Search Terms That Pointed to KnowledgeForward in 2007

December 31, 2007 at 8:17 am | In Fun | No Comments

Since New Year’s is tonight, I thought it would be fun and informative to publish some of the search terms that people have used in 2007 to find this blog. WordPress lets me see what search terms people used to find my blog. so I find it interesting to scan it from time to time to see what zeitgeist I’m connecting to, especially when its inadvertent.

Here are some of the more interesting searches that have found me (honestly!):

  • fired for turning off Blackberry vacation
  • portal are dead (multiple searches)
  • Jingle Bells metal version
  • chart of dwarfs in america
  • mucketymucks definition
  • feeling disconnected from it all (sad that multiple people were searching on this. Sadder still that my blog probably offered them no solace)
  • People who behave rudely at social gatherings (I’m still struggling with why my name popped up with this search query)
  • virtual monkey,virtual torture, etc. (it’s a bit disturbing that this is not a one time search - it’s shown up consistently over a long period of time)
  • computers hate me, my computer hates me, computer hate
  • weight management, weight loss
  • bell bottoms back in style
  • cootie shot pic
  • sleek kills
  • managers cant afford to be moral
  • 50000 FEET=?KM

Happy New Year!

-Craig Roth

Content Globalization: John Yunker Predicts

December 26, 2007 at 4:03 pm | In Content Management, Globalization | 1 Comment

John Yunker points out a driver for content globalization (web in particular) that I hadn’t glommed onto:

The weak US dollar is helping companies weather a poor local economy by selling their goods abroad. And this year I’ve noticed a number of companies boosting their Web globalization budgets to expand into new markets or improve their current localized Web sites. All signs point to 2008 being a very busy year for translators and Web localization teams.

I agree and, in addition, I don’t see why this has to be limited to web globalization. I believe all types of content (printed manuals, books, packaging, etc.) will see a similar increase in globalization.

This quote came from John’s top 10 Web Globalization predictions. From my point of view, there’s a key one missing from this list - a shift wherein enterprise IT (often clueless on content globalization until now) becomes part of the solution. John mentions this in a November blog post however, where he says

I believe the changes are due to the simple fact that the translation agencies are no longer leading the industry. The technologists have taken over, and they have a different vision for the future.

By technologists, I’m referring to software vendors, such as Idiom and Language Weaver and Clay Tablet. I’m also referring to the buyers of translation services, buyers who have seen how technology can make their lives easier and want to see their vendors make full use of this technology – from hosted project management software to machine translation.

While linguists focus on the “art” of translation, technologists focus on the “science” of translation.

John feels the machine translation vendors will make out very well due to this trend. True, but I think vendors in all stages of the enterprise content management (ECM) lifecycle will benefit from content creation to content management to analytics.

We Learn Through Play … But Only When It’s Fun

December 18, 2007 at 2:45 pm | In Gaming, virtual worlds | No Comments

The MIT Technology Review reported today on a failed experiment at using virtual worlds for educational purposes.  While there is certainly a long list of failed attempts to use games to educate, this one comes from an unlikely source: Ed Castronova.  Castronova wrote the book on virtual worlds (literally: Synthetic Worlds is a very good book on the topic), and even covered the “economics of fun”.  But what he found is that 1) a game has to be fun to attract players, 2) reaching critical mass in terms of the number of players is critical to launching a virtual world, and 3) creating a good virtual world still costs a lot of money.

According to the article (Virtual Labor Lost) Castranova says:

“I was talking to people like it was going to be Shakespeare: World of Warcraft, but the money you need for that is so much more,” he says. Castronova also says that he was taking on too much by attempting to combine education and research. He believes that his experience should serve as a warning for other academics.

I wouldn’t take this as meaning that serious games cannot work if they are not fun.  Simulation and training exercises can use game-like elements without being “fun” and still be useful.  But it seems Castronova found that it’s important to distinguish between the serious gaming situations that require a major dose of fun to be successful and those that don’t.

The Application Infrastructure Dilemma: How to Assess Risk When You Don’t Know the App

December 13, 2007 at 12:56 pm | In Content Management, collaboration, communication | No Comments

Yesterday I posted about the importance of recognizing how a lot of the communication, collaboration, and content technology that is implicitly seen as an application is really infrastructure (Everything’s Now Infrastructure! Where’s My App?).  Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it is infrastructure in application clothing - which can be just as dangerous.

