Top Challenges Information Managers Must Master In 2008

"Top Challenges Information Managers Must Master In 2008" as seen by the Editorial Staff at DM Review:

Moving content management throughout the enterprise. If you concentrate on some facet of enterprise content management (ECM), you know the challenge of getting business people to actually use the content system instead of relying on the old way of doing things. And now it’s getting more complicated as business people’s expectations continue to change through their use of new technologies that can store content in the cloud.

Evolving collaboration strategies to reflect the way people work. If you focus on collaboration, there’s not only the constant issue of Microsoft versus IBM, but now the ante has been raised with questions like “Should I bring Google into the picture?” or “Should we use wikis instead of document management?” coming from all corners within the
enterprise.

Dealing with a changing data management landscape. If you concentrate on data management and decision support, then recent consolidation in the BI market created more work for you. Plus, data governance issues continue to grow, driven by increasing interest in data warehousing appliances, metadata management, and master data management.

The value of Enterprise RSS

I personally often argue for the potential that Enterprise RSS has for the purpose of improving decision making within an organization. The reasoning is as follows: By encouraging conversations between people in different initiatives and making them explicit as RSS feeds and by making it possible for anyone within the enterprise to tap into (subscribe to) these conversations and passively observe them, managers as well as any stakeholder can get valuable information to make better informed decisions, as well as getting signals about things starting to happen and react on them before it is to late.

When I manage a project, I usually ask each member in my project to write a diary (either as text stored stored in a document or send via an e-mail) about what they have been doing, what they are currently doing and what issues and risks they see. This way I have been able to stay on top of things and resolve issues before they become real problems. I also get information telling me if we are on schedule or not. The problem has been that these diaries have been hard to access and that anyone who wanted to read them had to actively look for them on a file share or in their inboxes. As a result, the only one who have read them has been me. Occasionally. I have also had to remind and motivate each and everyone to write their diaries, which is hard to do when they know that the only one who is reading their diaries is me. Hopefully.

But things are changing as technologies such as blogs and RSS are becoming more common even for enterprise use. With a project blog which every project member can contribute to and an RSS-feed that all stakeholders can subscribe to, the whole process of informing each other within a project as well as informing externa stakeholders becomes so much more simple and powerful. When the effort to inform yourself is small enough, then you find it worthwile. The value is simply so much higher than the cost. When that happens, then you also see a value of sharing information with others. If you know that someone reads what you are writing, then you get the motivation needed to continute writing. And then it becomes a positive spiral.

In the post "How Corporate RSS Supports Collaboration and Innovation", Dennis McDonald advises his readers to read the post "RSS: Underappreciated Web 2.0 in the Enterprise" by corporate IT manager Jim MacLennan. So I did and here is an excerpt:

"We added RSS capabilities to our internal PMO systems this past month, and traffic & content is already building up to become a valuable resource. Some have [correctly] noted that this increased visibility puts a bit more pressure on project managers and team members, to keep updating project blogs with pertinent information. This "time shifting" of communication should develop into the most effective way to let the rest of IT know what is happening in all areas"

"These spontaneous, organic, and very impactful "conversations", between people still experimenting with a new technology, show me real potential for spontaneous innovation and idea sharing. More evidence of the value of [judicious] experimentation with new technology - no silver bullet, but just enough spark to start a few fires."

Dennis McDonald makes a summary of Jim MacLennans findings:

"RSS feeds make it easier for people to kee up with what a lot of different projects are up to.

This has led to better communication as well as innovation.

Email is still the most ingrained communication platform.

Upper management still expects PowerPoints for reporting purposes."

He then continues by addressing the problem to quantify the costs and benefits of Enterprise RSS:

"Simply put, a generally available RSS feed creation and subscription capability can increase the number of projects any one person can remain abreast of for the expenditure of a given unit of time — just as it can increase the total amount of time a person devotes overall to managing — and responding to — the monitored RSS feeds."

"Granted, taking such a quantitative view does not tell the whole story about what might be gained by making RSS subscription features generally available across projects and the people they interact with. There’s no way to predict, for example, when an innovation or improvement will occur as a result of a communication that might not have otherwise taken place."

"That’s a disadvantage of taking a “beancounter” approach to implementing social media within an organization. While you might be able to quantify the time, effort, and technology associated with impacted processes, you can’t necessarily predict when and where the benefits (such as innovations or new ideas) will occur."

If you want to know more about Enterprise RSS, the ChiefTech blog by James Dellow is a good starting point.

Google opens up Google Docs for developers and provides new data visualization features

"Collaboration goes one level deeper" according to the Google Docs team by giving developers outside of their team tools to extend Google Docs using the Google Gadgets platform.

