Editor’s Note: This post is a featured guest post by one of our IAI University Partners, Barry Murphy from the eDiscoveryJournal.

There’s a new category called “information governance” (Editor note: which may variously be called “content governance” or “enterprise content governance“) springing up in the marketplace.

With terms like information management, records management, and enterprise content management already out there, it’s likely that this new category will introduce yet another level of confusion. Never fear, though, information governance is a good category name that provides a framework for what I call the conservative side of information management.

Information is the lifeblood of businesses; you’ve heard term “information economy,” I hope.

I like to talk about information as the fuel on which businesses run.  Taking that analogy further, raw information assets are like oil – they need to be converted into fuel that can make an engine run; in the case of business, that fuel is knowledge.

As the early 2000’s evolved, knowledge management took a back seat and enterprise content management (ECM) moved to the front of the class. (Editor note: Knowledge Management [KM] vs Enterprise Content Management [ECM] as a technological system vs. business practice continues to cause confusion – although most of this is converging together for modern organizations)

The software giants (EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) and others like Interwoven, Open Text, and Vignette, rushed to build out their suite of ECM applications.

To be considered an ECM suite, the offering had to include the following components:

• Document Imaging – the ability to process and store high-volume images of documents like insurance claims.
• Document Management (DM) – the ability to provide library services and version control.
• Records Management (RM) – the ability to declare and manage corporate records.
• Collaboration – the ability to share content with team members.
• Web Content Management (WCM) – the ability to publish and update web sites.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) – the ability to manage digital assets like powerpoint slides and movies.
• COLD/ERM – the ability to capture and store enterprise reports, like the ones that were printed on that green and white wide paper (the acronym came from Computer Output to Laser Disk / Enterprise Report Management)

The market was on the right track – all of those functions are important to successfully managing unstructured content – but it was silly to think that any organizations could successfully put so many initiatives together when information is used across so many aspects of business.  When the Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect in December, 2006, information governance was born.  Not that the need for information governance didn’t already exist, but the FRCP amendments just brought the spotlight to the need.

When most people think of information management, they think of some pie-in-the-sky strategy for managing every information asset within an organization…and that’s basically true.  Many initiatives under the information management umbrella, however, are tenable.  There are many content-driven processes within every organization – think insurance claims, sales proposal management, human resources onboarding, and the list goes on and on.  The goal with these processes is to make sure that information assets are available easily to those (people or systems) that need the asset in a fast, efficient manner.  The information is the fuel of the business in these scenarios.

There has also been a lot of focus on making information available to employees quickly and easily.  This gave rise to mobile devices and social networking sites like FaceBook – these are faster ways to collaborate and share information.  Despite the business benefits, these applications pose risk because content gets harder and harder to control and monitor.  This is where information governance comes in – it turns the perspective on information management from providing fuel for the business to covering your a$$ (CYA for those that know the acronym).

Information governance is not a separate category from information management, but rather a different perspective of it – a more conservative one.

In a perfect world, organizations would bar applications that put content out of control, but efforts to stop people from doing what they want to do with information always fail.  Always.

Information governance is really the practice of putting in place measures to mitigate the risk.

For those of us in eDiscovery, information governance is about putting in place the right people, processes, and tools to be able to efficiently respond to requests for information. Those organizations that have good information governance programs in place know:

• What information is retained
• Where it is stored
• How long it is retained
• Who has access to it
• How that data is protected
• How policies, standards and regulations are enforced

Because eDiscovery initiatives are really part of information governance, they are closely related to records management, compliance, privacy, and security programs.

The challenge many organizations face is connecting these programs under one umbrella and correctly assigning ownership – sometimes to legal, sometimes to IT, and sometimes to compliance.

Each organization is different, but in general the following diagram is a good description for information governance.

Is information governance a hot topic at your organization?  Who owns it?  What types of projects are underway?  We’re always interested in learning more about what you’re doing, so feel free to contact us or comment on this journal entry.

- end article -

Where are you in your eDiscovery Education?

• Unsure how to best proceed with an eDiscovery strategy?
• Find the wide variety of tools and platforms available throughout the eDiscovery process to be a bewildering mish-mash of “marketing speak” from the vendor community?
• Looking for a sanity check on how you are approaching eDiscovery, and where you can cut time, money and resources out of the equation?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions” created in partnership with Barry Murphy and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Not only did Barry give us a comprehensive overview of the challenges organizations face with managing eDiscovery, but he also gave a detailed analysis of how to address those challenges.  Barry was able to take a complex subject with many moving parts and allow us to understand it in less than half a day.” – Greg Arnette, CTO and Founder, Sonian

The “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions“ course has four modules and includes a 30-minute live call with Barry to discuss the course or any eDiscovery project you have in play.

Register Now for “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions”

Module 1: Understanding eDiscovery

• Understanding and Defining eDiscovery
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
• The Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Module 2: The eDiscovery Imperative

• The eDiscovery Imperative
• The Challenge of Managing and Finding Information
• The Immediate Impact of eDiscovery on Organizations
• The State of eDiscovery Today
• eDiscovery Trends to Consider

Module 3: Getting Started on eDiscovery

• Critical Elements of Good eDiscovery Programs
• Aligning Roles and Responsibilities
• Creating Retention Policies
• Near-term vs. Long-term Issues and Challenges

Module 4: Understanding the Complex Solutions Landscape

• Understanding the Solution Landscape
• Benefits Promised by eDiscovery Solutions
• The Truth About eDiscovery Platforms
• Positioning Solution Providers and Products
• Final Thoughts and Considerations

Register Now for “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions”

Editor’s Note: This post is a featured guest post by one of our IAI University Partners, Ellen Domb from the PQR Group, and originally co-written by Ellen Domb with Katie Barry, editor of RealInnovation.com, and Michael S. Slocum, Ph.D., principal of The Inventioneering Company.

