Conversations on Knowledge Managment

As well as interesting stuff going on internally this week, as we move forward with our 'SharePoint for Projects' project, I have been involved in some interesting conversations on Knowledge Management in general across the jolly old blogosphere with two Patrick's, make sure you read down the comments to follow the conversations:

Patrick Walsh at his manIA blog: Knowledge leverage and information creation in the enterprise

Patrick Lambe at his Green Chameleon blog: Memory and Infantilism

Stephen Bounds at his New Agora blog: Facets of Information Management

So I thought I would list some of the other KM related blogs I hit, or subscribe to via their RSS feeds:

Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge

David Gurteen

Bill Ives - Portals and KM

Actually I think what I will do is figure out how to upload my OPML file, or share stuff via Google Reader and link to it here, but in the meanwhile, we have a long weekend coming up in Canada, so keep your fingers crossed for some nice sunshine please :-)

Wikipedia page on 'Knowledge Management'

Books, books, more books, and free books too...

So I am just going to drop some 'authors' names in this post, just to show off that I know them, well I have to admit its not like any of them are Steven King or anything, but......

Martin White clued me in to an excellent new book on Search User Interfaces by Prof. Marti Hearst. Its a 'real' book, printed on paper and all that, but if you click on that title link you can read the entire thing online for free courtesy of Cambridge University Press - bless em' ! In fact his blog includes a posting on how he convinced the publisher to let him do that: http://www.searchuserinterfaces.com/blog/

Now as Martin brought this book to my attention, it is only fair that I bring it to the attention of my 3 regular readers (who probably already know) that Martin is the co-author of a rather spiffing book on search himself: Successful Enterprise Search Management (which is now available on Amazon as well as directly from the publisher).

I would think that if your running an enterprise search team in any organization these two books should definitely be on your shelf.

However my next read, when it arrives in the mail from New Zealand is SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: Using SharePoint to enhance business collaboration by Michael Sampson, who is also the author of Seamless Teamwork.

Seamless Teamwork is on my desk at this very moment (see picture for proof!) but I have to admit by the time I bought it, everyone else had written (rave) reviews, so my aim this time is to get a review of SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration posted in good time. Well, when it arrives........

Totally off the topic of information management and search books, but for Micheal's benefit should he read this, I will qoute a conversation from a certain avaiation podcast I subscribe to:

• Technical Editor: I can never understand who the Australian's think the main threat is anyway
• European Editor: Well, the All Blacks are quite scary.........
  

Now if only I can get Martin and Micheal to collaborate (i.e. do all the work) on my 'seminal volume' on practical knowledge management....... :-)

Early user review of Google Wave - Updated

Loved this posting by Ben Romstech on his company blog:

Google Wave, First Impressions

I laughed out loud at this bit:

"Using it suddenly makes Chrome and Chrome OS make a whole lot of sense. If you listen carefully you can hear Ballmer's chairs flying around in the background..."

Update

Ben Par at Mashable has posted his short review as he and his colleages have been testing since the devloper release in May: Google Wave, Is the world ready ?

40 years since Apollo, Records Management and Organizational Memory - updated

Yep, that's quite a title for a post....

I am an unabashed space geek, always have been, always will be. However successful I am in work I will probably never reach the enjoyment factor of working for ESA on the Mars Express program as part of the Beagle 2 Mars Lander project. Which, incidentally was my introduction to Information Management, when I took on the role of the Science Data Archiving Manager, to build a NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) compliant archiving system.

So I have been thoroughly enjoying the all the stuff on the web about the 40th Anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing.

Including the stories pertaining to NASA's failure to hold onto the original film / video tapes, and all the Records Management and archiving issues that this leads us to. There have been lots of blog postings and tweets about this, but if you have not seem them I will just reference this one posting at Green Chameleon: "Not my job to preserve history"

When I was at the Open University (where I worked on the Beagle 2) I was part of the Digital Preservation Working Group examining long term digital archiving issues (the OU social charter requires extremely long retention of its materials, 100 year plus), and now I am working in Knowledge Management for a very large retail company - so were do the two collide ?

