has conducted research on its effectiveness. They compared the perceived “interestingness” of content served up through Social Lens with content from other sources, one that is a personalized filter and the other is a general one.  Social Lens scored higher on both interestingness and also on the “relatedness” of the second-tier auto-generated content.  It also generated a large amount of useful content that the user might not have been seen otherwise.

I really like what they are doing here. It offers the user a role and then makes use of what a computer can do best to amplify the user’s selections. Here is another description that appeared in the Technology Review. 

 

Traction Team Page 5.1 Integrates Project Management Capabilities

I have been covering Traction TeamPage for several years (for ex. Traction Announces New Integrated Micro-blogging and Solid Revenue Growth for 2008) and continue to respect their accomplishments. I recently spoke with Greg Lloyd about the newest release, Traction TeamPage 5.1.

Now that the enterprise 2.0 market is starting to mature a bit, I think one of the success factors for platforms will be the ability to align with business processes. I observed this with knowledge management. The only successful KM efforts that I saw were business process aligned. This is exactly the direction that Traction is taking with its last two releases. Now Traction is always been about supporting business, but it is now even more explicit with its current integration of project management capabilities.

At the beginning of the year they released TeamPage 5.0 with the new Proteus skin that provides faster performance and a cleaner interface using Google Web Toolkit user interface technology New features then were the inclusion of profiles, Twitter-style status updates, tag clouds,  and enhanced metrics. Now with the 5.1 Release they are adding action tracking, calendaring, milestones, and projects using the term “observable work.”

The action tracking concept is not old school project management with Gantt charts and resource allocation. It is allowing employees to manage their work tasks and make this management transparent to those who need to know. This is where the observable work comes it. I have seen considerable improvement in employee and team performance when their work becomes transparent to the right others. The spot light does wonders when applied correctly.

This is the action tracking part of project management for the regular employee, not the program management office. It brings this activity into the enterprise 2.0 world as every task is treated as an object for comments, RSS, and made searchable to those with the proper permissions. Traction has always had great granular security and this permission level technology is applied here, as well.  Below is a sample screen for action planning. In this case it is for their recent TUG 2010 user conference.

You can also get an overview of all milestones, goals with a date, as you can see below.

Taking it up a level, a project is a collection of tasks or actions and milestones. Here is a sample screen showing projects. You can drill down into the details.

There is also enhanced calendaring with automatic updates based on changes in tasks and milestones. Only the tasks, milestones and projects that fit your permission profile are displayed. A Traction TeamPage calendar can be referenced and included live in Outlook, Google calendar and others that support the iCal format.  You can subscribe to  a top-down view of all calendar items, or subscribe to a personal calendar view of just the item’s you’re responsible for.

Each person’s Team Page profile page shows everything that the profiled person is doing within your permission level, including work stream, status, projects and personal task calendar. It can also be auto-updated through changes within LDAP. Here is a sample profile page showing the various features. The tabs are configurable.

You can filter content by person or task. You can also change a note to a task to provide the ability to track it and increase its visibility.  Tasks can be treated like tags and added to any paragraph in any space within the system. I think that this complete collection of new capabilities builds on the strong platform already established to take it further into the ideal of enterprise 2.0.  Here the activities of an organization are accessible to those who need to know and this transparency operates at the task or action level. It will be interesting to see what they do next. 

 

Cortex Offers Healthcare Providers with a Focused Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Platform

The healthcare industry is one where increased knowledge sharing of best practices will benefit all involved.  This is certainly one way to drive health care costs down while improving service that any one should agree with. I recently spoke with David Beyer whose company, Cortex, is providing a collaboration solution targeted specifically at this need. David mentioned that since most healthcare competition is only at the local level, knowledge sharing of best practices at the national and global level is likely to occur.

There is a need for both increased documentation and sharing of best practices within institutions and across institutions. The initial release of Cortex addresses the first challenge and they will soon to expand their reach to serve the second challenge.  Their initial clients include hospitals and professional associations that serve the healthcare sector.

David gave me a tour of the system. There are five major components: recent activity, discover, share, discussions, and members.  Best practices are shared in two formats that are housed within the share tab. There are notes for quick entries and cases for more comprehensive examples. The cases are placed with a useful template. Each case provides the challenge, the solution, a summary, and links to similar cases. With both cases and notes you can add comments and attachments. Suggested tags are auto-generated through NLP and the contributor can also put in their own tags.  Here is a sample screen shot of a case.

 The recent activity tab leads you to a dashboard where auto-generated updates of user activity are displayed. You can see when new content or new comments are added and who did it.  The discover tab provides a search capability that looks at both the notes and cases, as well as the content within any attachments.  The discussion section offers threaded discussions to take useful dialogue out of the siloed spaghetti of email.  You can browse the members section to find expertise within the system. Here is a sample screen shot of the dashboard.

At the moment Cortex is set up to serve individual organizations. However, there are plans to provide a global capability to share across institutions. In this case you can look for expertise across institutions, as well as find new best practices.

I like the simplicity of the system and the intuitive interface. It is very focused and serves a real need. I look forward to see how it progresses. You can also get more context and interesting stories at their blog. 

 

Inmagic Presto 3.5 Expands Its Collaboration Capabilities

Inmagic is a Boston based company that provides Presto, a comprehensive knowledge management and collaboration application. I covered them before (see Inmagic Offers Social Knowledge Networks with Presto 3.3). Recently, I spoke again with Phil Green, CTO, and Mike Cassettari, VP of Marketing, about their latest moves with the release of Presto 3.5. Presto enables business users to create and manage KnowledgeNets™, Social Knowledge Networks (SKN) that are tied to a specific business objective.

I mentioned to Phil and Mike that I really like that Presto is designed to support task focused collaboration.  When I was involved with the early days of knowledge management I never saw a successful implementation that was not aligned with business processes. I think KM lost some of its promise when it strayed from this goal and became more general content repositories. With enterprise 2.0, we have also sometimes lost the business task focus, especially as tools for the consumer Web are applied within the enterprise.

The new release of Presto provides enhanced functionality that includes discussion forums, which facilitate topic-specific collaboration, extended single sign-on (SSO), which authenticates third-party applications, and improved overall performance optimization for large enterprises. There is also increased metrics with the Integrated Report Writer.  You can set up reports to see such social metrics as top contributors, content ratings, etc. A sample report screen is shown below.

