I’ve been an analyst since 1998, focusing most of that time on various knowledge management technologies like portal, web content management, and intranets.  One client inquiry that has been consistent over time and between technologies is the need to prove value for knowledge infrastructure.  Sometimes this takes the form of financial analysis (ROI, NPV, time to payoff), and sometimes it is around metrics (how can I show improvement or prove in a year or two that it was worthwhile).

Overall, there are two reasons owners of collaboration infrastructure start work on a business case: because they have to and because they know it’s good for them. There’s an inbetween option which is that it behooves them to do it now because there’s a good chance they’ll be asked for it in the future. Even if not explicitly asked for, a business case should be an integral part of any collaboration plan or strategy to validate that the technology is aligned with business goals and objectives.

The journey is the destination when it comes to business cases. When the business case creation process is seen as valuable on its own rather than just a hurdle to get past to start work it can be used to steer the direction of the project and form the basis for an ongoing dialogue with the business.

At a high level, the business case for technologies that fit under the KM umbrella are very similar (portal, web content management, attention management, intranets, collaboration, search, etc.). Note that I will not distinguish between the business case and a business justification. The differences are very minor and lead to the same steps in my experience.

I’ve talked to 100+ organizations about their business cases over the past 7 years, worked in detail on a few, have read through many case studies, and have seen many different approaches that worked at different companies. It’s all about 1) starting with a worthy project, 2) understanding the situation – the why, what, and how, 3) building the business case by selecting the most useful methods out of the many available for the specific situation and the line items to apply those methods on, 4) presenting the business case (in multiple formats), 5) keeping the business case in mind while executing the initiative, and 6) following up once the initiative is in place.

That represents my high level view of this issue. I’ll post more thoughts in an ongoing fashion. I’ll focus on #2 since I think that’s where most of the misunderstandings occur and business case production often goes astray.

I’m still typing frantically on my report on building portals in SharePoint and preparing for our upcoming workshop, but I thought I’d poke my head up for a minute to point you to a presentation I’m looking forward to doing in May in Las Vegas.  Details are below. Hope to see you there!

The Shared Insights’ Portals, Collaboration and Content Conference

My presentation is:

Picking the Right Tool for the Job: E-mail, IM, Post or Publish
Wednesday, May 23, 2007, 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Presented By: Craig Roth, Vice President and Service Director, Burton Group
Information workers today are blessed with an abundance of communication and collaboration tools on their desktop, including e-mail, an intranet portal, wikis, instant messaging, shared workspaces and team rooms and the old-fashioned phone. Unfortunately, they do not always receive guidance to go along with this embarrassment of riches that would help them decide which tool to click on or when to use it. Instead, they often wind up selecting by convenience and familiarity rather than picking the best tool for the job. In this presentation, Craig Roth will discuss individual and enterprise guidance on how to find the right tool for the right job.Key Issues:

• What kind of problems are information workers trying to solve today?
• How do the communication and collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, team rooms and e-mail fit with these needs?
• How do I use enterprise policy and guidelines on channel and workspace selection to improve overall efficiency of information workers?

Research from CIO Insight has shown an increase in collaboration and content spending. According to their press release:

Compared to 2006, we see a whopping 17 percent increase in budgeting for business intelligence, and spending on analytics is rising faster than any other software category, trailed closely by Web 2.0 technologies and customer self-service applications.

As much as companies are keeping a leash on IT spending, it’s good to see content and collaboration are not getting the short straw. Pessimistic view is that they already have low spending anyways so an increase doesn’t take much and that it’s just “keeping up with the Joneses”. I prefer the optimistic view that organizations are making rational decisions based on return and they have judged that portals, collaboration, and participatory web technologies (see #2,4,5,6,17,20) can provide good returns for relatively little investment.

Especially interesting to see where spending is going by company size. Wikis and blogs are being favored by small companies, portals by large.

A Line56 article called The Distraction Economy seemed to be a standard romp through the info-stress and information fatigue issue (subtitle is “Continuous partial attention is a cry for help; don’t overburden cognitively fatigued knowledge workers”), but my ears perked up when it got to portals:

One potential fix comes in the form of the portal. Predefining what knowledge workers do, and what kinds of information they need, and then feeding the relevant data into a portal, is, in my mind, an excellent first step. Creating a unified and contextual template from which you can’t “surf” away is, in my personal experience, a powerful productivity booster.

This gives me an opportunity to mention my thoughts on how portals relate to attention management.

First, per my previous posting, the word “portal” is fluffy so I hesitate to say “portal” fixes anything without any more specific description.

