Information lifecycle management?

Sounds relatively straight forward, doesn't it ? But if I Google this three letter acronym (TLA) today the top hits are rightly, Industrial Light & Magic. Down the search result list is a wikipedia entry for ILM, then an article from Computerworld on ILM vendors. But where are the vendor entries?

A year or so ago I was awash in ILM white papers, articles and other items from the vendor marketing sausage machines that were telling me why I needed to buy all this fancy hardware to manage my information. We are now told that this is storage 2.0, But where is all this ILM marketing now ? It looks like it has gone the way of most hype cycles, disappeared like a good fireworks display.

Sure storage is important, but it is not the beginning or the end of the the lifecycle of information. We would all agree that storage is not going away but it is increasing because information is increasing and in most cases is still not managed. Organisations are still struggling with the basics of getting the people and process parts of the lifecycle sorted, but unfortunately it is still easier for many to just throw some technology at the problem.

IT is from Mars and your Information is from Venus

"Information structure , Sure, no problem , got that covered" says the Enterprise Architect as you ask about the alignment of the Business Classification Structure and metadata to the IT technology that has being proposed for the Pan Galactic rollout that you have just heard about.


"It's all just a quick review and we get on with. The vendor told us it will be easy", he adds, almost without taking a breath. After wondering that maybe you are in different solar systems, or different companies you race off to see how wide spread this IT selection disease has become.

Does this sound like your situation? Scary as it is, it is still be played out across companies of reasonably large size as we speak.

IT selection alone will not solve an information problem that you have. In treating the information just as a bit or a byte ultimately the thinking will by default go to a technology only "Storage Bucket" view.

Maybe this is why most technology only selections seem to fail, or why IT seems to get impatient with information management people who see the need to get a clear understanding on the complex mess of connections and associations between information in a contextual way.

By focusing only on product (technology) not the capability that it can provide you to assist in the management of your information in context you will replay the IT solution that fails over and over again. Only when you realise that there are two planets involved will you start on the right path to providing a working solution.

Don't forget to execute

In a previous post "Plan, plan, plan then execute" I stressed the importance of planning, and that is correct.

But what often happens is that the the execute part of the plan gets left out, becuase people stop at the end of the plan, consequence, little or no execution to make the plan a reality. After all why have a plan if you are not going to execute it in the first place.

In the strategy world it is often said that a bad plan executed well has better sucess than a great plan not executed at all. Execution is all about having the right direction as indicated by the plan and then adjusting according to weather conditions on the way to the destination.


Like sailing there are times when you must tack like crazy just to get a few yards up the line and in other areas you are blasting ahead with a downwind stream behind you. What really matters is that you keep making decisions (execution) along the way to ensure that you are headed towards the goal that you have set.

Now back to the linking blog. Why were Justain & James successful? Not only did they have a plan but they executed sucessfully by making decisions to compensate for the unknowns, keeping the end goal in mind. Outcome, sucess.

Leverage Momentum

The US Elections have been and are still quite topical. What was the result, sweeping change to the government from the Republicans to the Democrats. Barack Obama on his victory night speech invoked the picture of lines and lines of people, thereby creating an illusion that the voter turnout was massive towards the change mantra that had been preached over the campaign. To quote from his victory speech.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in
numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four
hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this
time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.

Listening to the victory speech made we want to check the inside messaging of the statement.

Was it massive voter turnout? NO; Total voter turnout was 60% of total voters up 3% from the previous election in 2004, and the increase is in line with the general increasing trend of participating voters showing a steady increasing trend from '96 when it was 49% of total voters. So this is a trend of +4% per election over 12 years.

Yes, there were more registered voters this time, but that is also line with general population increase and the general trend of registrations.

Was it total dissatisfaction (excluding President Bush's personal ratings)? NOT NECESSARILY., as there was only 53% to 46% in the popular vote total, a gap of only 7% in the end result. The electoral votes are a winner takes all, but in some states the individual races were very close indeed.

What made a difference was the mood for change. The Democratic party identified this an galvanised people to action, leveraging the mood for change. They managed to gain the precious percentage over and above the registered party core to win through.

Along with the change message there was the defining figure of Barack Obama. Change became personalised, a history making event and therefore more real, more personal. Momentum began to build more and became defined in the person of Barack Obama.

Then on top of this was the availability of funds for ad spending and airtime. In reviewing the numbers I see that the Democrats had roughly a 2:1 ratio in funds to put into the overall campaign. In Florida alone the Democrat's spent somewhere around $24M to the Republicans $9M, go figure that, great marketing.

So to sum up, the thoughts here are that there was a momentum for change, a defining figure to attach to and that momentum was leveraged through solid marketing to ensure achievement of success.

There are some lessons that we can learn here for our ECM projects.

1. Find the mood for change (the compelling event)
2. Place the right leader in front to make the change personal
3. Leverage the Momentum through marketing and messaging for example "Yes we can" Change you can believe in"

And don't forget that a little extra funding does help to move things along. I am sure that now the campaign is over and the victory won that reality will hit home. All the best Mr President-elect.

MOSS 2007 - Infrastructure counts!

Like all things infrastructure is often not seen, but is essential. There is a song called "The wise man built his house upon the rock". This is very much the same with MOSS 2007. The infrastructure, hardware, storage, network that supports the database and the application software is a very essential part of the design and deployment.

A case in point is the difference that a SAN can make to a MOSS 2007 deployment where there is lots of dynamic content from a very transactional Internet facing website, along with the right kind of Internet pipe as well. The difference is the time to load and deliver the pages necessary to make a great user experience rather than a pathetic one. Here are some good links to places that will give you a start on the necessary planning.

