The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Network

Antonio López García at the MFA [Portals and KM]

Bill Ives — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:27:00 -0500

To complement the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III there is an amazing exhibit of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who is a realist with soul. The MFA site give you a tour of the exhibit. He does landscapes on Madrid, not showing the historic old part but the more modern suburbs. There are also details of his studio. I was most amazed by his pencil drawings that captured such detail with only a pencil. Some of the pencil drawings were quite large. This was an unexpected treat to go along with the main exhibit.

links for 2008-07-19 [Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley]

Sandy Kemsley — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:33:54 -0500

Twitter is Not a Micro-Blogging Tool

The whale has no clothes…

(tags: web2.0 blogging)

The people part of SOA [Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley]

Sandy Kemsley — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 09:24:34 -0500

I was going to just link to Mike Kavis’ post on the Top 10 Reasons Why People Are Making SOA Fail, but I wanted to added some of my own comments. By the way, he’s talking primarily about IT people, not business people, in the fail part of the equation.

Number 1 reason: they fail to explain SOA’s business value. Kavis recommends (and I completely agree) starting with business problems first, specifically using BPM as the “killer app” to justify the existence of SOA.

He continues with a number of cultural and organizational issues, such as change management and executive sponsorship, then discusses a few of the flat-out IT failure points: not having the skills to actually do SOA (and not getting the outside help required), trying to do it on the cheap, thinking of SOA as a one-time implementation project rather than an ongoing architecture, and neglecting SOA governance.

His final reason for failure is allowing the vendors to drive the architecture:

[T]he vendors promise flawless integration if you purchase all of your tools within their stack. The reality is, they have purchased so many products from other companies that their stacks do not deliver any better integration than if you bought the tools from a variety of vendors.

In the face of recent acquisitions, this could not be more accurate.

El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III [Portals and KM]

Bill Ives — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:10:00 -0500

I recently went to the great exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, El Greco to Velázquez - Art during the Reign of Philip III. As their site says the show, “examines a fascinating period (1598–1621) bracketed by the two giants of Spanish painting, El Greco and Velázquez. Discover the masterpieces of Philip III’s court and the artists who flourished during his reign. To separate themselves from Philip II’s approach to governing, Philip III and his court "issued in a new style of grandeur."

I have seen a lot of this grandeur in Spain, as well as a wonderful exhibit of Spanish Still life’s, I saw at the National Gallery of London in 95. I brought the catalog and these Spanish still life paintings have influenced my own painting. It was nice to see them more closer to home. I had to get this MFA catalog, as well. I liked the still life paintings the best and may try to do a few of them. This was new form for these Spanish artists and they used a lot of black backgrounds and very modern compositions for their day. The MFA site gives you a slide show.

How to make an idea spread like an epidemic - and stick [The Content Economy]

noreply@blogger.com (Oscar Berg) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:08:00 -0500

This vacation, I finally decided to read the best-seller from the by Malcolm Gladwell; "The Tipping Point" (I have previously read "Blink" by the same author). Here are a few quotes that I wrote down in my notebook as I read the book:

"The Stickyness Factor says there are specific ways of making a contagious message; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it does."

"When people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclutions than when they are asked the same question by themselves. Once we're part of a group, we're all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence..."

"Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arragement...//...The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes beyond knowing who they are and how they relate to us...//...At this size (of group), orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible."

"An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. But we need to memorize where to find them....//...We store information with other people. When people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system - a transactive memory system - which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kind of things...//...When new information arises, individual members (of a group) are automatically assigned to remember it. Expertise leads to more expertise. Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best."

"For a company...//...that relies for its ability to innovate and react quickly to demanding and sophisticated customers, this kind of global memory system is critical. It makes the company incredible efficient. It means that cooperation is easier. It means that you move much faster to get things done or create teams of workers or find out an answer to a problem. It means that people in one part of the company can get access to the impressions and expertise of people in a completely different part of the company...//...an organized mechanism that makes it easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip - to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That's the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure."

"Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickyness. Simply by finding and reaching those few people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics."

links for 2008-07-18 [Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley]

Sandy Kemsley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:37:00 -0500

Adobe readying new mashup tool for business users - Network World

Adobe’s upcoming mashup tool, Genesis. They envision users creating their own workspaces through mashing up apps and data, then sharing that with colleagues.

(tags: mashups)
SnapLogic Adds Amazon EC2 Support In Data-Integration Tools > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

SnapLogic now in the cloud.

(tags: soa saas)
SAP Network Blogs

Link to presentation about mashups for enterprise applications.

(tags: mashups)
Attensa Blog - Enterprise 2.0 Mashup Business Process Management meet Enterprise RSS

The Wallem presentation that I attended (and blogged about) at Enterprise 2.0 in June: RSS and business processes.

(tags: bpm enterprise2.0 rss)
Google’s Services Converge in the New iGoogle

Instructions on how to get a sneak peak at the new iGoogle interface

(tags: google web2.0)

First Steps: Establishing a Professional Presence on the Web [Dennis McDonald's MANAGING TECHNOLOGY]

Dennis D. McDonald — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:49:01 -0500

By Dennis D. McDonald

A friend, a professional engineer, asked me for tips on establishing a “web presence.” This is what I wrote:

Before you jump into creating a “web presence,” you first need to figure out who are the people and organizations you’d like to “hang out with” on the web. Then, research them to see what you can find out about where they already are — which companies have blogs or forums (that you can post comments and discussion items on), which people have blogs of their own or memberships in networks like Linkedin and Facebook, etc.

This research will give you lists of people and organizations you will want to interact with - potential customers, potential employers, potential gatekeepers, and just plain friends. Study the people and organizations and the presence they have on the web — what you like, what you don’t like, etc.

You might consider, initially at least, to concentrate this research on your geographic region. Be prepared to be flexible about that since, as you may already have found, web based networking can easily lead you to form relationships around the world.

Then you can start deciding what your web presence(s) should be, perhaps a professional looking and sounding blog (basically, a personal web site) with ancillary memberships in various networks, plus a list of web sites and blogs that you will visit regularly (or subscribe to) to see about posting comments in order to initiate and respond to conversations.

You should also have a list of people and organizations you subscribe to, either via newsletters, via stored searches (e.g., Google Alert searches), or “news feeds” you can subscribe to and read using a special feed reader (e.g., Google Reader).

Perhaps your professional association already has a site or discussion forum where you can discuss topics of interest. This also is part of your web presence. Whenever you leave a comment somewhere on the web you should also leave a link for your web site so people can link back to your blog.

Keep in mind that a blog is an interactive device. You can post ideas and text and audio and video items in the blog. There are also “comment” features which means that people can leave comments and discuss the items that interest them. It’s not like you’re hanging out a static resume; it’s an opportunity to interact with people based on the series of individual items that you’ll be posting.

Join as many online networks related to your goals as you want. Keep in mind that your membership in these organizations will only work if you actually participate and it’s easy to spread yourself thin. (To see what I mean, see A Map of My Online Networking Tools: Part 1 .)

There are many different ways to start a blog, and some are free. I have a monthly paid account with Squarespace and I don’t accept advertising. Squarespace is a remotely hosted service. I can update my blog from just about any web browser on any internet-connected computer without installing any extra software on the computer.

I recommend giving some thought to the image you want to promote and how what you write will contribute to that image. Your blogging vendor should be able to supply a set of different templates that you can customize to fit your preferences. My advice: keep the blog simple structurally, content-wise, and appearance wise.

Three more items relevant to “web presence” are also available.

The first is a list management or contact management system that you can use to keep track of people and your outgoing and incoming communications. Perhaps you already use gMail, Outlook or something like that. I use DabbleDB, which is a very flexible password-controlled web based database management system that I can access from any web browser.