The discussion forums connect collaboration activities (e.g.: commenting, rating, tagging) to a specific process or topic, (e.g.: proposal development, sales enablement, competitive analysis), and retain discussion details, unlike email.  Much of the important conversations within an enterprise get lost in email so this allows for a transparent archive to make this valuable content accessible.  You can post a comment, create a reply, and tag it for easier access. Below is a sample forum screen.

The enhanced security comes through what they term “Social Security” through extended SSO. It provides striated levels of access to information based on user authorization and privileges, creating cohesive security across KnowledgeNet repositories.

There is also improved search performance for large organizations with substantial repositories (>1M records), and ingestion performance is improved for enhanced data loading. Content can come in immediately and then the metadata is added in background processing. Enhanced content relations establish a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between Presto objects (e.g.: a contract may reference and link to multiple P.O.’s).  This allows for easier content curation.

After reviewing the new capabilities within Presto 3.5, we looked at a client case example, HRPA, a Canadian HR association. Inmagic has found a great acceptance in associations and this case makes it clear why.  HRPA wanted to provide greater service to its members through enhanced access to content so they set up a Resource Centre enabled through Presto. They also wanted to create a greater sense of community. Both goals are being accomplished as they have empowered users to be more actively engaged in gaining content and deciding what content is provided. HRPA was receiving massive email requests for content and operating in a reactive mode. Now they can make this content accessible through the Resource Centre, making the process more efficient for both the association staff and the members.  You can see the Centre below.

HRPA staff monitors requests and adds the most common ones to the content repository.  They can also offer fee-based customer research generating more revenue.  Now they are looking at organizing forums around practice areas and launching subject matter expert blogs.  The Centre was launched in September and the members have seen very excited about the new developments.

I like the improvements with Presto 3.5, especially the ones that address the social side of content management.  With enterprise 2.0 we are seeing an increasing integration of collaboration and content management capabilities. Presto 3.5 is a great example of this trend.

 

 

 

Darwin Awareness Engine™ Named a 2010 KM World Promise Award Finalist

I am very pleased to mention that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ was named a finalist for the KM promise award sponsored by KM World.  The winner will be announced in the November/December Issue of KMWorld with distribution at the 2010 KMWorld and Enterprise Search Summit in Washington DC which will occur November 16-18.  I will also be speaking on Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory as part of the Knowledge Showcase. My session is from 12:30 to 12:45 on Thursday, November 18.

Here is the description of the award from the KM World site.

“Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of these companies will deliver on this promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering this promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are imbedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.”

We are very honored to be named as a finalist for this award.

 

Choosing the Best Enterprise 2.0 Tool for the Task – My Talk on Yakabod’s Collaboration Pizza Blogtalkradio Show

I had the pleasure of appearing yesterday on Yakabod’s blog radio talk show. Yakabod is a collaboration platform that I have covered before (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). In this session I discussed the impact of media on cognition and communication.  This was an area I looked at in my academic research years and the concepts still influence how I look at the new social media. 

Here is a link to a recording of the Yakabod show.  Examples I discussed include MIT’s Sloan’s School and the US Military All Partners Access Network.  The session lasts 15 minutes. I hope you find it useful.

Here is the summary that the Yakabod site provides:

"Are you tweeting when you could be microblogging? Emailing when wiki-ing makes more sense? With so many choices out there, it’s tempting to pick one social media tool and use it all the time. Don’t do it, says Bill Ives. You get better results if you choose a method based on the outcome you want. In today’s show, Bill talks about how the medium you choose for your message—words versus pictures, for example—influences the way people process information, draw conclusions and solve problems. He shares specific examples of how to use wikis, blogs and microblogs to get work done faster and better.”

Collaborative Applications Market Remains Strong

I frequently speak with vendors in the collaborative applications market as I cover this space for the AppGap blog. Many of the smaller best of breed vendors have been reporting strong revenue despite the economic down turn. They have been helped by the need for tighter budgets as they are often seen as a lower cost alternative.

A recent IDC report supports these observations. As reported by Tekrati (see IDC: Hot Spots in Overall Collaborative Applications Market Help Offset Economic Decline), IDC research shows worldwide revenue for the collaborative applications market was $7.6 billion in 2009, representing a decline of 0.3%.  The top 3 vendors in 2009 (based on worldwide revenue) were Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco. These vendors accounted for 55.8% of the market total. However, that leaves 43.2% of a large pot.

IDC found that some of the largest year-over-year growth came from the emerging social platforms submarket. Erin Traudt, research director for IDC's Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions program is quoted,"IDC believes that with a minimal decline during a very tough economy, the worldwide collaborative applications market is poised for a positive rebound in 2010 and that key submarkets such as social platforms, conferencing applications, and team collaborative applications (TCAs) are helping to sustain the market as customers continue to benefit from the enhanced productivity and lower costs associated with these solutions,"

I am very pleased to hear these observations as I think this is growth market as these tools are part of the core of enterprise 2.0. I am glad the market continues to like these options. Here is more good news. When IT professionals were asked by IDC if they had to choose between best of breed versus the collaborative applications from their current vendor, 64% of respondents indicated best of breed would make the strongest business case.

These results are also consistent with growth in the technology job market that was reported by the Wall Street Journal (see Region Leads Rebound in technology Jobs). This article indicated that Silicon valley was the leader here and many of the best of breed players are located there.    

Yammer Extends Its Enterprise Microblogging Offering with Communities

Yammer was one of the first enterprise microblogging tools, and it continues to add features to extend the original concept of Twitter into an enterprise business application. A while back, I wrote about one case example, Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ., Océ is still an active user of Yammer. I was pleased to recently speak with Yammer’s VP of Marketing, Steve Apfelberg, about their capabilities and latest developments.  Steve said that many of their new features came from customer input. Here is a sample screen.

We began with an overview of some of the ways Yammer has extended the functionality of microblogging beyond Twitter to better serve business needs. First, they have not placed a 140 character limit on updates, or Yams, as they call them. There is a suggestion to keep things crisp but many business messages require more than 140 characters. I agree and have reluctantly avoided Twitter at times for this reason when it would have served a good purpose. 

Next, Yammer allows for file attachments. Twitter allows for links to documents but often you want to use microblogging as an internal distribution channel for things like the latest sales presentation. These attachments are stored in the Yammer cloud and become searchable in their own right, a useful feature.

