Its official Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management

Well, maybe not 'official', but this posting from Jon Husband from the FastForward08 conference (I wish I was attending that one !) mentions many many big names from the knowledge management arena and the fact that they are all starting to agree on this one thing in particular, that so called 'enterprise 2.0' tools such as blogs, wiki's, social bookmarking etc can indeed help to capture and surface an organisations knowledge. Follow the link and read the post.

eRoom is dead, long live.......

........ the 'Knowledge Worker Rich Internet Client' - or something like that anyway !

Prompted by Sharepoint postings by Pie (Embracing Sharepoint, Recipe for Death ?) and Big Men on Content ( Warning to CMS Vendors - Sharepoint doesn't need you) - I was chatting with someone this morning, who used to be (well, still is) a serious eRoom expert, who is now a serious Sharepoint expert - who pointed out that at EMC's European Momentum 07 Documentum user conference in Monaco last November, EMC announced that eRoom 8 (the project formerly codenamed 'Phoenix') is 'dead' (if it had been codenamed Parrot, it would have 'shuffled of its mortal coil....').

Now I missed this because I was attending Janus Boye's CMF07 instead, and non of my colleagues who attended Momentum seemed to have passed this gem on ! When I attended EMC World 2007 in Florida in the early summer of last year, the talk was very much of Phoenix / eRoom 8 and its merger of eRoom with Documentum Content Server. In fact they were saying the new web services stack in Content Server basically made eRoom just an MS ASP.Net front end to Content Server.

Now apparently this was decided to be not good enough, and we are going to get an interim eRoom release and wait until 2009 for something 'much better' - the aforementioned 'Rich Internet Client' for knoweldge workers. I have no inside scoop on what this will be or what it looks like, but apparently there is going to be a presentation on this subject at a big D6 marketing event at Wembley Stadium in London the 28th of Feb. Unfortunately I can't attend that either !

So, in response to 'Pie' and the 'Big Men' - perhaps not everyone has rolled over for Microsoft ???

Chuck Hollis on Social Media

I don't know if your aware of Chuck Hollis of EMC, I have been reading his 'external' o r 'main' blog for sometime, but having followed a link from there, I came across his 'other' blog: A Journey In Social Media - this is fascinating stuff taking the reader along with Chuck as he leads the move to instill social media awareness and use within the worlds sixth biggest software company.

If your not aware of 'A Journey.....' I suggest you go right back to the beggining and follow the story through. What is really interesting in our own internal context is the early postings on EMC's use of its own eRoom's product - one colleague suggesting we lift the text of one posting and make it our 'eRoom usage policy' :-) (p.s. Chuck - we haven't done this !)

I have to say I am happy that we seem to have foreseen most, if not all of the issues Chuck notes, and put policy in place to prevent them. However our use of eRooms is for 'content centric' collaboration (linked to Documentum Content Server) or the more traditional eRoom 'project management' use case, and definately not the social media 'conversational collaboration' use case that Chuck is looking to spread.

I noticed some other postings which themselves suggested the amount of postings about 'collaboration' seem to be on the increase, thus it must be a trendy, or hot topic. Now I know there are arguements that humans have been collaborating since we discovered fire and developed language, but I also think we can't deny that the new 'social networking' dimension and the various "Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0" tools bring some new elements to the mix, and I like Chucks definition of "conversational collaboration" - perhaps its time for a "Collaboration Maturity Model" (oh no, another CMM, only kidding....!) :

Messaging Centric Collaboration (eMail / IM) -> Content Centric Collaboration (DM / ECM) -> Conversation Centric Collab (forums / blogs / wikis)


Chuck's team decided to go with Jive Software's Clearspace - an excellent product by all due accounts, but not one I think we could afford, so whilst we don't get the benefits of the integration, we are developing 'skins' for our internal WordPress, MediaWiki and PHPForums systems to give as common a user experience as we can.

iPhone for business use

Not entirely an ECM topic, but to be honest I am getting a tad weary of reading analysts and pundits putting the iPhone down and saying it can't be used for 'business' because it does not have 3G etc, so I have decided to blurt out my thoughts on the subject.

Many seem to think the iPhone could never be used for business as it does not have 3G and because Apple have not released the SDK yet, so 'business' apps won't run on it. What applications are they getting at exactly ? I own a brand new Toshiba Portege 3G capable 'Windows Smart Phone' and an iPhone. Which one crashes, hanges, has various 'foibles' * that I have to put up with ? Well it aint the Apple 'toy' ! Which has the biggest and best screen and one of the most useable UI paradigms and user experiences ever - well its not the Windows powered device thats for sure.

However everyone seems to think the inability to receive 'pushed' Exchange email or run specialist apps means the iPhone is not a serious business device. Have any of these people ever connected by free "coffee shop" wi-fi sat down and used a 'real' browser on good size screen ? The only reason I have an iPhone is because it was part of the great 'Office 2.0' experiment at last years conference of the same name. Specialist apps were written for the conference and used to prove the utility of the mobile web paradigm. So, I can understand the complaints about lack of 3G, but as I understand it public (even free) wi-fi connectivity is a lot more prevalent in North America than it is here in the U.K.

Its all about 'web 2.0', 'office 2.0' and 'enterprise 2.0' ! Yep, it doesn't have a hardware keyboard, but I have 'live blogged' from conferences, fill in web forms, used Outlook Web Access as well as the built in Gmail, etc etc the list goes; all with the on screen keyboard - its 'good enough' for a mobile device of this size and form factor. As for the user experience - well my 4 1/2 year old son loves to use my iPhone - he can look up the weather in Toronto, find clips of Lego Knights on YouTube and do his ' 2 + 2 ' on the calculator. I know 44 year olds who can't wrap their heads round Smart Phone interface !

So can someone please tell me categorically with a good argument, why you can't use an iPhone for 'business' use - please ? Either that, or for goodness sake shut up !

* = Foibles that include not telling me when I have messages, not vibrating when its set to, not turning off silent mode when you try to, and on and on.....

ECM and BPM

So, on Friday I had a good long 'futures' session with our University Secretary, our equivalent of CEO, CIO and Chief Legal Council all rolled into one. We were strategising as I will be leaving the my current employer at the end of my contract on the 30th of April, as I am emmigrating to Canada, but the ECM Programme here will continue, so there was plenty to talk about.

Of particular interest though was the interplay between our ECM efforts, as part of overall information management, and what is normally characterised as 'Business Process Management'. Of course I can not going to go into details of what we discussed, but the overall concept was one of ECM and BPM being different sides of the same coin - nothing new there you might be saying, but for our organisation, taking that view is a somewhat radical, and of course necessary if we want to move forward. For example, we have a few big, inhouse developed systems which have some built in workflow, and at least one division which has mapped its processes to the n'th degree (only to find no one follows them.....), but a lot of units do not have very good documentation for thier 'as is' processes and this has come to the fore as our computing services divsion looks at what we can do with the tools available (the EMC Documentum Business Process Management suite).

So, it will be interesting to see the differences in the context of the particular business units, and which takes priority, the information or the process. Of course for some outcomes, the process will remain human oriented and ad hoc, more about collaboration. For these use cases the ability to subscribe to content, to use built in threaded discussions, to receive notifications and alerts etc is more important than 'traditional' aspects of BPM, such as whole process encompasing workflows.

One good thing, the 'boss' has "unfrozen" a post for an ECM Programme specific Business Process Analyst - which means my colleagues will not have to rely on just my experience (and what I learnt on my AIIM BPM Specialist course).