The implications of the special nature of application infrastructure (as opposed to pure infrastructure or pure applications) became even more clear when a client asked about doing a risk assessment on Microsoft Office.  Remember that Office is more than Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.  It also includes InfoPath, Access, SharePoint, and many other products.  There’s a lot more variability to what end-user facing collaboration and content creation/management tools can be used for than there is for back end infrastructure such as a router.  Or even pure applications like an accounting system where the application is known.  There’s a level of indirection introduced by application infrastructure in that you first have to determine what the user will create with it, then the risk of that.  Think of the enormous span of artifacts that can be created by these systems:

  • End user databases and end user db applications with Microsoft Access
  • Portals and all kinds of extranet and Internet websites
  • All types documents that may contain sensitive data or macros
  • Workflow that can kick off automated transactions (such as approving invoices or links to payment systems

Then consider that the scope of users who can create applications, websites, and content with these systems is pretty much all encompassing (all information workers have access to Office in most organizations), and the idea of assessing the risks is daunting to say the least!

I have no answer or even framework for addressing the problem at this point.  I’ll be involved in some ongoing research into this topic and will post a summary of findings when ready.  Until then, if any readers have encountered this issue - particularly in regards to a risk assessment - please drop me a line.

Everything’s Now Infrastructure! Where’s My App?

December 12, 2007 at 1:31 pm | In Content Management, Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration, communication | 3 Comments

Burton Group was founded as a special kind of analyst firm - one that is specialized in infrastructure and is able to go deep technically.  Accordingly, our Collaboration and Content Strategies service was founded on the premise that collaboration, content, and communication have become infrastructure as well.

Many users still think of email as an application.  Part of it is.  But the vendors realized a while ago they needed to carve out the parts of email beyond POP3 and IMAP4 that should go on the server, named them Domino and Exchange, and now they are treated like infrastructure with service levels, backup/recovery, contingency plans, farm scaling, and operations-minded folks in charge of it all. 

Well, Microsoft Office is an app right?  Sure, until Microsoft realized they needed to carve out the parts of Excel that could go on the server and created the Excel Server part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.  A Powerpoint server is rumored to be in the works too.  And Office Business Applications (OBAs) are being created on the principle that Office is infrastructure that can be reused.  It can be repurposed to produce applications that treat Office as infrastructure, connected to line of business apps, rather than a hermetically sealed application.

Well, SharePoint is an app right?  Bingo!  That’s where this gets you into trouble. It has a purpose built front end and a wide and deep pool of infrastructure underneath it.  When the purpose built part doesn’t do exactly what you want, it can be a long fall down to the deep pool underneath.  SharePoint buyers should understand that as much as the initial demos look like an application, really they are buying collaboration and content infrastructure. If you go into SharePoint thinking it’s an app because the demos or out-of-the-box test install you did seemed to do what you want, you can be very surprised when all of a sudden this starts looking like infrastructure.  You quickly move from being an application owner to an infrastructure owner and those are very different hats to wear. 

As the infrastructure nature of communication, collaboration, and content (I’m including content creation in this category, not just what WCM or DM tools do) is being properly realized, we’re seeing a separation of what used to be considered “applications” into infrastructure with an application on top.  The infrastructure parts keeps getting thicker (such as email going from POP3 to Domino and Exchange).  Accordingly, there needs to be more awareness - from end users and from vendors - of how the transition is made from application to infrastructure. 

The transition is difficult, but doesn’t need to be as painful as it has been.  Not if vendors recognize quickly what parts of their apps need to be pulled out and treated as scalable, reliable, reusable infrastructure and are clear about the depth and solidity (how far are you likely to get before needing to call for a team of coders, is this supported, etc) of the applications layers they provide on top.  Enterprises need to set up management processes and organizational structures to catch new infrastructure as it sinks from the application layer down into their domain and to understand the difference between infrastructure capabilities surfaced in a demo sort of UI and real applications.