Steve said that Yammer allows for public or private groups within each Yammer network. This is not like Tweetdeck groups as the feature allows you to indicate who can receive what updates and provides different access levels. Yammer also has more social networking functionality than Twitter as there is an enriched profile feature.  Samuel Dreissen at Océ said that the Yammer profiles helped spread usage. Samuel said he got more compliance with the profile completion in Yammer than in knowledge management systems because of the simplicity of the form.  As new users complete their profiles, the system guides you to invite your colleagues, which support the viral adoption of Yammer.

To further enhance social networking, Yammer also offers org charts that connect profiles. You can see how participants are connected and this can help you decide who to follow. Yammer provides suggestions on who you might want to follow that are partially based on the org charts. You can see a sample org chart below.

Yammer provides auto updates or Yams based on user actions such as joining a group or adjusting an org chart. There is two-way email integration. Steve said they did this since some people still live within email. You get email notifications if you want and can post to Yammer from email.

Users can “like” an update. This will then display the update in the message feed of all of their followers who do not follow the original message poster. I really liked this feature as it avoids spamming people with redundant messages but also does the work for you of trying to figure out who already saw the message and who did not.

You can use tagging through a hashtag in the same way you do with Twitter. Steve said this is something frequently used within their own firm to segment information into searchable topics.

We next discussed their latest major feature,Yammer Communities.  Steve said that many customers who were using Yammer for internal communication asked them if they could additionally utilize Yammer to collaborate with their external business network, including customers, partners, suppliers, and vendors.  Until now, this was not possible as Yammer required all members of a Yammer network to share a common, work email domain. 

Now Yammer Communities enables companies to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  The Communities option provides companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.  Membership, messages and other data in the Community are completely separate from membership, messages and data in the parent company network; users must toggle between networks to access these separate Community networks. It has all the features of the traditional or “canonical” instance of Yammer. People within a company can use both. Steve gave the example of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that has used Yammer Communities to allow newly diagnosed cancer patients to communicate with cancer survivors in a secure manner.

Yammer provides both a free version and premium paid versions with expanded features. More than 10,000 companies and organizations created new Yammer networks in Q1 2010, bringing the total to more than 70,000. More than 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer and there are over 800,000 users. This is a testimony to the power of microblogging and to what Yammer brings to this capability. 

Collaboration Seen as Top Driver of Enterprise Content Management Investments

I recently received a review copy of the Forrester report on 2010 ECM investment projections. Stephen Powers and his team surveyed 170 knowledge managers with decision-making roles in enterprise content management about their plans for the coming year. The team found that 72% of respondents said their organizations plan to increase ECM use or the number of ECM deployments in the next 12 months, while only 4% of organizations plan to scale back ECM use or number of deployments.

It is good to see that organizations will continue a steady investment in ECM. More interesting from the enterprise 2.0 perspective, 61% cited content sharing as the most important driver for investment in ECM. Other top drivers include compliance (51%), improved search (45%). This makes sense and fits the enterprise 2.0 paradigm of transparency and collaboration.  It also reflects the continued concern over regulation and associated compliance and search certainly plays a large role in compliance.  I have seen much progress made in the search space and the enhancement of enterprise collaboration suites so these investments are becoming more attractive. The report suggested than the role of collaboration will only increase.

The report when on to say that while enterprises desire an end-to-end ECM suite that covers all content needs, in actuality they continue to have multiple ECM point products and/or suites in place. More than half have over 3 vendors in place. The report predicted than there will be more ECM integrations to compensate for the hybrid environments.

Return on investment (ROI) remains an issue as a majority of firms can’t prove ROI. This may make approval for ECM investments more difficult. However, these investments continue to improve knowledge worker productivity, at least in terms of output, as the amount of content enterprises produce continues to increase.

There is much more in the report and you can find it at the Forrester site. 

Our Upcoming Session at Boston KM Forum on Chaos Theory and Information Discovery

Thierry Hubert and I will speak at the December 17 meeting of Boston’s KM Forum.  We will discuss: Deliver Us from Web 2.0 Content Chaos: Activity, Attraction and Personal Knowledge Create the Awareness Engine™.  Here is the session description.

The presentation will share with the audience a practical application of chaos theory for creating knowledge focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the Web. Using a couple of examples, one from the Internet where socially generated content is exploding, and one from the enterprise where social tools are also contributing their own content bloat, We will discuss the ideas that are driving a new product idea at Darwin Ecosystem. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable, and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. These techniques open the door for more self-discovery through intuitive recognition of patterns. They will help the explorer to find relationships among content objects and people that would not have been found using traditional search methods.

We hope to see you there. It will be from 4 to 6 PM at the Microsoft offices, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA. Here is the announcement post on the KM Forum blog with directions. Here is more about Darwin Ecosystem and how it works. 

Darwin Ecosystem’s Awareness Engine™ Provides Enhanced eDiscovery within the Enterprise 2.0 and on the Web

The introduction of Web 2.0 social media into the enterprise creates large amounts of potentially useful information about the social side of business processes. Enterprise 2.0 also provides a wealth of social “data” as a byproduct of its use. We are only beginning to figure out how to harvest this content. The organizations that do this are truly working in the enterprise 2.0 space.

In this post I want to bring to your attention to a new tool that I have been involved with for the past two years. We have been operating somewhat quietly and are now making our work public with both an enterprise edition and a Web edition. The Alpha version of the Web addition is available on our Darwin Ecosystem site through free registration for your use. The enterprise version is also available to early adopters.

Increasing awareness in context and finding related content is the goal of Darwin Ecosystem. Its awareness engine™ gives users the ability to perceive and be conscious of events and patterns of activities captured in the enterprise and Web 2.0. The introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise also opens up possibilities for even more information silos if these tools do not connect. Darwin provides a way to see emerging patterns of related content across information generated through a variety of tools.

Darwin reduces the effort of keeping-up with enterprise 2.0 content (Information Overload Management). It classifies and correlates patterns of the business activities trapped in your Web. Through its Scan Cloud™ Darwin makes visible and measurable the value of the enterprise 2.0 content (Awareness and Monitoring). You can see related items in a tag cloud like visualization and this relationship shifts as you move through the cloud. This dynamic nature makes it easy for users to see the correlation across the enterprise 2.0 content (Discovering and Sharing).