What Is TRIZ?

Projects of all kinds frequently reach a point where all the analysis is done, and the next step is unclear. The project team must be creative, to figure out what to do.

TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team’s ability to solve these problems creatively.

TRIZ also provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure and algorithmic approach.

“TRIZ” is the (Russian) acronym for the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” G.S. Altshuller and his colleagues in the former U.S.S.R. developed the method between 1946 and 1985. TRIZ is an international science of creativity that relies on the study of the patterns of problems and solutions, not on the spontaneous and intuitive creativity of individuals or groups. More than three million patents have been analyzed to discover the patterns that predict breakthrough solutions to problems.

TRIZ is spreading into corporate use across several parallel paths – it is increasingly common in Six Sigma processes, in project management and risk management systems, and in organizational innovation initiatives.

TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. The short version of this is:

Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.)
Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem.

The research has proceeded in several stages during the last sixty years. The three primary findings of this research are as follows:

1. Problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences. The classification of the contradictions in each problem predicts the creative solutions to that problem.
2. Patterns of technical evolution are repeated across industries and sciences.
3. Creative innovations use scientific effects outside the field where they were developed.

Much of the practice of TRIZ consists of learning these repeating patterns of problems-solutions, patterns of technical evolution and methods of using scientific effects, and then applying the general TRIZ patterns to the specific situation that confronts the developer.

Exhibit 1 (below) describes this process graphically.

In Exhibit 1, the arrows represent transformation from one formulation of the problem or solution to another.

The arrows from the specific problem to the general problem, and the general problem to the general solution represent analysis of the problems and analytic use of the TRIZ databases. The arrow from general solution to specific solution represents thinking by analogy to develop the specific solution.

This four-step problem solving approach forces the user to overcome inherent psychological bias that is typically the foundation of psychological ideation techniques.

For example, a powerful demonstration of this method comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Following the flow of Exhibit 1, the specific problem is as follows: Tailored bacteria are used to cultivate human hormones, producing a superior product to those refined from animal sources. To produce the product, very large quantities of tailored bacteria cells are cultured, the cells must be broken open and the cell wall material removed so that the useful hormones can be processed. A mechanical method for breaking the cells had been in use at a moderate scale for some time, but the yield was 80 percent, and was variable. A current crisis was a reduction in yield to 65 percent, and a long-term problem was anticipated in trying to scale production up to high rates, with yield much better than 80 percent.

The TRIZ general problem at the highest level is to find a way to produce the product with no waste, at 100 percent yield, with no added complexity. A TRIZ general solution formula is “The problem should solve itself.” One of the patterns of evolution of technology is that energy (fields) replaces objects (mechanical devices). For example, consider using a laser instead of a scalpel for eye surgery. In this case, ultrasound can be used to break the cell walls or using an enzyme to “eat” the cell wall (chemical energy) instead of hitting them. This may seem very general, but it led the pharmaceutical researchers to analyze all the resources available in the problem (the cells, the cell walls, the fluid they are in, the motion of the fluid, the processing facility, etc.) and to conclude that three specific solutions had high potential for their problem:

1. The cell walls should be broken by sound waves (from the pattern of evolution of replacing mechanical means by fields).
2. The cell walls should be broken by shearing, as they pass through the processing facility (using the resources of the existing system in a different way).
3. An enzyme in the fluid should “eat” the cell walls and release the contents at the desired time.

All three methods have been tested successfully. The least expensive, highest yield method was soon put in production.

The “General TRIZ Solutions” referred to in Exhibit 1 have been developed over the course of the 60 years of TRIZ research, and have been organized in many different ways. Some of these are analytic methods such as:

• The Ideal Final Result and Ideality,
• Functional Modeling, Analysis and Trimming and
• Locating the Zones of Conflict. (This is more familiar to Six Sigma problem solvers as “Root Cause Analysis.”)

Some are more prescriptive such as:

• The 40 Inventive Principles of Problem Solving,
• The Separation Principles,
• Laws of Technical Evolution and Technology Forecasting and
• 76 Standard Solutions.

In the course of solving any one technical problem, one tool or many can be used. The 40 Principles of Problem Solving are the most accessible “tool” of TRIZ. These are the principles that were found to repeat across many fields, as solutions to many general contradictions, which are at the heart of many problems.

A fundamental concept of TRIZ is that contradictions should be eliminated. TRIZ recognizes two categories of contradictions:

1. Technical contradictions are the classical engineering “trade-offs.” The desired state can’t be reached because something else in the system prevents it. In other words, when something gets better, something else gets worse. Classical examples include:
   The product gets stronger (good), but the weight increases (bad).
   • The bandwidth for a communication system increases (good), but requires more power (bad).
   • Service is customized to each customer (good), but the service delivery system gets complicated (bad).
   • Training is comprehensive (good), but keeps employees away from their assignments (bad).
2. Physical contradictions, also called “inherent” contradictions, are situations in which one object or system has contradictory, opposite requirements. Everyday examples abound:
   • Surveillance aircraft should fly fast (to get to the destination), but should fly slowly to collect data directly over the target for long time periods.
   • Software should be complex (to have many features), but should be simple (to be easy to learn).
   • Coffee should be hot for enjoyable drinking, but cold to prevent burning the customer
   • Training should take a long time (to be thorough), but not take any time.

Two personal examples offered by recent TRIZ classes:

• I want my boss at the meeting, but I don’t want my boss at the meeting.
• I want to know everything my seventeen year-old child is doing, but I don’t want to know everything she is doing.

