Content Reuse - The Heart of Content Management

I started working with content management in the late nineties. After having been involved as Usability Architect and Business Analyst in a couple of document management projects (we developed workflow solutions with web-based GUI on top of Eastman Software for a Swedish insurance company), I headed my first (web) content management project. The project designed, implemented and rolled out web sites for country distributors for a leading manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses. The distributor web sites where based on a common site blueprint and based on an early version of DialogServer (version 3) from Tridion. It was a successful project with many benefits for the customer.

The content management project demonstrated the value of content reuse and how it was made possible by content modularization and separation of content and format (using XML). Not only was the content (primarily text and images) to be reused in different locations on each web site, but it was also to be used on all web sites and translated to a large number of languages. Being able to reuse content (as well as code thanks to the templates) meant a quick a return of investment and made it possible to deal with all the inconsistent web sites of various quality that the country distributors had developed on their own.

As I had just left the world of document management and saw many similarities between document management and content management, I also came to realize that there is a fundamental difference between document management and content management. That difference is spelled R-E-U-S-E. Document management technologies and content management technologies might be similar, but the approach to content management is completely different from document management. While document management is often focusing on automating and routing documents in workflows and not really dealing with the actual content in the documents, content management is focusing on how to produce, structure, describe and organize content modules in order to assemble it into content products that can be made available to users in different formats and channels (web, e-mail, mobile, print and so on).

The idea with content reuse is to produce once and reuse many times. The same piece of content can be published to multiple formats and made available via different channels. For example, the individual components of a news article (title, abstract, body) can be presented in formats such as HTML, PDF or XML and be made available to the users via a web site, mobile portal, RSS feed or e-mail newsletter.

There are of course many advantages in being able to use the same piece of content in multiple content products and make it available to users in different formats and contexts. The most obvious is that you save time and money by not having to produce the same piece of content more than one time - you avoid or at least reduce duplicate work. Another advantage is that you achieve consistent communication in multiple channels. By designing content to be reused, you also increase quality and usability of the content.

To sum up, the idea of content reuse is what fundamentally separates content management from document management. To be able to reuse content, you need to be able to modularize it and keep the format and content separated. This can be done with a content management system but not with document management system.

However, achieving content reuse is more about methodology than technology. Content reuse might sound easy in theory, but is hard in practice. It is nothing you can achieve by buying and implementing a content management system. Many organizations have eventually come to realize this. To achieve content reuse a different way of thinking and working is required. Content management is primarily an approach and methodology for how to produce, manage and deliver content. With reuse as one of the primary goals.

Now you can upload and share PDFs with Google Docs

The Google Docs Team has listened to a common user request and adressed a need that many of us have - to be able to share PDFs and thereby being able to share files created with other applications. So now it is possible to upload, preview and share PDFs in Google Docs. You can copy text from the PDFs, but there are no editing capabilities. I don't believe that is necessary at all since the value is in the possibility to easily share PDFs with others. Though it would have been nice to be able to highlight and annotate content in a PDF, expecially when sharing articles, reports and such where you might want to direct others to the parts in the PDF that you find interesting. I guess these features are not that hard to add.

Read more on the Official Google Docs Blog or try it out yourself in Google Docs.

The missing piece in the Google application portfolio is an light-weight document / content management application that allows users to upload, store, manage and share their files. It seems as Google Docs is now heading in that direction. Surprising? No. Appreciated? Yes.

This week in links - week 22, 2008

"SOA marches on despite U.S. economic troubles, analysts" from ZapThink:

Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., argues that whatever is happening with the economy it is a mistake to scale back on SOA. "Companies who have been struggling with SOA -- either in the planning or deployment stages -- are at risk of canceling or scaling back their initiatives to their peril," Bloomberg said. "After all, SOA offers cost savings and agility, two essential benefits in good times and bad. What smart organizations are doing is taking a more focused approach to their SOA initiatives, driving toward key business benefits with more rapid, less expensive iterations that show value quickly."

"How SOA and IT are faring in the ‘unrecession’" by Joe McKendrick:

...there has been no apparent impact or downturn in support for SOA projects and initiatives. And we also generally agreed that any rise or fall in SOA’s fortunes will happen regardless of how well or how lousy the economy is doing. But it may be in many organizations’ best interests to look into service orienting.

