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Do you have a vision for how technology can??transform what your company or department does, but no one will listen??? Do you spend your day “evangelizing” the merits of social networking behind the firewall but finding it fall on deaf ears??? Do you find yourself explaining how a wiki works to everyone who emails you the 8meg ppt deck (that you already received 3 times)??? You are not alone.

In our capacity as an innovation team inside a big organization, we end up talking to quite a few individiuals who live and breath this whole Web 2.0 thing, feel it has great import to their business, and yet, can’t get the ball moving.?? This article is for you.

How do you win over the naysayers in your company?

There is a great book on storytelling called The Story Factor. In it, the author mentions this concept of mental stories. A story is simple a set of notions, beliefs, concepts, ideas or mental structures you have in place in your mind.?? It’s what you believe on a given subject as filtered through your background and experiences.?? I find this model??to be??a great way to think about the disagreements we have with others.??A??disagreement is simply a conflict of stories.???? Because these stories arise from out personal viewpoints, challenging them can be deeply emotional.

Take something simple. Imagine you believe that a site like Facebook would be great for your company to start using to work with partners and customers. You think it will tap into a group of people already there, make work more fun, improve collaboration, and be free to boot. What could be bad about that??? That is your story.

Now you mention this to a co-worker and they bring up concerns about privacy, they ask if people will be spending “too much” time on this kids site, and how you will measure the effectiveness of this program? All they see is risk.?? That is their story.

Here is where the problem begins. Most people become so enamored with their story, that they become ineffective in driving change. Oftentimes, what started as a simple mismatch of two stories spirals into personal attacks, ending with the ultimate innovator’s insult - “they don’t get it”. This term attempts to absolve the speaker from any further reasoning. Mark Cuban makes this point well on his blog. My point however, is that it shuts down conversation. It is the easiest way out and I have rarely found the easy way to be the best way. In the words of Thomas Paine:

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘Tis dearness only that gives every thing its value, Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods”

How do you win others over?

In my experience, you begin??by being open to the possibility that they actually have something to offer to the conversation. A healthy dose of mutual respect will go far. You need to abandon the notion that you are 100% right.?? If you don’t there is really no dialouge.?? Anytime I bring any idea to another person, the idea is improved upon.???? Sure there will be days when??you think you have it all figured out, but rest assured,??you don’t.

Now that you are open to actually hearing other perspectives; listen. This means paying attention to the other story. Finding the elements of??another’s view that diverges from your own and really working to clearly hear the root of that position.?? In our above example, you would deeply listen to the concern around wasted time, the fear of private information being disclosed, and the honest query into the ROI of the project.?? If you take each issue, one at a time, and talk it through, you will in most cases have a mutual solution.?? It can be a set of guidelines on what a site is meant for (and what it is not meant for).?? It may be a clear privacy and terms of use policy.?? It may be up front metrics and monthly tracking reports on activity.?? The point is that respect for the other viewpoint and a bit of??flexibility with both sides looking for a creative answer goes a long way.

This seems like a lot of work, do I need to listen to everyone?

Yes and no.?? You need to understand where everyone is coming from, but that does not mean you spend all your time equally with each person.?? In order to maximize your effectiveness, consider looking at your critics in a few buckets.

The Haters: These people are against you all the way and actively work to stop you.????They are set in their ways and typically argue against big concepts like openess or social networking.?? They use broad brushes and rarely spend enough time to really understand your position.?? These people are not worth talking to, and certainly not worth keeping up to date on your activities.?? Cut your losses.

The Herd: Anything innovative is by definition, not yet mainstream.?? Most people are in the mainstream, but don’t take it personal - It’s just a bell curve after all.?? This group may not agree, but are most likely just ignoring you.?? They??have seen one too many fads and are waiting for this??new thing to either become real or die.?? This is another area where time can be wasted.?? Juse keep them up to date (say with a monthly email) and draw them in with successes along the way.?? Over time you may just??find them joining in - once it is proven of course.

The Wannabes: This is the most important group for making change.?? These are the ones that love the things you are doing, almost.?? They really want to be a part of making a difference, but they feel your solution is just missing the mark.?? You are over the hardest part with this group since they are not arguing in broad terms, so??now just need to deal with the finer points of what you are offering (ie.”we really need file versioning, but this is cool”). These are the ones you bring into your discussions on the roadmap, you explain your vision, and you get engaged.