"Developers now have an easy way to both add features to Google Docs (in spreadsheets to start) and to pull collaborative data from Google Docs into gadgets on iGoogle and other platforms"

"We joined forces with the Google Visualization team, who developed a common data delivery method, starting with data from our spreadsheets...//...This is really an exciting feature for us, as it gives spreadsheet collaborators more than a dozen new ways to look at their data -- including animated charts from the Google Finance and Trendalyzer teams as well as Pivot tables, Funnel charts and Gantt charts from a few of our beta developer collaborators (Panorama, Infosoft Global and Viewpath, respectively). And that's really just the beginning... so don't stop asking for more."

Boris Evelson at Forrester commented this release earlier today:

"This morning, Google will unveil a beta version of its spreadsheet application with some new advanced features, such as Pivot Table. The Pivot Table is a product developed by Panorama, a small, but upcoming BI vendor (they are currently being evaluated in detail by Forrester BI Wave ’08), who were, interestingly enough, the original inventors of Microsoft Analysis Services OLAP (Online Analytic Processing) engine. So now, part of Panorama code will be inside two of the biggest software companies in the world!"

"With this new feature, every Google spreadsheet user will have access to powerful OLAP, as a free BI SaaS add-on to Google Docs. In my opinion - a very wise move by Google to continue to push Google Docs into enterprises. "

This week in links - week 10, 2008

"Sorry, Was That an Aphorism?" by Andrew McAfee:

"I met with a group of CEOs recently, and asked them in advance for their questions related to Enterprise 2.0. Many of these concerned definitions of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0...//...I got the impression that some confusion existed, and tried to think of how to tee up the points I wanted to make during our session. So one of the first slides in my presentation (yes, I still use PowerPoint) read:"

"You cannot greatly influence Web 2.0. You can greatly influence
Enterprise 2.0"

"Is that the right message for senior executives, or did I greatly oversimplify or steamroll an important distinction?"

"Back to Decision-Making Basics" by Tom Davenport:

"We have lost much of the connection between the supply of information and the demand for it in decision-making. Despite the fact that companies often justify IT projects on the basis of better decisions, there is seldom a direct tie between the information a particular system produces and the decisions that are supposed to be based on it."

"How have supply and demand become disconnected?...//...One is that many systems implemented at the enterprise level are initially focused on transactions, not decisions...//...second reason is that managers don’t often know all the information and knowledge that is available to help make a decision."

"I have faith that access to information and knowledge can yield better decisions. On occasion they already do. However, I do not have faith that our trillion-dollar investment in corporate information systems is yielding better decisions on a regular basis. If your organization spends money on IT, that should worry you."

Using blogs and RSS-feeds for better decision making

Here's a train of thought and I hope you will be able to follow it.

On a high level, business intelligence can be defined as initiatives that use various forms of IT-resources to support better business decision making. But the most commonly definition narrows it down to using facts (= data) to support decisions, a fact being "something that is the case, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation". (Wikipedia)

Facts can be good, especially aggregated facts that provide a highly informative context for decision making. However, I would argue that most business decisions are based on some kind of intuition and that this is not necessarily something bad. A decision might be the right decision even if it is is made in a split second and not based on facts or a rational process. Sometimes (often?) intuitive decisions are even better than fact based. Personal experiences and implicit and subjective information and knowledge might be just as important for decision making as hard explicit facts represented as data.

Intuition is about your previous experiences and lessons learned. It is about passive consuming and digesting information, information which is then processed by your sub-consciousness. It puts the active process of trying to figure out an answer aside and is based on effortless awarenesses. These awarenesses can create insights and solutions to problems that you are directly or indirectly working with.

In my mind, Enterprise 2.0 is not about creating gigantic data warehouses with numbers and figures from which management can get aggregated reports about how the enterprise performs from a hard fact-based perspective. No, Enterprise 2.0 has much more to do with enabling information to flow between people and making it easy to passively tap into these information flows to support intuitive decision making. This requires creating and fostering an environment where employees readily share their information and knowledge. In such an environment, tools such as blogs and wikis have their natural uses. When the information that is locked into departmental information silos and peoples' heads is eventually unlocked, we can all tap into relevant blogs, wikis and other tools and information sources with the use of push technologies such as RSS and passively and almost effortlessly consume and digest information. We will know a lot more about what is happening in the business and we will, as our sub-consciousness is constantly processing this information, become better at making intuitive decisions that actually turn out to be the right ones.

That's enough of thinking for today.

A Train Of Thought

Information is the result of a successful communication process. Technically speaking, a message has been sent from a sender to a receiver who has interpreted it successfully. A communication process can also transmit experiences (compare a time table vs an artwork). It can of course transmit both information and an experience.

Content is the vehicle with which information and experiences travel in the digital world. A sender (producer) creates content to transfer the information and/or experience to the receiver (consumer). The information and/or experience is created by cognitive processes in the head of the receiver when the content is perceived and interpreted (or experienced).