The second is a way to bookmark and tag pages and sites you come across that you find useful. There are several available. I mostly use del.icio.us which is one of the bookmarking sites that you can get at from any internet connection and web browser. I also use del.icio.us to keep track of comments that I make on other web sites and blogs. (You can, if you like, mark selected del.icio.us bookmarks as “private” so that they cannot be viewed by others.)

The third is a way to get regular news about topics, people, or organizations. You can store Google Alert searches, for example, and have the results emailed to you whenever something occurs in a web based news story about a person or company you are tracking. Another way to get news is to use a service such as Twitter which enables you to send and receive brief (140 character) text messages to and from selected groups of people. This usually works best when the people you’re interested in following — and who might be interested in following you — are part of the service.

This should be enough to get you started. If you have comments or questions, send me an email at ddmcd@yahoo.com or use the comment space below. Hope this helps!

Copyright (c) 2008 by Dennis D. McDonald

Closed for the holiday [peterdehaas.net]

Peter de Haas — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:13:51 -0500

No Blogging, No Twitter, No Email …

I’m back on August 11 …

Talking about Social Software [CMS Watch Trends and Features]

tbyrne@cmswatch.com (Tony Byrne) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:04:00 -0500

I recently had a long and wide-ranging interview with IT Business Edge on the topic of Social Software technologies.

The intrepid reporter, Ann All, transcribed nearly the whole discussion verbatim -- a rarity these days! -- and something any analyst (well, at least this analyst) welcomes only with some trepidation, because you're never (I'm not) as articulate in a stream-of-consciousness chat than a well-considered article. For example, I was more harsh on SharePoint in the end than I intended to be. Anyway, the key points come through and I'm not complaining.

Ann also offers some interesting commentary here.

Look for more from us over the coming months on the topic of Social Software, in these pages and others...

links for 2008-07-18 [BizTechTalk]

Dan Keldsen — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:37:19 -0500

Enterprise Search and the Findability Gap | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

Seth Grimes covers our Market IQ on Findability, summing up 'the bottom line, that it takes more than Search technology to achieve findability' - great example embedded as well. Thanks Seth!

(tags: seth_grimes market_iq_on_findability findability enterprise_search intelligententerprise aiim_market_intelligence aiim dan_keldsen carl_frappaolo)
Blocks and Files - The world of search is not enough

Brief writeup by Martin Edwards - Appreciate the coverage, but disagree that any of our research is slanted towards selling technology (for anyone). Seemed quite clear to me that we're saying technology isn't the answer by itself, and search definitely is

(tags: martin_edwards blocks_and_files findability enterprise_search search dan_keldsen aiim_market_intelligence aim)

Gartner: Microsoft's E-Mail/SharePoint Pricing Portends Shift to SaaS [peterdehaas.net]

Peter de Haas — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:48:48 -0500

Microsoft’s S+S message has landed in the market. Gartner picked up on it (ofcourse) with a very positive point of view… exciting times :-)

… Newly announced Microsoft software-as-a-service pricing and distribution for Exchange and SharePoint -- coupled with robust pent-up demand -- will accelerate the transition away from premises-based collaboration software. …

… Analysis

Microsoft's newly announced collaboration SaaS pricing is likely to generate substantial interest from enterprises seeking to cut costs or move away from premises-based collaboration deployments. The economics will be most appealing to small enterprises (those with fewer than 1,000 employees), which have the highest operational unit cost and generally can't provide the BPOS suite services internally for less than $15 per user per month. Enterprises with 20,000 or more employees are unlikely to experience cost savings, but may be looking to move to a SaaS model for other reasons. Microsoft's inclusion of a strong channel model for SaaS distribution will ensure broad market coverage and should keep government regulators at bay. …

… Gartner expects elements of the BPOS to mature rapidly, with routine, mainstream adoption occurring in 2010. We expect 20% of enterprise e-mail seats to use SaaS (from Microsoft and other vendors) in 2012, up from 1% in 2007. Early adopters of this multitenant SaaS will likely encounter issues associated with its immaturity, such as stability, contract terms, data migration, integration, security and legal issues. Enterprises should therefore wait for several quarters of successful large-volume operations prior to engagement. ..

