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

Beyond Individual Innovators

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

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

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

Innovation Market Maturity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trend Watch

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

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

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

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

Your Thoughts?

If you are a current or prospective user of Invention Machine, or any innovation management related solution, please weigh in with your feedback. Are current offerings serving your needs? Running ahead of where your organization is? Where your budget is? Just right? If not using Invention Machine’s Goldfire, but solving similar problems, what solution are you using?

How We Can Help

These trends, and solutions such as Invention Machine’s Goldfire 6.0, are an argument and opportunity for the explicit focus of our business practices and expertise, which is in creating strategies to provide for flexible information architectures and applications (technologies) that support the business architecture (roles, goals, people, processes, skills and culture) that, when combined, can deliver significantly greater value than a single business problem and isolated tool by itself. We call this an Innovation Architecture.

If we can be of help via our assessments, consulting or workshops, contact us now to schedule a private 30-minute executive briefing on how we can most effectively work together.

Schedule a private executive briefing now

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

Colliding the Cloud and Premise

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Theory Is…

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

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

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

Destroy and Converge

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

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

Are You Embracing Hybrid Strategies?

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

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

Information Architected Market Alert (IAM Alert):
Intridea announced today a new open source, free Web Part (an add-on for SharePoint) to embed Present.ly (Intridea’s enterprise microblogging offering) within SharePoint. (see press release and Intridea site)

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.