Group items tagged

In two of our projects with large law firms we included an RSS feedreader in the social software mix (among wiki, blogs, social bookmarking). We introduced it primarily to Knowledge Management Lawyers (KML) that needed to gather a lot of content from various sources. They also use it to subscribe to updates from the wiki and blogs. They appreciate the fact that it is much easier to plow through a stream of updates rather than going from email to email and deleting every one of them.

Have a look at two case studies: Dewey & LeBoeuf and Allen & Overy

In our company, we had a survey in April (2008), asking managers if they needed a RSS Reader. Some figures: 72 managers responded, 68 managers subscribed to more than one (company) blog. 9 managers already used iGoogle or a RSS Reader, 13 managers replied they did not need a RSS Reader, 50 managers replied they need a RSS Reader. As a result we planned a project to select and deliver a company RSS Reader. The project will be executed mid 2009.

Once CRM, DMS, Intranet and other proprietary system vendors thoroughly implement RSS functionality, it will get a big push.

I think a tipping point might come if ERP apps providers (SAP, Oracle, etc.) started publishing RSS feeds of ERP data!

In another project with a large law firm we took a very close look at the production (and consumption) of current awareness material. Current awareness included for example information on current developments within legal practices, latest court decisions etc. The firm made extensive use of newsletters to disseminate that kind of information. There was a multitude of newsletters available, some of them covering similar grounds. Maintaining email lists was very time-consuming and frustrating. Consumers did not know which newsletter were available. Also, newsletters were not personalised nor very timely, as they had a specific publishing date. We therefore recommended using RSS as delivery format, which would make the process of producing and consuming content more efficient and in the end more cost-effective as shown in a business case

It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

If dashboards take off, then maybe RSS will gain traction as the wiring? This probably requires: secure feed displaying widgets, good filters.

Enterprises are scared to disrupt their own structure and command lines by introducing uncontrolled information flows both internally (which can route around management) and externally (which can route around the official PR outputs and sales inputs of the company)

Look at the headline you used.. RIP Enterprise RSS. Now read that from the point of view of a manager in an enterprise. WTF does "Enterprise RSS" mean? What are the business reasons to care? What does it do for them? People don't care adopt RSS, just as people don't adopt XHTML, Javascript etc. They adopt products that use technology to do something that they value. No one cares about the technologies used to display this page... they want to read the page.

Enterprise RSS doesn't mean much. When RSS companies start talking about secure communications channels that intelligently and automatically route relevant information to the people who need/want it, light bulbs start lighting up.

I think Microsoft SharePoint could be the killer app for RSS in the enterprise. SharePoint has RSS built in and uses it to syndicate changes that happen within the SharePoint ecosphere and notify enterprise workers that something significant has happened. Of course, SharePoint RSS could work with third-party RSS readers, but it's really designed to be used with Microsoft's Office Suite, where enterprise workers can interface with SharePoint, through RSS and other means, directly

One thing missing from this (great) post is the cost of these tools. Looking at Newsgator & Attensa, these are expensive enterprise tools and trying to sell them to IT managers that don't fully understand RSS is next to impossible. Imagine saying to a CIO, who barely understands what RSS is, that you need $175,000 for Enterprise RSS software... it isn't an easy sell.

In this part of the world (SE Asia) we're seeing more & more top management wanting tools for themselves and their teams to connect to "Facebook and these social network things". Feeds and aggregation/search tools are the perfect wiring for this. But the front end? There's a lot of choice and individual needs vary. A decently setup igoogle/netvibes page can work wonders..so why pay?

Also, reading RSS is likely viewed as not work related, and so its frowned upon within the enterprise (remember, those enterprise folks have "real" work to do, they don't get paid to read BoingBoing all day long).

As much as we dislike it, people live in their inbox and this fact is not going away over night by telling them about the benefits of using social tools! Given the lack of appropriate tools in the past, people have grown accustomed to (ab)use email for everything, e.g. public conversations (e.g. cc'd), collaboration, awareness (e.g. newsletters, updates), connecting with others.

Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records.

What I'm saying amounts to this: Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate.

unfortunately SocialText is not very good at linking to the documents in the obvious place (attachments).

The solution to having too much information is, surprisingly, more information. For law firms, that means a better document management system. One that incorporates some of the great lessons we have learned in Web 2.0. Too much of the DMS is an undifferentiated mass of documents. Folders are no solution if the folder is not incorporated back into the retrieval and information about the document.

Content is made of people: from ECM to E2.0 Der Vortragende Lee Bryant ist CEO von Headshift aus London. Sein Vortrag beschäftigt sich mit der Transition von Enterprise Content Management zum Enterprise 2.0.