Download the full analysis : microsofts_emai...pdf (116.1KB)

Source: gartner.com

Serena Upgrades Mashup Composer and Brings in Application Release Manager [Portals and KM]

Bill Ives — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:08:00 -0500

I have written about Serena on a number of occasions on this blog, the most recent was “Serena Moves into SaaS, Project Management, and Agile Application Development.” Recently, I spoke with Nathan Rawlin, their Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Kyle Arteaga, VP, Corporate Communications to catch up their latest moves. Serena continues to upgrade its mashup offerings and has added two major enhancements since my last conversation so I am cross-posting on this from the App Gap.

First, we looked at the Serena Mashup Composer, a visual design tool to build and test mashups without coding, now allows you to incorporate widgets, which have primarily been used in the consumer world. Now users simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and more into their business mashups. This means that people can now pull in information from any widget on the Internet – details from a Facebook profile, a photo from Google Images or the local weather forecast from Yahoo! Weather -- into a mashup. This traditionally consumer information can enhance enterprise applications.

Nathan gave me an example. Suppose a sales rep is preparing for a big meeting with a new customer. The rep might start with the customer's record in salesforce.com, and have the mashup fetch related information like a photo and details from the customer's LinkedIn or Facebook profile, external news feeds showing the company's latest stock price, credit report information from a Dun & Bradstreet Web service, and widgets showing local weather and traffic in the customer's location. Soon, the rep has all the information needed for the meeting. This mashup can be reused as a template for other meetings, saving the time and effort of rebuilding the mashup, visiting multiple data sources again and again for the same information.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Mashup Composer remains, free. The charges start after you have built and tested the mashup and need to have it hosted.

Serena has also launched a new Business Mashup designed specifically for the application release process. It provides an automated way for application developers, IT operations, and business users to communicate and collaborate with each other during the release process. Serena’s Application Release Manager combines Web 2.0-based workflow capabilities with ChangeMan® ZMF, a Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) application for the mainframe, to manage the application release process, from initial change requests through final deployment into the production environment. Nathan said this is the first browser-based app to mainframe mashup he knows about. This is a positive development, as the mainframe is certainly not going away but the people who can work with it are declining. Enterprise 2.0 will need to get along with it.

There are many large companies that still generate an extensive number of mainframe applications. One of their clients created 484,000 new mainframe apps in the past year. The number of IT people who can sit and stare at mainframe green screens is getting smaller. Now users can monitor and communicate through a browser-based system that is more familiar to the current generation of IT people. As with any Serena Business Mashup, the Application Release Manager includes a visual process designer with out-of-the-box process templates that can be customized to suit individual needs. As a result, all of the project stakeholders can coordinate their activities, including application developers, IT operations teams, and even business users who traditionally had no visibility into mainframe applications. The templates include the following: Issue Tracking, Request to Test, Agile Backlog, Change requests, Hardware and Software Changes, and Demand Management.

These two developments represent nice bridges in opposite directions, to the consumer web world and to the mainframe world. In each case, Serena is going to these worlds for the right business reasons. I look forward to hearing about further developments such as their announced future moves into Agile application development.

One of the Serena announcements mentioned that Forrester projects the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013 (see Forrester’s May 2008 report called "The Mashup Opportunity”). If anything, I think this underestimates the total volume as mashups are becoming a major application development mode that underlies much of SOA application development. Perhaps, they are only thinking of the market for specific mashup tools, as the divide in enterprise tools is getting grayer. At any rate, mashups are a big deal.

Here is some additional commentary on the Serena move by Dana Gardner, including a response to my App Gap version.

links for 2008-07-18 [The Enterprise Content Management Blog]

George Dearing — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:31:40 -0500

Joint Contact: First Business Tool To Integrate Twitter?

Microblogging slowly creeps into the enterprise.

(tags: Collaboration enterprise2.0 productivity twitter web2.0 microblogging microsharing microcasting)
Slideshare: Dealing with Analysts (From Redmonk)

Light-hearted look at dealing with analysts. I like RedMonk's wit.