"Cloud Computing and Content Management" by Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analyst at CMS Watch:

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing...//...In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants -- many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C02 emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate -- often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields, then consider further that according to market research firm IDC, there are over 7,000 major data centers worldwide, and many more in the process of being built. By the way, just because they are big does not make them efficient; it is estimated that around 1/3rd of Data Center servers continually sit idle.

"Study Points to Enterprise 2.0 Perplexity" by Lauren McKay at destinationCRM.com:

Despite steady growth forecasted for Enterprise 2.0, recent research by content management association AIIM demonstrates that organizations are unclear of exactly how to make the best of the Enterprise 2.0 market.

AIIM, which recently introduced an Enterprise 2.0 training program, defines Enterprise 2.0 as: "A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise."

Respondents seem to agree on the goals for Enterprise 2.0, despite not really knowing how to deliver them. Sixty-nine percent of respondents say they wish to use Enterprise 2.0 to increase collaboration. However, they are not clear on which business processes to enhance collaboration.

Experiences from using SharePoint for collaboration (file sharing)

From the comments to my post "SharePoint 2007 - Dream or Nightmare", I could tell that I need to give a little more detail about my experiences from using SharePoint as a collaboration platform. I will try to do that in this post, but I must first say that it is hard for me to tell if the issues that I am experiencing are the specific to the installation I am using or not. Although I have in-depth experience from developing and implementing ECMS, intranets, portals and web-based collaboration tools, I am just one end-user among others when it comes to SharePoint. I have no deeper insight into either the architecture or what features come out of the box of SharePoint and what needs to be added or customized by custom development as I do not work with SharePoint from an implementation perspective.

However, one of my main points in my critique against SharePoint is that SharePoint – as Microsoft claims SharePoint to be a collaboration platform - should provide better capabilities for a smooth collaboration experience out of the box. As end-user I am not interested in investing time and effort to know the architecture of SharePoint in order to use it. I also suppose that most businesses are not happy about having to invest a lot of time and money in customization and custom development to get the basic capabilities for collaboration when they purchase a product that claims to be a collaboration platform (such as SharePoint).

I would like to utilize the collective intelligence of the readers of this blog to help me identify the root causes of my problems and suggest solutions to them, as I know there are many of you who are skilled and experiences in relevant areas (such as SharePoint 2007) and since I might just having problems with symptoms of something else than actual flaws in SharePoint. To get you started I will try to describe my usage context:

As IT management consultant, I often team up with colleagues for team deliveries. As we might work from different locations and have other assignments in parallel, we have to do much of the work on distance. So we need some collaboration tools besides phone and e-mail to support us. Our basic need - which I believe can be addressed by SharePoint - is to be able to share and collaborate on files, primarily MS Office documents, together. We simply need to be able to store the files somewhere we all can access, find and update them in a controlled manner. More specifically, this is what I personally expect from a collaboration tool that supports file sharing:

• Easy access to the files so that we can access the files from any computer or device equipped with a web browser
• A user interface is simple to use so that occasional users can find their way around and perform their tasks without the need for education
• The possibility to organize and tag the files so that users can find them easily by browsing and / or searching
• The possibility to share the documents with anyone we want to share them with, includes notifying them how and where to access the files

Now back to SharePoint. I have trouble doing the following in SharePoint:

• Accessing my files in an easy way - I can access SharePoint from a web browser via a secure gateway, but it is a process that navigation wise takes a lot of time. I would like my SharePoint sites to appear as virtual drives on my computer even though I am not logged on to the domain with the computer.
• Finding my way around – I have had to invest a great deal of time in getting to know the SharePoint environment to be able to find my way around in SharePoint. Options that are likely to be used frequently are hidden with a lot of other options in cascading menus.
• I have found no possibility to tag files with my own tags and to organize the files in folders is anything but a smooth experience. To move a file from the web interface, I first need to know the URL of the destination folder! In addition, instead of copying a document which is already located somewhere else in SharePoint (or even outside of SharePoint), I would like to link to the document from a folder but I have found no easy way to do this.
• It is not possible to share documents with users outside our domain. I would like to be able to send an e-mail with a link to the document and that the receiver of the document can download. Or, I should be able to select a document from within SharePoint and send it as an attachment via e-mail.

