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.

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

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

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

Like thousands of my colleagues
I came, I saw, I commented.

So, why has it taken me so long to blog about it? Well, in addition to the usual – “I have been busy” excuses (truthful as they are), I also am learning how to balance microblogging and blogging. My more prolific than usual use of Twitter while at the conference kept the burning need to post an entire blog entry at bay. I am beginning to learn the complementary nature between microblogging and blogging. But more on that later.

Let me start by stating that some excellent commentary and insights have already been posted via Twitter. If you missed them you can retrieve them via the tag #e2conf. Additionally, there have been some very insightful blog posts form friends and colleagues such as Larry Hawes, Doug Cornelius, Oliver Marks, Stowe Boyd, Ron Miller and Bill Ives.

So the purpose of this post is not to rehash the comments I made in Twitter, or to restate (most) of what has already been documented in the blogs I listed above. Here, I share a very high level summation of the event.  I have pondered in retrospect what it all came down to, and for me it can be expressed in the  acronym – CIT.

C

The “C”, could have stood for collaborate – but I have bundled that into the “I” – see below.  No the “C” in this case stands for, Culture.  Why, if I heard it once, I heard it a million times during the show “Enterprise 2.0 is not about technology, it’s about culture.”  Organizational and individual culture matters the most, supported by strategy and leadership. OK sure, no argument there. But I have to be honest, listening to many of these talks I could not help but think of Nelson Riddle and Linda Ronstadt’s  successful collaboration on “What’s New”, and how that lyric goes on to state “probably I’m boring you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not labeling the show boring.  There was a real energy there that could be felt (more on that later). But from a what’s new in practice insights and lessons learned, there was not much new being shared.  Yes, we know that culture matters – a lot. Indeed Dan Keldsen and I last year in our keynote stressed that according to the study we did, culture far outweighed age, and any other factor in determining success with Enterprise 2.0.  What was lacking in this year’s show was the HOW. How does one shape and manage culture and change behavior?

Indeed, despite the ubiquitous mantra “It’s not about technology it’s about culture”, the majority of presentations and panel discussions were from TECHNOLOGY providers. And with all due respect – for there are some great technology tools and platforms to be leveraged, for the most part these “providers” do not get it.  Culture may be important, but they would like to see it go away, or convince us that “if you build it they will come.”  An example: during one panel discussion, the issue of ROI came up, posed by a “user attendee”.  The panel of solution providers tip-toed all around it, but never directly addressed it (this was a common approach to the issue throughout the presentations I saw.)

Stowe Boyd approached the microphone at one point to offer a different perspective.  He stated that e-mail and even telephones at one time required an ROI in their nascent stage, but now we see that the value was “obvious” and defied traditional ROI. He had me with that, until I read Doug Cornelius’ blog post in which he stated: “When email was first adopted in the enterprise there was an ROI calculation. It was cheaper and faster to send an email, than to send a message through the post office. There is a reason we get so much spam. It is cheap and easy. Businesses may no longer calculate the ROI, but they did as part of the adoption process. Even though now it is just an assumption that you have email in the business. There was a compelling reason to adopt.”  Well said Doug – and we in the Enterprise 2.0 world should not get lazy.  If there are real tangible benefits than we should demonstrate them. More on that later.

But, before moving on I feel compelled to state that there was one very good presentation, given by a user organization, that did shed some light on the “reality” of implementing E2.0.  This presentation was given by Walton Smith of Booz Hamilton and Allen, the recipients of the Open Enterprise Innovation Award.

Speaking from experience, Mr. Smith shed some light on what it takes to put E2.0 culture in place. The project had a “C” level sponsor (pun intended) and champion in the organization. A multitude of technologies were used – and so a strategy for technology  was necessary. A relationship with corporate IT was most beneficial (e.g. Corp IT had to provide the network, data warehouse, SharePoint and active directory). There was a need to also align with a security team and help desk to make sure they were doing it “right”.  And most shocking, even to me – there was a heavy handed approach to change management. Mr. Smith shared that at Booz Allen Hamilton, 50% of profit is allocated to change management. Now there is a culture ripe for Enterprise 2.0.  The bottom line take away from the presentation for me was E2.0 is not viral, despite all the marketing hype to the contrary. Adoption may be partially organic, but success comes when you plan and develop a strategy, proactively control change management, and provide leadership. Go figure.

I

I reiterate that the award they won was the Innovation Award.  I reiterate it because that brings up to the I in CIT – Innovation.

Although not spoken quite as often as culture – innovation was a popular term du jour. It was used in the definitions of E20 and as part of virtually every value statement associated with E20.

