Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Invention Machine (headquartered in Boston) announced yesterday the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 6.0 with integrated collaboration and expert identification technologies to further accelerate product innovation. (see press release from Invention Machine)

Beyond Individual Innovators

Historically, Invention Machine’s Goldfire has been oriented towards providing an individually focused innovation “workbench” for the lone researcher or inventor. The offering combined (and continues to offer) advanced techniques and technologies such as semantic search capabilities, process modeling (typically in support of the assembled artifact of a product), knowledge mining, and knowledge re-use to decrease the amount of time it takes for individual engineers (much of the environment is modeled in support of physical rather than intellectual property inventions) or inventors/innovators to analyze a particular problem or set of problems, and uncover the ripest areas to go forth and solve the problem.

The offering has been and appears to remain one of the most advanced convergence of these technologies and techniques that we have seen in the innovation management space, and in many ways, is truly a solution with no direct, out of the box, commercial competition.

This is both a blessing and a curse, as markets are not typically made up of a company of one, but an ecosytem of competing products.

Innovation Market Maturity

As the company and it’s offerings have matured, and frankly, as the general awareness of innovation management has matured as well, there has been more of a push, alongside the rise of Enterprise 2.0 (meaning in most cases, collaboration) to support team-based or collaborative efforts at digitally supporting and scaling innovation capabilities.

With Goldfire 6.0, Invention Machine has added the collaboration-oriented ability to:

• Automatically identify and connect innovation workers with domain experts within their network
• Empower the community with precise “innovation intelligence” (similar to the “relationship intelligence” brought about by social network analysis and social computing I’d begun writing about in 2004 – see “Death of a Salesman? Birth of Relationship Intelligence” – now read over 4,000 times on Scribd) by leveraging undocumented expertise from problem-sharing dialogues, capturing and processing those discussions as reusable corporate assets.

From the managerial (top-down) aspect of Innovation Management, v6.0 provides:

• The ability to measure company-wide innovation initiatives and trends in real time.

With this third component, they have now begun to straddle three distinct layers – tools providing benefits to individuals (the original offering), to teams, and through to managers/executives.

Trend Watch

This offer is indicative of a two-part growing trend, collectively defined as “convergence”:

1. The convergence of tools to deliver value to individuals up through the executive suite (traditional enterprise software tends to focus on only one extreme or the other)
2. The convergence of process, information, content, knowledge and search techologies into a unified and pre-packaged business application (as opposed to a technology focused on a specific issue/problem)

Keep an eye open for areas where these trends are surfacing as business needs within your own organization, as this convergence is happening more and more, particularly as the realities of competition in the current economic environment continue to be challenging.

Combine those trends with the rising trend of innovation management maturity, and we’re (finally?) witnessing a triple convergence for business innovation.

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, 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 not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How We Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for 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 call this an Innovation Architecture.

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.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Iron Mountain announced yesterday that it had acquired Mimosa Systems, Inc., an enterprise-class content archiving solutions provider, for approximately $112 million in cash. (see press release via Iron Mountain or coverage on TechCrunch)

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

Iron Mountain is a curious company with a very large installed base from it’s traditional business of storing physical items for “safe, offsite, long-term storage.” Given the nature of most people in businesses as information hoarders, their traditional business has been remarkably robust, even giving the flailing economy.

What many people do not realize is the growing and significant impact of digital content that is “under management” by Iron Mountain. The split-personality of their physical and digital businesses not-withstanding (they reportedly have issues with the sales teams on either side of the virtual fences of the business not proactively selling across departmental or business unit lines), the digital business is booming as well, due in large part to concerns around rapid (and as low-cost as possible) response to eDiscovery issues.

Cloud 1st, Premise 2nd – Reverse of the Norm?

Back in 2007 (see Carl’s coverage of the acquistion of Stratify by Iron Mountain), Iron Mountain made one of it’s first explicit moves to directly address eDiscovery concerns with it’s acquisition of Stratify, a cloud-based offering used to outsource discovery activities with dedicated processes, semantic intelligence, etc..

Intrestingly, even though Iron Mountain’s longest line of business has been in the physical world, the Stratify acquisition jumped the straight past the traditional “legacy world” of on-premise solutions (to an extent) and straight to the cutting edge.