TRIZ research has identified 40 principles that solve the Technical/tradeoff contradictions and four principles of separation that solve the Physical/inherent contradictions. Additional examples include:

• Entertainment: Singapore needs to find a way to manage automobile traffic on the Sentosa, its entertainment island (aquarium, bird sanctuary, dolphin show, restaurants, music, etc.). Applications of TRIZ developed eight families of solutions.
• IT Product development: A manufacturing company doubled the value to the customer of their patient interview system for opticians offices by applying the feedback and self-service principles of TRIZ to the overall product development, and applying the principles of segmentation, taking out and composite construction to the training and support.
• School administrators: Creativity has been greatly enhanced in situations ranging from allocation of the budget for special education to building five schools with funding only for four, to improving racial harmony in the schools.
• Waste processing: Dairy farm operators could no longer dry the cow manure due to increased cost of energy. TRIZ led the operators to a method used for the concentration of fruit juice, which requires no heat.
• Warranty cost reduction: Ford used TRIZ to solve a persistent problem with squeaky windshields that was costing several million dollars each year. Previously, they had used TRIZ to reduce idle vibration in a small car by 165 percent, from one of the worst in its class to 30 percent better than the best in class.

A recent case study presented from the Dow Chemical Company showed the combined effect of TRIZ with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) most dramatically.

A Dow Plastics business found itself responding to meet the ever more rigorous needs of a cost-driven marketplace, for a technology tuned over decades.  It convened a group of technical experts to redesign its “most effective” standard process technology for manufacturing facilities for this family of products. To stay competitive in costs, they needed to drastically reduce the capital needed to build future plants. Requirements seemed ever-tightening, calling for lower energy use, better ergonomics for operating personnel, and lower monomer residuals in product. The process, being decades old, had technology and equipment systems considered highly optimized – oh, the psychological inertia!

An overall Ideal Final Result helped outline the zones of conflict / pathways to innovation so that sub-groups could divide and attack each opportunity with the most appropriate tools. Substantial use of technical contradictions and inventive principles helped address trade-offs. The group assembled a dozen alternative systems by using a morphological box at the high, conceptual level.  A Pugh concept selection matrix helped narrow the candidates to four for which the intermediate level of detail enabled cost estimations. Elements of IFR contributed to the evaluation criteria.

Breakthrough was achieved in control of monomer residuals, handling of raw materials, and reactor design. The reduction amazed even the project team, when the capital cost of a plant built to the new standard dropped by more than 25 percent, from nearly $110 million to < $80 million.

The best way to learn and explore TRIZ is to begin a problem that you haven’t solved satisfactorily and try it!

- end article -

Where are you in your TRIZ Education?

• Unsure how to best proceed with an eDiscovery strategy?
• Find the wide variety of tools and platforms available throughout the eDiscovery process to be a bewildering mish-mash of “marketing speak” from the vendor community?
• Looking for a sanity check on how you are approaching eDiscovery, and where you can cut time, money and resources out of the equation?

Take advantage of our 5-Hour Online (+ 60 minutes of instructor feedback) and On-demand eLearning course, “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ created in partnership with Ellen Domb from the PQR Group and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Ellen is one of the world leading teachers in TRIZ. Her teachings will not only educate, but also entertain you. She is the first of all the TRIZ teachers who really researches in how to teach TRIZ the best way. But what I appreciate the most, are here really quick responses whenever I have a TRIZ-related question. And this is independent from the place she is staying at around the world.” - Robert Adunka, Innovation Coach, Siemens AG

The “Applied Innovation with TRIZ“ course has five modules and includes approximately 60 minutes of class/homework feedback from Dr. Domb, to discuss the course and the application of TRIZ to your own work.

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Module 1: Introduction to TRIZ, Ideality and the Ideal Final Result

• History and Development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• History of TRIZ
• Defining Ideality
• Ideality and IFR
• Ideal Final Results: Examples
• Applying Ideality
• Using Resources

Module 2: Using Resources

• Using Resources
• Accelerating Innovation by Using Resources
• Example of Real-Time Traffic Information
• Examples of Using Customers as Resources
• Recognizing Energy Sources
• Checking Your Understanding – Using Resources

Module 3: Eliminating Trade-offs

• Eliminating Trade-offs
• How to Recognize a Trade-off
• How to Look for Assumptions That Cause Trade-offs
• How to Use the Contradiction Matrix and the 40 Principles to Eliminate Trade-offs

Module 4: Examples of the 40 Principles From Many Disciplines

• The 40 Principles
• How to Use the 40 Principles
• Examples from Business, Technology, Services and Society

Module 5: Eliminating Inherent Contradictions and Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

• Identifying Inherent Contradictions
• Resolving Inherent Contradictions
• Integrating the Tools of TRIZ

Register now for “Applied Innovation with TRIZ

Editor’s Note: This post is a featured guest post by one of our IAI University Partners, Barry Murphy from the eDiscoveryJournal.

Microsoft SharePoint has spread like wildfire through organizations of all shapes and sizes.  SharePoint delivers real business benefits by enabling collaboration in efficient ways, providing ways to track versions of documents edited by multiple parties, allowing non-technical business people to apply basic workflow to content-driven processes, and faster access to information (via search and integration with the MS Office suite of apps).

Many laypeople assume that if information is searchable, eDiscovery will be no problem when the time comes.  But as is often the case in life, the devil is in the details.  Because SharePoint allows users to add value to content (e.g. adding workflow tasks), there is the factor of metadata to consider.

We’ve discussed metadata and the challenges it can create in collection in earlier eDiscoveryJournal entries.  This issue will be paramount in SharePoint instances because of the fact that so many organizations use SharePoint and most collection tools are only able to grab SharePoint document libraries (as they are stored on file systems).  It’s only a matter of time before the legal community figures out the value of these other content items.

The solutions for SharePoint eDiscovery are still in the infancy stage (which makes sense when you consider the youth of SharePoint itself).  There are the archiving vendors like Autonomy,AvePoint, CommVault, EMC, IBM, Iron Mountain (Mimosa), and Symantec.