I have already invested time and effort in trying to understand the SharePoint environment. My key concern however is to get the people I need to collaborate with to use the SharePoint for collaboration. The main obstacle is, besides the usability of MOSS 2007, that it is hard to access files and resources in SharePoint when we are outside of our domain or using computers provided to us by our clients.

Please enlighten me on how to make the collaboration experience smoother.

Information Management Principle #1: Information cannot be managed

This is the first in a series of posts where I will address a number of important principles for information management. If you let your information management strategy rest on these principles, it is much more likely that you will identify the real information management challenges that your organization is facing and to address them in the right wat. In short, it will make sure that you focus on the information needs of people and avoid getting lost in the technology swamp.

Principle #1: Information cannot be managed

The discipline of Information Management is often confused with the disciplines of Content Management and Data Management. I believe this happens because key concepts such as knowledge, information, content and data have not been properly defined or used in a consistent manner. The terms representing these concepts are often used as if they are synonyms and thus interchangeable. The result can be that important questions are not addressed, at least not in the right way. Here are definitions of the concepts mentioned above:

• Data is content that has been structured so hard (in order to be stored and accessed in an efficient way) that it does not provide enough of context to be usable on its own. It needs to be aggregated, formatted and described to be usable.
  
• Content is something that is indented to communicate a message (information, something about something) from a sender to one or several receivers e.g. a diagram, document, picture or movie. The purpose of the message (e.g. the communication process) can be to inform the receiver about something and/or to create an experience. Digital content is formatted and described in a way that it can easily be managed and delivered to the receiver by means of information technology – over time and space.
  
• When perceiving and interpreting content which is intended to inform the receiver about something, the receiver will hopefully “get the message”. In other words, the content is transformed into meaningful information by cognitive processes in the receiver's head.
  
• When the receiver reflects and applies the information, it can be transformed into knowledge.

What these definitions tell us is that data and content can be managed with the means of (information) technology, but that we cannot manage information and knowledge with technology. This is because information and knowledge exist only in our own heads. What we can do however is to try to conceptualize what we know and encoded it into content - text, images, sound and video. We can also try to identify the intended receivers and make the content available to them. But we cannot guarantee that they will understand what we are trying to say to them or that they will act as we want them to even if they do understand. We can only hope that they get our message and that it is persuasive enough and that they have the motivation required to act as we want them to.

Acknowledging that information and knowledge cannot be managed with technology is important if we want to support people so that they share their information and knowledge with each other. First of all, it allows us to focus on what we actually can manage by means of technology; how to manage various forms of content and how that content is then made accessible to the right user in an efficient way. Secodly, it tells us that we must focus more on creating an environment which encourages people to share information and knowledge with each other and help them develop their communication skills.

SharePoint - Dream or Nightmare?

To answer my question in the title; it depends on which side you are on, if you are on the provider side or the customer / user side.

I myself have been having some nightmares as I have been on the user side for almost a year now. During this period, I have had two assignments where I needed to collaborate with colleagues located at other offices. As we have tried to minimize traveling and face-to-face meetings unless they have been absolutely necessary, we looked for support in our SharePoint 2007 installation. Our primary need was support for creating and sharing MS Office files with each other. Given our needs and the promised capabilities of SharePoint 2007, we should have been hand in glove.

Michael Sampson recently shared his notes from a web seminar by Tony Byrne from CMSWatch entitled "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective". Here are some excerpts and my own comments:

"Tony said that the key strength of SharePoint is in file sharing. Other types of collaboration -- project/task tracking, social networking, enterprise knowledge management, collaborative authoring and review, discussion and collaborative filtering, and synchronous collaboration and communication -- have varying degrees of out-of-the-box capabilities vs. custom development required"

If file sharing is the strength of Sharepoint when it comes to collaboration, then anyone having thougths about using Sharepoint for collaboration should seriously reconsider. There are simply much more simple and convenient ways to share files than using SharePoint. SharePoint is more about file storing than file sharing. File sharing requires easy access, such as the possibility to access files from any computer with Internet access. For this, there are many web 2.0 apps which are better suited.

