If you’re looking to “Enterprise 2.0″ to make you:

• Better at collaboration, or
• More social, or
• Better at innovation, or
• Anything else that is equally vague… stop right now.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

And certainly, do not buy or build any Enterprise 2.0 tech just yet.

Let’s Back Up…

• What will “better collaboration” actually do for me? Me – as in the one person currently reading this post (ok, you, if you insist).
• What would that do for my normal team of co-workers?
• What about the random teams/projects I get pulled into?
• What about the company as a whole?
• What about relationships to my partners, suppliers, customers, clients, patients, you name it?

Get specific, or go home…

A recent video posted by the Danish company Podio, illustrates a glimpse into the day in the life of a research scientist, and the wide variety of very specific, and quite different tasks/projects he needs to juggle to get his daily work done.

Watch below… (and back after the break)

Make a Project out of Getting Task-y

After watching the video…

• Have you really thought through the *specific* and real-life tasks, projects, etc. that you or other people in your organization really need to get done?
• In the places where they’ll be doing the work?
• With structure (when needed), or freeform (where desired) to support *real* work – and not just some vague idea of a “collaborative environment?”

Is the toolset you’ve bought, built, or are about to use actually going to be useful in a “day in the life?”

• If yes – fantastic – go forth and multiply. You wouldn’t believe how rare your situation is – run like the wind and make great things happen!
• If not… please put your RFP on pause for a second, and look at the *specific* work that is done currently in your organization, and ask what will support that work – to enable more useful collaboration, to create the transparency that you need/want, makes it easier to share information for those who need it (while protecting truly sensitive information).

Trust me – “better collaboration” is not what you really want (see article on Internet Evolution from last year, or listen to an interview with Carlos Dominguez, SVP at Cisco). Better collaboration takes focus, and technology is the least of your worries. As Carlos said “If you suck at collaboration in real-life, you’re just going to suck virtually.”

For thoughts on other collaboration scenarios, see this webinar from last year:

How are you specifically supporting Collaboration/Innovation in your company?

I’d love to here the specific tasks, roles, etc. that you’re targeting with Enterprise 2.0 (or whatever term you happen to be using).

In the concluding chapter of my book, Net Work, I focused on “The Leader’s Net Work.”  From reading about and talking to leaders of networks, I arrived at the following set of prescriptions:

• Network intentionally (high performers are those who pay attention to their personal networks)
• Practice network stewardship (you can’t manage a network, you can only manage its context)
• Leverage technology (see below)
• Build the capacity for net work (ensure that others become aware of and and develop skills)
• Use the network lens and net work tools to enhance the lives and contributions of individuals and the collective power of the network

These change, of course, each time I give a talk or think about leadership and networks. I’m currently working with Leadership for a New Era (a research initiative of The Leadership Learning Community) as well as other networks to explore more deeply this topic. My most recent thinking, part of a collaborative effort, was posted as a guest blog “How can we prepare leaders to work in a networked world?” on Beth Kanter’s site.

This included the very important notion of network literacy by which I mean “the language and tools [leaders] need to be able to discern and describe network activity, the insights they need to understand network structure, and an appreciation for the vital yet often subtle tasks of managing a network’s context.” I failed to acknowledge, in that post, that the insight into the need for literacy came from a grand brainstorming conversation with Grady McGonagil, whose recent work and research with the Bertelsmann Foundation was presented recently at an International Leadership Association webinar, Leadership Development in the US: Best-Practice Principles & Patterns.

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How are you managing leadership and network context?

• Wondering how to tap the brains in your organization?
• Tired of hoping that installing “social tools” will break down the cultural silos you know are cutting out value from your employees?
• Eager to learn how to run an entire Social/Organizational Network Analysis project yourself? Soup to Nuts – Process to Tools?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis” created in partnership with Patti Anklam and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis is designed for people who want to understand how to systematically identify and map networks within their organization as well as those who want to learn about the tools and methods to map and analyze networks. This is a practice fundamental to effective collaboration, social networking, Web and Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Knowledge Management.

