How Star Trek Informs SharePoint Governance Models

October 30, 2009 at 2:55 pm | In Fun, Governance, Microsoft SharePoint, portals | Leave a Comment

I just got back from an onsite visit to help a client work through their SharePoint governance issues, which includes talking about picking the appropriate spot on the governance continuum.  This is almost always some form of federation.  My definition of federation is “Groups in an organization recognize a central authority’s right to set high-level policy but retain the freedom to make their own decisions within the bounds of that policy.”

I’ve been asked before if federation can exist without a central authority.  I realize in some technical domains the word “federation” is used that way, like with P2P federation.  But for this domain, federation does imply a central authority. 

When talking about federation and governance, my model is federalism, which the U.S. was founded on.  Wikipedia calls federalism “is a political philosophy in which a group of members are bound together (Latin: foedus, covenant) with a governing representative head.” That’s how I seem to remember it from Social Studies class too, although that was a long time ago. 

For final proof, please note the definition of perhaps the best known, most advanced federation: The United Federation of Planets.  According to the Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki: “The United Federation of Planets (abbreviated as UFP and commonly referred to as The Federation) was an interstellar federal republic, composed of planetary governments that agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a single central government based on the principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality, and to share their knowledge and resources in peaceful cooperation and space exploration.” 

BTW – Apparently the UFP had an anthem too.  Click here to hear it.

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

Information Overload Movie Clip

August 25, 2009 at 10:29 am | In Attention Management, Fun, Information Work, communication | Leave a Comment

Picture this situation: a businessperson on a plane checks her email inbox on her laptop and finally goes bonkers at how the emails keep piling up and never end.  The constrained ability to move on the plane and similar lack of control over incoming email leads to a sudden desire to escape.  A nearby passenger tries to shake this woman to her senses, but then another passenger wants to try too.  Now, here comes a professional information overload pundit!  The pundit comes over to shake her up and try to get her to snap out of it by realizing what “we” are doing to “ourselves” with this constant need to communicate.  But then more pundits show up – a book author here, a consultant there, a blogger/columnist next – all trying to outdo themselves on how to shake this woman to her senses.

Well, you don’t need to picture this in your head.  Just click on the link below for an accurate recreation of this event.

Get a Hold of Yourself!

Get a Hold of Yourself!

Yeah, it’s just like that.  While they all seem to want to help, the sheer mass of them and desire to out-shake the last pundit makes them seem a bit too gleeful for the opportunity to slap her around.  It’s not tough to slap someone around on information overload – most people are guilty of poor attention management processes and most people feel info-stress from time to time.  It turns out, it’s so easy to slap people around on information overload that it’s actually fun – even cathartic! If only her seatmate would have tried to talk to her instead of slapping her down, this might have ended better …

Out of the Mouths of Babes (or Ad Randomizers)

August 17, 2009 at 8:54 am | In Fun | Leave a Comment

Once again the contextual ads in Bloglines reveal their wisdom …

twitter dummies

Microsoft Posts Profit Decrease, Ford in the Green for 4Q: Bizarro World Finance

July 24, 2009 at 11:58 am | In Fun, Microsoft | Leave a Comment

Does this feel like you’ve stepped into an alternate reality when you open the Wall St. Journal and the top 2 stories on the Marketplace page are “Microsoft Profit Skids 29%” and “Ford Navigates Path to Profitability”?  Gotta love the automotive analogy with “skids” vs. “navigates”.

BTW – I haven’t checked the historical quarterly data, but I don’t think a quarterly loss on OS right before a new version of Windows comes out is unusual (although 29% may be high).  This is the time of the highest expenses (as all hands are on deck for development and marketing expenses are gearing up) and lowest revenue (as buyers hold off until the new version).  Same goes for Office (down 13%) right before the new version of Office 2010 comes out in the first half of 2010. Still, Microsoft’s expectations were off.