Search and collection vendors such as Digital Reef and StoredIQ also note an ability to do SharePoint collection, and some vendors have specific SharePoint collection tools like AvePoint DocAve eDiscovery and EMC SourceOne-Kazeon eDiscovery SharePoint Manager.  Another example is the SharePoint governance tool Autonomy ControlPoint, which utilizes Automomy’s IDOL search engine to access SharePoint repositories and make the index available in the IDOL federated search view.

With most of these solutions, the collection is focused on the SharePoint document libraries (the documents that users store within a given SharePoint site).  Some of the archiving vendors combine backup and archiving so that the system captures more than just the document libraries.

However, because SharePoint has a “webpage” interface, it has become common practice to ‘snapshot’ page views using applications like Adobe’s Acrobat Pro and to record the exact URL and time taken when citing that presentation as evidence.  This approach allows for reviewers to have the context of the user interface in addition to the actual content of a given document.

Thus, the solutions on the market today are not full SharePoint eDiscovery solutions at all.  They may help with understanding how much SharePoint content might be responsive (based on keyword searches) or with finding a smoking gun early, but they are not capable of “forensic” collection.

The first product I have heard of that does support forensic SharePoint collection is from MicroForensics.  The solution is a point-in-time collection of SharePoint that captures document libraries, metadata, and snapshots of the UI. MicroForensics collects the document libraries and maintains them as native copies, collects all metadata fields including custom metadata along with the snapshots of each page and stores the snapshots in a MHTML file for ease of review.  Note that this is a point-in-time collection in response to a request (so, this is not an approach that would work for backing up or archiving SharePoint).  Because it’s a forensic collection, it satisfies preservation needs and does so in a way that does not impact the production SharePoint environment.  If there are other products that do this, please let us know by commenting on this Journal Entry.

SharePoint and most modern enterprise applications support custom fields created by the users or at the enterprise level.  As a result, collection systems will have to be nimble to adapt to the changing landscape. The discovery team will need to regularly validate and quality check collections against the originals to be defensible.

Informed customers will make sure that the collection tool can get more than just SharePoint document libraries, but all metadata, as well.  Also look for solutions that will not impact the production environment too heavily; you don’t want to bring SharePoint to its knees when it is a valuable business application.

And finally, get legal and IT together on the same page about how to reasonably prove that your SharePoint preservation and collection methodologies and tools are defensible.

- end article -

Where are you in your eDiscovery Education?

• Unsure how to best proceed with an eDiscovery strategy?
• Find the wide variety of tools and platforms available throughout the eDiscovery process to be a bewildering mish-mash of “marketing speak” from the vendor community?
• Looking for a sanity check on how you are approaching eDiscovery, and where you can cut time, money and resources out of the equation?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions” created in partnership with Barry Murphy and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

“Not only did Barry give us a comprehensive overview of the challenges organizations face with managing eDiscovery, but he also gave a detailed analysis of how to address those challenges.  Barry was able to take a complex subject with many moving parts and allow us to understand it in less than half a day.” – Greg Arnette, CTO and Founder, Sonian

The “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions“ course has four modules and includes a 30-minute live call with Barry to discuss the course or any eDiscovery project you have in play.

Register Now for “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions”

Module 1: Understanding eDiscovery

• Understanding and Defining eDiscovery
• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
• The Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Module 2: The eDiscovery Imperative

• The eDiscovery Imperative
• The Challenge of Managing and Finding Information
• The Immediate Impact of eDiscovery on Organizations
• The State of eDiscovery Today
• eDiscovery Trends to Consider

Module 3: Getting Started on eDiscovery

• Critical Elements of Good eDiscovery Programs
• Aligning Roles and Responsibilities
• Creating Retention Policies
• Near-term vs. Long-term Issues and Challenges

Module 4: Understanding the Complex Solutions Landscape

• Understanding the Solution Landscape
• Benefits Promised by eDiscovery Solutions
• The Truth About eDiscovery Platforms
• Positioning Solution Providers and Products
• Final Thoughts and Considerations

Register Now for “eDiscovery: From Legal Imperatives to Technical Solutions”

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
On July 28th, 2010, Adobe announced it’s intention to acquire Switzerland-based Day Software for approximately $240 Million USD. (see press release from Adobe)

The Past, Present and Future of Adobe

With the acquisition of Day Software (highly scalable, standards and open source-oriented [not as deployment/sales model, but as underpinnings]), along with the late 2009 acquisition of Omniture (enterprise-class, quite high-end web analytics), Adobe clearly has their eyes beyond the deskop, with arguably the first major moves into server/cloud territory that they’ve executed on in many years.

Of course the question is… even if they have “best of breed” solutions in what they’re calling “customer experience management” (or CEM) – a decidely “big company/large enterprise” vision of customer engagement (or “marketing” as those who haven’t yet crested the new meme will still call it), can they actually pull it off?

Can they legitimately compete with the other “big (ol’) boys” of ECM/WCM such as ECM/Documentum, Oracle/Stellent, Autonomy/Interwoven, Open Text/Vignette, and the like?

Boundaries to Break, Skills to Sink Deep

The sales model is entirely different in enterprise/server-sales from the desktop and team-oriented, more consumer-oriented sales of most Adobe solutions, and although Adobe has some experience in the enterprise sales area, given their (long past) acquisition of Allaire (Cold Fusion), LiveCycle (born of various internal components of Adobe and one-off acqusitions of various parts, stretching back to 2001, and launching as a suite in 2005), and with the high-end web marketing folks of the enterprise via Omniture (a $1.8 Billion USD acquisition). Underestimating the sales cycle and re-aligning marketing/outreach to “sell” the new Adobe are classic traps that are not as easily avoided as they would seem – and all too many mergers/acquisitions that cross boundaries of sales mentality and market positioning #fail miserably in this regard, and the early focus of Adobe and the Macromedia acquisition from years past, with a focus on graphic/design tools for individuals and small teams, the core DNA is, in my opinion, anti-large enterprise. Time will tell how this shift works out – do they lose on the low-end and win on the high-end, or learn to juggle the spectrum?