Using correlation metrics based on Chaos Theory Darwin looks for the emergence of correlated themes within chaotic content. This moves Darwin away from the voting and popularity rankings used by many information aggregators and search engines to rank information. By using correlation metrics, it does not require a known process or taxonomy to discover useful and related information. Darwin allows for the emergence that Paula discussed. You can set up ongoing filters or “attractors” to explore emerging themes in specific topics of interest or simply look at the broad picture.

Darwin is a not a replacement of existing enterprise 2.0 technologies, dashboards, and document management tools. It is designed to complement and leverage these technologies by making their tacit knowledge more visible. Darwin looks at events, blogs and other Web 2.0 sources that may correlate with the enterprise actions, its competitors and the voice of its critics and customers. This allows the enterprise to be capable of more easily discovering its own knowledge assets as well as its market and competitive positioning.

For example, Using Darwin’s Awareness Engine, a program manager in Marketing becomes aware of concerns in R&D, Sales or other initiatives that are emerging as he/she tries to promote a product (all without having to wait and depend the next meeting or coffee break encounter). They can also see competitive moves that may correlate with their own plans or the efforts of their customers and prospects. Likewise management can have a high-level view of what topics are emerging across all divisions and initiatives to better steer the business or measure the effectiveness of the vision’s execution, in the process discovering emerging and stronger initiatives or employees that are noteworthy.

It is a Web browser application (Scan Cloud™) or it can become a custom solution through API access. It is delivered through a Web server with services and a database correlating the different Web 2.0 sources. For the enterprise there is an on-premise solution running on Ruby on Rails and making use of RSS feeds. Its Virtual Cortex™ database can be set on Oracle, MS-SQL or mySQL according to scalability needs. You can go from inside out so an enterprise can correlate their initiatives, knowledge and business intelligence against the pulse of the Web. The application is currently in Alpha stage and available for use.

Here is an example of Darwin in action. Using the Web edition. I set up a query on social media and saw the word – gain - in the cluster shown below. I looked to see why the word - gain - is associated with social media by selecting it and highlighting the cluster of correlations between social media and gain.

Then I saw three articles that matched this correction in the past few days as you see in the image below.

There was as story about how NASDAQ launches social network site as shown below. This was new news and very interesting to me.

I also saw an article that reported in the UK that social networking sites accounts for 25% of display ads. I had read elsewhere that in the UK online revenue has passed television ad revenue so this added further context to that story. There was also an article on using Facebook traffic to drive brand loyalty. None of these articles appeared on a Google search on social media and gain. Nor did they appear on Google News on the topic. Below is a screen shot of the complete Darwin interface so you can the relationship of the detailed components shown above. This exercise is a very brief sample of how you can discover new information that is often unanticipated through correlation that is hard, if not impossible, to find in traditional search.

You can also find stories about themes that are emerging in the Web, as well as images that correlate with content as shown in results about a very recent helicopter crash in the Pacific ocean.

Darwin also allows you to correlate content in traditional mainstream media with what is happening in the blogs and other social media. In 2008 Darwin won a Young Entrepreneurs Award from the Office for Science and Technology of the French Embassy in the United States. The Young Entrepreneurs Initiative (YEi) is a platform for mentoring and networking US-based entrepreneurs who understand the importance of internationalizing their vision and their activity, and who wish to set up a technology venture in France.

We recently started the Darwin Discovery Engine Blog to provide more background on their efforts, as well as commentary on content issues on the Web and enterprise 2.0. Please join us there. Our Twitter feed is: @darwineco. We look forward to hearing from you.

Open Text Adds Social Media, More Web 2.0 Features, and SAP Integration

Open Text is a relatively old player in the enterprise content management and collaboration space. It recently announced Open Text Web Solutions 10, the latest release of Open Text╒s Web Content Management (WCM) software. The new release allows ?organizations to intelligently manage and deliver a broad set of corporate information to users over the Web, and features extensive usability upgrades, a new technology foundation, and deeper and more comprehensive integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and the SAP NetWeaver¿ Portal component.? They also offer Open Text Social Media that brings together many of the current social tools such as blog, micro-blogs, wikis, communities, profiles, and social search

I was especially interested in this as I was involved in an Open Text based knowledge management implementation at a major telecom provider in 1995. It was very poplar and spread across several divisions in the organization. Ironically, while working with a different firm, I came back to evaluate it in 2002 as part of a plan to upgrade the software. The knowledge management system remained quite popular, despite the aging software platform. We were able to look at instances were call center people sued the system versus times that they did not. Those who used the system performed significantly better on a whole array of metrics such as cross-selling success and reduction in repeat calls.

Now it is 2009 and social media is entering the enterprise. It is nice to see Open text keeping up with the times. As the note the role of web content management has expanded from a place to store and publish external-facing content to a helping support organizational business goals in such areas as sales and customer support. It is more deeply embedded in work processes. So Open Text is bringing in a ?full Web 2.0 user interface to both the people editing content within the company and to the consumers of this content.?

Not only are they brining in social media components, but they are also offering tighter integration with legacy applications such as SAP. This will better support their work process integration. The new release allows editors to combine dynamic content from social media, the Open Text ECM Suite and rich media applications and reuse it across many target systems, including the SAP NetWeaver Portal. In addition because it is based on the Microsoft .Net technology, Open Text 10 offers support for Microsoft SQL 2008 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

Other enhancements in Open Text Web Solutions 10 include a new search integration API, extended tagging support, creation of memorable URLs, and dynamic aggregation of personal content in newsfeeds. Its editor now uses RIA technology to provide more Web 2.0 capabilities. All of these enhancements are bringing it into the current times.

KM World 2009 Program Available

I received my paper copy of the KM World 2009 program recently. You can see the agenda online at the KM World 2009 site. It looks great with people like Andrew McAfee, Christine LI, David Snowden. Nancy Dixon, Thomas Vander Wal, and Leslie Owens.

The KM World people were kind to allow me to offer you a $200 discount on each of your full-conference passes. They can also sign up for a free expo pass. Go to this KM World registration form.

