Here is the second in my first series of abstract paintings. It is painted from a close up view of a portion of a red napkin I tossed on a table several times until i got the right folds. It is a 16" x 20" acrylic.

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Here is a 16" x 20" acrylic abstract painting. It is actually based on a close detail of my green rain jacket.  I plan to do a series on this which I refer to as micro-landscapes.

A few months ago I wrote a
series of posts on the innovative and award winning approach Booz Allen is taking to
enhance enterprise collaboration and engagement (see Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series).  Recently, I spoke again with Walton Smith, the Program Manager for Booz
Allen's information sharing efforts and the lead for the Government 2.0 client
practice. Walton said that the first version of Hello, the collaboration
platform, covered the exchange and archiving of tacit knowledge. Now they
wanted to expand it to incorporate document management in an integrated and
collaborative manner.

Booz Allen selected SharePoint for the document management
application as 90% of their clients used it and they already had an enterprise
license.  To extend the
collaborative capabilities they made use of a number of third party tools
including MindTouch and some other open source offerings. MindTouch was added
as the wiki platform because of its ability to scale and the flexibility to
rapidly develop mashups and social applications. It could also be easily
integrated into the overall Hello skin.

The new version
of Hello includes a front end dashboard built on the iGoogle model.  Users can configure it to meet their
individual requirements. The third new feature is the capability to support
projects. In the prior version of Hello everything was open. Now you can put in
security levels to create private subsets of the conversation to support a project
team.  They also have added FAST
for enterprise search as it provides a federated search across applications.
The search results bring back related people and documents at the same time.
These are all great next steps to make the collaboration platform more robust
and serve a broader array of needs within the enterprise. Here is a sample
screen.

We also discussed their
micro-blogging efforts (which plan to be installed in the near future). Walton
likes micro-blogging for circulating content because of its speed.  Busy managers and consultants often do
not have time to write a blog post or make a wiki entry and email is too
limited. However, they can quickly push information and ideas around the firm
through micro-blogging. He finds that it also levels the playing field for
information exchange. Messages more quickly move up and down the organizational
levels as anyone can put a message into the micro-blogging system and anyone
can respond. The traditional filters of company hierarchies can be put aside,
furthering the speed of communication. 
At the same time private groups can be easily set up for conversations
within levels as needed.

In addition to supporting individual exchanges, micro-blogging can become the vehicle
for virtual group discussions. For example, Booz Allen has held several forums
through micro-blogging.
In this case senior executives make themselves available for questions at an
agreed upon time. Employees can follow the discussion thread and make
contributions.  This provides a new
sense of connection, as well as updates on where the firm is going which is
especially valuable for a global organization of 23,000 people operating in
almost every time zone. Even if people cannot participate, these forums are
archived and accessible at any time. 
We have seen these group dialogues on Twitter. Moving them inside the
trusted environment of the enterprise can further open up the conversation.

Walton related another use case as micro-blogging can serve as an ambient
alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart
phone roll out.  The IT people
responsible for this began to see concerns on the micro-blogging system long before the
volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the micro-blogging system and other
channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way.
The speed of detection that micro-blogging
offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people into an
example of proactive responsiveness.

Walton sees micro-blogging
as a means to stay in touch with the pulse of the enterprise. This can be
oversight of a tactical issue like the smart phone effort or more strategic
topics such as what are people hearing from clients in the field or what are
the main concerns of employees. Many of the enterprise micro-blogging tools have recognized
this potential and have implemented metrics and dashboards to aggregate
messages for more comprehensive monitoring.

The system recently received another award, this
time from CIO Magazine. The award citation noted that “Booz Allen Hamilton
wanted a "deliberately fun" way to increase collaboration among its
23,000 worldwide staffers, especially those who might feel isolated while
working at client sites. Its solution: Hello, a suite of tools including blogs,
forums and wikis that make it easier for employees to find staff with specific
expertise, and to mine and enlarge the consultancy's knowledge base. The system
serves the company's goal of finding ways its employees can "work together
differently" and has also added to the bottom line: While Booz Allen
doesn't sell Hello, it has leveraged its experience with the system to develop
customized Enterprise 2.0 solutions for clients.”

I continue to be impressed with what Booz Allen is doing in the enterprise 2.0 space and enjoyed Walton’s presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.  

Here is the eighteenth
in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain
links to useful information.  This is pushed back a bit because of my
Enterprise 2.0 Conference notes. 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.

I spot tested the
reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for
you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

Also see the Darwineco favorite
tweets.

