This week in links - week 19, 2008

"Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution" by George Dearing:

"I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently...//...Newton makes everything sound so damn easy when he talks about enterprise content management. And when's the last time you heard the words 'easy' and 'ECM' in the same sentence?"

"If you take into account the way information increasingly lives inside and outside the firewall, ECM becomes even more complex. Companies now have to figure out how to consume and create content in both environments, something Newton says Alfresco accomplishes by adopting a 'content-as-service' approach. He argues that most enterprises lay out their palette of required services based on the need to create content. The focal point shouldn't be centered so much on the ECM suite, he argues. It has more to do with looking at 'how the Web browser can help knowledge workers do their jobs.'"

[Newton:]"'Content services should just be accessible wherever knowledge workers are. We shouldn't be forcing workers to go into these ECM suites. In our view, collaboration spans far more than ECM.' "

Hear, hear.

"E2.0 Fundamentals" by Jeremy Thomas:

"As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before), 'Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core'...//...Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically."

Hear, hear. Again.

"Report says enterprise mashups on the rise" By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com:

"A new Forrester report says that enterprise mashups, while not yet a panacea for connecting all the dots of corporate data, will help companies (and their employees) mix and match information to help them do their jobs better. According to the researchers, vendors will provide tools for business users to build a mashup on their own with no programming experience."

"'Mashups are trying to solve a long-standing business problem, which is combining disparate data sources,' says Oliver Young, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. 'We think mashups are doing it in a unique way that's more user-oriented.'...//... "It absolutely starts to look like BI,' Young says. 'Mashups will eat into that market.' Forrester defined a mashup in the enterprise as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique."

Interesting readings from this week

Here are a few interesting readings from this week.

To start with, Bill Ives lists the best Enterprise 2.0 success stories he has collected during 2007. Read and get inspired.

In Information World Review, Phil Muncaster writes about research that show a trend of "increasing resources for council IT departments and greater influence for chief information officers". He refers to the Forrester vice president Alex Cullen and writes:

"IT leaders will seek to more closely integrate their departments with the wider business by sending smaller groups into different business areas to act as specialist technology advisers...//...There is also a great opportunity for so-called “change agent” IT chiefs to take advantage of their insight into line-of-business and functional silos in order to become trusted advisers to the board, argued Cullen."

There has, of course, been much buzz this week following Microsofts aquisition of FAST, the Norwegian enterprise search firm. As SharePoint user, I personally welcome this aquisition (yes, I am not too happy about the current SharePoint Search). Guy Creese at Burton Group splits the search market into three sectors:

"(1) cheap and OK, (2) relatively inexpensive and an 80% solution, and (3) expensive and sophisticated, Microsoft is targeting tier two with SharePoint Search".

He concludes that the list of competitors in enterprise search is getting smaller and smaller (Autonomy, Oracle, IBM and Google besides Microsoft).

Interesting Readings

"IBM, Microsoft, SAP lag behind on Web 2.0" by Jon Brodkin, NetworkWorld.com:

"IBM, Microsoft and SAP are taking a charge at the business Web 2.0 market, but the big vendors still lag behind smaller rivals who have developed far more innovative technology with quicker release cycles, according to a Forrester analyst"

"Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?" by Andy Dornan, InformationWeek:

"Enterprise mashup tools are the long tail of SOA, letting ordinary employees build applications that aren't on IT's radar screen. But what about the risks?"

"Microsoft Expands Enterprise Search Offering, Introduces Search Server 2008 Express", Microsoft PressPass:

"In delivering Search Server Express, Microsoft has taken the enterprise class search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and made them available as a stand-alone server for free"

"AMC 2007: 'Don't Put Content on Lockdown' Google Exec Urges Mag Eds" by Noah, FishBowlNY:

"Search is a proxy for a brand's vitality," Google media platforms director Eileen Naughton asserted to a roomful of magazine executives at AMC today in Boca Raton. "Search is a core consumer behavior that defines our times; it's an activity at the essence of what it is to be human," she said in her keynote talk entitled "Insights From Google"

"Make sure search engines can find your stuff," she urged. "Don't put it behind paid walls, don't put it on lockdown. Tag your story archives, photos, video clips and make them freely available."

