Information Development

To Pluto and back

Robert.hillard — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:02:01 +0000

Richard Wray, writing recently in The Guardian, pointed out that the volume of data held is now estimated at 487 billion GB. To put this in perspective he explained that in printed form this would form a pile that would stretch to Pluto 10 times over. The really staggering statistic, however, was that if this data were printed then the stack would grow faster than NASA’s fastest rocket. I haven’t checked the stats, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests he’s in the right order of magnitude.

What does this mean? Apart from the staggering numbers, it tells us that the problem for organisations isn’t holding large amounts of information – they already do that. Nor is the problem necessarily how to index that information – increasingly they have defined information standards to do that. The real problem is its continual growth – very few taxonomies or models properly account for the rapid rate of growth.

MIKE2.0 hosts a new generation of Information Management techniques which are designed to deal less with the data you have now and more with the data that you are likely to gain in the future. A great place to start is with the SAFE architecture.

Using MIKE2.0 to win IM strategy work in tough times

Sean.mcclowry — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:09:27 +0000

It’s tough out there if you’re trying to kick off a critical information management program. Whereas most clients I speak with want to significantly improve their capability in how they manage information, they find it tough to get funding for major programs of work This is where I believe some real benefits come through for MIKE2.0 - you can still get a comprehensive, highly relevant approach more quickly though reuse of the framework:

You can use the approach to drive cost reduction, through a comprehensive approach for:
• Technology and system consolidation
• Alignment of common information management programs
• Operational efficiency through better data quality and efficiency

You can reuse free content and improve delivery quality:
• A common, open framework that can be reused across all your projects
• A common, open framework for external providers
• Free collaboration technology

You can build momentum for your priority business initiatives:
• Make sure you have a fact-based business case
• Improve data and analytical capabilities to meet new business demands
• Prepare for major changes related to merger integration

I find businesses will spend money these days on information management - you just need a strong “case for change”. To read more, check out the extreme blueprinting and roadmapping approach to building a transformational IM strategy and some recent Case Studies.

AIIM Roadshow 2009 UK

Andreas.rindler — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:44:58 +0000

A visit to the AIIM Roadshow 2009 in London, UK, helped me get a quick update on the state of the ECM industry. Doug Miles gave the key note presentation with results from a recent AIIM survey:

Focus for investment in 2009 will be on Document Management, portals, Enterprise 2.0, Electronic Records Management and Search
Document capture, MFPs, OCR, digital mailroom are falling behind in importance
Software expenditure (i.e. license fees) will be up, services including training (which will harm associations like AIIM) are stagnating
Most organisations achieve the expected return on investment (ROI) with their ECM investment, in particular with hard $ ROI; but interestinly enough, most overachieve their soft $ ROI - This makes ECM look like a pretty low risk investment compared to some of the other IT initiatives.
43% of organisation achieve a payback within 12 month on their document capture and digitisation projects alone!

Doug moved on to discuss Microsoft’s offering for ECM, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS):

12% of respondents stated that MOSS is their chosen ECM suite (enterprise wide)
Collaboration is stated as the top reason to implement MOSS
Although Enterprise 2.0 and Search are only 8th and 9th on the priority list, with ~25% of respondents working on that
5% and 22% of respondents stated that MOSS is compatible or works in parallel to other ECM solutions

We also got a bit of visionary (wishful?!) thinking:

Focus for ECM should be on creating an “ECM Central”, a central capability as opposed to single purpose solutions
Drive ECM towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via single sign-on (SSO), open source and open standards
Provide enterprise search for retrieval across all repositories and systems
And consider managing assets “in place” as opposed to endless migration efforts from one system to the next
Interestingly enough, 35% of respondents want to migrate to a single system
34% will provide linkage between systems via portals
and only 9% are considering or implementing enterprise search

We also heard a bit about Software as a Service (SaasS) and Cloud computing:

20% of respondents plan or use Cloud or SaaS for document management
Top concerns are around security and integration with other systems

Well, who is gonna survive the industry consolidation? IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are battling for the next wave. OpenText remains as the single, independent specialist ECM provider…

Personalizing MIKE2.0

Sean.mcclowry — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:15:05 +0000

We’ve recently added some new functionality to the MIKE2.0 site that will help our users have a more dynamic and personalized experience. Go to the home page and you can drag-and-drop portlets on the site to give it a more indivual feel. This is just the early stages and we’ll be adding a lot more functionality over the coming weeks. You can see a bit more about what we’re building here.