Planning and Architecture for MOSS 2007 - Microsoft Technet
SharePoint Capacity Planning Key Info - Joel Olsen SharePoint Land Blog (recommended)
MOSS 2007 Best Practices book link - Microsoft Press

ECM - MOSS 2007 How do I get going?

How do we get going with MOSS 2007. Well, Setup.exe is NOT I repeat NOT the way to get started. Why? MOSS 2007 is a great platform for collaboration and information sharing but if not planned correctly it quickly becomes a virus within the organisation with information silo's that are out of control.

Now, I am not advocating the evil empire control, but like most projects if you don't have the end in mind then failure at least comes a total surprise I guess.

Planning, especially in the information management space is hard work becuase it takes some hard thinking and some hard talking up front to get everyone on the same page, with a single view of the end game that we are heading towards. This is especially true with MOSS as you have to take into account the nature of containment in the MOSS Hierarchy.

Microsoft have some reasonable guidance and checklists on their Governance resources centre on Technet. However, this does not cover fully the information management side of getting ready, which if you don't get a good handle on will cause you pain in the long run.

Another starting point would be to look into the "Best Practices" book by Ben Curry, Bill English, Mark Schneider and the Microsoft SharePoint Team; you can find it here at Amazon. This book is a good one for both technical and business people to get a handle on the things that you need to consider with MOSS 2007 and some best practices based on real world field experience.

This is a good resource to get a handle on how to start and what to consider before SETUP.EXE.

ECM - Information Infrastructure

"Information infrastructure" interesting term! Well this is a term that I use to try and raise awareness that like any building it is the infrastructure supports all the other ECM deployment areas.

Information infrastructure is about putting the right information thinking and planning in place to make our ECM rollout a real success. Just as in building projects the infrastructure is not sexy, but it is essential to the structure and longevity of the overall building. If you have noticed any large building project it is the initial foundations and infrastructure that seem to take the longest. But once this in place the rest seems to take off, according to the plan, so to is it with ECM projects, you need a solid information infrastructure to build on.


If I use the term "information architecture" generally people are confused, and think in terms of the web definition of architecture. This definition has more of a focus on the structure that needs to be in place for the navigation and the web side of the Manage, Process & Deliver information chain. Yes there are linkages between the overall architecture and the infrastructure part but the core fundamentals of infrastructure go well beyond just the web.

Information infrastructure encompasses the core pieces of content classification and structural metadata that must be defined in advance to ensure that there is a clear understanding of what needs to be managed and how it will be managed in a business context. Along with this understanding you also need to define and map the set of business rules that will provide the glue to the content relationships. Then once this has been put in place you can concentrate on navigation and findability as the infrastructure is now in place to make the upper layers successful.

So that is a general look at Information Infrastructure. Soon we will look at bringing some of these pieces together realitive to MOSS 2007.

Plan, Plan, Plan, then Execute

So three days at the Sales Conference. Someone has to do it, right! Well the great speaking event this year was two 20+ year old adventurers. Justin and James a couple of ordinary guys that think big and go for their dreams.

They had kayaked 3318km, braved 10 metre swells, faced howling winds of over 50 knots, endured severe food and sleep deprivation, wasting muscles and adverse winds and currents to become the first kayak expedition across the Tasman Sea as well as become the longest trans oceanic kayaking expedition undertaken by two expeditionary individuals.

But was was more interesting to me was that while it took 62 days to complete the mission there was 4 years of planning and hard graft that went into making the execution happen. I had the pleaseur to speak to Justin just before dinner and told him the math.

For every day of rowing there was in rounded terms 23.5 days of planning, and boy did they plan. They started by created pages of questions to which they had no answer and then set about looking to acquire through experts and from their own inquiry the answers necessary to create a blueprint for success.

Then having a list of question they then set about looking to build a virtual team of experts that would share the vision and who couldprovide them with the best minds and materials for answering the questions and propelling them forward towards success.

Having got the team and the questions starting to be nailed they also focused on making sure that they had a risk plan that covered off all the likely events that would or might happen while in their execution phase.

Great stuff guys ! and a great lesson for ECM'ers that are heading into the dream of content management, do the plan, work the plan, do the plan and then execution is simply a playing out of the moves that have already been set in place.

In fact if you take the 4 years *365 days and add 62 days and then do the division.

Planning = 96% of total
Execution = 4% of total

No wonder success was achieved, because as they stated we had the blueprint. For more information on this amazing feat check out James and Justin at their site crossing the ditch.

Where do I start?

I was called on the other day to run a briefing session to talk about SharePoint licencing, Hmm! This type of request generally gets me thinking, do they know what they want? and what they are doing?

Well it was evident that there was from the outset of the meeting that there was a bit of confusion as to roles and responsibilities of the people in the room. Not a good sign if this is the way you feel about your own structure, or organisation.

Fortunately I had already prepared my deck as a game of two halves. The first half was talking about their licensing request, as expected, and the second half was all about getting them to focus on, why? and what? of the wider content issues that they would have to face up to.,

I started the second half by asking some questions:

* How does the organisation view information?
* How do senior executives view information?
* Is there an information strategy?
* What understand do we have of how information flows?
* Do you understand the relationship of information to business processes?
* Is there a view that there is a problem?

These are generic questions that if you fail to get a solid answer up front indicate that there is some serious thinking, planning and alignment that needs to go on before you buy software. Then from this opening I gave an outline of five steps to help get started. These steps are as follows:

1. Conduct an Information Assessment (where are you today?)
2. Align content (you need a definition of content first) to People and Process
3. Identifying problems (with the content alignment) and solutions (how can we make it better)
4. Sell the solution (to identified sponsor(s) ) and gaining executive Air Cover
5. Break the overall delivery into manageable steps (build a road map of projects)

And with these steps, always ensure alignment to business objectives and outcomes of the organisation.