The course is presented by Patti Anklam, Principal Consultant at Net Work, and author of the best selling book “Net Work.”  She has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the world.

The “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis“ course has four modules and includes a complete walk-thru of the ten steps in planning and running an Organizational Network Analysis project.

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Module 1: Introduction to Social/Organizational Network Analysis (SNA/ONA)

• Overview of SNA/ONA
• The Premise
• Evolution From Science to Practice
• Core Concepts and Terms
• Case Study: Ten Steps

Module 2: Network Patterns and Metrics

• Basic Principles and Patterns
• Structural and Centrality Metrics
• Roles

Module 3: Software Tools for Network Analysis

• The Basics of Inputs and Outputs
• Collecting Data Using Surveys
• Analysis Tools
• Available Resources

Module 4: Managing an ONA Project

• Managing the Project
• Organizational Preparation
• Working With the Results
• Critical Success Factors

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Fascinating book so far – as usual, bought the book wirelessly while I was having a conversation about this book, and was able to flip through it instantly. Ah, digital content… subject for another day.

Distributed Convergence

As I’ve been mentioning recently, and the reason the book came up… the vast majority of work we’ve been doing lately (and the ramp up into 2011 is astonishing, honestly) has been explicitly about taking various approaches (depending on the client) to do what I’m calling “distributed convergence.”

You’ll be hearing more from me about this over the coming days and months. It’s a massive trend, and in all seriousness, no matter what size organization you are, you need to be thinking about this.

Chapter One – Illusions of Synergy

In the very first chapter is a primary case of exactly what clients are looking to avoid. Now the majority of our clients are not facing potential failure (usually) at the scale of a true “billion dollar lesson” (we should all be so… lucky?). Regardless, it’s a long-rising trend that it’s high time is ended.

From the book, under a case study discussing the merger of two Disability Insurance companies with sharply different approaches and target markets – Unum Corporation and Provident Companies – and under the aptly title subtext of “UnumProvident: Giving ‘Disability’ a New Name”:

Unum and Provident talked before the merger about back-office efficiencies. But they began as a combined company with thirty-four separate information systems that didn’t talk to each other. As of 2005, six years after the merger, UnumProvident had managed to eliminate just four of those thirty-four systems.

The book is primarily about business management and culture failures – clashing cultures, misunderstood strengths/weaknesses, the fallacy of expecting 2+2 to equal 42 or more, in an overly optimistic timeframe… But, right up front, it’s a classic case of “un-convergence” or as we all typically call it “siloed systems” and the dangers lurking there. Silos aren’t necessarily bad – targeted functionality is what makes mobile apps, for example, so darn useful, and yes, those are stand-alone silos, essentially.

Shut down, Blow it up or Integrate?

Photo credit: muffinmaker / photocase.com

Now, does an aquiring company HAVE to shut down a system or many systems to make it more efficient? No.

Could they shut them down more quickly and systematically? No doubt – but big companies especially, tend to dance like elephants, as the saying goes.

Could they introduce integration layers, not necessarily BIG BUDGET integration layers, like an Enterprise Service Bus or SOA overhaul, but perhaps light-weight integration, say Business Process Management, Portals, Taxonomies, or Search technology to cut across systems? Yes. Rather… YES!

There’s no single clear path to untangle what is easy to see is an unholy technology mess – pre-merger, during or post-merger. But clearly, as this book indicates (based on lessons learned from extensive research into 750 major bankruptcies between 1981 and 2006, including Enron, Conseco, Texaco, Kmart, and Refco – as well as companies that survived, but were clearly hard hit in their businesses due to bad decisions and tragic assumptions), if you do not have your SYSTEMS in order, behind the scenes, not only are you crippling your ability to run the business on a daily basis…

But when you add extra fuel on the fire, through mergers & acquisitions, or economic downturn, or any other large shock to the system, it becomes all to clear how both fragile the new system is (2 merged companies that in theory are bigger, better and… more nimble? Contain that laughter!), and how resistant to change the old systems and sub-systems (departments, regions, vice presidents of divisions, suppliers, etc.) are.

