BizTechTalk

The Un-Usual Suspects

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at our (AIIM), Advisory Trade Member Executive Summit in Chicago on 9/12/2007.

Embedded below (or via slideshare.net) are the raw slides for my portion of the kick-off - for those who wanted a copy, or are interested in some of thoughts I'm having these days on the "old world" of ECM, and the "new world" and future state. This was a "hyper keynote" of 43 slides, which I believe I managed to do in about 12 minutes. I did not capture the audio at the time, so am playing around with a post-edited version with audio (and animation) so you can get the full effect.

As always, would love feedback on the presentation (particularly if you were there - as the slides themselves don't tell the entire story), and your thoughts overall on the impact of open-source, SaaS (software as a service), wikis, blogs, and RSS - all in an "enterprise" context, rather than individual/personal context.

Enjoy! Discuss?

Link to presentation - or embedded version below.

Advertiser meets Consumer

Keep stumbling on a Massachusetts-based company, Cymfony, through a number of network connections and marketing-oriented blogs I read. Appear to be doing some interesting work on analytics and modern marketing - and I'm always interested in Massachusetts companies right in the thick of things.

On their blog, they have a great pointer to a video of "The Breakup" (a consumer breaking up with an advertiser). Very funny, and very relevant if you are trying to get your head around Marketing 1.0 and Advertising 1.0 versus Marketing 2.0 (tending towards "conversational marketing" aka "social media marketing" - blogs, YouTube, etc.).

For further details on the creators of the video are at their blog, Bring The Love Back.

Video embedded below, or see it on DailyMotion.com

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

And lastly, while I don't have my copies of The Brand Gap or ZAG (by Mary Neumeier of Neutron) at hand, there is a great two-page spread showing the differences between advertising, marketing, branding, and how that affects consumer interaction. Anyone have a digital copy of the spread I'm talking about? (Marty?) Both The Brand Gap and ZAG are great, and quick, reads.

Global Innovation, The Good and Bad

Innovation remains a burning interest of mine, and to many people that I speak with - and in the interest of continuing to both widen and deepen the conversation around Innovation, in this interview, I discussed the Global stage with Bruno Giussani, who is a writer for BusinessWeek Online, the Special Project Editor at L'Hebdo; the European Director of the TED Conferences; the author of several books and a frequent public speaker.

He also happens to be Swiss, living in Switzerland, although frequently found around the globe, examining Innovation from every angle.

Bruno has some fascinating insights, and believes, as I do, that Innovations of any shape or size count, not just the "big bang" (or Big I) Innovation, of which I've spoken about previously here on the blog and podcast series.

In addition to this podcast interview, I would highly recommend reading Bruno's blog, which is Lunch Over IP, and another wonderful resource, covering very different ground than the "typical" innovation blog (if there is such a thing!).

Enjoy, and any commentary on the discussion from this interview, please post, and we will see what we can do to continue the conversation!



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Rubbish, I say! (The Dangers of Content)

Ok, so this is tangential (isn't it all?), but an interesting coincidence. Just last week I gave a presentation which reference the photo from the man from Brooklyn a few years back, who was buried in his own apartment by stacks of newspapers, magazines and books that had fallen and crushed his leg. Many bags of trash later, and some agonizing minutes later, they were able to recover the fellow and get him the hospital, where aside from temporary fears of a need to amputate, he apparently has made a full recovery.

And today, in our own (for us locals that is) Boston Globe newspaper (which is rare enough that I even read the cover), another article, describing a fellow (90 years old) in Norton, MA who also fell prey to a serious (physical) information overload problem. When paramedics arrived, all they could see was his head above the mountain of debris in the house. (see full article) Needless to say, the house has been condemned, and the family has been asked to clean out the house to see what the structural situation is from years of piling.

My favorite bit from the article:

Halko's son and daughter-in-law arrived, and as they looked on, Norton firefighters formed a 14-person chain to pull the barely conscious and dehydrated Halko out of the mountain of debris. He was sent to Attleboro's Sturdy Memorial Hospital, where he was determined to be in stable condition.

There was so little room to maneuver in the house that they had to pass him from one person to the next to even get him out of the house. Wow.

Now, perhaps with your enterprise content, the situation isn't quite so dire, although even moving your own information piles out to a service such as Iron Mountain, or similar services, isn't quite cleaning up your mess. What smoking guns lie in those archives? What beneficial content is literally buried that neither you nor anyone else will ever be able to benefit from?

Personally, I'd prefer to be buried in electronic information - while it may be mentally taking, at least you don't run the risk of being crushed!

What's your take? How are you dealing with paper versus electronic information? Are they
mountains or molehiles? Do you know what you're keeping, what you're actively using (or wish you could)? Let me know what you're thinking - and if this Boston Globe article frightens you (for it's similarity to your working life), or amuses me (because this couldn't possibly happen to you), I'd love to hear your stories here.

Is your content secure? (survey says - or will, with YOUR help)

As the kick-off Market IQ (Market Intelligence Quarterly) launches, we’re tackling a topic that information managers around the world have told us is a burning topic within their organizations.