I also want to bring to your attention to my workshop, Business Social Media Best practices: Blogs & Twitter. It is offered Monday, November 16 form 9AM to 12PM. Here is the workshop description:

Blogs were one of the initial social media and their influence continues to grow. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Gartner also recently wrote, “Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.” This interactive workshop will help you develop and refine your business blogging strategy. It covers blogging best practices in 2009 and how to complement your blogging efforts with the new emerging social media such as Twitter. New customer communication options opened up Twitter are also explored.

I hope to see you at the conference, and even better, at the workshop. :)

Yakabod Adds a Social Side to Knowledge Management

Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003. It was founded in 2001 by CEO Scott Ryser and CTO Scott Williamson and first focused on web applications. I recently spoke with Scott Ryser and Chris Coleman, their EVP for Marketing. The firm is headquartered in the DC area and their main clients have been in the US Federal government’s intelligence community.

Yakabod’s flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network. It is built to meet Protection Level 3 standards for software used in the U.S. Intelligence Community. It is a secure knowledge-sharing system that enables organizations more control over their content and allows for secure collaboration, both internally and with their business partners. I feel even more importantly it provides the users with great control and flexibility in how they manage content relevant to their work. It is activity based rather than based on taxonomies and file structures isolated from daily work processes. With the release of Yakabox 3.0 they are plan to engage a broader market outside the intelligence community.

Scott and I discussed the importance of activity based knowledge management. I was already onboard with the concept, as all the successful KM systems that I have seen have been work process-based, rather than standalone knowledge repositories. Scott pointed out that 80% of knowledge management efforts fail primarily because of cultural barriers. I believe this and I imagine most of these failures are not work process centric.

Scott mentioned that with transactional applications you can force people to input data as part of their job. However, you miss the large amounts of useful unstructured data around these transactions. If the system for unstructured data is not part of the work process it is hard to get people to engage. A knowledge system that is aligned with work transactions is more likely to pick up this content.

As McKinsey wrote a few years ago, the real value in companies is now in the interactions rather than the transactions, but IT has largely supported the latter. Now more investment needs to be made in supporting the interactions and making them accessible. This is the goal of Yakabox.

If you make the knowledge management system aligned with work processes you have gone a log way to handling the adoption issue. Next, you have to add value to the work process. Yakabox makes the user the center of knowledge sharing and enables them to find content useful and relevant to their work. You can designate content as relevant on a 1 to 5 scale. These ratings drive other relevance algorithms and the systems learns from your actions.

Scott said that when they added the relevance engine to the system, adoption exploded. People now had content come to them that was helpful and spent less time looking for stuff. You can also tag it and make comments for others to see. Yakabox provides fine-grained control over who can see these comments and ratings so people are less hesitant to share, knowing that this information goes to a selected subset of the broader audience with the organization. Scott said that these controls help to build trust and people frequently expand who can see what they do as this trust develops. This way silos can be broken down piece by piece.

The system integrates four applications—collaboration, social networking, content management and search—on one secure platform. It is delivered three ways: an appliance (bundled hardware and software installed behind the client’s firewall), on-site subscription (no hardware/software purchase), or hosted (SaaS with no per-user fees).

Scott gave me a tour. You start with the Activity Viewer page and content is organized around your activities. The top of the widest column contains the “road blocks” you are responsible for. These are the items where your team is dependent on your actions to move a project or initiative forward. Underneath the roadblocks are items organized by recency. Since your rate items on a 1 - 5 scale you can also filter them down by only showing items that meet your designated criteria. You can apply this rating scale to content, people, blogs, and any other item within the system.

For each item you can learn more about the people or topic. You can leave a comment and go to the profile of each person involved. You can go to the home page of every person to see what each is doing. These home pages are not limited to people as you can go to the home page of document and see all the actions around it. You can also see the objects that are generating the most activity.

There is a Twitter like status update field where you can answer the question, “what are you doing that matters.” I think that within the enterprise status updates like this work better within a system such as Yakabox, than as a standalone application like Twitter. I feel the opposite about the Web where I think Twitter status updates work better than those within a system like Facebook. You can set up a TweetDeck like interface to see the actions of people you want to follow and apply the 1-5 rating scale to determine the number of people you see at any one time.

There are robust access and dissemination controls over content. They can be role-based or individual-based. You can add filters to the search function to look at things such as only documents, only people, or even only documents by a certain person. You can add a “see also” link to provide access to additional material related to any content. This allows you to first narrow down and then expand the content you look at while keeping things relevant.

Yakabox also provides a blog tool where you can post in the context of the complete system. The same access controls can be applied as well as the search and relevancy filters. There is also a calendar with these same filters. In addition to the features that come out of the box you can add more. I think that Yakabox provides the right balance of control, features, relevance, and ease of use for an enterprise 2.0 style knowledge management system. It will be interesting see how it doe sin the broader business market.

Can Twitter Serve as a Personal Knowledge Management Tool?

Personal knowledge management can be very useful and when it is social it can serve many purposes. Can twitter serve this function?

Here is an interesting post from Andre Yee at eBizQ, Is Twitter's Growth Sustainable? He raises four issues: attrition, demographics, user experience and usage patterns, and monetization. I think that each of these are real concerns. However, I think the key in number three: user experience and usage patterns. If they get this right the others will take care of themselves.

Andre points out that “Facebook, MySpace and other social networks have a richer user experience beyond broadcasting. This means additional usage patterns and these translate to greater user affinity and stickiness.” The simplicity of Twitter is a large part of tits power. However, I think there needs to be more for sustainability. One part is the actual interface itself, as TweetDeck has proven.

Another part is the ability to use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I do this with this blog so I naturally started doing this with Twitter. I tweet or retweet links to things I want to go back to. Since it is Twitter, a social tool, I am also sharing them but in many cases that is secondary. Twitter does the social part fairly well. But the archive part is very primitive. It reminds me of del.icio.us. Once I got a few hundred links it became clumsy and I stopped using it.

Do you use Twitter for personal knowledge management? How do you think it can improve in this area? Are their third party apps that help here?

Inmagic Presto 3.0 Supports the Social Side of Knowledge Management

Inmagic began in 1983 in the Boston area by providing what became to be called knowledge management solutions unlike many players in the Enterprise 2.0 market. The corporate library function was their first market. Many companies would purchase data from outside sources and the corporate librarian had to manage this unstructured data and make it accessible.