Walk the Agile and Integrated Walk

I’ve been in working in and around IT/IS for a long time – and although I no longer (mostly) twiddle the bits and cables, much of my work surrounds strategy and implementation of technology.

Whether I’m brought in by IT explicitly (“I’m one of you, or least, was”), or by business sponsors as a bridge to IT (which happens far more often), I’m close enough to the problem that UnumProvident experienced to see it every day.

It is far easier to build systems, and groups of systems that are destined to fail… unintentionally… than it is to set up for both current and future success.

Looking too narrowly at a problem can cause serious pains in implementing solutions. Too often the BizTech problem that’s been solved is only a single pain point, and not the real, root-cause issues, or to be more positive, to enable the ultimate business goals of reduced cost/time/effort, increase revenue/profit, customer satisfaction/loyalty and the like.

As a result, the “systems” or solutions that are often put into place are a patchwork of solutions that are islands onto themselves, picking off a single or handful of issues, and (with luck and serious effort) those few issues or opportunities will be solved well.

But that leaves the organization’s systems as a whole as a fragmented minefield for the employees to navigate as the “human glue” between systems.

Scenarios like these are incredibly common – and very fragile.

Head Down, Prepare to Fail

When the economy tanks, and people are either laid off, or the company goes bankrupt, or the belts tighten and everyone fears for their livelihood, the only agile/flexible pieces in this “system” – the employees – suddenly become so rigid and fixed in their ways, with their heads down to play it safe and keep their jobs, that all of the break points in this wide array of systems stresses even further and in many cases, blows itself into a million bits.

I’m not trying to sell you on suites, or in spending a single other dime on “new” solutions – that’s not likely to help, really.

Our business is not in selling or re-selling solutions, nor in doing hands-on integration work.

That leaves us with the freedom to be able (in many cases) to tell clients that they probably do not need to spend much more in software/solutions, do not have to blow it up and try again, or spend thousands of man-hours to migrate from an “old” system to a new one.

Not to drop a “pie in the sky” strategic plan that’s impossible to implement… but actionable strategy.

My questions to you as we head into 2011…

• Is your strategy head screwed on tight, and focused on planning for both short-term pain elimination and longer-term integration opportunities?
• Are you laying bridges across systems and solutions so your employees can spend less time navigating the vast landscape of applications (a recent client estimated they have at least 20,000 applications in various stages of use/implementation), and focusing on delivering value to your clients?
• Are you taking a system rather than single solution point of view when you update, upgrade, replace or install a new solution from scratch?
• Can you take advantage of the trend of employees working from home or across wide geographic distances, but that can still function as a team and a whole system of coordinated brains?

Make  no mistake – this takes work, and no “out of the box” solution will make the lack of integration you probably have right now, just go away.

No pre-built strategy document with the best of the “best practices” is going to instantly move you out of the worst practices of DIS-integration that you may be struggling with right now.

This is knowledge work, plain and simple, and there are far fewer organizations who are doing this well than are doing it poorly.

As I said in a tweet at the beginning of the summer of 2010:

So the real question is…

Are you prepared to converge?

What are you doing to prepare? What have you tried, and hasn’t worked? What have you tried and *has* worked? Your comments are valuable not just to me, but to your peers and colleagues as well. it’s time we shed light on assumptions of that past that just aren’t true now, if they ever were.

More than the Web

The rise of wikis and similar web-based tools that make up the Enterprise 2.0 toolset have largely presumed that a browser interface is the one and only place that workers will need or want to go do get their work done. That may well be the case in many instances, but in recent discussions on the evolution vs. revolution approach to success with Enterprise 2.0, it’s become apparent with my clientele (and many others I know) that desktops and laptops, and importantly, documents, are not going away any time soon. Nor should they, necessarily.