Infrastructure has special characteristics that applications do not have and that can stymie implementers of communication, collaboration, and content technology (such as discussion groups, document libraries, portals, and wikis) that seems like an application at first:

  • Infrastructure (with regards to the kind of communication, collaboration, and content software we’re talking about here) needs an application to be useful.  Will a little bit of customization and tweaking to the out-of-the-box UI and templates be sufficient to act as an application?  If not, who is going to design and build your application now that you have the infrastructure?
  • Infrastructure is meant to be reused and repurposed, so who is going to own something that will be leveraged by a multitude of groups?  Probably not the first team that wants an application - if that’s the case it will be game to see who can stand on the sidelines the longest and let the first, most desperate group that needs an app take the plunge and wind up owning and paying for the infrastructure the groups on the sidelines will now leverage. 
  • Infrastructure needs to be managed.  It needs availability (according to negotiated service levels [SLAs]), contingency planning, backup/recovery. This is stuff that tends to be considered boring and “not in my job description” for programmers and power users.

So the next time someone shows you the interface for a great looking communication, collaboration, or content tool, think about stepping back and saying “That’s great infrastructure.  Now who builds the app on top of it and who manages the infrastructure?”

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

How to Pilot a New Communication Channel? Have Something to Say

December 10, 2007 at 11:27 am | In Attention Management, collaboration, communication | No Comments

I initiated my attention management and information overload coverage because, in addition to my own research as an analyst, I am also service director for a group of analysts that cover communication, collaboration, and content management technology. Many of the technologies we talk about are relatively new and can be very useful in the right situations. But with information workers already feeling overloaded, every new communication channel or collaborative workspace starts with a strike against it since even a useful new tool just feels like one more thing to have to check. You have to spend attention to save attention. But risk aversion and a lack of attention to spend impels many information workers to ignore new tools and keep plugging away in the same way they always have.

Accordingly, IT organizations are often encouraged to go slow with any new communication or collaboration tool and pilot it to build consensus around its usefulness before rolling it out to the organization. Some tools do eventually gain grass roots support that way and go on to greatness in the annals of corporate history. But I want to propose a twist on that advice - to pilot new channels or workspaces when you have something major to apply them to. This could mean holding onto a new tool for 6 months or more if that’s what it takes. The idea is to immediately imprint its usefulness on the user the first time and to make its initial use unavoidable.

There is precedent for new communication channels only taking off when they have something to say. Take CNN and the Gulf War - CNN had been around for 10 years when the Gulf War started in the summer of 1990 and, according to Wikipedia, “catapulted the network past the “big three” American networks for the first time in its history, largely due to an unprecedented, historical scoop: CNN was the only news outlet with the ability to communicate outside Iraq during the initial hours of the American bombing campaign, with live reports from the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad by reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett.” All of the news channels had improved communications capabilities that hadn’t yet been tested at that point, but CNN’s was the best (at 24 hours it was persistent and they had invested in good infrastructure, even if they underpaid their reporters). But it wasn’t until they had something to really say - an event - that people adapted to the new communication channel.

This applies to a new topic as well. I’ve given my presentation on “Which Tool to Use” twice now and both times a question was asked about whether an e-mail or similar communication should go out to announce the new guidance on which communication tool to use under given circumstances. The answer was a definite no - because the message would be ignored by so many people that it would strain the credibility of the sender and make future attempts to offer guidance more difficult. If the guidance is attached to another event of substance - such as announcing a new IM system or blog capability - then it has a better chance of being heard since it’s attached to a concrete event.

To offer a negative (and personal) example, some piece of software on my work PC has been giving off an alarm sound about twice a day. I’ll be sitting here and a “da-DING” sound comes out and … nothing happens. Nothing flashes, nothing comes up on the screen. I have no way to tell what application is trying to alert me. It’s as if a general announcement is randomly made every few hours saying “pay attention - check things”. It’s an alert with absolutely nothing to say. Debugging a “da-DING” is very difficult. And it’s quite annoying.

Applying this concept with a corporate reorganization would be a perfect opportunity to provide something to say to go along with introducing a new tool. Whether it’s a new intranet, wiki, President’s blog, or web conferencing, making it the primary source of new information about this important event that people care about can show how the new channel or workspace works when it really has something to convey. And it will be doing this better than the old tools could. Tying a new collaboration or communication tool to an event has many advantages over the standard piloting technique as the user sees the tool immediately applied in a useful situation.

Tracking Information Workers For Their Own Good

December 6, 2007 at 4:15 pm | In 1652, Attention Management, Web 2.0, collaboration | 1 Comment

I talked to the folks at Eluma today and got into an interesting discussion about how much people (enterprise information workers was the immediate concern) want their activities tracked and how much to let them know what is being tracked. Eluma is a web organizer (place to categorize and store the stuff you find on the web) with some social software capabilities underneath.  The conversation was around “Are people scared of all the things your computer keeps track of on you?  Should a product leverage tracking information to help a user find relevant information and, if so, how do you word that so it doesn’t sound like an invasion of privacy?”