(tags: redmonk,analysts,strategy,research)
AideRSS ranks and sorts your RSS feeds

We're looking at AideRSS for a competive intelligence mashup.

(tags: RSS,enterprise+RSS,AideRSS,metadata)

Infrastructure Updates for SharePoint [CMS Watch Trends and Features]

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com (Shawn Shell) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:20:00 -0500

Through the SharePoint product team's MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that it had released a significant infrastructure update for SharePoint (and related technologies like Project Server that leverages SharePoint components). The update seems to primarily address three areas:

Search functionality and search-related performance (like index performance).

Content Deployment bug fixes (which hopefully will correct a series of irritating bugs related to deploying content from one SharePoint environment to another in web content management scenarios). These are include the hotfix packs Microsoft released for content deployment back in May of this year.

General interface and performance improvements. In reading the three or four pages in Microsoft's site that aimed to describe what was actually included, it was difficult to pinpoint what these "improvements" actual mean to SharePoint administrators. However, Microsoft describes them as "...fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements..." Again, I was unable to nail what precisely has changed or how significant the improvements were.

What's interesting, at least with regard to search, is that it seems the "ancillary" search products like Search Server 2008 (and it's "free" sibling Search Server Express 2008) are driving updates to SharePoint's search technology. As mentioned in the SharePoint Report 2008, Microsoft has invested heavily in improving SharePoint search. In fact, historically, it seemed as if SharePoint Search was the the parent of these independent search tools, but it now appears as if "the student [has become] the master" as Darth Vader said to Obi Wan.

In particular, SharePoint is getting Search Server's federated search capabilities and "a unified search dashboard." From what I saw at the last SharePoint conference, both of these search products borrowed very heavily from the SharePoint interface construct, but improved the visibility of certain configuration settings. In particular, I liked the ease with which you could configure the federated search.

However, these changes call into question how this will all play out within the Shared Services provider and whether administrators who are struggling to figure out where to go to change search settings -- at the site, site collection, Central Administration (in the Application or Operation tab) or in Shared Services. While most key search settings reside in Shared Services, SharePoint has search-relate configuration in spread over virtually every administrative interface. My hope is that this "unified search dashboard" brings some order to search within SharePoint.

In the end, these changes (along with the FAST search integration) also add more evidence to the theory that Microsoft is going to decouple search from SharePoint entirely (and potentially the Office team) -- making SharePoint a client technology. As I blogged about in a post on the completion of the FAST acquisition, Microsoft seems to be leaning very heavily towards and independent search product team. And just to add fuel to the conspiratorial fire, this type of organizational structure might make sense if, say, Microsoft were to acquire a large Internet-centric search company (although it begs the question what they'd do with all of this overlapping technology).

DjangoCon 2008 [Enter Content Here]

noreply@blogger.com (Seth) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:52:29 -0500

The Django community recently announced the first official Django conference. DjangoCon 2008 will be held at Google's Mountain View headquarters on September 6th and 7th to coincide with release 1.0 of the platform. Admission is free (as in beer) but they are capping the attendance at 200.

If you are new to Django, Django is am open source web application development framework written in the Python programming Language. Despite its sub-1.0 status, Django is quite mature. It was first developed by the folks over at Lawrence Journal-World for sites like ljworld.com, lawrence.com, and KUSports.com. Later, Rob Curley assembled a team over at the Washington Post to build a bunch of local sites. Now Django is bundled and actively used in Google App Engine. There area also a number of books on Django. I am currently reading the Definitive Guide to Django by Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. So far, so good. I see a lot in common with Rails and the two definitely seem to get along at least at a philosophical level.

I will be covering Django in an upcoming report about web content management in media and publishing because of Django's widespread use in that industry. There is a small commercial CMS called Ellington that is specifically designed for the newsroom. Do you have any experience with Django or Ellington? I would love to talk to you about it.

links for 2008-07-17 [Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley]

Sandy Kemsley — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:34:46 -0500

TomDebevoise.com » BPMN Shapes to Avoid

Some recommendations on BPMN shapes that can be misinterpreted, and how to avoid using them.