So to live and work in a multi-faceted world, it’s time that Enterprise 2.0 tools grow up and realize that to pull the mainstream organizations who are not willing or able to leap straight into a browser-based and cloud-driven world, we are going to need to throw some lines out to help pull the past and the future tighter together.

This isn’t new of course…

I’ve been around in the content management, knowledge management and related industry slices for over 15 years. There has always been a divide between the normal content creation/productivity tools that workers have used, and the systems put in place to manage/store/find/share that content.

If it is too difficult to store the information, then people won’t be bothered to go to that system, whether it’s a fat client or thin-client such as a web browser. The same goes for tagging – classic taxonomy work presumes that “regular people” won’t be bothered to tag, and certainly not consistently, so why bother. Folksonomy/social tagging zealots believe that a complete free-for-all will emerge only goodness and light, and formality is useless. But I digress.

This digital divide between the normal working reality and computing environment for *most* organizations, is a heavily desktop-centric tool mindset vs. the 2.0 web-centric view.

Blow it up? Or integrate and extend?

So the sanest approach, unless you really believe in the Michael Hammer “Blow it up and try again” approach, is to explicitly tie the new world and old world together. And why not? It’s entirely possible, and for those who are not good at wholesale “change management” (i.e., almost everyone), it’s really your only approach.

ThoughtFarmer’s 4.0 release features a cross-platform application (the “Desktop Connector“) that acts as the check-in/out glue for just this scenario. While there have been many attempts, including a raft of open standards such as ODMA , WebDAV, and more recently (to a certain extent) CMIS, there is no single solution or standard that is going to solve all of these pains universally. So in the absence of that, I for one am thrilled to see that ThoughtFarmer has introduced this capability.

For all of the classic use cases of a pure wiki or blog environment, they’ve always provided that, and that is certainly a rich and deep tool set at this point. But for all of the classic “business documents” that people currently have, and may be migrating in to their Intranet, or that they just don’t see a reason to transition out of, from a document-centric point of view, that can be supported as well.

Along the way, the connector also provides activity stream monitoring and status updates, so it also provides a more visible and useful component to the ThoughtFarmer tool set as well.

Watch their video clip below for a shorter and simpler demo of what they have unveiled.

(Incidentally, the ThoughtFarmer guys have great marketing – humble, to the point, and really well thought out – if the entire tech industry acted the same, we’d have a much more productive tech economy IMHO)

Where are you with Enterprise 2.0?

(or Social Business, or Web 2.0 for the Enterprise, or whatever you’d like to call it)

Have you stumbled onto hesitancy in jumping to the cloud/browser app world? Bridged the digital divide between the desktop and browser apps? Join the conversation – let’s here your real world experiences, and see what we can do to get *all* interested parties into this brave new world – one toe or the whole organization at once.

A former Digital/Compaq colleague, Bob Fleischer sent me a link to Jyri Engeström’s blog entry, Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality, which provides an interesting perspective on what’s working and what’s not working in social network software and applications. He contrasts two views of social networks. The current perspective of networks as “maps of relationships among individuals” is what drives LinkedIn. But, he argues that LinkedIn misses the point by not making accessible the context for the link — usually an object.

He provides good background and references for the alternative view, “object-centered sociality.” Among the references are a gaggle of web sites that many have now adopted, although many more have still not, including Flickr and del.icio.us.

As I read Jyri’s well-written article, I immediately flashed on a key learning about collaboration software from a conference on GroupWare (some number of years ago). Intel chairman Andy Grove presented (remotely) from his office. Intel was launching a real-time collaboration product full of features that are now pretty standard — shared screens, co-editing of documents, video, presence. At the time, collaboration junkies were focusing on getting the video so that people could see each other talk over computers. His comment, “people don’t need to see each other. They are collaborating over something, and the key is to focus on enabling the ability to co-create [a document.]“

The above is of course paraphrase, but his assertion has stood me and many others well as a fundamental principle in designing the environments in which collaboration systems are deployed.