Well, as noted in the Green Chameleon article, the inability to hold onto the original Apollo tapes was a failure of organizational memory - this is a KM issue. However its a very complex KM issue, as we need to link operational Records Management, to long term digital preservation, to org. memory, to information search and retrieval............... etc.

In other words, this is a messy problem area that needs the full on holistic treatment, you need to take the 100,000 feet 'edge of space' view, so that you can tie your enterprise content management, records management (compliance and legal) strategies into your tactical deployments of content management and search systems.

For me, at the moment this means desiging metadata schemas, taxonomies and strategies for enabling them in SharePoint (MOSS07) via 'Content Types' to enable good document management at the purely tactical level, but linking this to the development of long term repositories and a KM portal in the medium term, to provide a 'knowledge enabled' organization in the longer, strategic term.

Of course the other discussions this week have seen Neil Armstrong heaping the praise on all that was achieved by Apollo, and Buzz Aldrin taking NASA to task for not being on Mars yet.

And as a member of the Mars Society, and a big fan of Robert Zubrin you really dont want to get me going on that subject.......

I often wonder why, if I could watch Neil step down from the Lunar Lander at Tranquility Base as a 3 year old perched on my fathers knee watching a tiny black and white tv, after they navigated themselves to the moon using a navigation computer that had a 1mhz CPU and 200K of memory, programmed using punch cards, over 40 years ago, why indeed are we not on Mars yet considering our current levels of technology ??

In an enterprise context, you might ask why do we keep repeating the same mistakes when we have powerful collaboration technology, the theories behind metadata, taxonomies and information management in general are well known and understood, various levels of legislation have produced reams of records management guidelines etc. Is it a vicisous cirle ? Because we don't have good KM inlcuding organizational memory, we 'forget' on an institutional level how to do these things well and succesfully ?

I will leave you to mull that one over - but President Obama, if your reading, scrap NASA, its not fit for purpose, how about reverting to an aeronautics research agency and a seperate U.S. Space Agency ? !!!

UPDATE - Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon has responded to my questions with some comments in a new posting on his blog here.

SharePoint 2010 'sneak peak'

OK, well thanks to MSFT for making this available:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Overview-Video.aspx

And I know its 'as advertised', but I guess I was just hoping for some really interesting information management snippet to leap out at me - but nope, nothing there.

The videos are good, and they concentrate on what can be shown right now:

• Aysnchronous UI
• The ribbon interface (yuck by the way.....)
• Sliverlight web part
• Beefed up BDC
• Developer tools
• Ability to restore a non-production database (?)

Well there is more than that, for example the super feature which allows you to import a 'style' from a PowerPoint deck and brand your SharePoint site with it, ooooh, thats useful.....

I was hoping that they may have fixed the products biggest architectural issue - putting content items into SQL Server as blobs, maybe they have made the file system connector an out of the box feature ??? We will have to wait and see.

Oh yes, and of course, lets not forget that Groove now seems to be the 'thick client' for SharePoint, including a name changeto SharePoint Workspace to reinforce the point.

At one point in the overview video the presenter mentions 'craddle to grave' information lifecycle management - but that was it, not details on how that was going to work, or what features would help to facilitate it.

However, like I said, there were very upfront about this merely being the 'sneak peek' to wet our appetites, and of course to get you to sign up for the SharePoint conference in Vegas in the fall, when the public beta will be unvailed, but for now to qoute the anonymous cop in BladeRunner "nothing to see here, move along now........."

p.s. the really funny part, I could not get the videos to play in my corporate locked down instance of Internet Explorer and had to watch them on the Mac when I got home last night (after installing a Sliverlight player, of course......)