(tags: bpmn)
E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez » Blog Archive » I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip - Additional Commentary (Part I)

Great post by Luis Suarez of IBM on his road to giving up corporate email. Best-ever justification for not using email: people hide behind it and shirk responsibility.

(tags: productivity)

Who are the Process Players (BPM/Workflow)? [BizTechTalk]

Dan Keldsen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:54:16 -0500

Rather than assume we know it all when it comes to the world of Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow, we're looking for feedback (as we did with Findability) on what companies should be considered on the list of solution providers for BPM and Workflow.

The twist is that we are not limiting this list to "pure-play" BPM providers, as fun as that might be.

We're interested in Document-centric Workflow/BPM and Transaction-based Workflow/BPM as well, which heads into the direction of larger platforms - Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suites as well as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suites. (If you care about business process - does it matter to YOU whether it's baked in to a bigger solution, or prefer BPM that is agnostic?)

Below is a guaranteed incomplete list of the types of providers we're considering having listed in the upcoming BPM survey. Who are we missing, and for that matter, who shouldn't be on the list? Even given acquisition/consolidation, it's a big ol' world of process.

The proposed list:
Adobe
Alfresco
Autonomy/Cardiff
BEA
Corticon
DST
EMC/Documentum
Flowcentric
Fuego
Fujitsu Interstage BPM
Handysoft
IBM/FileNet
IDS Scheer
Intalio
Integrify
K2
Legato
Lombardi Software
MetaStorm
Microsoft
Open Text
Oracle
Pegasystems
Progress Software (Sonic/IONA)
SAP NetWeaver BPM
Savvion
Singularity
Skelta
Software AG
SpringCM
TIBCO
Ultimus

So, who are we missing, and for that matter, who shouldn't be on the list? For example, does Adobe belong on this list? If no, why not? If yes, why? or Oracle? In or out? SaaS and Open Source options - SpringCM and Alfresco. Valid? Useless? (for this list)

Anyone representing a solution provider who should be on here, feel free to weigh in, don't be shy - there's no magic involved in this list. Process practitioners/consultants, your insights are especially wanted.

Flashback and Fastforward on Process [BizTechTalk]

Dan Keldsen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:34:37 -0500

Well, we released our latest research, the Market IQ on Findability yesterday (Got Find Yet?), but the research drumbeat marches ever onward!

It's a big world of content, information, knowledge, and process, and for Q3, we're tackling a more process-centric view of the world.

Specifically, our next topic covers the world of Business Process Management (BPM), Workflow, and the ties of processes (automated or manual) to specific business concerns.

If business process (fill-in-the-blank) is something that fires you up, let me start to whet your appetite for the topic by pointing you to a free report that was published by AIIM last year, right around the time that Carl and I came onboard to start Market Intelligence.

Go grab a copy of the AIIM Industry Watch on Business Process Management: Not Just Workflow Anymore - and stay tuned for more on process coming up.

Any information that you're dying to have statistics/findings on in the world of process, feel free to comment away here and on some specific subsequent posts I'll regarding what solution providers should be considered "in the BPM fold," what standards matter for process, how success is measured in BPM projects, what methodologies are in use, what systems and applications are (or should be) typically integrated within a BPM project, etc..

An Approach to Accommodating Government Alteration of Census Bureau Data on Gay Marriages [Dennis McDonald's MANAGING TECHNOLOGY]

Dennis D. McDonald — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:09:39 -0500

By Dennis D. McDonald

The July 17, 2008 Washington Post, in an article by Christopher Lee titled Census Won’t Count Gay Marriages, describes how the Census Bureau alters factual data collected on the incidence of gay marriages in order to comply with official Federal definitions of marriage.

In the U.S. there is much religious and cultural opposition to gay marriages. Nevertheless, there are currently two states in the U.S. that recognize gay marriages as legal. In addition, there are gay couples living together, some with children, in many states of the U.S. That’s the reality.