Bryants Herangehensweise an Enterprise 2.0 fasst er mit folgenden Punkten zusammen: Public feeds & flows: internal and external RSS, feeds based on subjects, persons, group or search Bookmarks & tags: people store, share, tag, vote or comment on useful links and news Blogs & social bookmarks: social objects shared within networks and discussed in blogs Group collaboration: intimate groups/teams organize knowledge in wikis and group systems personal tools: organise your “stuff” by tags; arrange in a portal; manage networks and feeds Dabei geht es ihm vor allem auch darum, diese Dinge als Stimulanz für die pragmatische Umsetzung der alltäglichen - geschäftskritischen - Aufgaben einzusetzen.

Lee Bryant stellt kurz die wichtigsten Vertreter der Enterprise 2.0 Tools vor, die wir auch hier beschrieben haben. Dabei spielt auch Atlassian Confluence eine Rolle. Microsoft Sharepoint kommt bei ihm aber eher schlecht weg, was die Akzeptanz als Enterprise 2.0 Plattform angeht.

Post Wide Web: Das Intranet der Schweizerischen Post

Social Computing bei MLP Finanzdienstleistungen

Einsatz eines Unternehmens-Wikis für das Wissensmanagement am Beispiel von IT-Delivery-Prozessen der REVACOM GmbH

Over the last year, his firm has created three to four thousand pages in the wiki. Lee estimates that 60% of his employees make at least one change to the wiki each day.

Lee really likes the flexibility of the wiki platform. People can work in the wiki the way that they want to work. Of course, that has lead to some disagreements over the way to organize content.

Lee sees a conflict between the need for rules and the freedom to contribute. There are places where the wiki is not organized in a way that works for him. But it does work for others.

Lee also likes that the wiki is externally hosted. He lets PBwiki worry about keeping the server up and all the "plumbing" headaches. He wants to be out of the IT business.

One of his biggest issues is keeping the wiki in people's minds as a way to communicate. It takes some time for people to realize that they can communicate through the wiki. Lee still sees lots of email communication that could be better handled in the wiki. They are also still transitioning some of the content from Lotus Notes into the wiki.

Enterprise wikis are often used for: collaboratively building documentation creating and maintaining knowledge bases project management gathering tacit knowledge (knowledge not related to any specific project but essential to getting things done in an organization) meeting management, from agenda to minutes and action items. Generally, an enterprise wiki will be used in a much wider variety of ways than an Internet wiki, because it is intended to support the wide-ranging needs of the people within an organization.

On an enterprise wiki, the contribution level is much higher based on the fact that people are contributing as part of the daily course of their work,

Microsoft estimates MOSS pricing at $US4,424 for a server license and $US94 per client access license (in the U.S.).

MOSS' capabilities range from basic collaboration to portal creation and business intelligence content management. Yet MOSS' breadth is both too much and not enough for some midmarket users.

While the portal capabilities in MOSS are mature, for example, some companies are holding off on what they perceive as less-developed features in the suite, such as social networking, enterprise search and Web content management capabilities. These companies are waiting until Microsoft releases the next version, Koplowitz said.

Another potential drawback is a dearth in skill sets, as well as a lack of SharePoint documentation coming from Microsoft

On the surface, SharePoint is easy to get off the ground, but he said he's finding that people quickly get in over their heads.

Although SharePoint appears to be on a lot of CIOs' agendas, midmarket businesses have plenty of other choices.

There's integration with enterprise content management systems.

There are also third-party add-ons

Open Text Corp., with its ECM suite, is another company that both competes and integrates with SharePoint.

Competing products and vendors in the Web 2.0 space include Jive Software's Clearspace business social community software, which has customers in the midsized market, and Atlassian Software Systems Pty Ltd. and Socialtext Inc. These started out as wikis but are broadening their community-based collaborative offerings.

What Have Law Firms Done?

Even with these IT and KM investments in law firms, it seems the frustrations remain: I can't find anything. It takes too long to find what I need.

What is ‘The Answer'?

the focus of law firms over the last decade has been absolutely correct: to concentrate on people and processes through KM, and on new information technologies and tools through their IT budgets. But maybe there's a third prong that's been missing from this focus? The messy middle: the content assets, the actual information itself contained in documents, e-mails, web pages, blogs, journals, books, video and podcasts etc.

The huge investments for enterprise search - providing lawyer and legal information professional alike with a single search box sitting over multiple repositories and offices - have certainly seen great improvements in uncovering information within a law firm.

Developments out there on the Web in faceted search (e.g. filtering a search for cameras by brand, price and resolution) have begun to seep through the walls of our firms and organisations.

Enterprise search has started to uncover some of the mess that we didn't even know was there. As well as showing, rather too starkly, the mess that we haven't wanted to deal with over the years: the poor tagging of content with useful terms or even consistent terms across different repositories; the lack of rigorous info management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.

law firms are now thinking and willing to invest in ways to actually clean and fix some of this information mess. Reviewing and improving a firm's Enterprise Information Architecture (or Firmwide IA) through an information housekeeping initiative is becoming a priority. What does that involve?

Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA

Systems & Tools

Information & Information Architecture Assets

Governance

The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:

What happens now?

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following: Optional Free of up-front workflow Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities Accepting of many types of data