Here is the eleventh in a new series of posts that provide
access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information. 
Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want
to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now
going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed
later. I will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume.

Here is the monthly listing of my Fast Forward blog posts. I
find it helps me with an archive and hopefully is also useful to you. There is
a separate category for these summaries in my right side column on this blog.
There will be more in March.

Details on Enterprise 2.0 in Operation in Haiti Relief

Collaboration Goes Mobile in 2010

Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500 in 2009

Creating an Internal Services Market Facilitated by Enterprise 2.0
Platforms

BBC Tells Staff to Get with Social Media

The Best Connected Individuals May Not be the Most Influential

“It’s standard practice at many companies to conceal information as a way of controlling employees – a formula that’s toxic to trust”

Gary Hamel

“In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.”

Peter F. Drucker

This year's KM World Conference &
Exhibition has moved to Washington, D.C. It will be November 16 – 18, 2010 at Marriott Renaissance, The Enterprise
Search Summit 2010 will be at the New York Hilton on May 11-12. It is nice to see these two conferences on the East
Coast. I went last year in the November to the combined
conference in San Jose.

I will be presenting at the Enterprise Search
Summit 2010 with my Darwin Colleague, Thierry Hubert. We are presenting on Deriving Order From Chaos Through Discovery and
Awareness. Our session is on Wednesday May 12 at 1PM. The Enterprise
Search Summit says that the “emphasis for Enterprise Search Summit is on how enterprise
search enables Information Access. Search can no longer be viewed as a
stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has
become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise.” I would
certainly agree.

The KM World announcement said that this year's
theme is KnowHow: the Knowledge-Driven
Enterprise. “The knowledge of how to do something smoothly and
efficiently with technical skill and expertise — also known as
"knowhow" — drives every enterprise, agency, and organization.
Creating knowledge bases, sharing them effectively, using them for
decision-making and innovation.”

This sounds familiar but it is great that it is
still very relevant. The session shave a 2.0 flavor like last year. I hope to
be able to attend. Deadline for speaker submissions is March 1. Here are my notes
from the combined event KM World and Enterprise Search Summit last year.

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative
Tools

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: The Role of Social Techniques in Search &
How It Impacts Your Organization

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Evolve From a Tactical E-Discovery Approach to
Search and E-Discovery

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Enterprise Search Technologies

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Fundamentals of Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: From Birth to Billions: The Life Story of
Google Enterprise Search

My KM World and
Enterprise Search Summit Notes: Is Semantic Technology Real?

”Throughout the primate world, social networks provide a fast conduit for innovation and information-sharing that help the group as a whole to adapt to its environment.”

Alex Wright, “Glut – Mastering Information Through The Ages”

The future workplace will be hyper-connected, meaning that we will use multiple means of communication, so that we can be more innovative, quickly adapt to a changing environment, and access and use all the best resources we need to do what we need to do, no matter where the resources are located.

More and more, work will be treated as something we do, not a place (building). Knowledge / creative work is highly collaborative by nature and we can’t let time, space and organization stop us from collaborating with the right people at the right time. Virtual collaboration will become the norm and face-to-face meetings will be seen as one of the many ways of meeting each other.

The previously so common 1:1 relationship between organization and enterprise will be very uncommon. A typical enterprise will be made up of people from many different organizations, and a typical organization will be involved in many different enterprises. People might belong to an organization, but it is secondary to the work do and who they work with.

The network will need to replace the hierarchy as the primary model for organizing resources. As work becomes more and more network-oriented, so will the way we organize ourselves and other resources.

New generations that enter the workplace will be always connected, they will be more open to making new connections, and they will be more connected than any generation before them. The will understand and nurture the value of their relationships, with a solid understanding that “no man is an island” and that their success and well-being depends on with whom they are connected, how they are connected, and how they mutually benefit from using these connections.