[Editor note: I constantly work to reframe people who are caught up in the current collaboration meme of the day to take a look at what is REAL set of collaboration scenarios they're looking to solve for. No single approach solves each problem, see presentation embedded below for more thoughts on that front. - Dan]

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Are you Using Organizational Network Analysis? No? How do you build a collaboration system that meets your business needs?

• Wondering how to tap the brains in your organization?
• Tired of hoping that installing “social tools” will break down the cultural silos you know are cutting out value from your employees?
• Eager to learn how to run an entire Social/Organizational Network Analysis project yourself? Soup to Nuts – Process to Tools?

Take advantage of our 4-Hour Online and On-demand eLearning course, “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis” created in partnership with Patti Anklam and Information Architected on our new learning platform, IAI University.

Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis is designed for people who want to understand how to systematically identify and map networks within their organization as well as those who want to learn about the tools and methods to map and analyze networks. This is a practice fundamental to effective collaboration, social networking, Web and Enterprise 2.0 strategy and Knowledge Management.

The course is presented by Patti Anklam, Principal Consultant at Net Work, and author of the best selling book “Net Work.”  She has consulted with hundreds of organizations around the world.

The “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis“ course has four modules and includes a complete walk-thru of the ten steps in planning and running an Organizational Network Analysis project.

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Module 1: Introduction to Social/Organizational Network Analysis (SNA/ONA)

• Overview of SNA/ONA
• The Premise
• Evolution From Science to Practice
• Core Concepts and Terms
• Case Study: Ten Steps

Module 2: Network Patterns and Metrics

• Basic Principles and Patterns
• Structural and Centrality Metrics
• Roles

Module 3: Software Tools for Network Analysis

• The Basics of Inputs and Outputs
• Collecting Data Using Surveys
• Analysis Tools
• Available Resources

Module 4: Managing an ONA Project

• Managing the Project
• Organizational Preparation
• Working With the Results
• Critical Success Factors

Register Now for “Intro to Social/Organizational Network Analysis”

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

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

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.)

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.

A knowledge management implementation, under any name, is, at best, only partially about technology.  This is particularly the case with initiatives that fall under the 2.0 umbrella. Definitions and discussion all too often focus on technology. The inclusion of a technology focus provides a direction, however, you must still define the business imperative behind your initiative. What are the business goals for the initiative and how will they be measured/justified?  I continue to be amazed at the number of KM initiatives (aka Enterprise 2.0), I encounter that fail initially for this very reason.  Indeed, my last client, a major financial institution in New York, had put in place an E 2.0 team and program over a year ago.  Despite the good intentions of business and technical staff, the program never came to fruition.  It took me less than a day to realize the root of this failure.  There was no consensus on what the purpose of the initiative was, the direction in which it would take them, its primary benefactors, and the goals it would achieve – beyond “make us more collaborative, smarter and more aware”.

So, as I look back on the lessons learned as a KM consultant and practitioner, I do believe there is much advice that can be offered. Here are 2 important lessons learned.

Lesson One: Clearly define the intended community and become intimate with its purpose and attitudes regarding knowledge sharing and innovation. Will the initiative allow users to function in a personalized manner, or be the foundation to building community and establishing common practices? Will knowledge production and sharing be viewed as a universal obligation or the domain of a few? Will the opinions and attitudes of some be drivers or magnets to the community? Is security necessary to regulate the community? Consider that the 2.0 Adoption Council, for example, is heavily policed. Admission requires passing the scrutiny of leader Susan Scrupski. This “exclusionary approach” seems to fly in the face of the mantra of E2.0 zealots, “open, transparent and user driven.” But Scrupski regulates community membership for good reason. Scrutiny of community can immediately determine if the practice is a case of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0, which leads to, typically very different goals, objectives and approaches.  Some time ago I blogged about a Web 2.0 collaborative site, Sermo, that similarly policed admission and participation. The post is worth a (re)read – the community, eventually opened the doors to “outsiders”, but only under strict regulations that included obvious and clear identification of any and all content submitted by these “outsiders.”