I spoke with Phil Green, the current Inmagic CTO, and Mike Cassettari, the VP of Marketing. With most of the traditional database tools available in the 80s, you had to make the data fit the structure of the data fields. Inmagic offered fields of unlimited length so you could make the database structure fit the nature of the content. They were one of the pioneers in handling unstructured data. They added the ability to handle imaging in the early 90s.

Then in 1996 Inmagic began offering web publishing tools and Web 1.0 applications. went with Web services at the front end level. As Phil and Mike said, their path reflects the ongoing changes in the industry. Some of their clients wanted a Web version to share data across locations. These clients and others discovered that this led to far greater data sharing on a global basis than anticipated. I also experienced this in several firms.

Next, Inmagic moved to a complete Web version with a .Net solution. They now provide both a hosted offering and an on-premise solution. Mike and Phil said it is about 50-50 in terms of client preferences. If the client is a business user and does not want to get IT involved, they often pick the SaaS version. If the client is within IT and/or concerned with security, they often pick the on-premise offering.

All this brings us up to the present and the advent of Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. Inmagic now has two product offerings. Their legacy Inmagic DB/Text still serves a large number of corporate clients in the library space. They now also offer Inmagic® Presto as a Web 2.0 offering. They recently announced Presto 3.0 that includes a number of features to make knowledge management more social. Below is a sample home page of a knowledge sharing system based on Presto.

Mike very rightly pointed out how the introduction of social media into the enterprise can add to the information silos. I have seen this before and agree. Presto provides access to a broad array of unstructured content within the enterprise to overcome these silos. It provides this access in a way that maintains the unique aspects of each data type (e.g. images, text multimedia). There is both a quick one field search and advanced search through categories. You can create virtual folders so items can be indexed in multiple ways.

Presto can also be employed in a Sharepoint environment. This enables firms to reduce the amount of costly and time consuming Sharepoint customization to get the capabilities that Presto brings out of the box. Here you can see Presto search results that bring forward to nature of each file type.

The four main social aspects that have been added with Presto 3.0 are the ability to tag, rate, and comment on content, as well as the abilty to Blog. There is also role-based access to these capabilities and the other features Presto offers. An administrator can decide who has the ability to place tags, as well as rate and comment on content, and they also have the ability to permission who can Blog. Below you can see the role-based options open to the administrator.

It is nice to see a long term player continue to evolve with the market and do well. Mike said that their performance continues strong in the down economy. He attributes this to three factors: their large client base and long standing clients, the appeal of the Web 2.0 features in Presto, and their focus on departmental solution with low cost points of entry.

Tethys Solutions Moves Business Process Automation into Enterprise 2.0

Business process automation traditionally required large-scale applications and armies of systems integrators resulting in big budgets and long development cycles. It also meant that knowledge sharing and business processes were usually siloed in separate tools. As a former member of a large consulting firm I have had plenty of opportunity to witness this first hand. This limited implementations to large enterprises and even then to a few processes. Enterprise 2.0 is changing the paradigm here and Tethys Solutions is a prime example. I recently spoke with Tethys CEO, Mihir Shukla.

Tethys Solutions was founded in 2003 and the name comes form the Greek goddess of water. They want to make business process automation available everywhere to everyone and be a ubiquitous as water. They have an R&D center in India and their main sales office is in San Jose. Unlike the big enterprise software firms, Tethys targets the millions of business processes valued between 2K and 100K, the long tail of business processes. Most large-scale business process implementations result in the top down dictation of business process, driven, in part by the software. Automation Anywhere allows for the bottom up creation of business process automation designed by the user.

Mihir said they are aiming to replace the scripting applications that are now hand done within organizations. The focus is supporting all aspect of end-to-end business processes. The flagship product is Automation Anywhere, available in both licensed software and cloud versions. Target processes include the collection of data from several sources and emailing it to stakeholders, the transfer of patient records from a mainframe application to a patient database, and automated invoice processing. Here is a screen shot of the visual designer of processes.

Automation Anywhere first has you go through the business process while it records the process. This supplies both an automated way to execute the process in the future and a documentation of the process. You can then edit the process if needed through a visual drag and drop interface with no programming required. In addition, there are more than 300 actions than can be added like Lego blocks, such as Internet, conditional, loop, prompt, file management, database and system with faster speeds, automatic email notifications, task chaining, hotkey, variables and logging, etc. Here is a sample screen showing a task actions list and other process details.

I especially like the way that Tethys documents the process in the act of recording it for automation. You are creating a knowledge management system in the process of creating the automation. In the early 90s, I was involved in helping a major insurance company create new business process. We found the experts in each area and documented their best practices in large sheets of brown paper. Then we built new applications aligned with these processes, beginning with a prototype. Next, we documented the processes and built a knowledge management system to support the new processes. This took an army of consultants and several years. I wish I had Automation Anywhere then to have the experts create the software and the documentation in a few days instead.

Mihir said they have used a similar method with a number of clients. For example, a major telco was able to create the software support and documentation for their provisioning processes by turning a few experts loose with Automation Anywhere and operating in their normal manner. In a few days they had all the variations of the process covered in a best practice manner for the rest of the organization. He also pointed out the built in ROI calculator so you can see the cost savings grow as you use the tool – see an screen shot below

I asked Mihir how they were doing in the down economy. He said quite well despite reduced budgets in some places. He had expected that their initial target market would be the small to midsize business. However, the majority of their initial clients are actually large corporations who see the value of optimizing micro-decisions, as Tom Davenport refers to it (see - Microdecisions for Macro Impact). Client examples in the IT sector ironically include a number of the firms in the large enterprise application space such as Oracle, IBM, Accenture, Siemens, and HP. In a down economy there is less room for error and inefficiency. Rapidly automating every day business processes in a cost effective manner is aligned with the times.

Should Enterprise 2.0 Software Vendors Offer Professional Services?

Here is re-post from FastForward as I wanted to see if I could stir up some more conversation on the topic. An interesting question was raised in the post, Should Software Vendors Also Sell Professional Services?, by Stewart Mader. He quotes Oliver Marks, "The reality for all "social community" roll outs is that the software is a relatively minor component compared to the change management required to drive uptake and usage and to weave the software into the business fabric of day to day use." I certainly agree here and was even part of a panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in 2007 titled: 90% people, 10% technology.