According to Michael Sampsons notes, Tony Byrne have the following answer to what SharePoint really is:

“Myth ... 'out of the box product' to fit most information management needs"

"Reality ... the most 'finished' pieces still revolve around file-based collaboration. And it's very user-friendly for this."

"When you get beyond that, it becomes a development platform ... or 'consultant friendly'"

The best thing with SharePoint is that it has a lot of capabilities out of the box, ranging from ECM to collaboration. A bad thing is that it underperforms in more or less all areas and that a lot of custom development is required to make it perform. This is why SharePoint is a dream for consultants and why Microsoft has an army of consultant firms that help them sell SharePoint to potential customers. But the worst thing is that SharePoint fails in usability. I disagree with Tony Byrne when he praises the usability of SharePoint when it comes to file-based collaboration. And potential customers need to keep in mind that usability is not something that comes out of the box from projects run by SharePoint consultants.

Classic Content Management Problem #1

The DNA of Enterprise 2.0

The need to be able to communicate and collaborate over time and space increases for most enterprises. To get this communication and collaboration in place, we need to have means to easily exchange our key resources - information, knowledge and experiences - with each other. Web 2.0 technologies and solutions such as wikis, blogs, RSS and social software have are certainly making this exchange easier than ever before. However, Web 2.0 technologies and solutions are still quite unproven when it comes to enterprise use (Enterprise 2.0) and their value for enterprises is sometimes not clear. Many enterprises seem reluctant to adopt them and might not even have assessed their potential uses. They might even see them as something that will worsen their content management problems and the information overload employees are struggling with. But they couldn’t be more wrong. To quote blogger David Weinberger:

“The cure to information overload is more information - the way to manage information overload is more information. That's what the doomsayers of the 90's — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn't foresee.”

Yes, the solution to deal with information overload is absolutely not to stop creating and sharing information. It is rather to create more; information about information (metadata).

Traditionally (in the IT world), metadata has been more or less synonymous with file properties; file name, location, date created, and so forth. These metadata have been hidden and hence remained unknown to most users. They have also been of technical character, making them hard to understand for users. In other words, they have not been usable for the wider public. They have not really helped people to find what they are looking for.

The point with metadata is to create usable metadata. Users must simply not be forced to spend their time and energy on trying to understand detailed metadata or weird terms with complex syntax. The metadata must be easy to read, interpret and understand. To create good metadata, you need to have knowledge about both the content and its intended uses. This is also why there usually is a need for different metadata for the same thing; the same metadata might not be usable for all intended uses and users.

To me, the most revolutionary thing about Web 2.0 is how creating metadata has become a natural thing to do - it has almost become a life-style. The value of describing things for other people has become evident to us since simple tags and descriptions have made it so much easier to find and share these things with others. Metadata is now being created by the people, for the people.

The key to make efficient communication and collaboration happen within enterprises is to make it easier for users to create and share metadata. This way, they allow not only themselves but also other people to easily find what they are looking for – be it virtual resources such as information, experiences and knowledge or physical resources such as people, locations and objects. This is where Web 2.0 technologies and solutions have an important part to play for enterprises, but only if they are coupled by a culture of trust, participation and openness. The old ommand and control style will not do it.

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. "

Achieving findability without taxonomies

Theresa Regli, Analyst at CMS Watch, provides some answers to those who argue that taxonomies are not needed to increase findability because their own taxonomy initiatives have failed for some reason or because new (semantic) search technologies will soon emerge:

"While that may be the case for some future date, it's not the case now for business trying to find information today. Yes, text mining technology is getting better at extracting meaning from content and in turn categorizing or using it in a useful way, and one day my cell phone may just let my doctor know immediately if I'm having a heart attack. The technology exists now to be able to do that. But the car has also existed for over 100 years, and most of the continent of Africa doesn't have roads. Useful technology without infrastructure doesn't go very far.

For now, content is stove-piped in multiple systems, and search has made people lazy. People think the answer should be as easy as a keyword. But the answers to our biggest findability questions are no more easily found by typing in a keyword than a non-French speaker might get a ticket on a working Métro line during a strike. Getting there is no easier than what Amtrak had to do to get the tracks laid down for Acela, and they still couldn't get the train to go as fast as it could have due to organizational and regulatory disarray."