Knowledge is applied information. It is created when the receiver has understood and reacted on the information.

Data are small pieces of content that need more context to transmit something of value to a knowledge worker. A small piece of content (datum) need to be put together with other pieces of content to get more context. By aggregating data and presenting them in spreadsheets or diagrams, them can communicate how a business is performing and help to make business decisions (Business Intelligence). But alone, these small pieces of content are practically useless.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is about efficiently and securely producing, managing and delivering content within an enterprise context. The purpose of the content can be to transmit information and/or experiences. If delivered to the right person in the right time in the right way, it can create the proper reactions and generate (transfer) knowledge.

Until now, ECM has primarily focused on unstructured content. However, it is reasonable to suppose that it will also extend to including production, management and delivery of structured content (data) in the future. By combining delivery of structured and unstructured content and prodividing collaboration tools to facilitate collaboration, knowledge workers will be able to make informed decisions together and increase their productivity, efficiency and innovation capacity.

The overall approach for aligning structured and unstructured content and delivering the right information (or rather content that transfers information) to the right person in the right time within an enterprise is Enterprise Information Management.

BI is about more than information

"BI needs to address more than the information component of decision-making. Collaboration, social networking, exposing underlying assumptions and better representation of the meanings and relationships of things – these are the things we need to turn our attention to. We need to understand how to turn people around from unproductive positions, how to expose these points of view to commentary and how to hold people accountable for what they do instead a bunch of post mortems that obscure more than they illuminate. If we want BI to rise above cheap parlor tricks, we need to broaden the base" (Neil Raden, The Intelligent Enterprise Weblog)

Decision Support using an Enterprise Wiki

Knowledge workers typically need information of the following four kinds to make informed decisions; the current status of things, exceptions, historical records and relevant knowledge. The first three are primarily for answering “what?” questions. What is going on? What has gone wrong? What has happened since XX? What is likely to happen in the future? The last type of information - relevant knowledge – can be used to answer not only “what?” but also for example “why?” and “how?” questions.

The first three types of information can usually be answered with queries to operational data stores or data warehouses, typically containing transactional data and data from other sources (business systems) that can tell something about how the business operates.

“Relevant knowledge” is a bit fuzzier. The knowledge needed can potentially be retrieved and extracted from content of any different kind such as documents, web pages and graphics, or directly from people. The findability of relevant knowledge is however suffering from content management problems – that the content is not formatted, aggregated, organized and described in a way that allows it to be found in the vast, over flooded and fragmented content landscape. In short, this means that the content management problems need to be addressed and resolved if knowledge workers are to be able to find relevant knowledge for making the right decisions.

An enterprise wiki is a powerful tool for collecting knowledge from every corner of the organization and making it accessible for everyone with the right to access it. Besides making knowledge explicit inarticles, links to related knowledge resources can be provides as well as links to the knowledge workers who have contributed to the article. Below is a simple interaction diagram illustrating a wiki that can provide access to knowledge resources, including access to other knowledge workers that might possess the relevant knowledge.

BI + ECM = True?

Rich Cohen writes in DM Review:

"The next few years are going to provide a bumpy ride for the IT function at many companies. The rise of unstructured content will require new ways of thinking about how information is used and managed enterprise-wide - indeed it will require a new definition of the term "information." The goal is simple: treat all information - unstructured and structured - as if it is one of the most valuable assets your company possesses. Learn all you can about it, manage it properly, and use it to help grow the company. "

Jacques Surveyer argues why ECM will become a necessity for BI:

"Enterprise content management (ECM) has always been a bit of a wallflower -- acknowledged as important, but emerging slowly and flourishing most in professional and service-oriented firms where collaboration and knowledge management are paramount. But ECM offers a lot that's beyond the capabilities of most business intelligence systems -- the ability to handle semi-structured data in diverse document formats, team collaboration, support for ad hoc working groups, and knowledge management. All are of growing interest in the world of BI."

TDWI uses a similar reasoning when promoting their 2007 TDWI World Conference:

"Business intelligence is a major beneficiary of ECM. As the volume of information in data warehouses and BI systems continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to find relevant information and make the right decisions. Traditional BI and analytics are good at telling you the “what” of business performance, but they often leave out the “why.” ECM search capabilities fill in the blanks by making related information in memos, e-mails, and policies findable, reaching further into the heart of a business. "

Dave Kellog gets to wrap up this post:

"So ECM seems to be heading in a new direction. If things evolve similarly in BI, you can expect to see cannabalism (such as Business Objects buying Hyperion) and incursion (such as IBM buying Cognos) in the future. People have speculated about such things for years. If BI continues to evolve in parallel fashion to ECM, then perhaps soon the speculators will be proven right."