Stewart goes on to quote Jive's Gia Lyons, "Most of what we do could be done with almost any other social software tool, but naturally, we only make ourselves available to Jive customers." Stewart then writes in reaction, "If most of what they do could be done with other software, then why only make themselves available to Jive customers? After all, isn't professional services an even larger source of revenue than the software? That's how SharePoint works. Microsoft sells a basic infrastructure on which lots of 3rd party consultants build and customize tools that meet each company╒s needs."

I would certainly agree with the last statement about revenue sources. When I was part of a large consulting firm we usually figured the system integration costs were about 3 to 5 times the software costs.

Stewart then implies that software vendors will not have the objectivity of third party implementers who can use a variety of tools. Having been on all sides of this equation, I think that this is a complex issue. I like Jon Mell's comment to the post, "I think it╒s slightly more subtle than vendors only trying to validate the sale. If a customer invests in Jive (or any other product) there is a mutual interest in making sure the solution works. If that also happens to validate the vendor╒s sale it doesn╒t automatically mean it╒s wrong and not in the customer╒s best interests."

I would add that just because the professional services firm is independent of the software vendors, there are many alliances that will provide motivation similar to an internal services provider. I was the alliance sponsor for three portal software firms while working for a large consulting firm. There were several tiers of alliances and many wide-ranging agreements and motivations. In the end you have to be able to trust your service provider, whether they are inside or outside the official software provider and trust that there is full disclosure

I have also seen situations where the software firm's internal people partner with a third party developer. This happen on a knowledge management project I led in the early 2000s. It worked well because the internal experts gave us their unique knowledge to help with the implementation and served as a connection to the software firm. The project was a success and promoted by both the very large software firm and the consulting firm, my employer.

In the 80s I was involved in another situation were it made sense to use the software firm's service providers. My employer was a firm that sold CBT software. This firm originally thought that over half their income would come from selling software. I was the head of customer development and we only used our tools. What actually happen was that selling software accounted for only about 10% of our revenue. The rest came from custom development, as our clients would rather pay us to use our tools than purchase the tool themselves. Now software for learning development is a bit of a specialized case, as you need expertise in creating good learning materials as well as using the software.

In the end the answer to the question is not yes or no but the old "it depends." There are many issues to making enterprise 2.0 work (see McKinsey on Making Enterprise 2.0 Work is Reminder of Process Centric KM in Early 90s) and I think there is a role for software firms to engage in this implementation for everyone╒s success.

What has been your experience on this issue?

Post Script. Thanks to Social Computing Journal for republishing this.

Tom Davenport on Improving Management Decisions

My former colleague, Tom Davenport, is working on a new book on decision making. My friend Andrew Snider of Athenium recently spent some time with him to talk about the leverage that an organization can get by improving micro-decisions using systematic behavior measurement. Tom reflected on this conversation as part of his blog post, Microdecisions for Macro Impact.

Tom starts with the premise that “what many companies don't realize is that microdecisions — small decisions made many times by many workers at the customer interface — can have a major impact on the business.” I have seen this over and over again, both the “don’t realize” part and the major impact part. One insurance company in the early 90s laid off many of their supervisors to cut costs and effectively removed their company’s intelligence for making microdecisions. The subsequently began losing over 600 million a year. Sound familiar?

One of the solutions for this firm was to build a knowledge management system to capture the wisdom of the few remaining supervisors and place in at the right points in the business process to affect microdecisions. It was my introduction to knowledge management and this help lead to the company becoming profitable again.

Tom adds in his post that until we “start to measure micro-decision makers at the individual level, we aren't likely to improve their performance much. This is the approach of a company called Athenium, which applies it regularly to insurance, health care, and legal processes.” Athenium's offers its teamthink® web-based performance measurement solutions to address this issue. Their Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) measures the workforce behaviors that directly impact the alignment of operations with strategic goals and best practices.

Tom concludes with the idea that one of the simplest approaches to improving micro-decisions is to give those who make them a checklist to make sure they didn't forget any key steps or issues. He mentions a recent New England Journal of Medicine article concluding that a 19-item checklist reduced deaths during surgeries by almost half.

I can believe this also. In the mid 80s, I was involved in developing a checklist for loan officers of a major US bank that recently got a lot of bailout money. In this case they were losing tons of money on loans to South America. The solution was a checklist. I still have my copy. I should offer it on eBay or perhaps to bank so they could reuse the concept to help get out of the mess that they created.

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Platform from Knowledge Plaza

Knowledge Plaza is a new Web-based platform for enterprise search, social bookmarking, knowledge management, information brokerage and expert identification. It was developed by the Belgium based firm, Whatever. I recently spoke with Olivier Verbeke, CEO at Whatever and COO Antoine Perdaens. They explained the concept behind this interesting platform. There are three components, the Dashboard, the Plaza, and the Web. They offer a SaaS version and an on-premise version.

The Dashboard lets you know is happening in your knowledge community. You can see recently activity within your personal workspace, team workspaces you have joined, and your network of contacts. Pieces of information are called Tiles and they are put together to create Mosaics that provide knowledge. You can see what you have saved and what others have sent you. Here is a screen shot of a Dashboard page

As mentioned above, users can individually and collaboratively combine pieces of information (Tiles) into a Mosaic, build wiki content around the information and make it available for other users. In addition it's possible to export the Mosaic for sharing outside of Knowledge Plaza. I especially liked this last feature. I remember using Quickplace in 2000 along with a Notes based content management system to provide a more primitive version of this concept. We could send the Quickplace where the document and other related ones were created to offer more context. Now with Knowledge Plaza you can create a specific collection of documents and links to build a story and then send this off intact to others.

The Knowledge Plaza is where the real action is located. As the name implies it is place to share information. You can bring many different content types into the Plaza. Users can add internet bookmarks, documents and files, e-mails, contacts and references into the Plaza. There is browser and e-mail integration to simplify the process of adding content. You can just email content to the Plaza. Users rate content and this helps guide search efforts. There is enterprise social search allowing you to use the expertise of those around you to find and retrieve information. You can also save searches and repeat them over time. Here is an example of a Plaza.

You can set up different workspaces, invite members, and provide layers of access to the content. You can search individual workspaces or across all of them. You can also rate members, as well documents, and this rating stays private but it can guide your search results. Members set up their own pages, as in Facebook. Here you put information about yourself and your network of individuals. You also add your workspaces and other information. People can use you to guide their search efforts by seeing what you are storing and what sites you have visited. You can restrict search results to the activity of one or many members.