Insights about Content Management challenges

"Culling Content Management" by Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

"It's long been a gripe of mine that ECM systems were designed to reduce the amount of content you needed to manage to essentials. Yet instead they often just manage everything - trash along with diamonds...//...It's really not that hard to reduce the volumes of content you manage dramatically - a simple content audit can clear out 70-80% without in anyway impacting your RM policies or frankly even being noticable to the end users. Most everything sitting there anyway is a duplication, is redundant or should never have been there in the first place."

"There once was a firm in Nantucket..." by Bob Larrivee at AIIM:

"If your information management and gathering effort is called into question, you may be asked to prove that you have policies and procedures in place that are followed by your employees, using a consistent structure and taxonomy for storing and managing information that is also tracked for purposes of auditing and reporting."

"Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search - Beyond the Out-of-the-Box Experience" by John Ferrara:

"It’s common for enterprise website developers to implement search engines with out-of-the-box functionality, point it at their content repositories, and then just leave it at that. Search is becoming something of a neglected orphan, in part because packaged search products are relatively easy to implement, and then even more easily forgotten...//...Quality search results only come about through applied effort, requiring in particular the skills of an information architect. And IAs must be ready to go well beyond their traditional front-end role, digging into the functional backend and source data of the search engine."

Some Comments on Enterprise 2.0 and Intranets

With the adoption of Web 2.0 applications and technologies within an enterprise context (Enterprise 2.0), the old intranet sites will be replaced by or transform into a network of hyperlinked resources that connect people as well as content resources with each other. The enterprise portal serves as the entry point and provides enterprise users with a single gateway to wikis, blogs, web based productivity tools, collaboration and communication tools as well as to enterprise applications and content sources. Although all applications are not executed and all content is not displayed within the context of the enterprise portal, all the resources that are available to the employees can be found via the portal.


One important aspect of Enterprise 2.0 applications such as wikis and blogs is that they can help to bring hidden but often valuable content up to the surface, content assets that otherwise probably would be forgotten and then be recreated instead of being found and (re)used. With blogs and wikis, these content assets are being brought up to the surface by the people who need and uses it - and who is better suited to know and decide what content is valuable or not than the users?

Furthermore, with the introduction of social software, the intranet can become a more efficient and dynamic environment for communication, collaboration and knowledge exchange. Instead of just being able to find and access content resources and applications via the enterprise portal and its connected resources such as wikis and blogs, the user can find and connect with the people that might possess the information or knowledge that the user is looking for.

Traditionally, when developing intranet sites, a lot of effort and focus is also put on creating a structure for organizing all content resources that are to be made available on the intranet site. The goal is often to define and design an information architecture in which basically everything can fit, existing content as well as content to be produced in the future. This is often an overwhelming, if not even impossible task - if the goal is to organize all content. In addition, such a static structure might work for content resources that are related to formal processes that almost always are carried out in the same way. However, a lot of the work that is being done within an enterprise is actually dynamic, instant and occurring only once in the exact same way. The information you need and the path you take to find it might be different from time to time, even for the same activity. The hypertext navigation model where users can navigate based on semantic relationships between content supports - in combination with search and social bookmarking - this way of working much better than the predefined hierarchical navigation systems that usually dominate on an intranet site. They are still needed, but they are not suited for all tasks or needs.

Waiting for Search Wikia

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that." (Search Wikia)

I was once a fan of Google. Because it returned better search results faster than any other search engine on the web. Because it was an upcomer, something that could shake the giants. Now Google has become one of the giants. And have search engines got much better since? Are we getting better (more relevant) search results? Not much, from what I can see. Search engines still search on words, not meaning. This is where humans excel machines. This is why Search Wikia is such an interesting project. If not only for what it might do to Google and the unrealistic expectations on Google we all have.