Lesson Two: Take inventory of the knowledge sources the community uses/seeks, and those they do not use/seek. Challenge the validity of these assumptions and inclination. Identify each knowledge source as explicit or tacit.  Determine the best means to organize the collection of explicit knowledge and make it assessable.  Whatever approach is taken to collaboration and knowledge exchange, capture the knowledge in as much a facilitated fashion as possible and tag it appropriately. The value of the exchange will hopefully have a very long tail – well beyond the initial exchange. But remember knowledge captured but not findable is captured in vain. The goal should not just be to make it accessible however, but to shed light on its history, validity – its context. This is where understanding how community members place emphasis, faith and value on content is critical – aka context is critical.

Several months ago I was called into a company in the Boston area, Impassioned by the market promises of social collaboration inside the firewall. Using a popular (unnamed) product, they had a collaborative online community up and running in 15 days. But, this success quickly turned to failure when the user community abandoned it as quickly as they took it up.  The site lacked a clear objective, had a poorly defined audience (“everyone”) and mostly consisted of random content.  It was a technology success – but a business failure.

Despite the fire that has re-ignited KM, ala Web and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, an effective KM initiative (no matter under what rubric it is brought in) requires the coordination of the cultural, technological, strategic and personal facets associated with a well-defined organization/community. The truth today is the same as it was 10 years ago: for knowledge to be managed it needs to be defined and quantified.

As computing power increases, “mashable” and findable data/content grows, GPS shrinks, partnerships and individual innovation explore, and it all comes together in the form of a handheld device like the iPhone, Blackberry, and myriad Androids being rolled out on a weekly basis, we continue to see the rise of applications that only a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Ladies and Gentleman, it’s the mobile content economy – and it’s going to impact your business one way or another. Isn’t it time get prepared?

The latest indication of this is Siri – Your Mobile Virtual Assistant.

Smartphones are not new, speech recognition is not new, but the concentration of power/content/data and location with contextual, “geographically smart” speech recognition, opens up interesting possibilities.

View the demo below (or download the app to your iPhone or Blackberry), before going on…

Just as with the business models of travel sites such as Orbitz, or Kayak, and similar meta-aggregators or “meta businesses” – new business model innovation is afoot!

It turns out that being *the* aggregation point for information, even given away for “free” (as far as the user is concerned at least), is quite the healthy business model.

The trick is to:

• Do it well = user experience and usability
• Do it with completeness = solid data/content partners
• Make it idiot proof = semantically smart speech recognition
• And not to presume that as the, in this case, mobile app provider, you have to create and own it all yourself.

Siri uses licensed data from allmenus.com, Google Maps, City Search, Taxi Magic, MovieTickets.com, OpenTable, eventful, Gayot, livekick, WeatherBug, BooRah, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo! Local, yelp, FlightStats, Vlingo and TrueKnowledge, and licenses the speech recognition engine of Nuance, and combines it into a self-contained application that is, as they say, a “person-centric app.”

It’s essentially the mobile generation of the “Single Point of Access” or Portal that had been all the rage in the 90s – it’s the “Personal Portal” – hyper-localized, and personalized, as it always should have been.

Of course in testing the application, there seem to be some data gaps, and some taxonomy work that needs to be done (hint: a wrap = burrito here in Boston, and vice-versa), but all told, it’s a sign of the mobile times to come.

Where to from here?

How are YOU approaching digital content strategies for a mobile world?

Is  your business found in the content/data aggregators for your market?

Is your business “socially connected” to applications like FourSquare and Gowalla

In short, are you leaving money on the table for your competitors to run off with? It’s early days, but disruptive innovation wins go to those who start the trend first, unless you’re an extremely fast follower.

Weigh in with your thoughts and concerns – and while we don’t do app development, at Information Architected, “there’s a consulting service for that!” (Need digital content strategy for your enterprise? Get in touch.)