For me this was another “what’s new” moment, but I was, in this case,  not bored by the white noise.  I was glad to hear the innovation buzz because it helped to draw a line between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (a line that was all too often blurred during the conference. See commentary by Ron Miller.) Why do we collaborate?  In the Web 2.0 world we collaborate in order to be social, to build communities of friends and COIs.  In E20 we collaborate to foster COPS, to drive faster decision making, re-purpose knowledge and experience – and drive innovation. There is typically a business goal or purpose behind the deployment of E2.0, as highlighted by the Booz Allen case study.

But while I was encouraged by the prevalence of “innovation” as a term, as was the case with the culture mantra – I was disappointed by the fact that no one was really providing any insight on innovation.  Does it just happen?  Were we being led to believe that if you deploy E2.0 you will have innovation in your organization. Hardly.

No one was talking about how you take a team of connected people and make them innovate. E2.0 no more makes your organization  innovative than it automatically change your culture.

Where was the focus on innovation itself?  To the best of my knowledge, there were no surveys, no studies, no presentations  on innovation, or commentary on how E2.0 maps into or complements the practice of innovation management.

This was unfortunate as innovation management is a hot topic. is such a hot topic.  In fact, I was reminded of this via my Google alert on “Innovation management” which linked to two articles published during the show, one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in Information Week. We at Information Architected view Innovation Management as one of the next big movements within enterprises, a movement that is well positioned to leverage the systems created by E2.0. I hope to see more presentations on innovation management and its relationship to E2.0 at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in November, and here in Boston next year. (Yes – in case you missed it, that was a shameless plug for our services in this area.)

T

And that leaves us with the T word.  Any guesses?  Those of you who are thinking Technology were not paying attention.  E20 is not about technology – remember. No the T is for Twitter. Yes, I know Twitter is a technology and a Web 2.0 technology at that, and so it seems that I am violating 2 of my own rules (E2.0 is not about technology, and don’t confuse web 2.0 and E 20.).  But its presence can not go unnoticed.

Twitter wins my award for the elephant in the room – displacing SharePoint – still a close second. Twitter was discussed in many contexts:  the older age demographic associated with its users versus other Web 2.0 tools; potential links to business applications and branding; its potential to make blogging obsolete; legality and authenticity.  There did not seem to be any definitive answers, but there was much healthy banter.

But,  more importantly, as I alluded in my opening paragraphs, Twitter was the tool du jour. Looking around the room you could see Twitterers everywhere, busy in their “Andy Warhol”  moment – my opinion counts.  It felt a bit like grade school, with the passing of notes back and forth. There was some wasted time and redundant tweeting going on. But there was also quite a bit of collaboration, both with folks not in attendance, and among folks in the audience. The most powerful example took place during the “Sheep in the Board room” keynote. Within 15 minutes the audience became the true presentation in my opinion.

Twitter is a tool that truly has value, but its exact value, its exact place in a collaboration strategy, and how it will morph inside the firewall of Enterprise 2.0, that remains to be seen and studied.

That’s it.  Whew – for a high level three letter acronym recap I guess I went on a bit.  But let me add in closing congratulations to Steve Wylie and his crew at TechWeb for staging a well orchestrated event and parlaying that success into a west coast conference in San Francisco in November.

Maybe I’ll see you there – or in the Twitter stream.

While there are many reasons not to adopt SharePoint or to use it as THE 100% solution for your content management, portal, search or workflow needs, it most certainly IS having a huge impact on our industry

Why is this?

What are some of the strengths of the “core” of what many call SharePoint’s “Basic Content Services” capabilities, and for the purposes of true enterprise-wide or cross-enterprise deployments, what are some of the hazards to be aware of regarding how information is organized and shared within a SharePoint environment?

Are the capabilities of SharePoint enough, if you care about managing and maximizing the value of your information? Are the tagging and taxonomy capabilities of SharePoint sufficient, or seriously deficient?

While we will not answer the questions to their entirety in this slightly over 22 minute podcast – I hope it prompts you to question whether your current or planned strategy for the use of SharePoint, or really, ANY content management system, is up to the full task or tasks you’re trying to accomplish, particulary with regards to organizing schemes such as tagging, metadata or taxonomy models.

Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Lowell Anderson, Vice President of Marketing at SchemaLogic, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of tagging versus taxonomies, where some of the weakness and strengths of SharePoint sit, and where we might be heading with SharePoint and the types of concerns that customers of SharePoint have in trying to wring out the most and best effective use of SharePoint in their organizations.

Is your organization struggling with SharePoint schemas? Succeeding?

What are the pros and cons that you have seen?

War stories you’d like to share?

Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and SharePoint itself matures.

Listen now!

Listen to the Interview: IAM Talking: Smarter Tagging in a SharePoint Enterprise