Our focus will shift from producing and organizing documentation to communicating and interacting in real-time, with documentation as a by-product. We will need to spend more time on building and maintaining relationships and less on trying to find information and people, recreating information we cannot find, and creating documentation as an activity separated from our daily work.

Right now, we are just seeing the dawn of the hyper-connected age.

This brings back
memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around
for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in
our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several
times.  These were the days of
better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that
this award is still around and still relevant.

For the first time, Apple was named the
overall Global MAKE Winner. North America took top honors with 7 Winners,
followed by Asia (5 Winners) and Europe (3 Winners). Teleos in association with
The KNOW Network conducts this award. There were also 5 'Global' Winners whose
organizational structures reflect the 21st global knowledge economy.

A panel of experts made the picks based on these
criteria:

- creating an enterprise knowledge-driven culture

- developing knowledge workers through senior
management leadership

- developing and delivering knowledge-based
products/services/solutions

- maximizing enterprise intellectual capital

- creating an environment for collaborative
knowledge sharing

- creating a learning organization

- delivering value based on stakeholder knowledge

- transforming enterprise knowledge into
shareholder/stakeholder value

The 2009 winners include some long time winners
and some major companies that you would not associate wit KM in the 90s. 

  by Brian W. Hill

Iron Mountain announced today that it has acquired privately-held archiving vendor Mimosa Systems. The approximately $112 million deal significantly bolsters Iron Mountain’s archiving portfolio with on-premises software for email, file and SharePoint archiving. With the purchase, Iron Mountain also picks up just over a thousand existing Mimosa customers and a good talent pool with expertise in archiving and eDiscovery.

My preliminary perspective is that this acquisition will entail some near- and mid-term bumps for Iron Mountain customers and prospects, but will ultimately prove positive. The three main reasons:

• Message archiving remains critically important. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of organizations have adopted message archiving solutions. An array of vendors, providing archiving offerings for Exchange, Notes Domino, and other messaging systems, have helped these buyers comply with regulations, mitigate legal risk, and improve operational efficiency. While the message archiving market is mature, it’s changing and growing at a rapid clip. Although Mimosa made an impressive initial entry into SharePoint archiving last year, message archiving accounts for most of new customers the vendor signed in the last 12 months. With this acquisition, Iron Mountain demonstrates that it understands how important message archiving is to prospective buyers and its strong intent to capitalize on the opportunity.
• Functionality delivered as on-premises software (as opposed to SaaS-based solutions) matters to many archiving buyers. With the promise of lower total cost of ownership, more rapid deployments, and other advantages, message archiving vendors providing SaaS-based solutions report strong customer growth. In announcing its April 2009 partnership with Mimecast for SaaS-based message archiving, Iron Mountain sought to take advantage of this market growth. While the vendor has had some traction with this partnership, prospective buyers with a preference for on-premises solutions due to privacy, security, legal, and other concerns remained out of reach. Now, with Mimosa’s on-premises message archiving software, Iron Mountain can more effectively target these buyers as well as organizations interested in exploring hybrid solutions, combining a mix of on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services.
• Message archiving buyers struggle with eDiscovery challenges. From a series of podcasts I’ve recorded with message archiving customers (e.g., Canaccord, Media General, and Rohm and Haas) over the past few months and from ongoing exchanges with enterprise buyers, it’s clear that many are achieving legal risk mitigation objectives but most organizations struggle. Interestingly, top challenges typically don’t include issues with insufficient message archiving features or other application-specific factors. Instead enterprises report difficulties in synchronizing eDiscovery, archiving, and records management efforts along with issues in establishing policies for retention management and legal hold as key challenges. Effectively incorporating Mimosa’s archiving products and expertise into the broader Iron Mountain portfolio holds potential to ease these difficulties. For example, a solution that tightly integrates message archiving, preservation, and legal review along with solid best practices guidance would go a long way in easing enterprise eDiscovery pain.

