I conducted a series on
interviews over the past two months on how Océ Is implementing enterprise
2.0. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management
technology and services. Most interviews were with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at
Océ. I spoke about their SharePoint
efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate
Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint
effort. I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking
experiences. This post provides a summary of some key points and links to each
of the five posts.

Samuel’s
responsibilities include both the information architecture for structured
information in applications such as PLMS and SAP and the unstructured
information in places such as email and knowledge management programs.

I really like this dual
architectural role for both structured and unstructured information. It makes
so much sense to have these two information sources under the same
architectural leadership. The approach is to define information architecture principles
and then convey these principles to management and employees so they will see
the logic behind the approach. This is move away from rigid top-down rules. The
implementation details will change faster than the principles and managers and
employees will be able to make intelligent decisions aligned with the
principles.

This granting mangers and
employees the right to make decisions is reflected in all of their enterprise
2.0 work and is consistent with the principles of enterprise 2.0. Samuel also
provides guidance on the capabilities of each medium so users can make
intelligent decisions. I think their effortts serve as a good model for others.

Creating Information Architecture at Océ in the Age of Enterprise 2.0

Lessons Learned from Implementing Social Bookmarking at Océ

Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ

Lessons Learned from the Océ SharePoint Implementation

Implementing Wikis in the Age of Enterprise 2.0 at Océ

This is the fifth in a series of interviews with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ and some of his colleagues, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging (Yammer) , wiki experiences, enterprise information architecture, and SharePoint implementation. For this post I spoke with Samuel and Peter Kruizinga about their social bookmarking experiences.

Peter and a colleague set up the social bookmarking application in the Research and Development department using an Open Source tool. Peter is a member of R&D and part of their job is doing research on current trends in various technical issues. People were sharing links to web articles through email. However, they would only send them to a few close colleagues so as to not “spam” others. The information was not getting fully distributed to the right people. It was hard to decide what to send to whom.

Peter wanted a better way to share important links connected with their research so he set up the social bookmarking application. This provided a non-intrusive way to make these links available and placed the responsibility to accessing them wit the individual. Several people had used public social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us but they needed a way to share information behind the firewall. Peter said they did not want to give away their areas of focus to competitors.

It started slow with only a few contributors. However, there were many more readers so information was getting shared and the experiment is accomplishing its objectives. There are now plans to both promote the system and extend its functionality.

There have been some notable success stories that Peter and Samuel intend to use as part of the promotion. For example, one R&D project had both Peter and Samuel as part of the team. The other team members had not yet used the social bookmarking tool. They were amazed with how information could be easily shared with the tool and new information that could be discovered. Peter found a number of prior bookmarks on their topic so they had a very good history of the issue with very little effort.

In another example, Peter and Samuel are following different topics on the Web and then sharing each other’s findings. This way they act as a filter to portions of the Web, saving each other time.

They have a number of ideas on how to expand the social bookmarking capability. First, they would like to integrate a trend-overview application based on bookmarks so they can look at what people are interested in over time. They also wanted to establish an offline cache to periodically fetch the bookmarked web pages and documents and place them in local storage. This prevents dead link problems and lost information for older bookmarks.

In addition, they want to offer the possibility to bookmark offline content such as files that were sent by email or any other files for which there is no URL. They want the possibility to search on tags, as well as on combinations of tags or words. They also want the ability to find experts for a specific tag (who submitted bookmarks with that tag). Finding the top three taggers on a topic can be a useful starting place.

We discussed both the integration and the differentiation of the bookmarking tool and other enterprise 2.0 tools. They can now bookmark pages in the enterprise wiki, as well as the memo filing system. They also plan to integrate it with the file sharing system. They will cross-promote the different enterprise 2.0 tools within each one and provide guidance on when to use each.

R&D is an ideal place to start using a social bookmarking tool because of its heavy research of the Web. They now plan to spread its use into the broader corporation. This will enable everyone to better stay current with their areas.