I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – [...]
Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis: ”The importance of good content management and governance as a [...]
The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]
Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them?
According to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the population of planet Earth was formed by a spaceship full of middle managers, hairdressers, marketeers and account executives. It’s easy to lump project managers into this mix. When Ford Prefect complains about this group’s inability to get stuff done — “This is futile! 573 committee meetings, and you haven’t even discovered fire yet!” — you can be sure that a project manager was there, maintaining the rolling action item log.
This is often exacerbated by project methodologies that foster a generic culture of project management, where all project management problems are essentially the same and if you can fix the issues around business case, stakeholders, executive sponsorship and resources you’re well on the way to project failure prevention. I’ve no doubt that these rules do apply for all projects, but I wonder that if you have a culture of just focussing on these issues you simply encourage project management by numbers where you get unthinking, standardised responses. As usual, Scot Adams got there first:
Even where you have a good project manger trying to help, it’s usually soft skills. Plant any management consultant in there and there’ll come up with the same answers without really having to get to grips with the fundamental issues. Why is the project struggling? Let’s not call lack of sponsorship a root cause when it’s just a symptom.
Sponsors are reluctant when they don’t understand project goals. You can see this for nearly any social media project. The business case is difficult to prove, the executive don’t buy into social media as reducing costs or increasing revenue, and the rigid formulae of business case definition help no one. This isn’t a sponsorship failure where the project manager can go in and mitigate against lack of funding. It’s fundamentally about whether an organisation is culturally ready to adopt social media and understand how they might use it. The project manager can facilitate this debate, but really you need a subject matter expert rather than a journalist who has read a couple of reports from the big analyst firms.
Jerry Manas recently wrote an article in which he suggests that project managers who run agile projects bring a completely different style to the table that’s much more concrete than traditional approaches. While I don’t agree with the entirety of his article, I think the main hypothesis is right. If you can get project managers who are close to the stakeholders, intimate with the issues and prove that they’re not just some glorified secretary, they can bring real value. Specialist projects require specialist experience and expertise and the world (of IT in particular) is littered with projects that have been delivered to industry best practice, but to abject failure.
The better generic project managers will continue to mitigate against failure and they’ll deliver their projects. But it the end, you’ll be judged on what you’ve delivered, not how you delivered it, and that’s where domain knowledge is essential.
My son will be just as precious to me whether he comes via forceps or scalpel. But it’s the people with the hard skills, not the soft skills, whom I’ll to put my faith in to ensure that he gets delivered safely.
A recent presentation I made to the J. Boye community of practice on speeding up project delivery using techniques from Scrum and Prince2.
Elgg 1.7 was released this week. Elgg is an open source social platform and is made for individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment. This new version of Elgg introduces some new features but much of the development time was spent improving the core API to make Elgg a stable platform for future development.
Some of the significant changes in Elgg 1.7 include:
Elgg 1.7 is available at Elgg.org on their downloads page.
Mobility has become a defining characteristic of knowledge work. A recent Basex survey revealed that more than 40% of knowledge workers work in nontraditional, non-Dilbertian environments on a regular (two or more days per week) basis.
On the road again.
Indeed, knowledge workers have become increasingly mobile and find themselves working from whatever location they happen to be in, be it a home office, the dentist’s waiting room, or an airport lounge. The range of devices they employ has expanded to include not just desktop PCs and laptops, but netbooks and smartphones as well.
Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to enable access to documents, spreadsheet, and presentations without tying the user to one specific computer or location.
In most organizations, there has always been a kind of second class citizenship for the mobile worker when it comes to tools and support. Among many managers, the prevailing thinking has always been that people will typically work at the office and, as a result, the best tools are to be found there. Sometimes tools have been limited on the grounds of corporate network security (a home user could inadvertently put an enterprise network at risk). But given that a clear plurality of workers work remotely today, this kind of segmentation makes little sense.
It is important to note that, even among mobile workers, there exist different groups, namely those who typically work from the same computer, be it a PC in a home office or a laptop that travels with the worker, and those who work from multiple devices such as public or shared PCs, netbooks, and smartphones. To boot, one must then differentiate the power users from the occasional users.
At the moment, the former group will most likely have standard Windows productivity software such as Microsoft Office installed on the device. However, the latter group, whose numbers are growing, will still need to be able to access tools that are more than sufficient to support their work, regardless of device or venue.
Such tools need to provide a variety of functionality, including the ability to create and edit documents (for the purposes of this discussion documents can include word processing documents, spreadsheets, and slide shows), and critically, provide links to corporate data stores to allow the knowledge worker to access files that do not reside on the device being used – and keep files behind the firewall.
Those who are working from home office PCs and laptops will almost certainly have a copy of Microsoft Word to use, but the ability to access files that are stored in a document repository is often limited. The established strategy to deal with lack of access or poor controls on access has been to maintain local copies of documents. This is for two reasons: ease of access and to preclude the possibility of someone else opening and/or editing the document at the same time. Unfortunately, this strategy can lead to more problems than it resolves including a proliferation of document versions and the potential loss of critical work if a machine goes down and is not backed up.