Let us know what you think about the approach!

Collaboration Analytics

Andreas.rindler — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:26:41 +0000

How healthy is your collaborative community? Well, measure it! You will have seen that we have introduced more analytics and activity portlets to omCollab, which you can find on the Home tab.

You can also check out the wiki statistics of MIKE2.0 via the following links:

Here are also some other resources that might be helpful:

http://wikitracer.com - an open source research project to analyse wiki contributions
http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?wiki_analytics - good collection of ideas about wiki analytics

And if you want to know about the mother of all wikis, check this out:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm

Information Development concepts becoming more mainstream

Sean.mcclowry — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:44:03 +0000

For an interesting point of view on how how quantitative social science is becoming more making mainstream, check out Steve Miller’s great article: Hopefully we’ll see more of these methods developed in an open and collaborative fashion through frameworks like MIKE2.0. Something we haven’t done well enough is engage the academic community becoming part of the collaborative community?

Seen any great published work on this space? Help add it to MIKE2.0 bookmarks ..

Build your MIKE2.0 Social Network

Sean.mcclowry — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:57:44 +0000

The social profile component has been enhanced to store data in a structured fashion to link to information management capabilities.

You can now tag your experience and the experience of others and look at the skills within our community.

Thanks to (Xiping) Kevin - who did a fantastic job in extening our social networking capability!

Driving Digital Growth

Andreas.rindler — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:10:33 +0000

Virtually every company is thinking about how to drive digital growth, getting more and more visitors and maybe even establishing something like an online community driven by forums and social networking type functionality. VCs still believe that the number one driver for valuation of a digital business is number of visitors. So how to do you really drive digital growth? Here are my top lessons learned from projects in the media and comms industry:

1. Make sure you have SEO compliant coding of the website
2. Employ SEO and online marketing specialists to drive traffic
3. Use site visitor analytics to understand their behaviour on the site and to adjust your content and navigation accordingly
4. Perform a connected customer analysis to understand what is hot in the market, what are people talking about etc. to adjust your content accordingly
5. Execute on focused 3rd party deals to drive traffic and brand awareness with specific relevance to your site
6. Create sticky applications like tools and games to increase hits per user, visit length but also get additional users by allowing them to share the tool with others
7. Drive cross sales between your offline business and digital, eg with deals or links related to your offline products that drive traffic to your website
8. Configure a site search engine with solid categorisation and predictive functionality to drive traffic through search visits
9. Write good and dynamic content to drive repeat traffic
10. Use personalisation features to engage users with ‘their’ site
11. Drive organic SEO by cross posting on other sites that have high page rank value
12. Pay bloggers or review sites to write about your site or, even better, specific contenton your site
13. Use of rich media and multiple channels (e.g. mobile access) to drive enhanced customer experience and traffic

Just my two cents…

MIKE2.0 - How to Help

Sean.mcclowry — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:26:42 +0000

One of the questions we’ve been getting lately with MIKE2.0 is … how do I help? Its great to hear this as we could certainly use it!

We’ve listed some overall ways here and in this context, the areas where we could really use help include:

Best practices information security
Best practices in business intelligence
Best practices in search
Best practices in content management
Success stories from a business perspective using IM
Requirements templates, ROI models and product-specific best practices

These could be architecture patterns, lessons learned or product reviews.

The easiest way to contribute, however, is to add bookmarks or engage in forum discussions. Bookmarks are a great way to add content from others sites and link it into the MIKE2.0 framework.

And of course we could always use development help with omCollab.

We’ll work on making this list more clear - any suggestions on how to do this best are welcome!

Want to help make omCollab better?

Sean.mcclowry — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:16:05 +0000

We’ve been working omCollab, the technology that supports MIKE2.0, for quite a while. The whole approach is free and open source. You can get the code from here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab

Our goal is to not only to build a better platform for MIKE2.0. Its to provide an integrated product that meets the requirements for enterprise collaboration and will support our key initiative at www.openmethodology.org and the concept of an integrated framework for information development.

A couple questions for this group:

1. Do you think its a good idea?

2. Do you have any recommendations on open source assets we might want to bundle into omCollab?

3. Does anyone want to help?

What to find out more?

The planned roadmap is here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab_roadmap
You can add bugs/feature requests here:http://waterloo.openmethodology.org/trac/omcollab/
Join our forum discussion here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4