The Post story describes how the Census Bureau changes census responses from gay individuals who state they are married to a classification of two single individuals. (The image that comes to my mind is Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth changing history bit by bit to make it correspond to the political realities in 1984. I know that’s a harsh comparison but I used to design and manage government agency surveys for a living and altering data was always a no-no.)

Even though government policy and decision making depend on accurate data, the data U.S. citizens are paying to collect is being, from what this article states, altered. One wonders if there are other policy-driven areas where census data as collected are being consistently altered to conform to other requirements?

If what this Washington Post story says is true, we have a documented example of the Federal Government explicitly altering populations statistics in order to comply with Federal definitions of marriage. At the same time, there are significant financial stakes that rest on census data. Many government programs make decisions on funding levels or benefits disbursements based on census data. If funding disbursement decisions are regularly being made based on “fudged” data, that’s not good, especially if competing sets of statistics start to circulate.

There is a possible solution, albeit a compromise: make both the altered and the unaltered data sets available to the public. Each data element and observation would include a change history that describes specifically the circumstances of the manner in which the observation was collected, observed, edited, or otherwise manipulated.

Safeguards would need to be put into place, of course, to guard against the revelation of individual identities in order to protect privacy. If appropriate standards and processes were implemented, it might be possible to manage both altered and unaltered data from a common source. (Perhaps the XDI standards and the concept of the “data web” discussed by Drummond Reed in DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast - Episode 12 could serve as the basis for such a published dataset made available for use and further manipulation.)

The use of a standard data description method, and the publishing of a schema that makes use of this method, could allow for the ability to publish an “official” and accurate data set that could then be manipulated by users according to their needs. Users would be able to compare the manipulated data with the original so that, for example, they could see when original data collected describing a gay couple as married might be changed to adhere to official regulations that forbid acknowledgment of such relationships. (Such transparency is related to programs and proposals to expose government collected data to public scrutiny; see, for example, W. David Stephenson’s comments in Let My Data Go: How Activists Can Transform Government Through Public Data.)

Figure 1 displays a simple outline of a process for publishing Census data in its original form while allowing for its manipulation in various ways:

Figure 1. Making Information About Public Data Manipulation Accessible to the Public

Note that procedures for editing and anonymizing data are included; I am not proposing that “raw” data as collected by the Census Bureau be exposed for public scrutiny.

One flaw in this schema is that decisions on what data to collect — and what questions to ask in the Census — can be politicized. If the data are not collected in the first place, there is no way to retrospectively introduce distinctions other than by estimation and imputation methods that operate on the original data according to a set of rules. Also, it’s possible that the anonymization process will remove certain types of distinctions that would prevent further analysis. So, a process like this could be complex to set up.

Nevertheless, I like the idea of exposing more data to public view and re-use, as long as the privacy of individuals is protected. I think the goal of more public disclosure and re-use of publicly collected data is a sound one.

If you have an opinion on this, please leave a comment in the space provided below.

links for 2008-07-17 [BizTechTalk]

Dan Keldsen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:33:58 -0500

AIIM Market IQ Research | Collaboration 2.0 | ZDNet.com

Oliver Marks does a video interview of me at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and discusses our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 and upcoming (released today) Market IQ on Findability. Thanks Oliver!

(tags: aiim_market_intelligence oliver_marks findability enterprise2.0 enterprise_search videocasting)
Powerset’s smarts are Microsoft’s gain

Dennis Howlett's takes on Microsoft's acquisition of Powerset. Similar to mine, but read some of the commentary. Met him at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Keep up the good work Dennis!

(tags: dennis_howlett zdnet powerset microsoft acquisition aiim_market_intelligence dan_keldsen biztechtalk)
AIIM Market IQ on Findability Published « KOnnect

A call to arms, based on aspects of our Market IQ on Findability, from the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) and the UK chapter. Thanks for the coverage!