In the end evangelism is a bit like politics -??you focus on the swing voters.?? It’s about good time managment. The only caveat to this is that in some orgs there are just some people or teams you must have on board for a variety of reasons. Even if they disagree (sometimes violently), you have to engage.

Have you run into any of these people in your company??? How do you get others on board to your plans??? Sound off in comments.

My recent move to Ubuntu over the long weekend has reminded me of a pet rant of mine, calendars. You’d think something so basic for every cross-section of users, from personal to every size business, would have an easy solution.

But no.

I’m a long time Palm Desktop user, long meaning I had one of the second generation Palm IIs back in the day, one of the first 3Com-branded ones. I have over 10,000 entries in my Palm calendar dating back to 1997. My address book is pretty big too, but not as vital to me.

For about a year, I’ve been trying to move to a more modern calendar, either online or installed. This process has caused me nothing but frustration with the state of calendar applications.

My requirements are pretty simple:

1. I want to preserve my legacy data.
2. Goto 1.

That’s all. I’ve stayed with Palm Desktop for years, even after I stopped carrying a Palm handheld. Why? Because it’s fast and dependable.

Seems pretty simple. I don’t care that it’s 10,000 odd records and over a 1 MB of entries. This shouldn’t be hard. Apparently, I’m asking too much though.

First off, I know Palm stores data in a proprietary format, which is a bummer. So, I bought an extension that dumps to iCal format for this. So, armed with my 1.8 MG ics file, off I went. Let’s examine my quest.

Installed calendars
I prefer an installed calendar because: 1) they (should be) faster and 2) they should support more robust imp/export capabilities.

Let’s first rule out Outlook. I used Outlook in the past and didn’t care for it. I won’t ever use it again, if I have choice, which I will I’m just not a fan. Let’s leave it at that. Yeah, I’m aware that Outlook does some cool stuff with calendars, but it’s still proprietary and only useful to a subset of users anyway. Don’t get me started on the mail features of Outlook, and don’t waste time trying to convince me how awesome it is. Deaf ears.

Initially, I thought I’d switch to iCal on my Macbook, which does just about everything I need for work, with a few notable exceptions. I could also sync to my iPhone, a huge benefit.

ICal imported the ics file just fine, although it took a while, but what a mess. I fiddled with it for a bit, but the amount of time required to cleanse the data was really high.

So I moved on to the Lightning, the Mozilla Sunbird calendar project add-on for Thunderbird, my email client of choice. Lightning also successfully imported the ics file, but man is it slow. Any action in the calendar took 15-30 seconds to complete, which is an eternity in computer/Intertubes time.

Moving on, I figured maybe Sunbird would be better, since there wouldn’t be any overhead for other features like mail. Not. Same story.

About a year elasped, and now I’m forced to find a replacement, since Palm Desktop won’t run on Ubuntu.

I tried the Evolution client that comes with the distro; it’s not bad. I handled the import well, and it’s not as slow as the other clients I’ve tried. Something about it just isn’t right for me.

So, I kept looking. Lightning is still a no-starter due to slowness. I didn’t even bother with Sunbird. I tried Zimbra Desktop, but couldn’t get it to run. I know I’m doing something wrong. But seriously though, if you have a snazzy wizard to install, why is it so hard to start the app, and why is it already running?

I also dug around to see if I could run Palm over WINE, but Google told me that was a rathole of bad news. So, I’m face now with two decent options: 1) run Evolution or 2) run Palm Desktop on the XP VM.

Neither is very good. I did find a few Palm-style apps for Gnome, but wow, did they look terrible. I guess there’s not much demand for connecting Palm devices to Linux.

Online calendars
Sure, so why not use an online calendar? It’s everywhere you want to be (with Intertubes). Rich and Paul use Google Calendar, so why not?

After a few tries, I determined that Google Calendar import is: 1) flakey and 2) restricted to no more than 500 entries per day, if that. Nice.

This is the part where I give up; why is this so hard?

Sure, most of this has to do with Palm’s proprietary format. I get that. It just seems like it should be easier to switch and take your data with you.