This was a timely discussion for me since just yesterday I wrote a posting on Could Attention Data Become a Record? that introduced a fantasy scenario where a corporate executive insisting on innocence about malfeasance on his watch could be undone by all the tracking and attention data on his PC. 

There’s no doubt that privacy and web tracking are issues getting a lot of attention these days.  It’s fair to say the majority of my readers are not embezzling millions of dollars and trying to deny knowledge of the situation, but even us law-abiding folks don’t feel right about being tracked - particularly if we haven’t been told and don’t see the value ourselves.

If you want to see how concerns about web tracking are on the front burner just open up today’s Wall St. Journal.  On the front page of the Marketplace section (page B1) is an article called Watching What You See on the Web which describes how NebuAd helps an ISP to do “deep-packet inspection” by looking inside the packets sent by the user and selling an aggregate view of the user to advertisers who will target messages based upon the profile. 

Then turn a few pages and on page B4 you see an article called Facebook Rethinks Tracking which describes how Mark Zuckerberg has apologized about their Beacon program which enabled friends to get messages based on their web activity.

Personally, my focus is on enterprise information workers.  Accordingly, my interest is more in how tracking information and attention data can be used to help information workers to pull information that may be of interest closer to their focus and push other information further back.  To me, I think the keys to using tracking information for the benefit of information workers are:

  • Being very clear about what’s being tracked
  • Allowing opt-in or out of what’s tracked. As Evan Schuman of eWeek wrote ”a little more selling of the benefits and permission-getting might have made a world of difference.”
  • Breaking open the “black box” (like a spam filter lets you check what it’s blocking) to check what it’s deciding

There is a line beyond which web users do not want to be tracked and the industry and users are feeling out where that line is drawn. As .com companies like Facebook try to cash in on their place as the center of conversations to monetize that stream, we’re going to see more companies stepping over that line through carelessness or to test the waters.  Will that line be tested and pushed back over time as other etiquette/decency issues like violence and suggestive behavior on TV shows has been?  Or will laws be enacting that equate deep packet inspection with wiretapping over the phone?

What is certain is that Google’s success at monetizing its attention stream has launched a gold rush.  Investors are demanding a payday from social sites that have succeeded in becoming free hubs for facilitating the buzz of blog postings, ratings, bookmarks, and music preferences.  And advertisers are proving willing to at least test the waters by showing up at the front door of these companies with bags of cash to get at the tracking data.  There aren’t too many companies out there like Craigslist that can resist this kind of temptation.

Could Attention Data Become a Record?

December 5, 2007 at 10:56 am | In Attention Management | 3 Comments

I was talking to Andre Bonvanie of Newsgator who spoke at our conference in Barcelona and he pointed me to a blog entry from Nick Bradbury: New Attention Report Coming in FeedDemon 2.6.

This got me thinking about some of the implications of having attention data around.  Here’s an interesting thought experiment: what if information like this was commonly kept and a lawsuit occurred?  Would attention have to be treated as a record and subject to records management policies regarding classification, storage, access, and archiving?  Could it be discovered in a legal action?  Think about how would the standard “I didn’t know” executive defense of Berney Ebbers (WorldCom) or Richard Scrushy (HealthSouth) stand up if attention data was available!

Here’s a fantasy courtroom transcript to show how this could play out:

Prosecutor to CEO: Were you aware of the options repricing, loan forgiveness, impending fall of stock prices, and other shady dealings that were going on?

CEO: No.  I’m very busy and a lot of things pass my desk … blah blah blah … I trust my executives to do their jobs and, in this case, so-and-so violated that trust … yada yada yada … I’m not the numbers guy - I leave the financials up to my CFO …

Prosecutor: (turns on video projector hooked up to laptop and walks through a series of reports) Then why does this inbox analytics report from your PC show that you spent 8 minutes on average reading emails with the words “loan forgiveness”? 

CEO: Ummm …

Prosecutor: Why does your browsing history show you looked at two dozen websites regarding options law? 

CEO: Well, I must have clicked on the wrong …

Prosecutor: Then why does your search history show you did multiple searches on “options repricing” the day before the repricing occurred? 

