The Knowledge Garden a reality.

I have been reviewing one of the early books that I had on web based information management systems. It is called "Managing Knowledge - A Practical web-Based Approach" published by Addison-wesley in 1999. You can probably only find this now in the seconds stores of Amazon or Alibris.

The was based on the work that was done at JDE to create what they called the "Knowledge Garden"What I love about this book is that it is short, (about 107 pages), practical and puts together the relationship of people, content and technology. Nice to see that people come first, after all it is us who deal with the content to make value.

The two key learning's that I got from this book were:

1. The process they used to determine the key areas to work on, and
2. Breaking everything down into a 90 day action plan.

The first part consisted of choosing a single business cycle that can be improved. Yes, that seems like business process improvement doesn't it. What was interesting in the book was that they narrowed down the business cycle to a manageable chunk, with a rider that you need to understand the objective of that business cycle before you start.

As well as identifying the business process the team at JDE then identified the content key to the success of the business cycle, then they mapped the people that need or use this content. The identification of the content as part of the cycle became their Information leverage points. Identifying the people relative to the content and the process then enabled them to key the key stakeholder requirements in a simple and relevant way.

And what is truly amazing all this was built using web based technologies and therefore in '99 was mostly hand crafted. Great work guys !

Posting from Word !

Thought that I would try out the post blog feature of Word Office 2007.

This is really getting productivity to the desktop. A couple of clicks and the registration hookup is done and I am in. All BlogSpot Blogs are visible and I can even look at previous posts and pull them down into Word to edit them and post up again! I have not worked out how to handle images yet as there was not an automatic hook into picasaweb, but hey the simplicity is great and the core features work so far.

This does beg the question of where is the line between personal tools, business tools and social networking. It all seems to be blurring rapidly. I hate to think how the corporate infrastructure types are controlling or even trying to control how this is all interacting. What about Policy, ouch ! time to reach for the aspirins.

P.S Labels not included in this edition.

Consolidation musings and Open Source dark horses

Intersting to see that the rash of vendor consolidation continues unabated from the pre Xmas rush.

Microsoft puts out the stocking and stuffs in FAST. This is an interesting play in the battle of the Titans (read Microsoft and Google). But it is also an interesting play in the Search piece of the ECM Market. Love them or hate them Microsoft entered the ECM market big time with MOSS 2007 and from the vendor stands at the annual AIIM Conference they have made a big statement over the last couple of years. It has been commonly said that once Microsoft enters a market in three years they tend to dominate.

As I have talked internally in my own business for a couple of years consolidation is coming down to one to two serious horizontal platform players and the traditional ECM specialist companies are looking desperately as to how they are going to differentiate themselves or die.

Some like EMC have the pleasure or pain of being part of a wider super tanker company and therefore can balance out the software side of the business with the tin sales that are made year on year, but others are in a serious position of looking to get purchased or face getting squeezed in the process.

Now the dark horses are the Open Source players such as Alfresco and Nuxeo. While these guys may not feature on ye old "Gartner Magic Quadrant" they are really becoming quite serious in the capability that they can offer.

Alfresco has a serious line up of architectural power that comes out of the roots of Documentum and Interwoven. Having all the industry scars but not having to be encumbered with an Architecture that is now set, they have been able to re think and retool for the "new age". I have been watching them for awhile and now that they have records management in the offering it will be interesting to see the customer pick up in the "government" type clients.

Zine-ing On!

In this blog I intend to have a personal look at the world of ECM from my totally biased and focused view. On, no! you say, another ECM Blog rant. Well the door is always open if you wish to leave.

I live down under (that's New Zealand folks!) the view is going to be interesting. Again the sole purpose of this Blog is primarily for me to keep my thoughts and notes together for future reference and maybe even a few good laughs if possible.

I thought a more generic Blog was in hand, to capture more of a general industry view as my other blog ECM Thoughts seems to be more practitioner based and a collection of ECM thoughts more in tune with how to get going with ECM, rather than just talking about the industry and the players. Have fun, I will.