The topic is... Content Security - We’re looking at the next level of thinking and implementation in content-centric systems, that goes beyond records management, beyond securing content in a repository, beyond e-mail management, and most certainly beyond traditional “information security” (securing boxes, wires, desktops).

All of these individual topics are still highly relevant, but how are you and your peers tying them together, from both a tactical and strategic point of view?

If you would kindly take 20-25 minutes to share your insights into the concerns that your organization have around security of content throughout it’s lifecycle, we believe there is an untapped series of pains that organizations from the largest to the smallest are feeling in this area, and that we are only just beginning to see whole solutions provided that can address the full swath of content concerns.

Your insights will help us in our efforts to drive the ECM industry as a community, to identify and solve these problems, minimize risks, and help to make security a positive driver of business, rather than an obstacle for all users (whether legitimate users or attackers).

The outcome of this research will be posted in the Market IQ on Content Security, due around October 5th, 2007, and we will also be providing glimpses of the research via this blog, Carl’s blog, and a specific webinar discussing the findings, roughly 2 weeks after the paper has been posted to the AIIM website, so we can give the audience a chance to digest the findings, and interact with us in exploring what the results indicate, and how they plan to move forward.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Jump into the survey, and help to shape this aspect of the world of ECM. (If your RSS reader has mangled the link, copy and paste http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB226UNAW64LA to take the survey)

100th Post, 1000th network connection

Ah, synchronicity - I seem to have passed a Tipping Point here in the wide worlds of social media and social networking (sometimes the same, sometimes different topics).

This post marks the 100th entry in my blog, BizTechTalk, which I first began in October 2005. My posting has become much more regular during this time, and I've clearly gone for the podcasting route for nearly half of my content, which has been a great way extend my reach into areas of interest both "spot on" and "on the fringe" for what might be called my sphere of influence.

Interestingly, it seems to be largely due to the podcasting that my network (on LinkedIn) has taken off quite significantly during this time. As I've continued to reach out and also sought to be found via LinkedIn, I have most definitely experienced a "network effect" as I have ended up one way or another in attaching to "super nodes" on the LinkedIn network.

Hence, my reason for calling out this post especially - now that I've built up a fairly sizable number of posts (and I'm working on frequency in addition to overall volume), and have seen an exponential rise in my number of network connections, I am seeing the benefits of being an attractor in a "rich get richer" scenario, where those with the most connections tend to continue to get even more connections (ah, power laws!).

As a result, even further reach in mindshare as my name and profile is now seen across thousands of profiles on LinkedIn (in 1st and 2nd degree relationships) and is seen daily now hundreds of times (via search stats that LinkedIn provides), I'm getting sucked up into the tornado (to use a Geoffey Moore term), or again, as mentioned above tapping into the growth curve of power laws that social networking theory (and reality as it turns out) discusses.

In the midst of writing this post, I've accidentally accepted the 1001st connection on LinkedIn, so the screenshot I'd planned on inserting here is already out of date! The upward spiral continues! (see image below)

In any case, the numbers are interesting, and for anyone sitting on the sidelines with regards to professional networking online, it's time to start experimenting - on LinkedIn vs. Facebook, there is essentially no damage you can do to your current and future reputation, and in my direct experience of the last 4 years, it will likely only serve to strengthen your position and stature in professional spheres.

Give it a whirl, and join me on your network of choice - LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, or ??? (what's your network of choice? let me know).

Also, keep an eye on the forthcoming AIIM network/platform - we are already on LinkedIn and Facebook, but have some things brewing here that I'm personally very excited about.

Splashcasting your Web 2.0 Media

In this episode, we discuss the intersection of the consumer world of mass media, the consumer-generated media world of blogs, Flickr photo streams, and user-submitted/created YouTube videos, with the enterprise world and a flashback to the late 90s wave of e-learning technology, and tie it all up in a bow under the Web 2.0 and Marketing 2.0 banners.

A mere 13 minutes long, you may be able to jump your understanding of the world of personalized aggregation and viral distribution, and who knows, perhaps become a new media megastar before the day is done. If not, I will settle for shedding SOME light into what Web 2.0 is, how communities interact with content in the 21st century, and how you might participate in this new wave of media.

Interview by your host, Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence at AIIM (www.aiim.org), of Michael Berkley, CEO from Splashcast Media (www.splashcastmedia.com). Michael and I encourage your commentary here, and would love to hear your thoughts on where Web 2.0 is going, the influence on marketing measurement, spend, and whether we are in fact losing or gaining control of media as we continue to move deeper into the 21st century. Start the conversation - join the conversation!

MP3 File

Influence Networks and Marketing - Connectors, Mavens and U!

If you've been following my blog for some time, you already know that I have been an intense follower of social networking and social network analysis. Coming from the background of the knowledge management  (KM) work that we had done while I was at Delphi Group, and the splinter of KM known as expertise location or expertise management, I must say, that anyone who has long since written off KM as a fad, or purely academic, has been missing quite a bit!

In this interview, I speak with Myra Gorman, CEO of Community Analytics, about the services that her company provides in identifying the movers and shakers within networks, for the specific purpose of... well, that would be telling now, wouldn't it! Nothing sinister - and it ties nicely into idea competitions and open innovation concepts, if you haven't also been following those interviews (see previous podcasts), or the memes in general.

