Group items tagged

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

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.

Group blogs facilitate discussion

Wikis organise information

RSS feeds constitutes the backbone

Consumption of information: personalising according to need

Aggregated bookmarks works as a recommendations engine

Personal and aggregated tagging make connections visible

Social network profiles adds a human touch and transparency

Better communication = A more profitable organisation

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).

This is a disaster. It removes the communications aspect of the wiki.

Alternatively, Kwizcom have a Sharepoint wiki which might do the trick (plus a free evaluation version). http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=524&ProductSubNodeID=525

We have been experiencing problems with the notification feature for wikis in Sharepoint. When there is a change to a wiki page, it sends out the whole wiki page with no indication of the changes.

I introduced Confluence in my previous job, and was very happy with it. However it's a challenge to maintain it with pure Windows point and click trained IT staff.

With Confluence, many many plug-ins and macros are available to present access to content on your web page.

Traction TeamPage has the feature you request (and then some) which is to send e-mail notification that shows the DIFF view of the old and new pages. You can fine tune which spaces you want to monitor at this level - and even fine tune it by author, tag or other search facility.

For categorizing any SharePoint items or documents cross-site based on centrally managed taxonomies and browse it by default navigation, category tree or A-Z directory you can use the Taxonomy Extension found at:http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx

There were wikis for different practice groups and they were searchable.

Their early success created a big demand. Every group wanted wikis. Updating was given to assistants, clerks & associates. However the technology was not perfect. You had to sign on separately for each wiki and they were creating silos of information. To solve this issue they looked at a number of enterprise tools and found most too feature rich and complex for lawyers to use them.

They went with Thought Farmer for its simplicity and ease of interface. (see my review - ThoughtFarmer – Intranet 2.0). It has Web 2.0 features – staff profile, tagging, RSS, social networking, email publishing, - also search with relevancy ranking.

The presenter’s thoughts on lessons learned include: select an easy to use tool, do not force participation, transfer the process of updating to groups and develop a process for each group. You should also offer training and share success stories. They held individual training in 10 to 15 minute sessions.

They have found that not all users will be active contributors and the ROI is hard to measure. The tool should also be more Blackberry friendly. However, overall it seems to be a great success.

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?