This has been a learning experience though. I’ve discovered you can’t export to iCal by date range from Palm using the extension I bought, bummer. I’ve also discovered that editing an iCal file is trickier than it looks, as is editing a CSV file.

Frankly, I just don’t want to invest more effort into something that should just work.
I’m blogigng this to get ideas about what I can do here, aside from Outlook. We went over that.

Thoughts? Sound off in comments.

In case you haven’t had enough of my epic dumping of Windows for Ubuntu odyssey, here’s another installment. This is likely to be the last one, but no promises.

This is my fist blog post from Ubuntu, not a huge deal, but still.

I’m probably 75-80% of the way done, with a few holes yet to fill, notably the dual monitors/docking station issue, which will probably require me to edit xorg.conf. If you have any insight, please share it in comments.

Today’s big hurdle was getting Cisco VPN client installed and connected to our VPN servers, a show-stopper for work. A quick search of Google tells you what a pain that is, and again, Rich warned me in advance.

I finally did get it working though, after a few hours, including a chunk of Rich’s time over IM (thanks pal), and a lot of blind command execution. Then I got Thunderbird up and running, including my archived Inbox of 30,000 odd messages and 20,000 sent messages. Like I said before, I’m a pack rat. I also imported my old Pidgin chat logs, so I’m feeling pretty good.

The big remaining pieces aside from monitors are a GUI for Cisco VPN and testing out OpenOffice as a Microsoft Office replacement. Even if it works, I’ll probably install MS Office in the XP VM I have, just in case.

So, time for impressions.

Ubuntu isn’t for the average user, even though it’s a huge advance over the Red Hat distros I initially tried to switch to over the past 10 years or so. This is probably just the way the community likes it too, and frankly, it works for me.

Things I like:

• The fact that you can Google just about anything and get an answer or 20, i.e. the huge community supporting it.
• The Synaptic Package Manager that allows me to install from a wide range of “universes”, rather than going to a bunch of disparate sites and downloading software.
• The fact that it’s both a great desktop and a fully functional server.
• It’s free as in freedom, and sometimes as in beer.
• It’s rock solid. I did have my first crash, but it bounced back quickly without a reboot.
• It’s fast, much faster than XP on the same hardware, even the XP VM seems to be faster than native XP was, but that’s probably because it’s new.

Things I don’t like:

• The fact that I get 20 or so answers to every question, but I guess over time, I’ll figure out the authoritative sources.
• The lack of an exact answer, due to the wide variety of kernel versions, modifcations and hardware.

That’s really all for now. I’m pretty impressed. Ubuntu really is a hacker/hobbist O/S, but with a new version coming out every few months, it’s only a matter of time before it’s on your desktop too, installed by IT.

Maybe it’s a function of newness, but right now, I’m preferring it to my Macbook. So far, making the move has been a big plus. We’ll see how it goes down the road.

What are your thoughts about open source, switching O/S, O/S comparisons (OS X vs. Linux distros vs. Windows), reimaging, etc. Sound off in comments.

I decided earlier in the week that the long Fourth of July would be a great time to reimage my work laptop from XP to Ubuntu.

A couple reasons from this: 1) I’m supposed to be off today, so I can muck around with my laptop without worrying about work stuff and 2) it’s a bit fitting to declare my independence from Windows on the 4th.

Not that I’m fully abandoning Windows, since as I write this, I’m installing a virtual image of XP, but rather, I’m opening up my options to include Linux. Like I said before, choice is good.

Rich told me yesterday over IM that it would take about 30 minutes to install Ubuntu and a bit longer to get it running. He also assured me that dual monitors and docking stations were supported. I think he said something similar to out-of-the-box, but I can’t check my chat log just now.

He’s partially right. It was a quick install, unless you try to take out the install CD when the restart is happening, and then you have to reburn another image. User error on my part.

Ubuntu did auto-configure my hardware, USB, sound, video, monitor, wireless card, all very impressively. I got the updates downloaded and installed and had Firefox 3 configured to my liking with all my favorite add-ons and bookmarks in a couple hours.

Then I spent the rest of the day fighting dual monitors.

I have a docking station with dual monitors, one LCD, one old CRT, different resolutions. I love my dual monitors; the productivity gain you get from multiple monitors is astounding. I highly recommend it, even if you just open your laptop and use it as a second monitor with your regular monitor, you’ll reap the benefits.