The development model that Adobe has historically undertaken has been… sluggish, to say the least. Their cycle times make Microsoft’s 3 year cycles look swift, and with a desktop-centric view, their cross-platform (Mac vs. Windows) product roll-outs can and have been unsynchronized for years at a time – ironic given that PDF, Flash and AIR are all designed to be entirely platform neutral. As they embrace server-based solutions more completely, perhaps they will be able to apply more focus into a single lens (J2EE-based solutions), and tighten the development cycle.

Agile or Fragile?

Can Adobe continue to leverage the more agile developer talent from their recent acquisitions? Day’s mantra for the last year or so (aligned larger with Kevin Cochrane’s entree to the management team at Day) has been in agile development and agile marketing – can they successfully infect the parent company? Or will the Adobe waterfall drown them out? As a long time proponent of Agile (everything), I certainly hope so, but this is a massive cultural change issue – and large companies, in my experience, struggle mightily to change the development mindset to Agile from traditional “waterfall” development. Let’s hope the one-two punch of Day’s agile discipline and open source participation wins the (ahem) day at Adobe.

What’s in Their Wallet?

From a size/scale/staying power perspective, Adobe’s current market cap is at $15.5 Billion USD (NASDAQ:ADBE) as compared to Autonomy at $4.01 Billion USD (LON:AU), EMC at $42.01 Billion USD (NYSE:EMC), Open Text at $2.25 Billion USD (NASDAQ:OTEX) and Oracle at $121.94 Billion USD (ASDASD). In the grand scheme of most of their competition, they are on the small- to medium-marketsize.

Adobe is certainly well out of the world of the startup (fraught with peril and struggling for mere existence), and are operating in worlds that have mostly (or damn close) “crossed the chasm” into the mainstream.

There is still plenty of growth in the world of content, and they continue to have the ability to invest in making that future happen, not only monetarily (the benefits of a war chest), and with huge “mindshare” in digital content (server/enterprise credibility not withstanding).

Assuming a majority of the talent that comes with and stays at Adobe from their acquistions, they should continue to have fresh/modern skills and experience that bridge the gap from the origins of Adobe (desktop/small teams, and individual tools) to the new Adobe (focused on seamless experience, mobile, server, and customer/employee engagement).

Closed to Open

And while the Adobe of the past was primarily about proprietary formats (Photoshop, Pagemaker, InDesign, Framemaker, Allaire Cold Fusion, etc.), Day’s focus has been heavy on the open source world, as well as in involvement in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) – a specification for improving interoperability between Enterprise Content Management systems -which is one of the convergence trends that is (finally!) gaining traction, as the buyers in the market of the last two years have finally begun to get it in their heads, and consequently into the seller/solution providers’ heads, that while they will continue to have silos (inadvertently or purposefully) of content… if the goal of an organization in 2010 and beyond is to provide customer or employee experiences, you absolutely MUST find some way to unify access to content – whether via CMIS, Federated Search, modern portals, or the like. Multi-platform access, seamless access, personalized – these are all areas where the combination of Adobe and Day holds the promise of serving people, rather than serving the acquistion of more raw technology (the typical buying organization’s approach).

Most of the grumblings I’ve seen about this acquisition thus far is in concerns that Adobe will kill Day’s involvement in open source and open standards. While both Day and Adobe deny this, again, it’s not really up to the stated goals of the acquisition – it’s in what happens when cultures collide, and if the support and uptake of a new mindset truly takes root, well after the acquisition has closed.

Wherefore Art Alfresco?

Another reverberation in the open source world, is the wonder as to what happened to the Alfresco and Adobe relationship? Up until this point, Alfresco had seemed a likely acquisition, given their partnership with Alfresco as the back-end and Adobe as the front-end in the 2008 OEM agreement relating to Adobe’s LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services offerings. Where will that relationship go from here? It’s anyone’s guess – as you can read over at an Alfresco blog post, the belief is that Day has been oriented more directly at Adobe’s customer engagement/customer experience model world, while Alfresco has been more about infrastructure and tools to support developers.

That’s a fair analogy, although at this point, while I’m a fan of developers having the tools and toolkits to do the job, I trust 21st century marketers and customer service managers to be far more oriented towards user success than I do anyone wearing a “pure” IT hat (and I used to be one of the IT purists – mea culpa). Thus far, no official word from Adobe on where the Alfresco relationship will go – and as a publicly traded company, it’s unlikely that we’ll hear why Alfresco or any other number of remaining independents did not make the acquisition list… at least not YET.

Embracing Managed Content

Last thought – I’ve seen some zings directed at Adobe and Day regarding the world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), specifically that the integration of Adobe and Day’s DAM solution is weaker than their competition, such as integrated DAM in Open Text’s suite of offerings.

To this comment I will say, stop trying to silo content in your enterprise – if you have to debate internally which silo to drop your content, DM, ECM, WCM, DAM, etc., then you have already so badly missed the point of any “content management” system of any kind, that you should take the time to back up and re-think your strategy. The more respositories/technologies that are thrown into the mix, the more likely you are to kill the purposes of manging content in the first place – decreased time to create/re-use content, faster processes, more consistent branding, etc.. For every ONE organization I’ve seen who has executed this well (as a buyer), I’ve seen FIFTY who have botched it.

DAM is DM (Document Management) on storage steroids, driven by metadata (the universal glue of ALL managed content) – with perhaps (if you’ve spent many millions), the ability to auto-transcribe or semantically identify the audio and/or video content above and beyond raw metadata (makes for great demos from Autonomy, but you probably can’t afford it, and really don’t need it).

