I earlier asked the question: Will Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short? Well it seems that Google is also having a rocky road, at least according to Rick Munarriz at the Motely Fool. Rick noted…
One thing that I have been meaning to do is to dive back into the state of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as a useful term and the challenges facing its use. I’ve also been meaning to draw attention to some of the excellent posts in the new AIIM Communities. I am going to try and [...]
Auctori:city, a web content management system designed for municipalities and built for SEO, is a sponsor of the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) National Conference which will be held at the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri September 22-24, 2010.
A silo of the search engine optimization friendly web content management system, Auctori, an innovation of Unidev, the Auctori:city solution provides cities with the opportunity to strengthen their Internet presence and their overall brand reputation by giving users a professional city website design and the power to maintain their web content in real-time.
“We are looking forward to attending this highly anticipated conference and introducing Auctori:city to the NAGW community,” said Andrea Bemis, Brand Manager, Auctori. “Our unique CMS integrates controls that give individual departments the power to edit components of their website, such as news, community calendars and business directories, making the general maintenance of a city website very straightforward and less time consuming for webmasters.”
The Forum Corporation blog
offers some excellent content on such topics as learning, leadership,
collaboration, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating strategic
execution. It is a collaborative effort by a number of the Forum team members.
The Forum Corporation began in 1971 and it “helps senior leaders
execute innovative, people-driven solutions that accelerate business growth,
corporate change and overall performance.”
I have known and respected Forum for some time as I competed against them in
the 1980s when I was with Spectrum. See my post, Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization, for a review of their recent book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate
Execution.
Recent posts include,
Why is it so hard to create a great customer experience? by Jane Marham
Weinstein that makes a great organization structure point. Customer experiences, whether viral or
physical, generally require an end-to-end process that involves multiple
departments. If the organization is structured around these different
departments (e.g. marketing, customer service, order fulfillment) it can be
like the blind men and the elephant with each department having a different, and
incomplete perception or the customer. However, if the organization is
structured around the customer experience, it can have a more accurate picture
of the customer and provide a better and more coordinated customer experience.
The VUCA Future – Are You
Ready? by Steve Barry describes the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
business environment. I have heard of complex adaptive systems for some time
but this was a new term for me. Forum interviewed futurist Bob
Johansen for his thoughts on VUCA and what lies ahead for business. Bob said
that the term VUCA was coined at the US Army War College that is the graduate
school for future generals. In a VUCA world the best leaders have vision,
understanding, clarity, and agility. Clarity and agility were two of the leadership
characteristics promoted in Forum’s new book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution. The world is
changing and leadership skills need to transition to adapt. The complete
interview provides many useful insights.
In the post, New Motivation Theory in Business: n Lrn?, Jocelyn
Davis builds on David McClelland (need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power) to offer a fourth
motivation, need for learning. People moved by this trait “would have a
strong need to collect and synthesize new information, to reflect on their
experiences, and to master new skills.” I would certainly fall into this
category so it makes sense to me. Jocelyn goes on to compare these n Lrns (to use McClelland’s
notational style) with those primarily motivated by the three original
traits.
For example, someone with the power motivation (n
Pow) would be motivated to teach for the ability to influence while a n Lrn person
would be motivated by what they could learn from the experience. In contrast, someone with the affiliation
need would be motivated to teach by the possible relationships they could
establish. Of course, there can be more than one of these traits within an
individual but one or two are often dominant. While Jocelyn notes that there does not seem to be
experimental evidence for this trait, it makes intuitive sense. If you have employees with the n Lrn
trait, then you need to make sure they are properly motivated in their work.
This is just a sampling. There is much more by
additional authors. I would encourage you to explore if you are interested in
the learning, leadership, organizational development, collaboration, and other
related fields.
CMS Made Simple© “Geek Moot” Conference
CMS Made Simple hosts its annual conference, “Geek Moot”, in Amsterdam September 15th – 17th
PHILADELPHIA – CMS Made Simple© (“CMSMS”), an open source content management system, is hosting its annual international conference, “Geek Moot”, scheduled to take place September 15 through 17, 2010, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Geek Moot is the official international conference for the CMS Made Simple content management system platform. CMS Made Simple founder Ted Kulp will be presenting “The State of CMS Made Simple” on September 16th; also celebrating the recent milestone achieved of generating 1 million downloads.