Anyway, XP did a passable job managing this setup. For some reason, it never could reboot and remember the settings, but I lived with that.

So, not having dual monitors is a huge gap for me. I spent literally hours trying to get it working until I tabled that to move on to installing the Cisco VPN client.

Which went equally well. Rich warned me about this one, and true to form, it failed. So, I skipped ahead to easy stuff because by then, I needed a win. I moved some files around, which is a great exercise.
Tim Hall commented on my first post:

If I lost my laptop tomorrow I could be back online in the amount of time it takes to buy the new laptop, install VMware Server and copy over the VMs.

Really good advice, and exactly why I keep current backups, JIC. I’m a pack rat though, so I have gigs of old work data. Reimaging gave me a chance to marginalize that old stuff on the backup drive.

So after getting a second wind, I moved on to installing VirtualBox, and I’m still walking through the XP install that I’ll need for IE 6, Oracle Web Conference and my old Palm Desktop calendar that has 10 years of data that I’m not ready to archive just yet.

So far, I’m pleased with Ubuntu. It’s very simple and easy, and it hasn’t crashed yet, in the BSOD Windows style. It has hung up a few times, but it starts so fast that hard rebooting doesn’t seem to be that bad a deal.

Well, XP has finished and needs me. Plus, I suppose I should enjoy the outside, maybe some fireworks.

Then back at this tomorrow.

Thought I would add new blog to mark the momentous move to a new platform here. On top of that, I am editing this post using Ecto on my Macbook Pro. So cool ...

The team that I work in has changed its name from ECM to Enterprise 2.0 which really reflects where we are going here at Oracle. The "face" of Enterprise 2.0 is WebCenter and there is now a whole host of WebCenter services (including some new ones from the BEA portfolio) that I want to blog about in the near future.

If you want a good look at Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 offering, you should start with this excellent demo by Vince Casarez, VP Product Management.

In the meantime, here is a view from the famous tower in Pisa ..

You may have noticed my irritation at ZDNet this week due to their borked podcast of Paul’s appearance at the Churchill Club a few weeks ago.

Everything is cool now, thanks to one Dennis Howlett.

A few things were wrong about this whole thing. First, I left a comment Monday about the podcast being borked; then two other people also commented to the same effect the next two days. No response. This perplexes me, since ZDNet is a media company, you’d think they want conversation.

Second, if oracle.com had anything like this happen, it would be picked by Twitter and certain bloggers (ahem, Dennis).

So, asking Dennis, a ZDNet blogger himself, to do a solid and help me get this sorted, seemed like a logical ask. I asked over Twitter (natch), and he replied in vintage Dennis.

Well, he wasn’t kidding. This morning I woke to a note from Larry Dignan that the podcast was fixed. So, thanks to Dennis for wielding his power for good, and to Larry for his help.

In case you’re wondering, I think Dennis bears a separated at birth resemblance to Zeus. His lightning bolts are verbal though.

Anyway, thanks Dennis. Please don’t fry me.

I’m sure Justin has tips on this one to add. Maybe he’ll chime in now that the Oracle blogs migration has ended; by the way, I’m really peeved that OraNA.info is clogged with reposts from Oracle blogs.

Not really, but it’s funny to me. Won’t someone please think of the children?

But I digress.

People frequently come to me wanting to start this or that community as a done deal, e.g. I want to start a social network like Mix for my own product. To me this feels backwards. Usually, the reasoning is fine; they want to share content (product or support related) with their users. Great.

However, they tend to jump past the fact that there is already a huge Oracle community, spread across several sites (Mix, Oracle Wiki, OTN Forums) that is bound to include most of the people they hope to reach.

So, why would you want to do all that development and maintenance work? Reinventing the wheel is wasted effort.

In reality, starting a community has nothing to do with software or Interwebs. Communities already exist IRL, so moving them online is a natural exension that benefits everyone.

By going online, you can bring the community closer together, across geographical barriers and draw in new members. Interwebs +1.

So building a community isn’t really the goal; it’s finding the community and attracting it to wherever it is you want it to be. This is beauty of the social network. People coalesce around affinity groups, and chances are they’re already out there talking about your product or brand or whatever. This gives you a logical place to start.