The divide between DM, ECM, WCM and DAM is all in your mind until you start getting into fairly sophisticated and esoteric deployments where you are doing true, large-scale content re-use, with complex interdependencies in the final output/delivery of content.

In short, if you feel that the combined Adobe/Day DAM solution is not up to snuff – I’d be willing to bet that you are overcomplicating your perceived needs and resulting solution, or you are in the 1% of the world that really needs incredibly sophisticated DAM. If you happen to be in that camp, please contact me at 617-933-9655 – I’d love to understand what factors have impacted what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. We can all learn from those both on the leading and trailing edges – so if I am missing something that truly makes DAM a differentiator for your managed business content, let’s surface some use cases to show what “real” DAM can do.

Alternative Takes on the News

Find other takes from analysts (official and otherwise – aka Bloggers) via:

• VentureBeat (an investment perspective – fairly lightweight)
• Jon On Tech (an integrator’s perspective – Jon’s a pragmatic guy)
• CMS Watch (via Apoorv Durga – one of the newer CMS Watch analysts – expressing similar doubts about the enterprise mindset of Adobe vs. it’s boxed software roots)
• Tim Anderson’s ITWriting (expressing hope for Day’s openness and REST strengths to penetrate Adobe’s proprietary nature)

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Day Software’s solutions, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If you’re not using Day for WCM/DAM and/or collaboration, but are solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How Information Architected Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Day and Adobe’s content offerings, are the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise -  which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We are vendor neutral, and more often that not, can help you find ways to make whatever technology investments you have already made, greatly outperform the end results you are currently experiencing.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together to solve your needs, whether customer, employee, partner or supplier-facing. It’s all content – manage it effectively, and get the technology out of your way.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal Consultant at Information Architected, Inc. (IAI).

Today, the topic is Taking Open Innovation to a Global Organization.

In this episode, I am interviewing Jon Bidwell, the Chief Innovation Officer for Chubb & Son.

Mr. Bidwell is currently responsible for the development and deployment of Chubb’s global innovation platform, designed to engage employees and distribution in the collaborative development of new products, services and process improvements and has been with Chubb since 1983.

Jon and I had first met in Boston at an Imaginatik User Conference – where the sheer speed and completeness of both Jon (and Chubb’s) vision and execution truly stunned me. There is always room for innovation improvement, but as you will hear in this interview, building a strong innovation foundation has given them confidence that the future seeds of innovation have already been planted, sowing both short-term and long-term innovation success.

Key Concepts in Scaling Open Innovation

Scalability is a relative term, and the speed with which you can scale out, in this case to employees on a global scale, is not something that the vast majority of organizations have any experience with. If tapping more than the R&D or marketing departments for innovative ideas is of interest to you, then stay tuned…

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Jon Bidwell – Taking Open Innovation to a Global Organization

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for Open Innovation? to engage employees, partners, and ultimately, the world?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within AND outside of your organization.

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting

Readers of my work know that one of my more favorite aspects of ECM is content delivery. Along with mobility, the ability to re-purpose modular “chunks” of content in a variety of formats and contexts significantly enhances the value derived from ECM, increases the effectiveness of communication and quite frankly is just plain fun.

I have blogged about the concept often over the last few years, and originally began writing about it more than 15 years ago.  Many never seemed to quite get it – but slowly over the last few years more and more apps have emerged that clearly demonstrate the value of dynamic content delivery.  The latest is a free app known as Flipboard.

Flipboard is a personalized digital magazine, created by culling social media and content pertinent to the reader.  This is the future of publishing, and it will take off – of that I am sure.  But do not just take my word for it.  Flipboard has received many great reviews, and commentary , that like this post, positions Flipboard not just as an iPad app, but another step forward in dynamic content delivery.  Initial reaction has been so positive that the provider had to ask for patience with potential early “blips in service.”

- My point, I am not enamored with Flipboard per se – but am very excited to see yet another well done app come to the market that helps all of us experience the power of dynamic content delivery. Merge this with DAM and multimedia and the possibilities for new more effective ways to communicate are endless and the boundaries of ECM are stretched once again.

Oh yeah, the ECM nerd in me is again having a very good day.

It has been weeks since I blogged, or even Tweeted on a regular basis. Where have I been?  Dan and I are on the road, consulting on a very complex, grand and most interesting ECM project.  A Fortune 100 company that remains successful and growing in spite of the economy, has managed to achieve such greatness without benefit of a formal Information Architecture and ECM strategy. This project has been the focus of our time and attention of late.  The challenge is great and the potential opportunity huge.

We are dealing with a large and diverse collection of content in various stages of maturity, quality,  accuracy and accessibility. The organization readily realizes that years of ad hoc, manual and individual approaches to content management have resulted in a nearly chaotic collection of content and processes. Many issues exist, from a need for enterprise search and a centralized taxonomy, to strategies for content distribution. But a fundamental issue is the state of the collection of content itself.

Among the many repositories, valuable content resides amongst  dated, ambiguous, unapproved and at times contradictory content. A critical decision has been made to clean up the content repositories before addressing findability. The merit of beginning with the establishment of search and taxonomy, under a series of UIs, and using these to expedite the discovery of dated and inaccurate content and subsequently deleting it was debated, but a fundamental decision was made not to expose users to the “garbage”, but rather, first authenticate and clean up the content and subsequently use the findability tools to expose an “official body of quality content.”

But I am not blogging today simply to relay this experience.  While deep in thought about this situation, I heard a news story that brought this decision point to mind, and ignited in me a chance to blog about the BP oil “spill”.  (Hey its not a spill -  it’s an underwater gusher. Let’s call it what it is.)