Enterprises report frustrations in integrating applications that support disparate steps of the eDiscovery process. If Iron Mountain successfully incorporates the Mimosa product set into its portfolio, the vendor has good potential to address enterprise legal risk mitigation headaches. This is a considerable effort, however, and success is certainly not assured. I’ll be monitoring Iron Mountain’s execution on this deal and will be looking for examples of customers leveraging multiple Iron Mountain archiving, records management, and eDiscovery offerings in production environments. If your organization fits this description, please send me a note at bhill@forrester.com.

What do you think the acquisition means for the message archiving market? I welcome your comments here. Also, Forrester is currently conducting research on message archiving trends, budgets, and user expectations. We’re wrapping up an online survey now and value your message archiving insight. If you would like to participate in an online survey to support this research, please click on this link. (No vendors please.) We plan to publish key summary findings in early 2010.

This post combines two FastForward posts as I wanted to continue to share this story with a broader audience. The US military
is using an enterprise 2.0 style collaborative network to help coordinate its
relief efforts in Haiti.  As
reported by David Pierce in Wired in Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for
Haiti Relief:

“TISC (”the
Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation”) is a new iteration of APAN, the
All Partners Access Network, which was developed by the Defense Department a
few years ago. Initially, the military was using APAN to communicate across
borders, particularly in countries without sophisticated communication
technology. Even in third-world countries, Internet connection seemed to be
frequently accessible, so the APAN system was built to work over the Internet,
to facilitate the sharing of classified files, as well as things like
coordinating calendars.

The system is
designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like
Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses
file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other
things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they
are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network,
its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.”

I recently spoke with Walton Smith from Booz Allen who
was involved in the development of APAN to get the details (see my series on
how Booz Allen, itself, uses enterprise 2.0 within the firm). First, I will
cover how it works and then cover how it came into being and then its use in
Haiti.

We have been reading about the logistics troubles in
Haiti but they might be even worse without the TISC. Haiti is the first
activity of scale to use the system. When you are determining ROI based on
number of hospital beds filled and people who receive much needed food, the
benefits take on a different meaning. The TISC concept is to help the US
military better coordinate with NGOs and other countries when disaster strikes.
The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular
disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key
people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as
well as a platform for efficient cooperation.

There are several main components of the system: forums, wikis,
chat and blogs. In the forums, people are able to ask questions (how to find
experts, etc.) and make requests (can you help with this issue, etc.), as well
as offer help or point out resources that others can draw on (e.g., available
hospital beds or safe landing areas). The forum tags content and sets up a
treaded dialog on the specific issues. 
The chat tool allows for real time secure communications.  Then the content is organized and
placed in a wiki for ease of retrieval. Finally, the best practices are
abstracted and put into blogs to attract comments and be available for use in
future disaster relief efforts.  In
the future, there will be expert locators and profiles. 

This version of APAN began two years ago when the US
Pacific Command (PACOM) wanted to develop an online community for the free flow
of information between validated people from the US military, NGOs and other
countries.  Ty Wooldrige and Jerry
Giles led the effort for PACOM. Booz Allen was asked to create the system with
PACOM, and James Kaina and Tim Gramp are the Booz Allen leads.

The system was first tested on some small efforts. The
support for mobile devices was strengthened. The US Southern Command asked the
PACOM to provide an operational demonstration of the system. The PACOM team was
in Miami for this demo when the Haiti earthquake struck. The Southern Command
said to forget simply doing a demo and decided to put the system into real use
to help with Haiti. Now APAN is providing real-time help, validating the
concept and vision, gathering useful content, and the Haiti effort is providing
a significant test of the system to make further improvements.

The US military was one of the early leaders in
knowledge management and the use of after action reviews and lessons learned.
It is nice to see it acting as one of the leaders in the use of Enterprise 2.0
concepts that take the vision of knowledge management significantly forward
with new tools, transparency, and capabilities.