With the acquisition of Mimosa, Iron Mountain rounds out the portfolio for eDiscovery (integration and post-acquisition pains not withstanding) by specifically pulling in a solution that focuses on content where it lives in the largest typical buckets – those being email (as much as my fellow 2.0 pundits like to tout that email is dead, I can assure you it is not, and won’t be any time soon), SharePoint (that slow-moving content platform that is raising all boats), and for those still unmanaged files on desktops, file servers, etc., they can tap into the unmanaged areas as well.

The Theory Is…

If you’ll pardon the pun, Iron Mountain’s strategy appears to be (and which I largely agree with) if you can’t move the (content) mountain into active management, bring the mountain into passive management, so that in case of emergency, you stand a chance of actively managing your way out of costly, and expensive legal proceedings.

While you cannot anticipate every emergency, contingency, nor accurately forecast risk, by setting up both a proactive information architecture for your normal 80% of daily content concerns, being able to embrace solutions like what Iron Mountain is aiming for with this acquisition (we’ll see how long it takes to connect the vision to a seamles customer experience), allows you to break down both your normal legacy content walls, and burst up and out to cloud-based offerings to get the best bang for the buck. While I did not use this exact example in a recent webinar on Collaboration (see slides), I believe the graphic is still useful nonetheless.

The next time you’re looking at an overhaul, installation, or minor tweak to your own information architecture, enterprise content management or eDiscovery capabilities, take a look at this graphic and see if you have spent enough time, money and effort to cover your bases adequately.

Destroy and Converge

This general movement of destroying silos or at least virtualizing and providing access across multiple silos of information is a continuing theme (well past it’s time to come to broader light), that we also covered in a past IAM Alert on Present.ly and SharePoint, and which is being covered in a Cloud/SharePoint webinar today, by my colleague Carl Frappaolo (stay tuned for link to the archive).

Expect more on the cloud and virtualization front as enterprises finally take to heart what software startups (and the US Government) has known for many years now. High costs and barriers to the flow of information = bad business, and not just bad legal outcomes.

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

Weigh in with your success or failure stories, and let’s keep pushing the boundaries. We have a long way to go, but there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in these areas.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The second wave of Google Wave invites (outside of the development community it was initially released to in May/June) has been zipping across the web in the last 10 days – with the 8 invites I’d waved on twitter being snapped in minutes, and similar pleas for Wave invites lighting up the trending topics on Twitter et al.

The Collaborating Hordes

An additional 100,000+ of us have now had the chance to experiment with the Google Wave environment, and while my analysis is slightly more favorable than the initial view from June 1, 2009 (see IAM Alert: The Whimpering Google Wave) – it is clear that of any “early release” offering from Google, there is a lot more work to be done.

In fairness, this is billed as a “preview” and not “beta” (although also recall that Gmail only THIS year was stripped of it’s beta title, so Google is a bit loose with their release terminology), and has a much more limited set of people accessing the system than the typical Google offering.

As the continuing pounding and feedback of the invitees start to push the boundaries of what Google had expected, no doubt we’ll see refinement of the offering from many angles, including the ecosystem that springs up around Google Wave for open source and commercial offeirngs.

Usability Where Art Thou?

It’s ironic that for all of the fame of the “anti-clutter” interface of Google – the completely opposite approach of the search portals of the 90s such as Yahoo!, Excite et al – that the Google Wave environment is by far the most cluttered and complicated UI of any Google product.

In informal conversations with clients, and the many contacts I have both within the usability community and the software business world as a whole, I’ve heard nearly unanimously that Wave has the “most complicated and confusing interface” of any “2.0″ solution in recent history.

Reinventing Portals, Collaboration and Realtime

While it’s still incredibly early in the life of Google Wave outside of the labs of the Southern Hemisphere team behind this work, they’re clearly hinting at a trend that has been gathering for some time.

I’m speaking of the convergence of:

• Collaboration
• Social interactions
• Standards
• Fast, browser-based tools
• Mashups
• Multimedia
• Extendability and
• The ability to flip between (near) realtime and asynchronous communication/distribution modes

When I was at Delphi Group (for 13 years) we had at one time the “Realtime Reality Seminar” – somewhere in the 1998-2000 timeframe. We were incredibly early in calling realtime as an important trend. Frankly, far ahead of the capabilities of the Net/Web at the time, and even for proprietary/non-browser-based solutions.