Why Folksonomies Work

“A folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags…//…the process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users” (Wikipedia)

As Voltaire wrote, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The point with metadata is not to create perfect metadata, but to create usable metadata. Hence, controlled taxonomies are not necessarily, as some IA:s argue, superior to folksonomies when it comes to supporting searching and browsing. Because to be able to create accurate and usable metadata, you need to have a very good understanding new content is to be used and how existing content is actually being used. And in many cases, the users know more about this than “experts”. So even if their metadata is not perfect in the eyes of the expert, they might serve their purpose just as good or better than the metadata that the expert can come up with. Or as Joshua Porter wrote in his article “A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content”:

"One of the most promising features of folksonomies is that there is no disconnect between the user’s words and the words on the site: the users words are the words on the site!"

Many metadata initiatives, such as the development and implementation of controlled vocabularies, start with a high ambition but then simply fall apart with time and die a silent death. Why? Because it never gets to be a natural thing to use them. Creating and using metadata needs to be a life-style. To tag your content with the appropriate metadata should be as natural as naming and saving it. With folksonomies, tagging has become just that for many users – a natural thing to do. Not long after the concept of folksonomies was coined by Thomas Vanderwal a couple of years ago, Clay Shirky responded to a post by Louis Rosenfeld about the downside of folksonomies:

"The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed…//…Any comparison of the advantages of folksonomies vs. other, more rigorous forms of categorization that doesn’t consider the cost to create, maintain, use and enforce the added rigor will miss the actual factors affecting the spread of folksonomies. Where the internet is concerned, betting against ease of use, conceptual simplicity, and maximal user participation, has always been a bad idea"

Very well said. You simply cannot beat ease of use, simplicity and user participation. On the Internet, this is basically a "law of nature". But that is not (yet) the case in most enterprises. I upcoming posts, I will write about how and where folksonomies can be used in the context of an enterprise.

More About Basic Content Services

For many organizations, buying an expensive and complex ECM suite will be overkill. Their content management problems are more basic and they simply don’t need even half of the features - and definitely not the complexity and cost - of large ECM suits to address and solve their fundamental content management problems. It is no news that one size does not fit all.

Basic Content Services address the fundamental content management problems that all or most of the information workers within an organization are struggling with on a daily basis. BCS are to provide each and everyone within an organization with unified access and tools for managing their content. By providing a productive and efficient content management environment for each information worker, the organization can free time and energy to increase the overall productivity of the organization.

The core services of BCS are library services such as versioning and check-in / check-out functionality. In addition to that, BCS should include security services such as access control and rights management, metadata services for classification of content and metadata management, and search services. BCS can almost - and probably also should - be seen as a part of the IT infrastructure.

In addition to BCS, many organizations will problably need more advanced ECM services as well, such as workflow and collaboration services. Some common more advanced ECM services are shown in the illustration below.

Please note that the richness and complexity of each type of service in the illustration above is not considered here. For example, two organizations can have greatly different requirements on search services (just as the search services from two vendors might differ considerably in capability and features). But even if they have, both need some kind of search services to address the need of easily and quickly finding content.

The Power Of The Enterprise Taxonomy - Part II

With an enterprise taxonomy, the organization gets a tool for increasing the findability of its content through unified access and improved searching and browsing. It also simplifies integration, maintenance, reuse, translation, exchange and syndication of content. So, the business benefits of an enterprise taxonomy should be pretty clear. But how do you actually develop and implement it?

The main challenge in development and implementation of an enterprise taxonomy is of course political. The different units within the organization will need to cooperate and agree upon a common taxonomy and vocabulary. This is by far the trickiest part of the taxonomy development and implementation process, and it should not be underestimated. Otherwise, the process is pretty straightforward. I have made a try to sketch it out below:

1. Define & Research

Developing an enterprise taxonomy should of course start with determining the objectives, scope and requirements for the enterprise taxonomy. The scope should be easy to define, since it should be an enterprise taxonomy. But for what is it needed? How will it be used? How will it be maintained, by whom, how often and with what resources? How will it need to scale? And so on.