Attendees of this conference will consist of CMS Made Simple users of all expertise, including technology firms, marketing and advertising agencies, web designers, developers, and other users and fans of the platform.
September 15th, the first day of activities, will be filled with pre-conference educational workshops discussing various topics facilitated by experts in their respective fields. These topics will consist of “Advanced Design Integration, “Instant Modules”, SEO & CMS Made Simple”, “A Beginner’s Walkthrough of CMS Made Simple”, “jQuery”, and “CMS Made Simple Extensions”.
September 16th & 17th are going to be information-packed conference days, full of sessions discussing topics such as the much-anticipated launch of version 2.0, current and future marketing efforts, e-commerce, mobile, modules and development, front-end users, flash video, along with time for Q&A with members of the development team.
Registration for Geek Moot Amsterdam is only €150. All attendees will be able to attend two full days of sessions and lunch will be provided. Register at http://geekmoot2010.eventbrite.com/. All workshops are priced individually.
To learn more about “Geek Moot” Amsterdam 2010, please visit http://geekmoot.com/2010/.
Enterprise-wide projects require clear vision and effective leadership. This is especially true if your company engages in business process management (BPM) with the goal of maximizing efficiency gains enterprise wide. Since your everyday processes are built around your mission-critical content, a thorough understanding of your data, routine processes, and the interrelationship of one business area to the next is crucial.
Establishing a grand vision isn’t necessary for a successful enterprise content management (ECM) and BPM implementation. Developing and communicating a clear vision based on an understanding of your company’s long-range goals, prioritization of needs, and knowledge of constraints, however, is.
Establishing a vision for BPM requires a strong team comprised of executive-level and IT leadership, line-of-business managers, and a dedicated project leader. Since a detailed understanding of your company’s content (data) and how it is used daily is vital, ground-level knowledge workers must also be represented on the team. Their involvement in day-to-day information gathering and processing brings critical knowledge and valuable insights into how your business operates, as well as potential improvements. As your team defines long- and short-term goals, understanding your current processes is as important as defining long-term business needs, technology capabilities, and budget constraints.
BPM requires that you view your business as a series of intertwined processes driven by people, data, and events. The data that feeds and drives your processes may be found in legacy systems, line-of-business software applications, paper, voice mails, and other media. Wherever it resides, it must be accessed, controlled, and manipulated intelligently so you can leverage it wherever it’s needed to drive efficiency. Understanding the sources and function of data within your organization is vital.
The IT Channel Planet reports
that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue
within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over
2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security
and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through
George Dearing on Twitter.
Three of the growth markets are project
and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration
(CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue
to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0.
It is encouraging to see these numbers,
It is interesting to note that the
collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS
adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82
percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform
vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow.
As I argued in my previous post “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers” (originally named “Serving the long tail of information needs”) there’s a long tail of information needs to be served within knowledge intensive enterprises, and which can’t be served with the use of traditional intranets.
Organizations typically try to serve their employee’s information needs by producing varying types of content (text, images, video…) which is intended to communicate a message to, inform, the employees. Due to limited resources, all information needs cannot possibly be served. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, and it’s usually drawn where the cost of providing a certain kind of content exceeds the potential value of the information that the receivers can gain when extracting information from the content (assuming that the value is created when the content is actually consumed, i.e. transforming into information by the receiver). This is illustrated by the dashed horizontal link in the Long Tail power law graph for information needs illustrated below.
Although sometimes blunt and misguiding (as when there is information which is supposed to be never be used, but yet is absolutely critical to provide access to – such as a Standard Operating Procedures for emergency situations in a power plant), content usage rate (or popularity, if you like) is the easiest way to estimate the value of a certain piece of content, and thereby the information extracted from it. The reasoning is simple; if many people request a certain kind of information, it is likely they see value in it. So if many employees request a certain kind of information, it is likely to be valuable enough for the organization to supply that information to them.