Inaugral Toronto 'SharePointSaturday'

SharePointSaturday's are free conferences, held on saturdays (well duh..) in various cities across the U.S. and this last saturday we had the inaugral Canadian event at Microsoft Canada's HQ in Meadowvale, Mississauga - which just happens to be a 15 minute walk from my new house :-)

It was an excellent event, and thanks most go out to all of the sponsors and speakers. There were huge piles of MS Press and Wrox books, all of which were given away as prizes. Unfortunately I did not manage to win either of the Acer Netbooks, or the 1TB external hard drive, but I did walk away from the day with U.S.$90 worth of info in the form of not one but two MS Press books !

There was 3 tracks, Administrator & Architect, Developer and Special Interest. I did not go to any developer sessions, but here are my brief notes on the ones I did attend:

SharePoint for the masses - Special Interest track, Mushin Shahid of www.sharepointdelivery.com:

A good basic overview of the MOSS and WSS ecosystem. Based around looking at the different slices of the famous MOSS capabilities circle diagram (the SharePoint pizza). Going on the questions being asked this was at the right level for some members of the audience, who obviously are not actually using SharePoint yet. There was some interesting statistics from Mushin on Microsofts use of MOSS; 3 main server farms in Redmond, Dublin and Singapore, with 112,000 (+) site collections with over 325,000 sites and using 14TB of storage. Also a comment about their sales people using MOSS sites as a front end to Siebel CRM data via the BDC.

Social Computing and SharePoint - Special Interest track, Andy Nogueira of Non-Linear Creations:

Andy started with some generic descriptions of 'social computing' type applications, and discussed blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc etc in generic terms to get the audience clued in. Interesting stats in this session was FaceBook registered user numbers being bigger than the populations of countries such as Russia, Brazil and Japan !

Andy had '8 pillars of social computing' and a mapping to MOSS features:

• Identity - User Profiles
• Relationships - Colleagues feature
• User experience - easy custom branding of OOB MOSS
• Sharing - communities built using MOSS tools
• Discovery - SharePoint search
• Presence - SharePoint free / busy (full presence with integration with other products)
• Conversations - Forums and integration with Office Communicator (instant messaging)
• Reputation - Ratings and activity

The bulk of Andy's session was basically building an internal FaceBook using Profiles, My Sites and the Change Log, adding 'status' update functionality and some elements of people search. All good stuff, and a very nice presentation.

Content Query Web Part in the wild - Administrator track, Hasan Shahid, SharePoint Delivery:

Hasan and his colleague (to whom I apologize as I forgot to jot down his name) did a two level demo of the CQWP: a configuration of the basic CQWP in OOB mode, to list some data. The then did a slightly more complex demo, building a "Staff directory' using Content Types, Lists and the CQWP. Hasan promised to post the demo PowerPoint with lots of details on his blog at: http://hasanshahid.sharepointdelivery.com/

Arhitecting Records Management Solutions - Architect track, Ken Wong, NetDexterity

Ken is a fan of building RM solutions using SharePoint because it provides the basic building blocks and the flexibility to architect a specific solution. He is not suggesting that OOB 'Records Centre' will be good enough, but that using the exposed web services and other features of MOSS as a development platform, you can build something that meets your requirements. This was an excellent presentation so I hope the slides make it up onto the SharePointSaturdays site.

Leveraging InfoPath forms in SharePoint - Ed Musters. Open Highway Consulting Inc.

InfoPath is certainly not my area of expertise, and Ed claims the form design side of things is not his, but this was an interesting and entertaining session on using the InfoPath forms facilities built into the Enterprise version of MOSS, which can present and processes forms through the browser rather than requiring the InfoPath client. When I was working for Prescient as an intranet consultant, it was always astounding to see how many firms do NOT have online forms, even simple ones for common processes, so it was interesting to hear from Ed that InfoPath can actually import PDF forms (of the download, print out and fill in with a pen variety) and turn them into online forms :-) As always with SharePoint you build a Content Type to support your form, and thus can easily give it a simple workflow.

At the small number of booth's present I BlueThreads 'StoragePoint' solution, and the KWizcom guys gave me a USB drive with presentations and information on their new Taxonomy management web parts.

All in all a very useful and productive day. Now if only I could find some more detials on SharePoint 2010 on the new Office 2010 Technical Preview website.......