You should also perform a content inventory – produce a complete list of all the content that currently exists in the content landscape. To be able to do that you need to go to those who are developing and maintaining the content. What content do they develop or maintain? What is it about? Where is it located? Who needs it? What do they need it for? Once you have the list of all content with questions like these answered, you can start analyzing the content and design the taxonomy.

2. Analyze & Design

Analysis means trying to understand the semantic relationships and patterns between existing content. As in software development, analysis and design are two intertwined activities, two sides of the same coin. You really cannot do one without the other. So, when you start analyzing you will also start designing the taxonomy.

However, it is important to select an architecture that is suited to its purpose and that is scalable, i.e. can accommodate new content. As in software development, establishing the type of architecture should be done as early as possible. Otherwise, there will be problems later. A taxonomy is often envisioned as a hierarchic tree structure, but it doesn't need to be. A taxonomy could also have a flat, network, or faceted architecture. It can also be a mix of two or more of these architectural types.

3. Validate

Now it is time to test and evaluate the taxonomy with the appropriate validation techniques. You can use qualitative validation, quantitative validation, or a combination. In any case, by this stage you should have a first version of the taxonomy so that you can test it on users and stakeholders.

4. Deploy & Implement

Deploying and implementing the taxonomy can be expressed with simpler words - making it ready to use and putting it into use. Deploying the taxonomy means that it is available and can be used by content management systems, search engines, and so on. Implementing a taxonomy means actually attaching its attributes to the existing and new content. The taxonomy attributes can be terms from a controlled vocabulary, a list of standardized terms that describe concepts within the domain. Using a controlled vocabulary with agreed upon and carefully defined terms ensures consistency in content metadata and also sets a common language for the organization that reduces the potential for misinterpretation. So, using a controlled vocabulary for the taxonomy has its clear benefits.

Again, as in software development, there is no such thing as a big bang approach to implementation. Instead, start with a pilot and then start implementing the taxonomy throughout the organization according to a realistic roadmap.

5. Evaluate & Revise

Once the enterprise taxonomy is deployed, you need to maintain it. Two important activities in the maintenance are to evaluate how the taxonomy is performing and revise it when needed.

But how to govern and maintain an enterprise taxonomy is basically a subject of its own, which might also be the subject for a post or two later on.

Metadata, The DNA Of The Content Enterprise

Metadata is commonly defined as data about data. But I would rather define it as content about content, additional content that is intended to help the user to interpret main content by adding context to it, by putting it in the context of other content. Metadata can provide answers to questions the user might have about the content, such as who created it and when or what subject it is about. Content without any metadata is more or less useless. It is hard to find it, hard to understand where it came from, hard to determine if it is accurate and up-to-date or not, and so on.

“Content that has been adequately tagged with metadata can be leveraged in usage tracking, personalization and improved searching.” (GIGA)

Metadata is a key ingredients to help users find the content they are looking for. One of the big problems with finding content on the web and in private networks is that most content is textual, written in natural language, which is hard for computers to effectively manipulate and manage. Computers cannot understand the meaning of a piece of content (the semantics), only determine the structure of it (the syntax). So, when you search for content, the search engine will look for content that contains the same words and has the same syntax as your query. But it cannot understand what the words mean. This makes searching quite inefficient.

But this is also where metadata comes into the picture. By tagging the content with words (keywords) that tell more what the content is about than most of the words within the content itself do, the search engine can look for content that contains keywords that are the same as the words you provided in the query. This increases the efficiency of search, enabling more relevant search results.


Once the right content can be easily found and retrieved, metadata can also help with many other things with the content, such as reusing it for other purposes, preserving it, making sure only the right users can access it, and so on.

In other words, metadata is the DNA of a content enterprise, vital for its growth, survival and success. The metadata has to be good, and it has to be the right metadata. Equally importantly is that there is an enterprise taxonomy that organizes all content semantically. But more about that later.