This is classical human behaviour. Instead of climbing the mountain to access the riches on the other side of it, we decide to stay put at the foot of the mountain and wait for some inventor to come by with a teleporting machine that will teleport us to the other side. If you think that is a good strategy, then you should probably not bother to deal with taxonomies.

And let's face it - to make content findable, we need to continue (or start?) describing content with both descriptive and structural metadata until the following occurs:

1. Search engines can actually analyze and understand the semantics of both the query and the content that they index
2. Search engines know what people are asking for even if they don't know it themselves
3. People can ask questions in a way that not only other people but also search engines can understand

This week in links - week 11, 2008

"The problem of dark matter in the information universe" by Kas Thomas, Analyst at CMS Watch:

It seems to me IDC may have missed (or at least skimmed over) some important conclusions in its newly released 2008 update of last year's widely cited The Expanding Digital Universe, which tries to outline the dimensions of the ongoing explosion of digital information. Not surprisingly, the 2008 update finds that the 2007 estimate of the world's information content was too small. It turns out the 2007 digital universe was actually 281 billion gigabytes, about 10 percent bigger than IDC thought.

By 2011, IDC says in its new report, the digital universe will grow to 10 times its 2006 size. I suspect that when 2011 rolls around, this estimate will prove an underestimation as well.

It seems there are two fundamental Laws of Information at work here:

• Information is vastly easier to create than to store
• Information is vastly easier to store than to dispose of

I believe we have to tackle this in two ways: Obviously, we need to make it easier to get rid of content. But we must also learn to accept that we cannot get rid of all content which is no longer needed. We have to accept that it is there, but use smart technologies to filter out irrelevant content.

By the way, you can now download AIIM President John Mancini's Keynote from the 2008 AIIM International Exposition and Conference. It is free for download if you register as an AIIM member, which is free of charge (unless you choose Professional membership).

And here's a podcast with Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence, who reveals the results of its’ exclusive survey (sponsored by EMC) on content management. From the summary:

"While 99 percent of respondents admitted that unstructured information played a significant role in driving their business processes, most identified major challenges if unstructured information was not readily available as part of those processes"

"Open Networks, Open Platforms Seen As Mobile Industry's Future" by Richard Martin, InformationWeek:

"As the FCC's auction of valuable spectrum in the 700 MHz range winds down, the mobile and wireless industry is entering a new era of open networks and open software platforms -- regardless of the outcome of the bidding in the auction.

'Finally, the Internet is going mobile,' said Jonathan Christensen, general manager for audio and video at Skype. With the open-access provisions attached to the 700 MHz auction, the advent of open platforms such as the Android operating system from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and the success of VoIP applications like Skype (which now has 276 million registered users), 'a new game begins,' added Christensen.

This new game is marked not only by efforts by large established players like Google and Verizon Wireless...//...but startups like OpenMoko, which is backed by First International Computer and has developed a fully open-source, Linux-based software platform for mobile computing devices."

Estimating the Value of Content

If you empty your pockets and there's a lighter, a pen, the keys to your home and your wallet - what would you care about putting in a safety deposit when you go swimming?

Estimating the value of content is key to efficient content management. Depending on how valuable the content is, it needs to be managed differently. Content that is estimated to be very valuable for the business should be considered as assets and managed with the same care as other kinds of assets. Content that is more or less worthless should be terminated - if it worth the effort to terminate it. Simply speaking.

Seth Gottlieb shares some very sharp insights on this subject in his post "CMS Business Case":

"There has been an enormous amount of writing and discussion about building a business case for a CMS and I don't have much to add other than to say that most of what I have heard is totally wrong ...//...In my opinion, the business case discussion should be around the content itself - not the technology used to manage it"

"At cmf2007, Bob Boiko's keynote talked about how we are not yet in the information economy because we have a hard time determining the value of content and the markets for trading information are primitive. Content managers are put into the subservient role of having to post everything that they are given. I would tend to agree with him. I do not feel like companies are any better at deciding what content to keep than the parent of a prolific three year old artist. In fact, I feel like the parent has the edge because he has a finite amount of refrigerator door space."

Very well said by both Seth and Bob Boiko.