It’s about YOU and NOW

But what was obvious then AND now is that realtime, while incredibly useful, is not ALWAYS the mode we need. But being able to blur the line and chose the tool/modality that fits YOUR business need, rather than being hampered by what tools are capable of or pre-determined by anyone, whether that be Google, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or any other solution provider.

When you need realtime, you REALLY need it… right NOW. Collaboration in wikis for example, while a massive disruption to traditional collaboration tools (in a positive way), has suffered from an ability to do realtime collaboration, due to the natue of the single-threaded “lock” of the wiki mindset (that’s changing as well, more on that in a separate post).

Clearly the lack of realtime has not been the death of wikis or any other “2.0″ toolset, but with the addition of realtime, we are finally getting close to having the ability to work in whatever we want, whenever we want it, all within a single environment.

It’s about SPEED in the Browser

The underlying guts of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which powers much of the snazziness and speed of the Wave interface is clearly gaining momentum, as other commercial software suppliers such as Traction Software (among others), begin to take advantage of the code investment of Google into high-performance Javascript and frameworks.

It’s about Expandability/Extensibility

The ability to add wavelets (ala widgets, portlets, applets, pick your meme from the past and drag it forward) to extend the general collaboration framework of Google Wave, or the ability to plug in “bots” as additional participants to conversations (to do automatic language translation, do lookups into systems, shorten URLs, etc.) both point to the benefits of standards and in Google not assuming that they can pre-determine exactly what people are going to want to collaborate on.

It’s about Social

The most obvious way to interact with someone on Google Wave is by what looks remarkably like an IM thread. My anecdotal evidence is that nearly everyone stumbles around being stuck in a reply chain before realizing you can edit other people’s comments – thus making it more like a real-time wiki than a discussion thread. (see the Usability comment – this seems to be a serious problem for adoption – although once the learning curve has passed, it’s not easily forgotten).

Yes, it’s about Collaboration

Collaboration is certainly the primary reason for Google Wave, but I believe we’ve only just begun to wrap our heads around what Collaboration online even means, as our tools have either been tremendously limiting, for geeks only (HTML warriors) or terribly expensive (e.g., traditional groupware and collaboration suites).

What are we collaborating ON?

Collaboration on a document? On a text-based project? On financials/spreadsheets? On revising business processes? On editing live video?

A larger world of options has opened up for collaboration via Wave, but getting over the hurdle of a text-based fixation for much of business content (what other reason is there for the vast amounts of e-mail and MS Word memo in any busines?), getting around to USEFUL outcomes of the ability to embed multimedia or apps of all kinds (remember the “death threat” style of desktop publishing when laser printers and web pages first came out?) while take some time, once we get over the thrill of the ability to embed all sorts of ridiculous content into our Waves. (see “Pulp Fiction Wave” [violent/questionable language - this is Pulp Fiction after all] and “Good Will Hunting Wave” for examples)

The Future is (Almost) Here

As science fiction writer William Gibson stated (ironically, typed, on a typewriter, at the time he’d coined the term cyberspace), “The Future is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed.”

2008-2009 has brought an incredible amount of innovation in solutions, and adoption by businesses in all things 2.0 – whether Web 2.0 (witness the election) or Enterprise 2.0 (witness Google Wave, major feature jumps by SocialText, Traction Software, Jive, PBWorks, ThoughtFarmer, Spigit, and more).

But it seems to me that we are right on the precipice of taking that NEXT big jump into the future of collaboration – at far more sane price points, with a broader mix of TARGETED functionality, and in a direction that is less likely (but not guaranteed) to be tied to any single vendor by virtue of standards and open source activities such as OpenSocial, GWT, the Google Wave APIs, HTML 5, CSS, XML and more.

2010 and Beyond

2010 is going to be an interesting ride – are you doing your part to take advantage of the business/professional and personal possibilities?

If you’re pushing the boundaries forward, or dragging the laggards from behind, get in touch – we need to raise as much awarenes and action as possible if we’re going to make collective progress.

In the meantime, find me (among other places) on Google Wave as dan.keldsen[at]googlewave.com. No invites left, but always interested in seeing how YOU are using Google Wave and 2.0 tools in general, to take advantage of realtime as we all invent the next generation of the USE of collaborative tools.