Then what’s the cost of information? Well, a simple way to define it is to define it as the sum of all activities that it takes to supply an audience with a certain kind of information. The lower the cost, the more information needs we can serve. That’s basically why we use media and information technology – to lower the supply costs of information.
Assuming this is true for a lot of the information needs that exists over time in an organization, then the organization have two major challenges to address concerning all the information needs that make the cut (has a value / cost above 1):
1. Make sure the information is, if possible, captured into some content and made accessible.
2. Make sure the content is as easy to access and consume (interpret and understand) as possible
The second challenge usually presents great potential for improvements in most organizations. You might be familiar with the now classic the IDC report from 2001 by analyst Susan Feldman, “The high cost of not finding information” (which you can read about in this whitepaper). Feldman’s research showed that average knowledge workers spent 15% to 35% of their workday searching for information. 15% of the time was spent on duplicating existing information and searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. Even though 10 years have passed since the findings of the research was presented, I’m pretty sure it holds true also today. As an example, Laurie Buczek,Social Media Strategist and Platform Vision Team Manager at Intel, partly motivated Intel’s investment in social computing in the following way:
“The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity and opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.”
Although the costs of not being able to find and access information fast enough are typically high, the costs of not being able to find a certain piece of information at all is potentially even greater. Rework, delays, suffering customer service, bad decision-making…you name it. All of these things happen frequently due to the lack of access to the right information in the right time – and quite often due to the fact that the information isn’t accessible in the first place.
These problems can partly be addressed by making sure all information that has been captured and encoded into content can be accessed and found by anyone who needs it. Yet, it is safe to say that the vast majority of all information and knowledge we have haven’t been captured and encoded into content. Sometimes because it can’t be, but as often as not it’s not been captured due to the high cost of capturing, storing, organizing, managing and delivering it.
The thing is that many orgs don’t bother much with the first challenge if they have just been able to produce and provide access to information that is worth managing. The problem is that there are lots and lots of valuable information which does not make the cut. Information that either never becomes accessible, or where access is very limited because it resides in email inboxes, in collaboration spaces that people won’t find or access unless they knows about it already and either has access or asks for it, on user desktops, on file servers not indexed by the intranet search engine, and do forth.
So what makes a certain piece of info worth managing? Well, if the value / cost quote is higher than 1, we’ll produce, store, organize, manage and distribute it to the users. Given that most of this content will be found in the long neck, that’s where we will focus most of our efforts and resources.
For content where the value / cost quote is equal to or lower than 1, we’re likely not going to manage it. We’ll much rather not produce or capture it. We’ll even delete it if already exists, so that it does not get in the way of other content that we need to manage.
Now, we should ask ourselves what would happen if the following was to become true:
Would this change the game plan?
YES.
By coincidence, these things have now happened.
Thanks to the (technological) development during recent years, we now have technologies available which allow us to communicate and share information with other people, across time and space, in a variety of ways. If you need to have a rich, two-way and real-time conversation with an audience you do not know in advance and want anyone to be able to join, you can do that. If you only need to send a small text message to one specific recipient while you are out on a run in the park, you can do that. If you want to be able to discover, connect and collaborate with like-minded people across the globe who you don’t yet know, you can do that.
The access to these communication tools is also being democratized as virtually anyone who possesses basic computer skills and a device that can access the Internet can get access to and use the tools anytime and from anywhere they want. For free. No education or training required.
Until quite recently, the only way to reach a large audience with a message was to broadcast it via print (newspapers, books…), tv or radio. Now you can be a one-man media corporation and reach as many people as any of the big old media corporations. The great power than comes with mass-communication, which for long have been restricted to those who could afford to buy and own the production means and whp had the education and training required to operate the tools, that power is now available to anyone. That’s a really big shift which has lead to a sort of new Renaissance – one that is not restricted to an intellectual class, but which anyone can join by engaging with other people in the blogosphere, Twitter and Facebook.
As a result of these changes, more and more of the conversations where we exchange information and knowledge with each other are taking place online instead of face-to-face or via telephony. Content is produced as a bi-product of our conversations. With virtual collaboration becoming the norm even when we meet face-to-face or just need to talk to each other, the things we say and do are being captured and encoded into various forms of content such as voice, video, photos and text. The dark matter of the business universe is becoming visible and accessible as our business conversations are being captured instead of being transient and passing by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participated in a specific conversation.