CEO: I’m sure that can be explained …

Prosecutor: And why does your OPML file show you subscribed to three sets of financial reports if you claim to not care?  Why are the unread markers on those reports cleared if you didn’t click on them? And why does this social map show that you had very tight connections and frequently exchanged messages with the foreign affiliates you claim to not know about?  Why do these content analytics show you read four internal white papers about the declining revenues and the implications?  Why does your APML file show you have had a sky-high 0.91 level of interest in “stock manipulation”?

CEO: (sweating, trembling, in angry voice reminiscent of a Perry Mason breakdown) All right, I did it!  Don’t ya see - I had to do it … the pressure!  (begins sobbing. baliff handcuffs CEO and takes him away)

This is a fantasy of course, but as more technologies allow one to track attention data such as social relationships, email analytics, content analytics, web browsing history it’s only a matter of time before some of this information winds up in a courtroom.  Among a lack of written evidence that an executive knew what was going on, how do you know they were aware of a situation?  You can’t read their mind, but you can mind what they read.  That’s a scary proposition for any executive under fire that is trying to blame their underlings as rogue operators.

Introductory Portal Strategy Questions

December 4, 2007 at 1:26 pm | In portals | No Comments

I was recently pulled in as an advisor to a portal strategy consulting project and came up with a quick five-minute questionnaire to get a feel for the situation before our first meeting.  I thought it would be helpful to post these questions up as anyone being thrown into a portal strategy project should have these answers lined up before the initial meeting or get to them in the first five minutes. 

There are tons of question one could ask of course, but in my experience these are the ones that result in the most useful answers most often.  So if I only have five minutes to do a kind of end-user portal request for information (RFI), this is what I would ask.  Once I have the answers to these questions I can engage in a useful conversation about any number of portal strategy dimensions (product selection, infrastructure impact assessment, portal timing and roadmap, portal requirements gathering, portal pricing, portal consolidation and rationalization, portal business justification, etc.).

For information gathering about a portal strategy project I want to know:

Introductory

  • What do you mean by portal? To Burton Group, portal products are website factories that aggregate a wide variety of content to deliver dynamic, contextual websites. They provide their users (website builders) with a common set of back-end integration and front-end contextual, dynamic displays that can be used to quickly create websites on a similar foundation. All the websites will share the same infrastructure integration, look and feel, development tools, and management UIs. (from the CCS document “Communication and Collaboration in Portals: Half the Battle”)

Business

  • What is the scope of the portal in question (e.g., just intranet, just a dealer extranet, just as a front end for Oracle Applications, intranet for Division X, intranet for the whole company except our subsidiary ABC which was just acquired) and where does it fit into the other portals the company has?
  • What is driving you to revisit your strategy at this time? Pain points? New initiatives that need to be supported?
  • How much funding have you been given to support the new strategy? Or is the current project being undertaken to determine the funding required?
  • Are there specific metrics that you are aiming to improve? Have they been benchmarked before starting on this project?
  • What products are currently in use today (describe what each is being used for and number of users) and which are being evaluated for the future?
  • What is the timeframe for the portal project (or is determining the timeframe part of this project)?
  • Is this project dependant on any other projects underway or being planned? Do other projects underway or being planned depend on this project?
  • Is there a need to build Web 2.0-type end-user content creation and feedback loops into the portal?

Technology

  • How are the portal products you’re currently using working? Are there problems?
  • Portals pre-integrate with a collection of infrastructure services that are surfaced through the portal UI.  These services include security/identity (authentication and authorization via single sign-on and directory), content management (document management and web content management at a minimum), search, business process management and workflow, and application server and development environment (J2EE server or .NET). What do you currently use for these infrastructure services and are they expected to change? 
  • What is the political context that drives usage of the portal products (particularly with regard to overlapping capabilities of multiple incumbent products) and may affect attempts to change the mix? Are there certain products that must automatically be on the shortlist or are not allowed on the shortlist?
  • What is the mix of development skills (Java, .NET) available for the portal effort?
  • Of the many features that portals can provide or integrate (e.g., collaborative workspaces, discussion groups, document libraries, workflow, access to enterprise applications, search, document management, end user web content creation), which are being used? Which are needed for the future?
  • Personalization and context are a foundation of portals. What are the main categories of roles that the portal addresses? Will need to address? How is personalization utilized?
  • Which enterprise applications will need to be surfaced through the portal?
  • Are mobile or offline capabilities important for your user population?
  • Where do you stand with service-oriented architecture?  Composite application development methods?

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