I think some of the core features of what I consider portal infrastructure and the portal UI certainly apply to attention management. The idea of having profiled users, access to many content, data, and application sources, then an assembly engine that can bring just the information of interest to that user at that point in time is highly applicable to attention management. I’m talking about personalization and customization.

Still, it’s too extreme to say that it’s a “fix”. It would be much more accurate to say portals can help address AM. And while it is a unified and contextual template, of course you can surf away from it unless you’ve found some way to lock down the browser.

Also, back to my attention management conceptual architecture, there are many technologies that help to pull important messages forward and push less important messages back. Personalized portals help with that, but there are many other technologies that do too.

That was the point of the AM conceptual architecture – to provide a way to put all the technologies in context and to avoid saying any one technology fixes the whole problem. They all have their place.

Now here’s a meme I can jump onto: Web 0.0. I haven’t been a big proponent of Web 2.0 as a meme. Although I embrace many of its technologies and themes I dislike the bundling, implication of stair-step progress instead of continuous, and general bandwagon nature of it before I feel it’s ready to have cement poured over it. But Web 0.0 speaks to something I can appreciate.  Keeping grounded in the need for real human interaction and the need for validation that communication technology is being used as a tool rather than a crutch sounds like a great idea to me.

Unfortunately I missed the WEB 0.0: INTERNATIONAL INTERNET-FREE DAY from the Global Ideas Bank. Here’s a quote from the press release:

Do you check your inbox every five minutes? Do you lose track of time surfing the online shops? Have you e-mailed a colleague at a desk next to you? Do you podcast your daily thoughts, rather than call your mother? Fear not: hope is at hand. Take a break on this Sunday January 28th: Internet Free Day.

In the meantime, a couple of news items from the Wall St. Journal that relate to addiction to internet communication channels.

First, for anyone who thinks today’s youngsters are losing the ability to communicate face to face rather than through a protective layer of technology and using complete thoughts and sentences rather than PowerPoint-like thought bullets or abbreviated IM or SMS text, the article on page W1 of the 2/9/07 WSJ “Say it with Txt” will only fuel your rage. The increase in text’ed love missives and breakups is appalling (e.g., “TGIF Hon, try to take it easy. ILU so much. by for now”).

Second, the article on 2/14/07 p1 of the WSJ titled “Deleting the Habit: How Email Junkies Do in Withdrawl” provides anecdotes of conntected people who have tried to go cold turkey and failed. It mentions the Web 0.0 day as well as some pitiful stories on people that just couldn’t turn off email. As I’ve written before, I think the issue is as much expectations that are set over time as addiction. But addiction is certainly part of it. As one person said “It’s kind of like people who go to the fridge when they’re bored. I check email”.

Speaking of being disconnected, I’ll be a bit more disconnected on this blog until March since I’m rushing to hit some deadlines. My report on how SharePoint (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) address the building of portals and complex web sites will be a rush to the finish line this month. And the beta of our Enterprise SharePoint Strategy workshop has to be ready in a few weeks too. Look for them soon!

This is going a bit too far. The idea of my computer muttering evil things to itself is a bit too “gollum” for me. I’ve always suspected my computer hates me and would say bad things about me if it could, but if I ever walk by my spare bedroom and hear a voice uttering “Delete all files … yes, the hidden ones too … ah, excellent!” I’m just giving up on technology, moving to the mountains, and taking up soapstone carving.

The beginning of the story is below. You can get the full story here.

Microsoft Downplays Vista Speech-Recognition Hack

By Jennifer LeClaire

February 2, 2007 8:27AM

 

According to security researchers, Windows Vista’s speech-recognition feature is flawed and hackers could use it to remotely force a PC to execute commands.

 

Microsoft Relevant Products/Services confirmed the vulnerability on Wednesday — a day after the consumer launch of the new operating system — when security researchers began offering details on how pranksters could exploit the speech technology. A malicious Web site, for example, could load an audio file that shouts commands to shut down the operating system without the user’s authorization.

For any of you in the Chicago area I wanted to make you aware of a free seminar that I will be doing along with my Research Director Peter O’Kelly in Chicago on 2/13/07. Details are below. Please contact Karen Warner (the email address is below too) if you’re interested. I look forward to seeing you there.

Collaboration and Content: Moving into an Infrastructure Near You Join Burton Group for its Complimentary Collaboration and Content Management Seminar. In this half-day seminar, Burton Group analysts will address emerging challenges and opportunities at the intersection of communication, collaboration, and content management. Attendees will also have the opportunity to network with Burton Group analysts and peers.