Online you can see the stories, although not the comparative “skids” vs. “navigates” in the titles and telling downward red arrows for Microsoft and a green bar for Ford.  Here’s the link (but it’s only good for today, Friday 7/24/09 since it updates the the current day’s headlines each day).

MSFT down FORD up

Content Globalization Report Now Available in Capsule Form

June 4, 2009 at 7:46 am | In Content Management, Fun, Globalization, Recession, wordle | Leave a Comment

I wrote a blog posting over at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog that answered the Global Watchtower’s pronouncement of “companies claiming that ‘it just isn’t worth it’ to have websites in other languages.”  My response is that I suspect this is due to tighter economic conditions that require harder business cases coming up against web localization efforts that have easily quantified costs but benefits that are difficult to measure.

If you want more detail, you can read that blog post here.  What I want to do here is provide this Wordle chart of my report “ECM for Translation and Localization: Raising IT’s Globalization Fluency“.  This report is only available to clients, but I can boil down all 45 pages of it into one handy chart on “content globalization”.  It’s like getting your knowledge in capsule form!  Click for a larger view.

wordle globalization report sm

Lord of the Portals

May 1, 2009 at 10:11 am | In Fun, Governance, portals | 2 Comments

I was speaking recently with a client who has three portals in house (IBM, SAP, and Microsoft) and was asking how normal that is and how to integrate them.  This is a very common question as well as very common combo of portals.

My advice continues to be the same.  It’s perfectly normal for a large organization to have several portal products around.  What is best (if possible) is to anoint one as the “enterprise portal” that acts as an umbrella above the others and then strictly define the roles of the other portals using governance.  This rationalizes the role of the other portals and makes sure people know where they should be posting and looking for information.  Certainly having a common search engine that can go across all the portals to find content is helpful, but you don’t want to use that as a crutch for lack of governance.  When you have multiple portals, integration is best handled by selecting separate, third party products for supporting services (e.g., web content management, collaboration rooms) if they will need to be exposed across all the portals, and use web services as an integration mechanism, although portal standards like WSRP may help.

After I got off the phone it clicked that this advice fit a very familiar pattern: it can be easily reworded to fit the inscription on the One Ring from Lord of the Rings! So here’s a link to the original, and here’s it is paraphrased as portal guidance:

One Portal to rule them all,
One Search Engine to find things,
One Statement of Governance to rationalize them all
and in the darkness integrate them using web services and emerging portal standards.

OK, so I’m not a poet.

geek^2, over and out.

Update: Instructional picture added below

portal governance lotr

Design Your Own Conference

April 23, 2009 at 3:07 pm | In Analyst biz, Fun | Leave a Comment

I just blogged the other day about vendor conferences.  While it was written after going to a an IBM Lotusphere event, the issue was a more general one about whether conferences should preach to the converted or try to win over new converts.  There are actually many such decisions that need to be made when a vendor (or analyst firm or independent conference committee) designs a conference. 

So, I decided to put together a list of the tradeoffs that need to be decided.  There’s no right and wrong here. Vendors have to be profitable and want to get their message across, and attendees need to watch expenses but want to learn in an enjoyable atmosphere.

I’ve attached a handy “design your own conference!” guide that includes my default positions for where I’d put the sliders if I’m attending a vendor conference.  I go to a lot of different conferences as attendee and speaker so my view may be skewed a bit.  Let me know what you think!

 

Design your own conference

Productivity Future Vision

April 3, 2009 at 3:37 pm | In Attention Management, Fun, Information Work, User experience, collaboration, communication, presence, social software, usability | 1 Comment

Peter O’Kelly’s blog pointed me to a Productivity Future Vision video from Microsoft Office Labs.  Highly recommended.