Finally, here are some of the posts on this blog related to the subject of content value:

• Perspectives on the Value of Content
• 8 Insights about ECM for the CIO
• Looking At Content Quality From Different Perspectives
• A Process Perspective On Content Production
  

Will Web 2.0 Drive Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management has a history. I wrote my first report on this subject back in 1996. Knowledge Management was then defined as a systematic approach to manage corporate knowledge to achieve business value. It is a general definition that still has merits. Some research and practices back then focused on managing knowledge assets with information technology and others on the dynamics of organizational collaboration.

Common practices to create, manage and transfer knowledge have been:

• Communities: Collaborative groups that span across organizational boundaries.
• Best-practice: Reusing knowledge via work descriptions, offerings and similar.
• Knowledge maps: Map knowledge to specific work processes or situations.
• Knowledge profiles: Describing knowledge workers’ roles and resources.

The above practices have often been enabled by means of content and collaboration technologies such as messaging, e-mail, document management, portals, enterprise content management, search and the like.

Content can be seen as a seed of knowledge. But extracting the knowledge and acting upon it require first, that people need to interpret the content to understand the intended information and second, people need to ponder the information for knowledge to emerge. As argued in a former post:

“Content can be managed with the means of (information) technology, but we cannot manage information and knowledge with technology alone since information and knowledge are created and exist only in the heads of humans.” (Back to Basics - Defining Data, Content, Experience, Information And Knowledge)

For Knowledge Management to succeed in an Enterprise it is, for the above reason, essential that appropriate roles, cultures, incentives etc are in place. This will encourage a knowledge sharing environment (knowledge market) necessary for better innovation, smarter services, increased learning, higher productivity etc.

So, what can Web 2.0 technologies and practices add to Knowledge Management?

Web 2.0 is fostered in an agile, open and distributed atmosphere. Recent social trends embrace more open collaboration where content is created and shared in self-organizing networks and communities. This attitude may be what is missing in many failed Knowledge Management initiatives, where company workers have been reluctant to join forces and share what they know.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) will simplify the production and consumption of content. Other technologies such as feeds, mashups, web services, ajax etc will have a role in developing a more flexible and richer web user experience more suitable to the needs and preferences of knowledge workers.

Social interaction (e.g. profiles and social networks) has possibly the largest potential in adding something innovative to Knowledge Management. Knowledge workers may market their knowledge and interests and passively or actively strengthen their relationships across company borders.

I think it is safe to conclude that Web 2.0 will drive Knowledge Management to another level.

Basic Content Services And Web 2.0

Consumers today are the first to get cutting-edge technology. Therefore enterprise technology adoption is increasingly driven by people from outside of the IT department. Changes in social practices also require a more agile way of exploiting new technology.

Basic Content Services (BCS) and Web 2.0 technologies follow these trends. They are both responses to a general call for improved communication and collaboration but are at the same time simpler in functionality, easier to deploy and available at lower cost. But where do they differ?

Seen from an enterprise perspective they target slightly different types of workers, namely:

• The information worker : Characterized by ad-hoc or semi-structured team collaboration
• The social worker : Characterized by personal relationships, knowledge transfer and participatory communities

BCS meets the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Document Management, meaning support for creation, management (library services) and sharing of office documents for information workers. The produced documents are often relatively static and long-lived intended for consumption within a controlled context.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) along with social interaction ( e.g. profiles and social networks) meet the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Content and Knowledge Management, meaning creation, management (aggregation) and sharing of content snippets for social workers. The content being produced is relatively more interactive and short-lived intended for consumption and reuse in an open context.

These two areas will be integrated within a near future and their combined service offerings will be a threat for established monolithic and top-down oriented Enterprise Content Management systems.

Allowing Chaos in Content Management

Content management is not about moving from chaos to total order, from anarchy to total control, from ad hoc to highly structured ways of working. For an enterprise to work, you have to mix and match; give a little freedom here, add a little control there.

What I am saying is that there is no paradox in providing users with the freedom and power to create, tag and share their own content and communicate and collaborate with others as they desire while governing and controlling the production and delivery of content assets. It is just a little bit harder than to either give total freedom or take total control. Because the easy way out to tackle content management challenges is either to do nothing or to put everything under central control.