Presented by: Peter O’Kelly, Burton Group Vice President and Research Director Craig Roth, Burton Group Service Director Date & Time: February 13, 2007 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM Location: Hyatt Rosemont 6350 N. River Rd. ROSEMONT, IL 60018 More Info: Email kwarner@burtongroup.com RSVP: Please register before February 5, 2007 Note: Seating is limited and is reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. A continental breakfast will be served. Agenda Collaboration and Content: Drivers and Trends for 2007 and Beyond Collaboration and content are transitioning from being optional (sometime seen as luxuries) to mandatory components of the information worker platform. In 2007, the market — including software vendors and open source initiatives — will respond to increased collaboration and content needs with a slew of offerings, including significant product updates from Microsoft (Exchange, SharePoint, Office, and Office Communications Server 2007), IBM (Notes/Domino 8 and new “Ventura” and “Geneva” offerings), and other potential disrupters (such as Adobe, Google, and Oracle). Formerly consumer-focused technologies including blogs, wikis, and social software, are also making inroads into the corporate world, often with poor results for organizations that do not understand them and/or plan appropriately. 2007 will emerge as a critical year for the owners of collaboration and content technologies to optimize their investments by harnessing the emerging power of new capabilities while also keeping chaotic usage and dysfunctional content proliferation habits at bay. In this session, we will describe these trends in detail, along with implications for large organizations. Break Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Notes: Superplatform Supercollisions IBM and Microsoft have dominated the enterprise markets for communication and collaboration products for more than 15 years. The enterprise collaboration market has historically been dominated by Notes/Domino, but IBM changed its focus for several years, emphasizing a new Workplace product line and implicitly relegating Notes/Domino to something of a legacy role. Since mid-2005, IBM has redoubled its focus on Notes/Domino and Sametime, recasting Workplace as an umbrella product strategy that encompasses the traditional Lotus products along with the latest WebSphere Portal product family. Microsoft has also made significant changes to its communication/collaboration product line during recent years, starting with a new foundation for SharePoint in 2003 and greatly expanding the breadth of its collaboration and content management value proposition with Office and SharePoint 2007. Collaboration is now a central part of Microsoft’s corporate strategy, and Microsoft has articulated a vision that encompasses asynchronous, synchronous, and business process collaboration. In this session, we will review the changing collaboration vendor landscape and provide guidance on where to go next and what to expect when you get there. Access Burton Group InflectionPoint.com for free podcasts, blogs and research to make smarter IT architecture decisions. View Burton Group Take 5 — five-minute audio-enhanced presentations. Independent analysis of infrastructure technologies and market trends To add other people in your organization to this alert service, visit www.burtongroup.com/newuser. Unsubscribe or update your preferences. 7090 Union Park Center, Suite 200 | Midvale, UT | 84047-4169 | 801-304-8174 | Fax: 801.566.3611 Home Terms of Use Privacy Policy

I’d like to go back to a topic that’s been near and dear to my heart for about 15 years now - user interface design. I did quite a bit of work on web usability in OS/2 GUIs and again in the early portal and web days when it seemed UI design hadn’t caught up with the need for dynamic and personalized sites (it still hasn’t). Well, my rant today isn’t about UI design for portals, but for the security-trimmed interfaces that are all the rage these days. There seem to be an increasing number of applications whose interfaces make me feel like a precocious child being shielded from the dangerous consequences of my inquisitiveness.

Microsoft has taken the plunge, most noticeably for me in SharePoint. I’m trying to find the audience creation functionality in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the problem seems to be that my server doesn’t have that functionality enabled. But I can’t tell for sure. Searching for specific step-by-step instructions has proven futile except for one streaming video of a presentation of someone demonstrating it with the camera focusing (or trying to) on the screen behind the speaker.

I had a similar problem with an audio waveform editor that I have. The manual kept referring to some great pitch fixing functionality. It made it seem so easy to launch the editing screen that they didn’t even have to describe the process other than to say “After launching the pitch editor …”. I spent half an hour searching for it (right click on the waveform? Is it a button in another wave editing screen?) to no avail. Finally after an email to support I was told it’s only on the “pro” version of the product (this isn’t mentioned anywhere in the manual as it must have been a last minute marketing decision to make that a premium feature) and therefore the interface was trimmed not to show it to me.

I understand the usefulness of the security or rights trimmed interface. It can help both the app owner (keep users from asking about features they don’t have) and end user (avoid confusion by simplifying the interface). But I believe it’s being overdone and without due consideration for the negatives (it’s hard to definitively tell an option is not present, so one continues searching).

