What exactly is the mental/cultural/political barrier for adoption of cloud computing and SaaS-based solutions?

It should no longer be technical barriers – nor cost – nor reliability – so what’s the disconnect?

Think about it…

Most companies do not own and manage (without third party suppliers/partners – the “analog” to cloud services):

• Their own phone company/network
• Their energy generation
• Their own internet service
• Their own shipping service
• All of their legal needs
• All payroll processing
• Insurance needs
• Marketing (Display advertising of all kinds, especially)

And the list could easily go on (please, feel free to add your own examples in the comments)…

Hint: You Are Already Partly Virtual!

So what do organizations *really* have to lose with letting go of control to put content/computing into the cloud?

A massive percentage of business activities have already been handed over/outsourced to a variety of other services/participants – so what makes the final conceptual leap to move into the cloud so difficult?

• Fear of saving money?
• Fear of delivering too quickly?
• Fear of too much flexibility?

Probably not…

• Fear of lack of skills to jump into a virtualized world? Perhaps.
• Worries about “hackers” and PCI compliance? It’s not necessarily more risky to hire someone else to shoulder that burden than to handle yourself (and I could recommend some penetration testers that will likely prove that you aren’t as secure as you believe).
• Concerns about ability to integrate to “non-cloud” applications/systems? Possible – but there are options for nearly any scenario.

For 2011 – What’s Your Cloud Strategy?

If you’ve run into barriers for cloud usage, or (perhaps) *you* (or your boss) are the barrier to cloud usage in your organization – what are you going to do to experiment with the cloud and validate whether the cloud concerns are real?

Comment below – let’s see what we can do to help others who may have run into similar issues.

Remember the watch phrase I’ve started talking about recently?

Distributed Convergence – what are you doing to take advantage of the strengths and opportunities of Distributed Convergence?

Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud collaboration, cloud applications, cloud integration – all very real, solvable now, and getting better, faster, cheaper, more manageable every day.

The cloud plays a very real role here – are you ready?

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.

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

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):

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.

Enter Microblogging

With the rise of Twitter in the consumer-facing world, has come the enterprise-facing versions of microblogging, with solutions such as dedicated offerings from Yammer and Present.ly, to the embedded capabilities within larger suites/platforms.

It seems clear that entirely stand-alone enterprise microblogging is not a “market” in and of itself, and the real trick, from a usability and adoption/change management standpoint, that microblogging, as with other forms of collaboration, need to be embedded within the flow of normal work, NOT as a separate interface.

Integrate to Disintegrate (Silos)

With this release of an integration point into the “elephant in the room” of Enterprise 2.0 – Microsoft SharePoint (which surprisingly does not currently have microblogging, nor, based on research we had done earlier in 2009, a usable wiki nor blogging capabilities), the power of an ecosystem around a major player in the market is helping to integrate and raise awareness ACROSS the market, as to the benefit of features and the overall system.

The benefits of light-weight communications (ala microblogging, streams) are tremendous, and in embracing the 2.0 methods of microcommunications (transparent, widely spread) vs. the siloed communications of traditional microcommunications (private IM conversations on specific platforms, such as LiveMeeting, etc.) is beginning to gain momentum, driven by the “twitter effect” (for those who see value in Twitter, of course). But it is still fairly early days for this capability, and the need to provide multiple ways to consume and use microblogging, whether stand-alone, integrated into a general platform (SharePoint) or a purpose-built Enterprise 2.0 platform (PBWorks, Thought Farmer, SocialText, Open Text, etc.), is key to getting microblogging/microsharing off the ground and into a sustainable mode.

Whether there is a market for microblogging per se, I would expect that purely stand-alone microblogging is going to disappear, as it is more of a feature than a “product.”

Where does your organization stand on microblogging/microsharing? Are you using Present.ly and similar microblogging tools, integrated suites WITH microblogging inside, Twitter (and damn the consequences), or none at all.