For example, an organization would probably benefit from having both user-driven metadata (folksonomies/social bookmarking) and centrally developed and managed metadata such as enterprise taxonomies. Why? Because they serve slightly different purposes and often complement each other; where one has its weaknesses, the other one has its strengths.

An organization could probably also benefit from letting employees choose their own tools for ad hoc content-centric collaboration and communication. At the same time, it would probably benefit from providing an infrastructure and structured and governed processes for producing, managing and delivering business-critical content assets.

It just requires a delicate hand to do the right thing with the right content.

I call for e-notifications

The number of e-mails in my inbox that are just notifications – short and automatically generated messages that inform me about something – has since long surpassed the number of regular e-mails. Most of them I don’t open and read. The information in the subject is usually enough and then I delete them. Some of them I have to open and read, just to view and click on a link to another location.

One of the “truths” in content management is that all content needs to be managed in some way or another. Depending on the purpose and intended (and actual) use of the content, it might need to have a different structure and format and be managed in a different way than other types of content…that is why we define and work with “content types”.

What strikes me every so often when I delete notifications received by e-mail is that I would really like to manage these in a different way than how I manage my other e-mails. For example, I don’t want them to be mixed up with other e-mails. I would like to view and manage them separately. I would also like to have them automatically deleted after some period of time. And, maybe it would be an idea to have all the information in the subject so that I don’t have to bother to read the body of message?

Much of what I ask for I can achieve - after some effort - by configuring an e-mail client such as Outlook. But should I really have to do this? Aren’t more people than me interested in viewing, using and managing notifications in another way than regular e-mails? If so, then not just I would welcome an initiative that defined, specified and enforced a new standard for notifications. Maybe there even is one on the way?

Are Microsoft over-complicating things with SharePoint?

These two posts about Microsoft SharePointare basically saying the same thing , but with completely different intentions.

Why SharePoint Portal Server is Terrible:

"SharePoint is a great idea; it was just built completely wrong. It's a perfect example of trying to build something that does everything, making the software so complicated that it is so hard to use, that it is useless."

MOSS: Effective introduction to an Organization:

"MOSS is such a big animal ... it includes content management, document management, search, security, audience targeting, project management, "fabulous forty" templates, workflow, business data connector, etc. Couple this with the fact that it's a large organization that can truly make use of virtually every major MOSS feature and you have the makings of a great project with an enterprise reach and many good things happening. We're confronted with this issue time and time again ... MOSS has an enterprise reach with its enterprise feature-set, yet even somewhat sophisticated clients have a hard time mentally absorbing those features, let alone incorporating an appreciable fraction of them into their daily routine."

ECM Illustrated - Data and Content Management will blend together

Enterprise users need accurate and complete information in a timely manner to do their jobs. The information they need is often located in different content sources and with different degree of structure. To satisfy the information needs of the employees, an enterprise does not only need to integrate content in different content sources to satisfy information needs, but also integrate structured content (data) with unstructured content.

The world of Data Management has until recently been separated from the world of Content Management, with suboptimization as a natural result. The separation of Data Management and Content Management has its roots in that structured content has traditionally been stored in databases and that unstructured content has been contained in documents and files stored in file systems.

Below is a simple way to illustrate the original positions of Data Management and Content Management and how they will eventually blend together.




From a user perspective, it does not make much sense to treat structured and unstructured content as two separate things. What matters to the user is that he/she can find and access all relevant content and that it gives just enough context to efficiently extract all the information that is needed from the content.

From a business perspective, it does not either make much sense to treat structured and unstructured content as two separate things, even though structured and unstructured content needs to be managed in more or less different ways. The primary concern of the business is to fulfill its goals and to do so it needs to enable the employees to carry out the activities needed to fulfill these goals. One important aspect of this is to supply the employees with just the resources they need, such as content resources from which they can extract the information they need. To treat Data Management and Content Management as two separate things would be as dividing a football (soccer) team into a defensive team and an attacking team and let them play independently of each other. It would be an interesting game to watch, but a sure loss for the team(s).

Back to Basics - Defining Data, Content, Experience, Information And Knowledge

The emerging fields of Content Management, Enterprise 2.0 and others introduce new concepts as well as modifications (new interpretations) of already existing concepts. There are often logical inconsistencies between key concepts such as data, content, information and knowledge, which cause confusion and