UI designers should:

1. Allow opting in or out of a trimmed UI. Consider an option for the end user to select “advanced mode” that shows all options with those not selectable grayed out
2. Make sure manuals and online help are accurate. They need to show exactly how to launch their functionality (the exact menu or button and where it’s found) and describe why it may not be visible
3. Consider the negatives of a trimmed UI as well as the positives and act accordingly. For applications where precociousness is not as prevalent or dangerous consider just graying out unavailable options.

For my upcoming report on building portals in SharePoint I’ve been mulling over the idea of how to easily describe my idea of what I mean by “portal” (since the word itself is pretty much meaningless) and why it’s important. Since my early reports on portals for META Group in 2000 and for the 5 years, 41 reports, 4 marketwide portal vendor Metaspectrums, and 2 primary research studies that followed (phew!) I’ve been referring to this as “Enterprise Portal Frameworks”. Now at Burton Group, I’ve been taking advantage of the opportunity to rethink how to describe the concept.

The EPF phrase worked fine and tied in to an overall infrastructure concept of a framework as being scaffolding that could be filled in. The analogy I used was that of the refrigerated cookie dough. It’s more than a recipie, but less than buying prepackaged cookies in a bag. It’s premixed and ready to slice off, maybe add some sprinkles, and bake. But it still took a little while to explain and I wanted a term that would get the reuse idea across my clearly. I think I’ve got it: “portal factory”.

Here’s the idea:

Buying, architecting, designing, installing, and integrating a portal requires significant time, personnel resources, and money. Duplicating that effort for every portal interface required would waste time and money. It would also burden cross-functional users of multiple portals with baffling user interface inconsistencies and create maintenance hassles. Nearly all organizations with successful portal implementations provide a common, pre-integrated set of services and guidance for building portal interfaces for any group that needs one. I refer to that pre-integrated set of services for building portals as a portal factory.

The goals of a portal factory as opposed to assembling each portal from piece parts are:

§ Findability: Stamping out portal sub-sites using a portal factory enables the information and navigation on all of the sites to be tied together. Searching across all of the sub-sites is enabled and navigating to the correct page becomes much easier. This also enables a common hub to establish subscriptions, XML syndication, and alerting that all help connect up useful information to the information workers that would find it valuable. This ability to simplify the finding of information is referred to as “findability.”

§ User Interface Consistency: A well-designed web site provides a more usable experience. But the cross-functional nature of information workers necessitates consistency as well as good design. Most knowledge workers and nearly all management and executives will utilize multiple portal sub-sites. Even a lower level knowledge worker may access several subsites such as a departmental or divisional sub-site, project sub-sites, role-based subsites (such as for .NET programmers), and administrative sub-sites (such as information technology helpdesk and travel and expense submission). The more sites one accesses, the more important consistent user interface elements such as navigation, footers, columns, and color schemes become to increase usability and findability.

§ Infrastructure Consistency: Just as users benefit from consistency across the front end of portal sites, infrastructure owners and developers benefit from consistency across the back end. Determining how to integrate user management infrastructure (directories), security (single sign-on), enterprise applications, manage its application server (clustering), and set up an integrated development environment for it is a difficult and time-consuming task required skilled personnel. Once the back end has been figured out, it would be a waste to repeat it.

§ Maintainability: Web sites built using a portal factory should break less often. And when they do break they should require less time to fix and require a more common skillset for the repair. There are two reasons for this increased maintainability. First, since more time and more skilled personnel can be expended on a reusable factory than a single-use web site, these web sites will be developed with best practices in mind. Second, since all sites coming out of the factory are designed the same, anyone who can fix one of the sites will find it much easier to help fix another.

§ Ease of creation: Integrating infrastructure, building connectors to applications, and customizing templates require a higher level of information technology skill than content creation. So reusing that work results in less staff staff hours and lower skill requirements.

§ Rapid time to portal: Since infrastructure integration work has already been done and many design elements are pre-determined, there will be less ramp up time needed before the specifics of the web site can be addressed.

The portal factory concept helps address a common question from portal implementers: “how many portals should an organization have?” This is a trick question since it contains an unstated assumption about whether a portal is just the interface or the set of infrastructure underneath it. If one is referring to the interface, the answer is that there should be as many portals as there are users since portals are personalized websites. But if one is referring to the set of infrastructure beneath the portal – the portal factory - it becomes clear there should be as few as possible, and sometimes one.

I give as a rule of thumb a 3/30/300 model where the realistic goal is to have roughly 3 portal factories (one for customer-facing product sites, one for partner sites, one for intranet sites), assume 30 sub-sites off of each (30 products on a customer site, 30 divisions or org areas on an intranet), and then 300 pages on each of the sub-sites. It depends on business need though of course – the 3 could vary a bit for each company, the 30 more so, and the 300 could vary quite a lot depending on the topic.