Despite many strong opinions about this disaster, I have refrained from blogging about it because the charter of my blog is ECM.  Last week’s news, however, gave me my excuse to express opinion about this disaster, ala ECM.  BP is using a form of ECM and Web 2.0 to control public opinion. They have hired “reporters” to write about the “spill” from a “more positive” perspective. These “reporters” are using phrases to describe their experience watching the clean up effort such as: “…enjoyed the spectacular ballet at sea… dolphins swimming around us. Even a shark came along to watch the show.” (Watch the show? Try struggle to survive, in disgust?  And what’s with “ballet?”).  They have also reported that “… hotels have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams.”  According to other independent, i.e non-BP owned sources, this is simply not true and the local tourist trade is seriously hurting.

I keep my outrage and disgust about this entire situation in check – the point I want to raise here is this, if left unchecked and un-managed,  garbage such as this could potentially be retrieved as “fact.”  Content authentication and source identification are critical to a comprehensive ECM strategy.

Internet and intranet sites alike have the potential to provide access to a wealth of content, but can contain “garbage” among the “jewels”,  garbage as rank and lethal as the oil “spill” itself. (OK I snuck that in.)

Consumers of content need to be diligent in filtering garbage from “fact”, or be assured, as is the case with our client going forward, that systems are in place to control publication.  I am not advocating censorship, but ECM systems need to provide some approach to quality control, tailored to the scope and needs of individual situations. Fact checking,  authority and credentials of authors, and/or providing clear and blatant identification of authorship are all steps that can be taken to at least let the reader decide what is content and what is “garbage”.

In an earlier blog post, I directly addressed the need to authenticate content – of all types. As an issue  fundamentally critical to any and all collections of content – especially those that are “findable.”

In another earlier post I commented on the irony of bloggers who were “unhappy” with a regulation that compelled them to disclose any affiliations or gifts they  received in connection with their blog writing.

I have to say that at least in the case of BP, authors are identified as “BP Reporters”. So at least the potential is there for the reader to use a garbage filter on the consumption of content. – In the absence of content quality controls, such as those being implemented by my client, readers must beware.

Last week the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was held right here in my hometown, Boston MA.  As usual, the E2.0 community was abuzz with Twitter (#e2conf).  But, now, with the show a happy memory, many of us attendees reflect more deeply than 140 characters allows, in our blog posts.  The blogosphere is ripe with conference coverage. Among them I recommend those from Sameer Patel, Jacob Morgan, Rawn and Ron Miller. I will refrain from sharing observations that are redundant to theirs – except in cases where I think redundancy will add to the power of the message.

So that said – here goes.  in keeping with tradition, I  have rolled-up my impression of the conference into an acronym.  This year the conference is characterized as

FAME

OK, to explain the acronym – lets start at the end;

E is for ENERGETIC

More so than ever before, I could not help but feel the energy level of the crowd (Yes crowd, this may have been the most popularly attended E2.0 conference yet), as the spilled out of sessions and milled around the hallways. MAybe it was all that fine Starbucks coffee that was being served – but I think not. Read on…

Now, back to the beginning;

F is for FUNDED

I came away with the impression that most of the attendees were not there for theoretical or introductory eduction – but practical insight on how to succeed with Enterprise 2.0.  Most seemed to be working on real and funded programs, (Which likely was the root of the aforementioned energy level).  I could not help but pick up on this during the various Q and A sessions and one-on-ones that I had.  Indeed, for the first time in 2 years I walked away with no less than 3 real leads – i.e. individuals seeking proposals for targeted consulting.

A is for APPLICATION-focused

The conference responded to the attendees’ focus on real-world issues with a nice mix of case studies, all focused on the leveraging of E2.0 functionality to specific business applications – many presentations in the form of real-world case studies.  My favorite was a group of three panelists all discussing how innovation was managed as a process within their respective organizations, partially based on collaborative software. Innovation Management was a popularly discussed business application at the conference, overall, including 2 of the keynotes.  The crowd was also coached several times by those pioneers of E2.0, the 2.0 Adoption Council members. Their experiences are always a conference highlight.

Lastly,

M is for MATURE

This is perhaps reflective of the other letters in the acronym.  Presentations were far more grounded in real-word examples, workshops were provided by industry veterans, and attendees came seeking practical advice to move funded project forward.  The market has matured.

Both of my presentations focused on implementation issues, each illustrated by real-world examples. The first looked at how culture impacts the implementation of E2.0. (Download slides)

My second presentation, based on a study done with the 2.0 Adoption Council, provided insights into deploying E2.0 in a controlled environment (in this case focusing on privacy issues in the European Union).

In the presentation I broadened the definition and scope of E2.0 (See slide 4) – positioning it within an integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy.  (ECM – at least the way I define it.)

In the end, I would have to say that Maturity was the big take away for me this year. In fact,  as I was presenting  E2.0 and Privacy it struck me, and I stated, that I believe the success of the E2.0 show – characterized by the maturing of its focus and audience,  will be the demise of the show or at least the label Enterprise 2.0. Typical of many nascent technologies – they are couched in definitions and frameworks that position them as  business applications. I draw the analogy to imaging. Circa 1990 imaging was discussed as if it were a business application.  People spoke in phrases such as “we do imaging”;  “I am the manager of our imaging application” . It may seem odd to think of scanning technology as a business application,  as opposed to a way to create and share content within business applications – but I assure you that was the case.  Imaging too had a trade show built entirely around it – less we forget that AIIM stands for the Association for information and IMAGE management.

The focus, attitudes and energy surrounding E2.0 are changing.  I do think that the success of E2.0  will be the demise of the conference, as we know it.  But this is a good thing, and it is actually critical. In its nascent state the market focused on E2.0 as an application: “Does your organization have an E2.0 project, budget, leader/champion?”.   This will fade into obscurity as we realize you don’t “do E2.0″, . you leverage this genre of capabilities to facilitate and strengthen and redefine business applications.  This was perhaps foreshadowed in the subtext of this year’s conference title,  “Business Powered by Collaboration.”