Again, don’t reinvent the wheel. Join an existing community; asking people to please come over to another community is work. Take the path of least resistance.

OK, so you found a network, but it’s too general. How can you stake your claim and get your users talking about your product? This is where social apps, deployed within a network rule; think Facebook’s F8 platform and OpenSocial.

You found where your users are, now build them a space within that network where than can talk about your product and, mostly importantly, where you can engage them to collect their thoughts and share your own. Create a group. Ask questions. Share insights. Talk to them.

Now comes the tough part, managing the community. Community manager is rapidly gaining acceptance as a real job. Starbucks and Dell both have dozens of community managers whose job it is to interact with people who submit ideas online.

Protip: People like to be heard. Bonus points for a quick response.

Many times when I get feedback about Mix or Connect, it’s a bug. I often feel badly when I have to tell the person sorry, but we can’t fix that right away. Bugs suck.

Oddly, at least to me, people tend to understand and are forgiving. Frequently, they thank me for getting back to them so quickly, even with bad news.

You can see the same behavior on blogs, which are micro-communities (some are macro, I guess). Commenters want to have a dialog. If you’re blogging and not replying to comments, you’re doing it wrong.

The community manager’s job is to make everyone feel welcome and heard and help them find answers. It’s like being a concierge or a Walmart greeter, and yes, it’s a full-time job.

So, the main points here are: 1) the Field of Dreams approach doesn’t work well enough, leverage an existing community and 2) manage and cultivate your community, listen and respond.

Yeah, I glossed over some stuff like promotion, moderation and content, but that stuff’s secondary IMHO. After all, it’s moot if no one shows up to your community.

What did I miss? I know a lot of good community managers who could chime in with points I’ve missed.

You may have heard that Oracle acquired Skywire Software several days ago. This is true. The implications for Oracle ECM and overall Enterprise 2.0 should be encouraging and the Analyst community agrees. Here's a summary of what they're saying:
CMS Watch
Forrester
IDC (PDF)

Overall DOM (document output management) is an important part of an Enterprise 2.0 Information Management strategy. To maximize re-use of information and not have to re-create information for each and every distribution channel is vital to realize efficiency gains and information penetration into target (personalized/persuasive) markets.

Look for coolness coming out of this acquisition in the E2.0 space from Oracle.

Managing structured data is so easy nowadays.  Construct an Oracle
database, populate it and query it.  A piece of cake!  Even if the data
is in another database all you need to do is to connect to it and run a
query.  So all your business problems are solved if all your
information is in the form of structured data!  But, wait a minute,
what about all those invoices, letters, emails, contracts ...?  Oh,
that's OK they are on the file system ... somewhere ... and in my Inbox
... or someone else's ... and in my filing cabinet ... but I can't
search them there.  Hmmm!  Maybe I do have a problem with my
unstructured data.

The answer is Enterprise Content Management
(ECM).  I can store all my documents in one repository and search for
anything I want.  Case closed then!  Well, not quite.  How come I
always get hundreds of results back when I do a search, when all I want
to find is just the invoices for ACME Corp?  OK, so I need to add
metadata ... my ECM system lets me do that.  Cool!  Now I can sort my
documents into places where I can find them.  But, it's a real pain
having to leave my Financials system and open a new system to do a
query to find the documents.  Can't I link them together .....?

Welcome to the world of ECM solutions!

The
ECM market has matured in the last few years to the extent that there
are many vendors with ECM systems that allow you to store documents,
categorise them and then retrieve them.  Smaller companies with
software offering extra bits of ECM functionality have been acquired
and now larger ECM companies are themselves being acquired.  So,
several companies have all the functionality you could possibly need,
but do all the component parts fully integrate?  Are they scalable? 
Are they efficient to deploy?  Can you integrate easily with other
business systems?

The answer to all these questions is usually
"yes!" - if you look at the marketing material.  But what about
actually deploying the software?  I think you will find all sorts of
scare stories.  Of course you can have anything you want ... if you pay
for it!  So, we need easily deployable ECM solutions that integrate
with business processes and systems without costing the earth.  That's
where I come in!  I will explore potential solutions in future blogs. 
Watch this space!

