Penultimate day at the OU

Yep, its finally here, time to leave ! I think this will be saddest I have ever been to leave a job, the OU is a marvellous institution, with some brilliant people, and in terms of ECM, Enteprise Architecture, eBusiness etc it is on the cusp of some serious change, which will make it an even more interesting place to work.

For those of you who are not British, or even if you are but you don't know any of the history of the distance learning University that has according to a recent study, one of the top, most recognisable brands in the UK check out the following pages at the OU web site:

• About the OU - about the mission, ethos and history of the organisation
• Studying at the OU - gateway to all the courses you can take in a huge range of subjects
• Research at the OU - many think of University just in terms of teaching, but it has world class research groups too
  
• OpenLearn - want to try out some courses for free ? OpenLearn has hundreds of OU course units which you can sign up for, all free. Forget MIT Open CourseWare, this is how it should be done... :-)

Of course its not all a bed of roses, the Open University suffers like the rest of the UK H.E. sector from a Government which appears to be making up policy on the fly ! When it was originally set up as the "University of the airwaves" in the early 1970's, it was heavily funded and subsidised. Although still in reciept of heavy central gov. grants, the system these days is very complex, and as we have seen recently, can change at the whim of Whitehall functionaries. Part of the issue has always been internal though, the tension between the academic side of things, the view of a university as a seat of learning, and the business side of things where we operate on a scale other UK universities can not contemplate, with hundreds of thousands of students, warehouses, call centres, data centres and a publishing operation more akin to Elsevier or Reed-McGraw. Personally, I side with the 'business people' but when it comes down to it, it is a University !

I got my BSc (Honours) in Computing from the OU before I came to work here. It took me seven years of working in my own time, weekends and evenings, and if it was not for the OU I would not be in the line of work I am now, I probably would not have had the eductional or work experience points required to get into Canada etc. Whilst working here, I continued to work in my own time to gain an MBA.

So, bottom line, its a great institution, I fervently hope it can embrace change and become a little more agile, but for the break it has given me and probably hundreds of thousands of others, I surely hope it goes onto be the world leading distance learning institution for a long time to come.

Enterprise use of Wiki's - new research report

My old mate Janus, and his colleague Dorthe have released a new report on the use of Wiki's inside the enterprise. You can read about it on the J.Boye site here: Wiki in the Enterprise - a new way of working

I have not had a chance to disect the report fully, as I have less than a week left here at the OU, I am a tad busy doing 'handovers' to various people.

However two of the highlights do not surpise me in the slightest:

1. Wikis are not always that easy to use ! Although I work for a top university, we have individuals who's IT skills are frankly non-existent, try teaching them a wiki markup.......

2. Its all about organisational culture. Oh yes, "what do you mean that someone else can edit my page and modify what I write..!" etc etc You absolutely must not ignore the cultural implications.

Biggest use of Wiki's in this organisation (that I know about) - techie development teams, who are very happy with technology, who have a culture of open sharing within the team, and who find wiki's a useful adjunct to the software development process.

Oracle expands its ECM offerings - updated

So it looks like Oracle is catching up with EMC and IBM by fleshing out their ECM portfolio with the news that a new 'Universal Online Archive' product will join the Fusion middleware portfolio, alongside the Universal Content Management and Universal Records Management products (those formerly known as Stellent).

There is also an email archiving element to this release, so it really is widening out their portfolio to match that of the big boys. Personally I was always impressed with the Stellent product set, so it will be interesting to see how both current Oracle users, but more importantly new customers buy into the Oracle vision for Information Lifecycle Management.

Update: See Alan Pelz-Sharpe's take on this at CMS Watch

New country, new job - its official !

My new employers have posted my bio on their website, so I am very pleased to announce that from the middle of May, I will be working for Prescient Digital Media in Toronto as a business consultant.

As well as contributing to Prescient's body of material on our main site, and probably adding the occaisonal article to the Intranet Blog I will continue to post to this site, hopefully more regularily once we are settled in our new home in Mississuaga. The usual caveat will continue to apply, that opinions published on my blog are my own and not those of my employer etc.

So, exciting times, new job, new house (not yet !) and new city, new country ! Let no one ever say I am averse to change :-)

I am looking forward to integrating into the Prescient family, and helping our customers with ECM, Intranet, web content management and search related projects. I will be sad to leave the amazing institution that is the Open University, and will probably do a longer 'official goodbye' posting at some point.

But for now lets look forward, so if your reading this and might be in the market for some assistance with your intranet or content management strategy, head on over to Prescients site and see what we can do for you !