(tags: findability market_iq_on_findability aiim_market_intelligence knowledge_organisation KO)

DAM industry rollup [CMS Watch Trends and Features]

tregli@cmswatch.com (Theresa Regli) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:17:00 -0500

I recently wrote an article for DOCUMENT Magazine summarizing the state of the digital asset management industry. Readers of our DAM Report 2008 will recognize these as excerpts from the Report's executive summary, but if you're looking for something to put in front of your boss or CEO to give a quick overview of the state of DAM, here's the place to look. It's in a downloadable, print-friendly, magazine-spread format, too.

Why most branded communities fail [CMS Watch Trends and Features]

tbyrne@cmswatch.com (Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:10:00 -0500

In "Why Most Online Communities Fail," the Wall Street Journal cites some very useful Deloitte research on businesses who launch their own online communities -- what we and others call "White-label Social Networks."

The Deloitte study found a low success rate, owing the usual culprits: over-emphasis on technology, lack of leadership and experience, and poor or inadequate metrics.

In our own research for the Enterprise Social Software Report, we found some other, likely related trends:

That technology companies with technically-oriented customers generally fared better at generating online communities, and pre-dominate among vendor case studies
That non-technology companies seem to have to prime the pump with a lot of their own content
That the purpose of the community matters a lot (e.g., peer tech support vs. collaboration vs. commentary) and -- here's the kicker -- most vendor offerings specialize in one at the expense of others (consult the report for details)
That vendors are struggling with analytics in step with their customers

We also found that there are several different ways to build, foster, and take advantage of communities, but (as Deloitte observes), each approach takes active care and feeding. Budget your schedule and resources accordingly.

Quark Acquires In.vision [CMS Watch Trends and Features]

rockley@rockley.com (Ann Rockley) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Today Quark Inc. announced that it is acquiring the assets of In.vision Research Corporation. In.vision is best known for its XML add-in for Microsoft Word ("Xpress Author for Word"). Quark is best known for QuarkXPress, a design and desktop publishing tool. The In.vision team will continue to be located in Florida, but the former In.Vision module will become "Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word."

In recent years Quark has lost ground to Adobe InDesign. There are many reasons for that, but from our perspective (XML & Component Content Management), Quark simply did not handle XML very well, and InDesign was more capable in that area. Quark began to signal an interest in XML when they announced the hiring of their new President and CEO, Ray Schiavone, formerly President and CEO of Arbortext, one of the frontrunners in XML-based authoring and publishing products. Schiavone brought a considerable amount of knowledge about XML to Quark and quietly hired a number of former employees of Arbortext that had left after its acquisition by PTC.

Quark more strongly positioned themselves in the XML multichannel publishing world with the launch of their Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS) in March of this year. DPS uses Quark Transformation Engine, essentially an XML rules-based engine, to convert content coming in from many sources to XML then renders it to multiple channels.

The acquisition of In.vision now takes the XML publishing process back to the content contributor -- Word of course being a ubiquitous authoring tool. While some would argue that QuarkXPress is an authoring tool, it is really oriented towards designers - few content contributors would ever want to work in Quark directly.

What does Quark gets out of the acquisition?

Integrated XML-based content contributor software, making dynamic multichannel publishing accessible to broader areas of the enterprise
Expertise and functionality in SPL (Pharmaceutical XML standard) and DITA (fastest growing XML standard)

What does In.vision get out of the acquisition?

Global sales force
Access to broader opportunities for the use of its products

But what does the customer get out of this? Well, In.vision and Quark have been working together as partners for a number of months, with some hand-offs to show for it. But the integration is not complete. For example, you can't just say "publish to DPS" from Xpress Author. DPS is treated much like a call to the DITA Open Toolkit. Round-tripping from XML to design to XML is possible, but not productized yet.

In the long run, customers may see some benefits:

Access to XML-based publishing software that allows not just simple layout, but full camera-ready layout
More DITA-based publishing for the enterprise

This acquisition moves In.vision from a small XML solutions company into a much larger realm, and this allows Quark to move closer to XML-based enterprise dynamic publishing. But full integration will take time. We'll keep watching...