Content management is a vital part of all businesses, but if there is one sector that could particularly benefit from managing their unstructured data it is the Financial Services Industry.

I have lost count of the number of financial services companies that I have visited which have vast armies of personnel re-keying data. A typical example is where application forms are manually completed in branches and sent by snail mail to the HQ. These may well be accompanied by supporting documentation such as photocopies of driving licences, passports etc. A sensible solution involving ECM would enable forms to be completed online via a web interface in branches so that the data is captured once and does not need re-keying. The same interface would also permit supporting documents to be scanned and uploaded along with the application data. Upon receipt of an application the ECM system would automatically start a workflow to enable the efficient processing of the application in the HQ. Such a system would also enable the building of dossiers for customers so that they do not have to provide exactly the same information the next time they apply for credit/loan/mortgage etc. In addition, branch representatives (and customers) can track the progress of applications without having to telephone the HQ.

Another segment of the financial services industry that could benefit from having an integrated ECM solution are those departments who deal with the application of anti-money laundering regulations. From 'Know your customer' applications through to integration with IMOLIN and databases provided by Finance Intelligence Units. AML is not just about structured data, it is also about the unstructured data held in electronic and paper documents. A case management solution based on ECM enables ALL data to be brought together to provide the whole truth that is required for AML staff.

The bottom line is that SERVICE is a key differentiator in the Financial Services marketplace. Introducing effective ECM solutions will empower organisations to improve their efficiency and levels of service to customers. Those who don't will get left behind ...

No, not a discourse on traveling in time, just some thoughts on Oracle's Webcenter Suite.

At the moment Oracle has Oracle Portal as a portal and Oracle WebCenter
Suite as a framework for developing portal-type applications.  Many of
the portal features in Oracle Portal are not available out of the box
with the current version of WebCenter Suite, although as time goes by
this is the direction I am sure the product will go.



In basic terms Oracle Portal is for business users and WebCenter is for
Java developers.



The following is an extract from the WebCenter FAQ:



"Oracle WebCenter addresses user interaction requirements holistically
by introducing new capabilities directly into the JavaServer Faces
application environment and providing Web 2.0 services that take
advantage of those capabilities to allow developers to create next
generation, context-centric applications. In essence, with WebCenter,
we have injected portal capabilities directly into the application
architecture rather than requiring a distinct and separate portal
framework. This provides developers focused on 100%
standards-development a complete solution to build any type of user
interaction they require.



In contrast, Oracle Portal is specifically targeted at the enterprise
portal use case, is built on top of a database-centric design-time
architecture, and incorporates a dedicated, portal-specific runtime
framework. It is designed to provide a simple wizard-based experience
to building portals that is targeted at the business developer rather
than the Java developer.



From a pricing and packaging point of view, Oracle Portal is part of
Oracle Application Server Standard and Enterprise Editions while Oracle
WebCenter is a separately priced option on top of Enterprise Edition."



What they are saying ... and I agree with them 100%... is that the
applications of tomorrow are not going to be constrained by a portal
framework and they will use Web 2.0 features to make them more
accessible to end users.  Currently, portals provide users with windows
into existing applications by the use of portlets.  In the future,
users will not see a distinction between different back end
applications because WebCenter will thread everything together with SOA
and present an interface for carrying out a specific task.  In other
words the user will not have immediate access to ALL the functionality
that a back end application makes available, only those parts required
for a particular task.  As far as the developer is concerned, he is not
constrained by the functionality that an application deems to make
available (e.g. a JSR 168 portlet) but will be able to pick and chooses
the services that are required for the task in hand.



So it is true that Portal is the SOA entry
point but ... WebCenter Suite will COMPLETELY change this.  And this
change is happening now.  It will make Oracle the clear leader in the
SOA field.

no need to send "TEST" comments over (though "FIRST!" is welcome). The MTE platform handles comments well.

techdirt - one of my usual blog reads - has an article HERE that got me thinking.  The article talks specifically about how news aggregators (think RSS news feed collectors like Google News or your personal collection) are the scourge of mainstream (old school) news media outlets. 

The crux of the article is this:

"

What aggregators do is make it a lot easier for readers to find new news sources. That's good for an up-and-coming site with a lot of great content, because aggregators enlarge the potential audience for the content. But it's not good for a mediocre site with a large readership based largely on inertia.