One potential solution may be online desktop productivity tools, a market that has been largely dominated by Google and Zoho. With the forthcoming release of Microsoft Office 2010, the company is also unveiling a line of online tools that are complementary to their desktop counterparts. We’ll examine the new offerings next week.
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
by Sheri McLeish
The new European browser menu launched this week, and Microsoft in many ways faces a no-win situation. These past few years have been a doozy for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. After extricating itself from a legal mess with Netscape, its IE6 browser braved on and captured more than two-thirds of the market at its height in the fall of 2003. While unbundled, IE’s fortunes remained closely tied the operating system, and so Vista’s failure to displace XP as the standard image for many enterprises around the world also impacted IE7 and IE8’s uptake. Even with the well-received launch of Windows 7, IE’s overall erosion accelerated this past year.
When AOL stopped development of the Netscape browser, it left Mozilla’s Firefox to challenge IE’s dominance. And it’s put up a good fight. Firefox today can claim browser market leadership for tech enthusiasts, with 46.5% of the market compared to 35% for all IE versions combined, according to the latest WC3Schools data. Google also started muscling in with Chrome. After a year-and-a-half on the market, Google finally took Chrome to the people, delivering a marketing onslaught in Europe to coincide with the new browser menu. It seems to be paying off: In January, Google’s Chrome cracked double digits and crept further up in February to 11.6% of the market share. Other market data sources like Netmarketshare aren’t quite as bad for IE, placing all versions of IE combined at 62% of the market versus 24% for Firefox and 5.6% for Chrome. Opera, which initiated the European litigation, only captures 2% of the market but said it’s already feeling the benefit of the browser menu.
But who really cares about browser market share other than the vendors and web developers? I mean, really, they seem to be free and plentiful. Consumers and information workers want web sites to work correctly, for their activities to be secure, and to have features that improve their web browsing experience like speed, add-ons, and customization. But despite improvements on all of these fronts with IE8, particularly around security, Microsoft’s IE6 remains entrenched in many global enterprises, because choice is often dependent on customizations with third-party apps, operating system upgrades, or security/compliance concerns. In these cases, European browser menu choice matters little.
Microsoft has been trying to clean up its web browser mess for enterprises by reaffirming its commitment to interoperability and standards for web browsers and ensuring compatibility between IE7 and IE8. It’s been advocating for more than a year for customers to upgrade to IE8, even if it’s obligated to continue support of IE6 until 2014. But it now seems the acrimony over IE6 is reaching near-hysterical levels, from an online petition in the UK for the British government to ditch IE6 to the revelation that the recent Google hacker attack in China exploited a vulnerability in IE6. (Yes, you read it right: Google was using IE6.)
All of this puts Microsoft in a no-win situation where IE6 remediation is needed. Every client I have spoken with in the past months facing this issue is either staying on IE6 or just letting users download an alternative browser, most often Firefox. Virtualization tends to be assessed and dismissed. Most customers say they will eventually upgrade IE, just as they will move to Windows 7. The effort and aggravation of IE6 application remediation may make more enterprises want to make a clean break from IE. But we don’t think they will. And Microsoft doesn’t want them to be swept away that easily either. Early indications show Microsoft is bucking up with IE9, adding HTML5 support and providing even more standards support. Now, if 6 turned up to be 9, Microsoft would definitely not mind. But for now, it remains a fine mess.
The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]
This is going to be a busy week for me. I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary). The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference. The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.
Before I jump into it, a funny little joke. When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face. They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8. Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7″ reference.)
Haven’t I Heard This Before?
So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side. I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies. I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.
When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:
You know something? Maybe I know a little something about Healthcare IT after all.
So I am going to be attending sessions and talking to people for five days down in Atlanta. I am hoping to define the size of the gap in my domain knowledge, and work towards filling that gap. I am also going to post notes from some sessions in a similar fashion to my EMC World posts. I will throw in the following disclaimer:
All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.
If you find anything of interest in these posts, and are at HIMSS, feel free to reach me on Twitter (@piewords). I’m looking for people to talk to that will expand my knowledge and deepen my understanding of the Healthcare industry.
Like all industries, there are unique challenges and environments in Healthcare IT. Like all industries, when you look at the core of the Information Management problem, you see similarities across the board, and lessons that can be brought to bear to solve them.
Going to be quite a ride this week. Stay tuned to see how I fare.
Last week, CMS Report received an email regarding a new CMS that focuses on managing multimedia content. The application is written in Python so naturally we’re going to talk to let our readers know about this new platform.
I’m not sure if you guys have covered this yet, but as a regular reader of cmsreport.com I thought I would let you know.
Earlier this month my company launched a new Open Source python based CMS focused on video and podcasting.MediaCore is a free open source video cms and podcast platform. MediaCore can pull video or audio from any source, track statistics, enable commenting, and provide a high degree of control over the presentation and administration.
Let me know if you guys need any further information on the project. Right now we are just trying to get the word out about it.
Cheers,
Stuart