I give the conference 2 – 3 years tops,  before it either fades into history, or morphs into something related – but bigger.  This is not a reflection on the show, but market maturity.  In fact once again, Steve Wylie and crew are to be congratulated for their skillful orchestration and attention to detail.  The show was a huge success, but with success will come obscurity (and likely something bigger and better.)

It’s likely you have been following the pressure Facebook has been getting concerning its privacy policies.  The pressure seems to be working, as Facebook recently announced it will change its approach to privacy and make it easier for users to protect their personal data. This has been an on going battle.  I first commented on the need for better controls in Facebook 3 years ago, prompted by the then reaction of Facebook to privacy violations related to its Beacon advirtisements.  At that time I commented that “mature” uses of 2.0 (especially those that take the form of Enterprise 2.0) have to address the issue of privacy and learn from established corporate practices concerning responsible content management.

Here it is  three years later and Facebook is in a similar situation, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still resisting the demand to do the “right thing.”  While the ability to set privacy controls within Facebook has “been made simpler,” defaults are still set to “open.”  The ability to disable the mining/access of personal profiling by marketers is still “not that simple.”  Sure, Zuckerman is moving in the right direction, but he is going kicking and screaming, one small step at a time.

But enough critisism on that issue. You can read the many articles and commentary out there, and determine for yourself if Zuckerman and Facebook are doing enough. In this post, I want to focus on one of Zuckerman’s recent quotes in particular. In commenting on the struggle between social computing and privacy, Zuckerman stated,  “The company [Facebook] treads a delicate balance between protecting privacy rights and promoting social networking.”  When I read this quote – I could not help but think of Seth Meyer and Amy Pohler on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update: “Oh Really.”

I have stated for years that as the adolescent  we know as “2.0″ matures, it will become a bit more cognizant of the realities of the real world – for many reason. The issue of balancing access and security is not new, nor unique to 2.0. I have been describing ECM as such a balancing act for over a decade.  I first developed the graphic above over 10 years, as a way to explain how to approach an ECM strategy. At the top  a grayscale bar represents  a continuum between  control/secure and collaborate/innovate. This is framed under the competing business practices of risk management and knowledge management.  This is the highest level design decision you must grapple with when controlling any and all forms of content – social content included. Depending on the context and the point in the content’s lifecycle, the balance between security/privacy and access/collaboration need to be treated perhaps differently, but always proactively.

So, come  2.0  GROW UP.  Social computing – open, transparent emergent platforms – sure they are powerful  and should be exploited, but you cannot throw caution to the wind.  It’s time for social platforms to  take responsibility for what they create – whether inside or outside the firewall.  Inside the firewall, there really is no excuse, not to address this issue head on.

The concept of balancing access to content against security is the focus of the IAI Primer: “Enabling Collaboration While Managing Risk.”  (Free download)  The issue is also addressed from many angles in a series of IAI Primers on Enterprise 2.0. (Free download)

I also recently authored a study on behalf of The 2.0 Adoption Council, sponsored by NewsGator, entitled, “Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Within the European Union:  Transparency and Emergence vs. Privacy and Compliance.”

I will also be addressing this very issue head on at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, on June 17, in a presentation entitled Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in a Controlled Environment:  Lessons Learned.

Want to hear more, and/or debate this point with me? I hope you can attend the talk, (Thursday at 9:30 AM). If you cannot make it, stay tuned, I will be posting my slides and the reaction I get from the audience in an upcoming post – promise.

Welcome to IAM Talking, a periodic podcast interview series, with your host, Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected.

Today, the topic is Business Model Innovation – White Space and You.

In this episode, I am interviewing Mark Johnson, the author of a new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal.

Mark is chairman of Innosight, a strategic innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India, which he cofounded with Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen. He has consulted to Global 1000 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries—including health care, aerospace/defense, enterprise IT, energy, automotive, and consumer packaged goods—and has advised Singapore’s government on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark’s most recent work has focused on helping companies envision and create new growth, manage transformation, and achieve renewal through business model innovation.

Find copies of his new book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal, at your favorite online or brick and mortar book store. The official website for the book is www.seizingthewhitespace.com.

Key Concepts Covered on White Space Innovation

We cover several of the key concepts, including a deep dive into the Customer Value Proposition (CVP) and the “job to be done” mindset that Innosight typically uses in their work, which is part of an overall trend in innovation management that focuses on the outcomes that customers are searching for, rather than the products, services, or solutions-based approach, which is rapidly becoming a dated and dangerous approach.

We also discuss several aspects of innovation maturity – both from the standpoint of innovation practices, product innovation vs. process innovation vs. white space or business model innovation, as well as maturity in skillsets and personnel to execute on a variety of innovation initiatives.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking with Mark Johnson – Business Model Innovation – White Space and You

Reference Materials for White Space Innovation

For reference, two of the figures or graphics referenced from the book, can be found below.

The Four-Box Business Innovation Model

And the Stages of Business Model Implementation

Closing Review

Whether you are just getting started with innovation management, or are already a seasoned innovator, I would readily recommend Seizing the White Space as a worthy addition to your innovation toolkit. Business Model Innovation may be the latest flavor of innovation to get air time, but not without good reason. By re-thinking the fundamentals of at least SOME aspect of your innovation portfolio, to make way for White Space Innovation opportunities, you will be in far better shape than your “head in the sand” competitors.

Is your Information Architected for Innovation? for White Space discovery?

Contact us at 
617-933-9655 to discuss how you can put in place systematic tools, techniques and yes, technology to make the most of the strengths of the people within your organization

More details on our practices related to Collaboration and Innovation can be found at:

• Innovation Management Workshops and Coaching/Consulting