A few observations:

  • Airline seats in the future will be wider and have more legroom, even when you aren’t in first class (the seats on the plane don’t look like big, puffy, overwrought first class seats).  Furthermore, they will be clean and not have potato chips from the previous occupant smeared on them.
  • People will use their electronics calmly and be nice to each other.  People in the video seem to calmly make a few gestures, then relax and smile.  It seems that productivity expectations in the future have remained about constant with today rather than increasing along with the improvement in the capabilities of their applications.  The time saved through their more productive interfaces has been returned to the worker to allow them to stop and smell the roses instead of their employers and clients demanding more from them. This will allow people in the future to relax and use their new wondrous equipment in serene happiness.
  • Devices get thinner and more translucent.  But while you may think holding remotes that are as thin as a piece of glass and typing on hard, flat surfaces would be uncomfortable, they will actually be pleasantly ergonomic because people in the future will have dainty hands and features.  There seem to be no obese, elderly, overly tall, or overly short future workers.
  • There is no need for paper in the future, so working environments remain clean and clutter free.  Come to think of it, there seems to be no need for food, conference SWAG, books, printers, or desk lights either.  This explains the lack of garbage cans in the rooms shown in the video.
  • Office workers will not create content anymore, such as typing long streams of text or slaving over the graphics in the beautiful interfaces they use.  They simply do a few manipulations to content that already exists.  Presumably a new underclass of information workers (I’ll call them “information morlocks“) slave away underground crafting detailed content that the surface dwellers can then use through simple, intuitive, tap-exhale-and-smile interfaces.

OK, a few serious observations:

  • I like the thought leadership I see here.
  • The basis for some truly wonderous technology exists today, such as the machine translation, digital ink, mobile phone projectors, and OLED displays shown in the video.
  • Interfaces with touch and gestures can be much more natural than keyboards and mice.
  • Collaborative workspaces can be made more natural and incorporate many other useful technologies.

While innovating user interfaces and display devices have great gee-whiz factors, I’m really looking forward to much more mundane improvements in productivity.  To name just a few:

  • I want to see content that is created in easy-to-use tools that scale to the needs of the user and produce content that is easily componentized, tagged, reused, and reassembled. 
  • I want to see contextual meaning to be captured and guidance provided through integrated ontology and machine memory during authoring to enable better translation and localization.
  • I’d like to see powerful and consistent reviewing and commenting features across all productivity tools that can discover implicit collaborative authoring processes through observation. 
  • I’d like to see rich presence information that improves productivity by inserting routing and channel switching to messages that determine the most appropriate way to deliver a message while taking both sender’s and receiver’s contextual preferences into account.
  • I’d like to see operating systems and productivity applications working together to create more interruptable environments that fit the time sliced, interruptable nature of the workplace. They would allow better bookmarking that can save retrieve the exact state of applications and their relations to each other, easing the burden of remembering what activities were in motion during interruptions and reducing time to resuming work.  Snapshots of window layouts and application states would allow easy, instantaneous switching between multiple workstreams.
  • I’d like to see wearable electronics that utilize personal rich presence, mobile technology, and social networking profiles to alert people to others in their vicinity that share interests (or other programmable searches) and are open to serendipitous conversation.

I might be waiting a while …

An Irrevocable, Perpetual, Non-exclusive, Transferable, Fully paid, Worldwide License to Kiss My A** …

February 9, 2009 at 1:22 pm | In Fun, Legal, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

I had a feeling of deja vu when reading Stowe Boyd’s posting (quoting Legal Andrew quoting) the Facebook terms:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This seemed really familiar, so I did a search on this rather unique set of words and was amazed at how many places use the exact same phrase. Here’s just a few:

The statement is so one-sided in its application that I would be curious how many judges and juries have knocked it down over the years.  The shame is that this kind of phrase acts as a landmine – it can sit there quietly for years, but then explode one day if the company decides to reuse some IP that the original poster (who probably didn’t read the long legal disclaimers) didn’t even think could be reused.

One company probably used this phrase first and other lawyers loved it so much they all copied it.  In fact FindLaw publishes it as a sample to be used by others.  Great- spread the joy.  I don’t know who the original lawyer is that came up with that phrasing, but he can’t complain about all the copying since his client probably had an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use it.

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