"

This is an interesting point when you remove the context of News Media.  Replace "readers" with "employees", "news" with "business information" and "site" with "intranet" (or other favorite internal enterprise information portal).  What you get is a good idea of why information aggregation matters in a business context.  Our new paragraph would read:

What aggregators do is make it a lot easier for employees to find new business information sources. That's good for an up-and-coming intranet with a lot of great content, because aggregators enlarge the potential audience for the content. But it's not good for a mediocre intranet with a large readership based largely on inertia.

The reality is that most internal corporate information portals (aka intranets) fall into the latter category.  They're mediocre with a large audience simply because the audience is captive.  However, business intranets are not *competitive* the way online news media is.  This means there is no reason to fear the aggregator within the enterprise.  What aggregation does is to expose lots of otherwise hidden but relevant information.  That means aggregation drives better business decisions, better business intelligence, better *business*.

I've been thinking a lot lately about synthesis.  I've been thinking a lot lately about composite applications and enterprise mashups (aside: check out mashup gaming at: PMOG, hat tip: Jake).  Though Jake doesn't like the term "Enterprise 2.0" and I do, I think that there are some very important ways that Web 2.0 paradigms and technologies can/should be brought to bear on inherently *business* problems. 

One such problem is outlined fairly well HERE.  Malcom Chisholm correctly suspects organizational "dark data" as not only the source of most information in the enterprise but also a the key untapped source for completing the intelligence picture. 

According to Gartner,

"

Effective information management will be critical in the next decade, differentiating those enterprises that will implode under the infoglut from those that will use it to dominate the global economy.   (Source: Gartner; June 2006; Spotlight on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Enterprise</st1:City></st1:place> Information Management)

"

Contained in the catch-phrase "effective information management" are not just notions of version control and distribution automation.  But there are also intricacies of extracting, finding and calculating relevant business intelligence from disparate and heterogeneous organizational information.

Chisholm describes the magical "dark integration" that have fancier terms on architecture diagrams but really end up signifying the same thing: human effort.  People indexing data from scanned items into other systems.  People scanning through a search result list to find what they *really* wanted.  People performing audits or analysis or recommendations based on what they know, in their heads, to be what *matters*. 

Because of the scope and pace of information generation, relying on the human element to perform the initial analysis is too little, too slow, too risky, too unpredictable, too inconsistent.  What is needed is an Enterprise Information Management structure and approach that can leverage programmatic indexing, entity extraction, topical mapping, social inputs, sentiment and semantic awareness.  These mashed up data sets become the new inputs in a new generation of composite business intelligence, real time decisioning, recommender, and suggestion engine technologies (to name a few). 

The organization(s) that can bring these capabilities together in real business solutions will lead the next generation of  adopting businesses to take over.  The competitive advantage those organizations hold will be *that* significant.

Dinosaurs beware.

A snarky take on power points, conferences, and semantics.

Chicken Chicken Chicken (YouTube)

Chicken Chicken Chicken (ppt)

Maybe Jake will include this for OOW 08

Yep, I'm tempted to call it API 2.0 but Jake might get mad.

Check it out HERE.

Nice work David!

UPDATE:

On Email, According to AIIM research

"
- Only 49% of survey respondents are confident that their electronic information is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy.
- Only 38% said they are "very" or "quite confident" that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable.

"

The words "accessible", "retrievable" jump out.  Email archiving, Retention Management, Text Mining and semantic analysis capabilities all converge here.

So Just how Big is Email Archiving?  It's Big. 

THIS is an interesting article on the prevalence and importance of email (HT: Impact Lab).  Of course you knew that email was the workhorse of business communication and this study reinforces that knowledge.  But what is interesting are some of the conclusions that email is not getting (or going to be) eclipsed by Web 2.0 technologies.

"

Nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America said they used it every day, according to an April survey conducted by Ipsos for Habeas.

"

Folks aren't moving to wikis instead of email to trade and share their thoughts on products, they're using wikis along-side emails.

From a business perspective, all that email is ripe for business intelligence analysis.  All that email is a discoverable  potential liability that needs to be archived.  Check out UOA.

I have a new article here:

thoughts, feedback, screeds, flames welcome here.