RT +1 @VMaryAbraham:
Notes #e2conf: Above and Beyond
KM » Measuring E2.0 Success http://bit.ly/c1OghB
#KM June 14

RT @socialmedia2day:
17 Techniques For Driving Traffic To Your Blog http://goo.gl/fb/ZUnH9  Jun 13th

RT @Pistachio:
12 CEOs that tweet by @AliPowell21:
http://bit.ly/dm2ILx (all are Boston
women, FTW)  Jun 13th

New York R Times bans use of word "tweet" except as
related to birds http://bit.ly/dd9PZb  Jun 11th via TweetDeck

Top
10 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube http://bit.ly/cK94Qz
 June 10

RT @mfauscette:
BP’s Social Media Campaign Going About as Well as Capping Wired.com http://tinyurl.com/29xua89 June 10, 2010

many primary voters trun to Twitter http://bit.ly/9LXCiS  Jun 9th

found thru @darwineco
http://bit.ly/9LqVdN how 2 Follow 2010
World Cup on Twitter http://bit.ly/aKIlpQ  Jun 9th

RT @skemsley:
Collaboration Hurdles: good list of why people don't participate in enterprise
collaboration http://j.mp/9DVBze #c2  Jun 9th

How Consumers Interact with Brands on Social Networks http://bit.ly/b13JXh June 8

Military Taps Social Networking Skills NYT http://nyti.ms/aftPmR  June 8

from @eelxer
Beyond Serendipity for Enterprise 2.0 http://bit.ly/aLPsB1
> good read  June 7

post from @robpatrob
25,000 IBMers support Luis! Workplace Flex http://bit.ly/djeLyk great story June 7

RT
@DearingGroup: Does
Internet Make You Dumber? http://bit.ly/a3VAFb
[Nicholas Carr] see also http://bit.ly/doZ7p5
June 5

RT @socialmedia2day:
Professional-Strength Social Media Aggregators http://goo.gl/fb/iEnH7 Jun 5th

Diplomats tap into social media http://bit.ly/9ap545
via @SBoSM  Jun 4th

The New Reality of the Twitter Ecosystem http://bit.ly/97nMsl  Jun 4th

via @GeorgeDearing:
will its Twitter makeover help? Digg loses third of visitors in a month: is it
deadd? http://bit.ly/bUcGuo | #fb  Jun 3rd

RT @DearingGroup:
Twitter Testing Users ‘You Both Follow’ Feature http://tcrn.ch/aC438J
June 2

RT @socialmedia2day:
When Should You Blog? http://su.pr/2Zs0Ry >
good points June 2

AT&T Pulls Plug on Its Unlimited Data Plans http://bit.ly/di7TZ2 June 2

Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social
networking base http://bit.ly/d92Zvz via @SBoSM  Jun 1st

IBM – The New Workplace – It’s all about the culture by @robpatrob http://bit.ly/bGtBQW

via @GeorgeDearing:
When Companies Respond to Online Criticism With Lawsuits [NYT] http://nyti.ms/bUnJox | #fb

RT @SBoSM: Twitter:
15 Billion Tweets and Counting [PIC]: http://bit.ly/cCNtaN

Here is a 20" x 24" acrylic painting of the duffle bag I use to carry my art supplies. It is the fifth in a series and the fourth with this image. I have varied to colors in each. Last weekend I did the red and blue versions. Here is the version with the original colors. 

I did a series of
ten posts covering sessions at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It remains
one of my favorite events in this space and is an especially good venue to meet
many of the people I often only encounter on a virtual basis. This is the
fourth year that I have participated and it is becoming like a reunion.  Here are the posts.

Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise
Collaboration Technologies: Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop – Afternoon Part One – Enterprise 2.0
Conference Notes

Enterprise 2.0 Black Belt Workshop – Afternoon Part Two – Enterprise 2.0
Conference Notes

The State of Enterprise 2.0 – My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Microsharing: It is All About the Tools. It is Not About the Tools – My Notes from Enterprise 2.0 Boston Conference

Are CIOs Ready to Bite? – My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption: My Enterprise 2.0
Conference Notes

Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the
Enterprise and on the Web – Part One: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the
Enterprise and on the Web – Part Two: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

Next in my occasional series where I refer to a different to letter to the one in a TLA (after discussing the R in ECM) – I wondering if it’s time we took the W out of CMS and thought about management and delivery as separate disciplines. I am not the first to think like this, obviously, but it’s something I wanted to explore in this blog.

To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?