In short, the cost of communicating has collapsed.
What is interesting is how the information and knowledge exchanged through these various kinds of conversations now is easily captured and can be made available to people who did not participate in the conversation. Content is increasingly being created as a bi-product of conversations. This is to be contrasted with the typical approach where we capture and encode the information into content (documents etc) before it is communicated. For information that is encoded into content this way, one can definitely say that the cost of producing content has collapsed. And here lies the great opportunity when it comes to being able to serve the long tail of information needs; if the information exchanged in our conversations can easily be captured and shared, then some of this information is likely.
To do this we must first make it possible for people to find/discover, connect and communicate with each other in various ways (blogs, web conferencing, micro-blogging, IM/chat) so that the information can be captured into content (text, video, sound…). We must have a platform that empowers and a culture that encourages people to communicate and collaborate with each other.
We must also find ways to store and collectively organize the content so that it can be found or discovered and used by anyone who might need it. Here we can learn a lot from the social web and the use of Web 2.0 technologies and how search, tagging, links, and metadata created from explicit and implicit user activities to make information findable even when there is an abundance of information available to us.
Again, just as I argued in “Why traditional intranets fail knowledge workers”, we need to focus more on creating filters to handle the abundance of information than trying to stop the inflow of information. We need to stop seeing information supply as a problem to be solved (by trying to delimit it) and instead focus on how to satisfy information demand. By using information about our own social connections, the exchange we have with them, and the activities they do, we can employ social filtering techniques to “pull” relevant information. By letting not only any systems you use but also your friends and colleagues become aware of what you’re interested in, currently working on, planning to do, and so on, you can create an attraction to yourself that will “pull” relevant information to you, even information you didn’t know existed or you didn’t know you where looking for. Instead of having to spend a lot of time and effort on searching for information, you will get more of your information needs served by social filtering; manual and automatic recommendations on what information might be relevant for you.
To me it’s clear that most enterprises, especially knowledge intensive, need a platform that provides the capabilities which I have mentioned above. There are many reasons as it can help them make better use of shared knowledge, improve decision-making, increase agility and responsiveness, and facilitate innovation. If innovation, like Idris Motee says, “is like ping-pong”, it is because ideas need to be bounced back and forth before they mature and can attract the right people who can bring it to the market. If an organization really considers innovation to be important, it should engage everyone and make innovation everybody’s business. It should provide a ping-pong table, give every coworker, partner and customer a racket to play with, and invite them to play.
To me, it is a feasible (pragmatic) strategy to extend and transform the traditional intranet into a social intranet that incorporates these new capabilities. With the risk that using the term “intranet” adds terminology baggage that might cause problems, I have chosen to accept that the expression “social intranet” seems to stick to people’s minds. Using an existing term will likely help people learn about the new things faster than “Enterprise Social Software Platform” (ESSP) possibly could – at least during a transitional phase. There will certainly be a few who will just put lipstick on a pig and call it a “social intranet”, but I don’t expect that many people to be fooled to believe that adding some features such as commenting for corporate news stories and profile pages will really transform a traditional intranet into social intranet.
Most people will, if they’ don’t already, come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds, social bookmarking and micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it’s about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate and collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated and managed. A social intranet needs to be seen as a strategic component when trying to do this.
Although the notion of social intranets is quite new, the business case for social intranets is anything but new. In fact, it has existed as long as there have been enterprises, and it’s growing stronger and stronger the more vital timely access to the right information and knowledge becomes for an enterprise in order to compete and thrive. The business case can easily be summarized, as in this quote from the 2001 IDC whitepaper mentioned above:
“While the costs of not finding information are enormous, they are hidden within the enterprise, and therefore they are rarely perceived as having an impact on the bottom line. Decisions are usually information problems. If they are made with poor or erroneous information, then they put the life of the enterprise at stake. Therefore, it behooves the enterprise to provide the best information-finding tools available and to ensure that all of its intellectual assets have access to them, no matter where they reside.”
It’s high time to start serving the long tail of information needs.