The third Web component creates on-the-fly vertical search engines within Internet bookmarks stored in the Plaza. A keyword search in this component can provide results exclusively located inside your own bookmarked websites, as well as inside all shared websites in the Plaza. Their concept of “Expert as Search Engine” (EaSE) allows you to search only inside a specific member’s bookmarked websites. Further contextualization of Web search results can be carried out through tag and faceted navigation. The Web component additionally provides a combined search tool for pulling in and categorizing external or commercial search tools to the Plaza. Here is a look at the Web component.

Knowledge Plaza has struck a balance between top down taxonomies and bottom up folksonomies. You can set up a taxonomy for consistency in tagging but users can add new terms. Then administrators can check these new terms on a periodic basis to decide which new terms to add to the taxonomy. When looking for information users are able to combine full text search with facet and tag selection. Such categorization is applied in the same way to all tiles (including members and contacts) and allows for many different uses such as efficient expertise location, library management, etc.

Every tile, or piece of information, has its own page like members so you can see all the activity related to the information. You can also send a link to the page so others can see the context around the information. I like this in the same way I think the Mosaic concept adds value. You get the context surrounding information and you can share this context. This concept of providing context is pervasive in Knowledge Plaza and I think that is one of its greatest strengths. It takes knowledge management nicely into enterprise 2.0.

Forrester on Enterprise 2.0 for KM Professionals

Forrester recently sent me a review copy of their 30 page report - Forrester TechRadar™ For I&KM Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0 - Wikis And Social Networks Are Ready To Deliver High Value To Your Enterprise, Q4 2008 by Gil Yehuda with Kyle McNabb, G. Oliver Young, Sara Burnes, Zachary Reiss-Davis. The major areas of focus and conclusions are similar to Forrester TechRadar For Vendor Strategists: Enterprise Web 2.0 - How Product Strategists Should Approach A Maturing Web 2.0 Market, Q4 2008 which should be no surprise. However, this reports is targeting the issues faced by KM professionals.

I have written on a number of occasions that the advent of enterprise 2.0 proivder knowledge management professionals with a great opportunity to play a leadership role in their organizations. This reports provides useful guidance on the some actions that KM people might take. It begins with some of options the organizations face.

On one hand, waiting for IT to provide approved Web 2.0 tools leads to competitive disadvantage. On the other hand, using the tools available externally puts information at risk. In addition, downloading and running Web 2.0 tools on internal servers increase IT headaches. I have argued before, as other have, that Web 2.0 is not enterprise 2.0. I agree with the report that none of these options are good ones. Within the enterprise you need to adopt tools that were designed for business use within the enterprise. Some of these tools can be cloud based but they also need to be business based.

They picked the same 11 technologies studied in the vendor report: blogs, forums, mashups, microblogs, podcasts, prediction markets, RSS, social bookmarks, social networks, widgets, and wikis and offered the same conclusions about the tools. Then the report goes on to provide advice to KM professionals in light of these conclusions. The main one are:

“Set your expectations: Web 2.0 technology will improve the business, but not transform it…Experiment with social networking tools. At a minimum, ensure that Web 2.0 deployments clearly connect content to the employees associated with that content… wait for microblogging to mature before jumping on the latest craze. Microblogs may offset email and regular blogs. Variations of the “What are you working on?” status question will be part of new social and presence engines. But microblogging will only become valuable to the enterprise once it truly integrates with other enterprise processes and applications, and only after a whole set of additional tools are added to help filter content and refine the value of aggregated information.”

In backing up the first advice statement, researchers said that, “no one we surveyed pointed to any one tool as “must have,” although many found significant value in wikis and forums.” I guess I have been talking more to vendors that KM people as I have seen examples where enterprise 2.0 tools have, at least, transformed business process to provide greater transparency, accountability, and thus productivity. On the other hand, in talking with a few implementers, they have not yet seen the big wave of demand for enterprise 2.0 tools. So I think the answer is somewhere in the middle here. I would agree to not over-sell.

I completely agree with the second advice statement. You need to take advantage of these two tools to bring out the social side of content. I also agree with the last statement but I think the preconditions for making microblogging useful will appear sooner than later. For example, I recently talked with Jordan frank at Traction who showed me their new microblogging tool that is completely integrated into their wiki platform with such feature as permission levels, search, and tags. It can be become part of a community page and team collaboration space.

If you are a KM professional who wants to play a leadership role in the implementation of enterprise 2.0, this report will provide useful explanations and guidance. There is a lot of detail here.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Intranet Portals - Not Much New

Toby Ward recently shared the highlights of the Gartner’s magic quadrant for intranet portals. First this is a consolidating and shrinking market, as only 12 enterprise portal vendors remain on Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for “horizontal portal products.” Toby summarized some of Gartner’s findings:

Mashups, lightweight composite applications based on Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), could emerge as alternatives to horizontal portal frameworks for creating enterprise Web environments

Increased interest in Web 2.0

By 2011, Gartner expects at least 10% of new enterprise portal projects in the Global 2000 to use open-source horizontal portal frameworks

Toby has covered these highlights for several years. He is also surprised that more organizations are not using portals. His own intranet 2.0 study reveals that only 10% of respondents (some 230 respondent organizations thus far) use a portal product to power their intranet. However, as he points out these solutions are complex, and pricey. I have seen this myself on a number of huge, expensive portal implementations that increased the revenues of systems integrators.

The Gartner portal quadrant is similar to Toby’s 2006 version of the Portal magic quadrant, with except of BEA, now part of Oracle. So we are not seeing a lot of movement here as consolidation has mostly peaked. The big players continue to be IBM and Microsoft with Oracle and SAP trailing and then further behind are a lot of some more pure play vendors and Sun. I think the big news is the first Gartner finding above - lightweight composite applications based on Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), could emerge as alternatives to the portal players. I think there is no “could” about this.

Intranet 2.0 Survey from Toby Ward

Here is a useful intranet 2.0 survey, especially if enough people respond. It is being run by Toby Ward at President, Prescient Digital Media. I have taken it as they said you could even you do not have intranet tools. My blog is my personal knowledge management system but there is no firewall at Portals and KM. There is total transparent here. It just takes ten minutes and you will get the results. The more participation they get, the better the results and findings that they share all with you.