The Defense News also
reported on how on APAN has evolved into a broader communications and
coordination tool that's proving vital to those who want to help and those who
need it. Governments, companies and private citizens are using it to post what
they are offering, allowing disaster relief officials to pick and choose what
they need.  Defense News also
pointed out the usefulness of Web social media such as Twitter and Facebook, as
well as geospatial systems such as Open Street that was been used to create
detailed maps of damaged areas.

I remember how a
very basic use of wikis helped with the Katrina efforts (see: Katrina
PeopleFinder Project). In this case a call for virtual volunteers to help
populate a centralized missing person database was meet over 20,000 people
within a day. It is great to see social media and its users helping out again
and the evolution of its capabilities. However, the basic human drive to help
others in need continues to drive these efforts. Social media just allows a
much greater way to productivity channel this human drive. 

The Gilbane Group is gearing up quickly for another one of their conferences. The Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco will be held May 18-20, 2010. This year’s conference will cover a number of topics including Web technologies, content management, and collaboration tools.

Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations’ products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. The four tracks include:

• Customers & Engagement
• Colleagues & Collaboration
• Content Technology
• Content Publishing

CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for Gilbane San Francisco 2010. If you plan on going to the conference, CMS Report has some good news that is going to save you some money. Our sponsorship of the conference entitles CMSReport.com readers to receive a special $200 discount to the conference. To receive the $200 discount, you’ll need to use the code “cmsreport” when you’re asked for it during the registration process.

read more

In today’s economic environment business and marketing professionals are having a difficult time justifying technology spending- and that includes the purchase of a brand new web content management system.

The justification for this major investment might seem hard to make, but delaying the purchase or piecing together an in-house solution can cost you more in the long run and severely impact your brand. Here are four rock solid points to help you make the business case for an investment in an enterprise web content management system (WCMS).

1.  Demonstrate Increased Revenue

By streamlining and centralizing content creation, a new or revamped WCMS boosts your revenue by allowing content reuse and re-purposing across multiple websites, channels, and, if you’re a global enterprise, in multiple languages.  Additionally, a WCMS simplifies workflow and provides robust analytic measurement capabilities to keep you focused on the timely updates of content that makes you money rather than wasting it.

A best-in-class enterprise web content management system will also have an integrated suite of online marketing tools that will help you achieve business objectives, like increasing conversion rates and building brand loyalty. Here are a few examples:
Brand management tools Email campaign tools Target audience marketing Website personalization Another revenue generating benefit of a top-rated WCMS is faster time to market.  Imagine launching a multichannel marketing campaign or a new product in just a few days, rather than a few weeks or even months.  What would this mean to your business in terms of increased sales or leads/

2.  Demonstrate Decreased Operational Costs

With the right WCMS, you will spend less money on updating your website and avoid the inefficient practice of copying and pasting content across various pages. Centralized design elements and templates can be created once and then instantaneously integrated across your website. WCM helps you save money on labor, protect your brand and get it right the first time. Most enterprise web content management systems are easy to use.  One of the major reasons organizations invest in web content management is because it empowers content creators (marketing teams, for example) to create, manage, modify, and publish content themselves- without IT involvement.  Consider the savings of hundreds of IT hours on an annual basis, not to mention the increased efficiency

3.  Calculate Probable ROI

Due to the economic environment, the concept of ROI is on the tip of everyone’s tongue when discussing technology investment. Don’t worry: an best-in-class enterprise web content management system almost always provides a sizable ROI. In addition to saving costs and boosting your revenue, a good WCMS interface comes with a high degree of usability. This means you can accelerate and simplify projects such as site development, implementation and content creation.

4.  Think Beyond ROI

In addition, a WCMS can provide benefits that supersede ROI.  Next generation web content management systems can really help to protect brand equity online and across multiple channels. For large companies, branding remains one of your most important assets and good customer perception is integral for continued success.  A next generation WCM system allows you to build and maintain your brand with minimal hiccups. Even if you come up with initial ROI figures that are lower than you want, maintaining your brand equity and providing the ideal user experience across multiple channels is enough to make the business case for updating your WCM strategy today.