Oscar Berg posted
a useful piece on why traditional
intranets fail today's knowledge workers that I want to bring to your
attention. I heard about it through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar starts
with some useful stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He
writes that a study by The Work
Foundation estimated
our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent
in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less
knowledge content. I think the numbers are higher for knowledge work but this
is still a lot.
Oscar notes that knowledge work is less
predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred
Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the
work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues
against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind. This makes it hard to know in advance
what knowledge you need. This
means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the
worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.
Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility
for knowledge access that knowledge workers require. As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist
of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information
needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform
predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.
Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to
address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0). This is more than a simply adding
collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that
allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect
with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.” Ahem.
I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is
enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.
The new Premier League season is upon us in England and it was with some surprise that I noted Tottenham were being sponsored by Autonomy, purveyors of Bayesian probability and content management systems.
Professional integrity dictates that I shouldn’t exclude Autonomy from shortlists just because of who they sponsor, but this deal may cause those of you with taste to reconsider whether Autonomy are meeting their corporate and social responsibility targets. Yes, I am an Arsenal fan.
I was going to write an article that mapped each Premier League team to a WCM product, but realised I’d be sued by anyone I associated with Blackburn Rovers or Stoke City. Nevertheless, I think their are a number of useful analogies to be drawn
Some WCM products have editorial interfaces that entice you to play around with them: thoughtfully designed with user-friendly tools like drag and drop, red-lining, or DAM integration. Others practically repulse: ugly web forms with incomprehensible labelling and non-sensical reference data.
But don’t assume that a beautiful GUI makes for more effective content management processes. Just as Bolton Wanderers are restyling their footballing approach under Owen Coyle to be more appealing, this won’t mean they’ll finish higher than they used to under the ugly pragmatism of Sam Allardyce. Give free reign to your editors’ creative spark and you may find your content strategy going down the pan.
Virtually no Premier League football club is without debt. WCM vendors are in a less financially perilous situation but hardly paragons of financial stability. This should make you wary in your contractual dealings with them. Always hold proprietary source code in Escrow. It’s not much of a security but it’s better than none at all. Check the financial stability of services partners and weigh this against their ability to deliver: a team that’s doing badly is likely to have disincentivised staff and the best of them may be looking to leave.
Be wary too of cutting deals that actually disincentivise your suppliers: if you cut their profit margin too much they’ll focus on more profitable accounts when the going gets tough. And the last thing you want to do is see your team go into administration like Portsmouth last season.
Just as some Premier League clubs look down on new entrants and see themselves as the established top tier, some WCM vendors subscribe to a similarly blinkered view. Don’t choose a team just because they’re an established player and appear in an analyst’s magic quadrant. Take a look at the wider field and figure out what it is you’re really after from your supplier. Having a vendor with a good reputation in the industry won’t improve your website any more than winning the league 49 years ago makes you a better club today.
So if you’re ignoring the past, what abou the future? No need for Paul the octopus: take a look at company history. Has there been a recent big-money acquisition? If so, you can be certain that the vendor is going to be focussing more immediate efforts on proper integration of that product rather than on new features. Assimilating new players takes time, as Manchester City discovered last season.
Or was the last release community-driven? If you don’t have the means to engage actively with that community, how are you planning on getting the enhancement (and fixes) you need the product to deliver? You’re unlikely to hold any sway over the selection despite your investment.
A crucial consideration must be who’s going to support your team once you kick off. Is there a loyal and knowledgable fan base? Are they likely to up sticks for another trendier team the minute the going gets tough? And where are they? If all your support is in a different timezone, you’re going to have problems.
In my experience, transatlantic services particularly suffer from this Manchester United syndrome of long-distance support. Many European vendors have struggled to provide north American clients with the same levels of support as clients in Europe and the reverse is certainly true. The problem is is seldom resolved by takeovers, when a larger company may bring a much larger support team, but product experts remain few and far between.
In the end, remember the crucial difference between implementing a WCM and following a football team: you’re a client, not a fan. I’ll support Arsenal even when the players all inevitably collapse with cruciate ligament injuries before Christmas; I’m a lifelong fan. But if you’re not getting what you need from your team, relegate them and seek your glory elsewhere.