Thanks again, to the organizers, sponsors and speakers - your efforts are appreciated.

Chrome OS and the enterprise - Updated x 2

(See bottom of page for updates)

As OM Malik noted on his blog, there appears to be a lot of hot air and not a lot of substantive analysis of the news of the week (?) the Google Chrome OS.

You can find some of that hot air here, a list of Google Blog search results for 'Chrome OS':

There is plenty of comment about low spec'd netbooks and cut down OS's not cutting the mustard etc, and why not, the Google 'press release' blog posting does afterall mention netbooks as a specific market. However no one seems to have thought about the bigger picture here, what about the enterprise market ?

Remember Sun and the 'network is the computer' - oh yes, we could be heading back round that circular argument again. I have blogged previously before on the fact that the 'cloud' is not reliable enough for many corporations, but that hosted apps such as GMail, Google Docs, and in the future Google Wave is (or will be) good enough for many smaller businesses - but where are the Google Apps Appliances to sit in the rack next to the GSA ? EMC has certainly talked about 'private enterprise clouds' - building your own 'cloud computing' type environment on your corporate backbone and inside the firewall.

So why would you not put Chrome OS onto desktops, conventional laptops and smaller netbooks (and lets not forget Android powered phones !) to provide the latest in 'thin client' experience in a corporate environment ? Simpler and cheaper support than Windows ?

Stephen Arnold sticks to his theme of looking more deeply into what Google is up to, and is maybe closer to drawing some similar conclusions in his post: Chrome, a shiny wrap for the plumbing of Google

Does anyone else think that when this vapourware becomes solid in 2010, it might be as part of a major push into the enterprise IT scene by Google ? Your own Gmail box versus Exchange ? Wave and Docs versus SharePoint and Office ? GSA versus FAST ? A YouTube appliance as Digital Asset Management ???

Who knows, only time will tell, but personally I think it would be very interesting to see a Wave and Docs based ECMS taking on the big boys in the space ;-)

Meanwhile on my nice new corporate IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre, with its locked down corporate Windowws desktop I am realy missing tabbed browsing, Digsby, Tweetdeck etc............

UPDATE - The Register actually seem to agree with me to some extent, they remember the Network Computer (NC) and wonder if Google might cosy up to Oracle for NC-redux ?

UPDATE #2 - Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld also seems to have caught part of the bigger picture in his posting: Why Google Chrome OS Matters Already on Day 1

My new role is.....

....... Senior SharePoint Specialist in the IT division Knowledge Management team at Canadian Tire Corporation !

Yep its official, well its been official for a while, as I near the end of my first week, but the word came down from HR that as long as I take a common sense approach, and don't give out any secrets, budget codes etc, then I can blog :-)

A common sense approach is good ! No, really..... actually I think what we have been waiting for is guidance on is whether or not I could blog some details of our programs that are underway and the work the KM team will be doing. No answer on that yet, so we will have to see, but even if I can't do a 'Journey in social media' type blog like Chuck did at EMC, I can still blog my own opinions on ECM and information management related subjects.

So, what does my new role involve. Well I am working at Canadian Tire Corporation headquarters, within a very large IT division. We have a small (and thus very elite ?) KM team, consisting of our AVP, the KM Manager, and me, the Senior Specialist - yep just the 3 of us :-)

My new role includes very SharePoint specific elements, and some very non-SharePoint specific elements, but in a SharePoint context, including:

• Metadata standards, policies and schema development


• Taxonomy development


• Working with stakeholders across IT and with the ECM team particularly


• Developing methodologies and techniques for using SharePoint as a collaboration platform and as a tool for knowledge capture


• To optimize SharePoint for project management, document management and as a knowledge management platform in general

There is a great deal going on in the IT organization here, moving to an SOA based enterprise architecture with lots of work on standardized platforms and migration away from legacy systems, so its bound to be both busy and interesting when we se set to in earnest. I think that will do for now, I was going to add a photo of the view from my 16th floor office, but my browser seems to be too old to let me position it within Blogger !!!