I've long been a fan of LISTENING to customers (makes for a great consulting technique, as well as marketing or product management technique, BTW), and here it appears that Myra's group has made an art and science of it, to profitable *and* palatable ends! (no 1984-style Big Brother concerns - their findings are summarized and sanitized to prevent hyper-saturation of the network nodes in question)

So take a listen, this interview is a mere 15 minutes, and well worth your time. If you have used similar techniques in your work, I would love to hear about it. Please comment here, or get in touch separately (hint - LinkedIn holds the key), and we'll see what we can do to round out this conversation!

As always, your host, Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence at AIIM. While you're listening, why not take a second to join the AIIM camp? 70,000 people, and growing - and who knows what you could add to our ongoing conversations?

MP3 File

Dangers of Paper in an iPhone world

Had a phone briefing today with NewsGator, who I've met for briefings several times over the last 2-3 years. They continue to do interesting things on both the individual/consumer side of the coin, and on my "normal" beat, on the enterprise and particularly the "management" side of the coin. This is the RSS reading/aggregating coin incidentally, a key component of the Enterprise 2.0 story.

Continuing to hear that MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) is making traction, and given what NewsGator is working on with their NewsGator Social Sites offering (in beta), interesting to hear their feedback on a MOSS-based portal world, versus the "traditional" portal world of BEA, Oracle, IBM, et al. Incidentally my colleagues at AIIM are running a multi-city roadshow on "Sharepoint Meets ECM" - I'll be at the Boston version, for anyone interested in meeting in person AND receiving a free near day long education on this topic.

I'll jump back to a MOSS thread in a later post, and the role of MOSS in Enterprise 2.0, RSS as glue/plumbing, but...

The point of this post is that in reading through some of the blog entries of CTO/Co-founder Greg Reinacker while chatting with the team from NewsGator, I happened across a post from Greg mentioning a 300-page bill a recent iPhone user received from AT&T (the sole carrier for telco services for the iPhone). That's right, a literal 300 page box arrived for this user. Whoops!

In the age of 'e' or 'i' or whatever you personally choose to call it, there are plenty of reasons to produce paper output, but particularly in the case of the iPhone (the most successful consumer product launch in history), you would expect that the full customer service experience would be as slick and modern as the device and it's services. As you may recall from my colleague Carl Frappaolo's description of my online user experience when searching for a new stove, even the most modern of e-commerce or search interfaces can, in the end, fall short of the user's needs (I wanted faceted search, and they didn't happen to provide 2 of the facets I wanted, even though the data was there). Honestly, customer services is the first and last step in innovation - something I'm going to be picking up over and over again moving forward.

So, I'm sure someone in the legal department or billing department at AT&T thought it was a good idea to line item ever byte of data sent, and to make the default billing method to be paper-based, but if ever there was a reason to proactively switch your business model, and the upfront and downstream expenses, this is it!

See embedded video clip below... or visit the original post on Tasty Blog snack, written/produced by up and coming new media star Justine Ezarik, out of Pittsburgh, PA, where I seem to be constantly pulled via my contacts at Vivisimo, talkshoe, and Davison Inventegration (a horrible name, but quite an interesting innovation/manufacturing firm that I plan on circling back with shortly).

aiimALERT: RSA (EMC) Grabs Tablus to Round Out Content Security Play

RSA, the security division of EMC, announced it's intent to acquire Tablus, a privately held company in  the more narrowly defined (but no less important) Data Leak Prevention (DLP) space. Once completed, Tablus' solutions will be integrated into EMC's Infoscape intelligent information management offerings. (see press release for further details, eWeek article By Chris Preimesberger, and News.com coverage by Dawn Kawamoto)

Busy times for EMC in recent years, as it knocks down pin after pin in the quest to own a significant portion of the "best of breed" solutions in the overall Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) picture. The Tablus acquisition adds an ability to know exactly where content is and what is being done with it, particularly for what is called "data in motion" (over the network) and "data in use" (typically on a desktop).

No doubt there is massive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry consolidation going on these days, with IBM, Oracle, OpenText and Autonomy (see aiimALERT on Autonomy acquisition of ZANTAZ) all in the game. While the financial implications to EMC and all its subsidiaries are interesting to consider, the real interest here is in the arsenal of solutions and the entire ecosystem that EMC is putting together to own DIRECTLY.

Conceptually, EMC's acquired solutions have one thing in common - virtualized policy-based information (structured or unstructured, data or "information") management - regardless of the type or format of content, regardless of what type of storage medium is being used, regardless of what system it lives in. It's not enough just to virtualize your storage, nor to have policy-based capabilities, yet have to implement that policy in multiple siloed systems. The closer to full integration, the more likely you are truly to have "managed" your information for both proactive and reactive purposes.

In short, with ILM, information is managed, cradle to grave (creation to destruction), and includes not just an "IT View" of information (typically concerned with operational matters), which EMC provides via it's core storage business as well as through the Legato and Dantz acquisitions, but also a "Business View" -  (i.e. compliance and regulatory matters, "knowledge worker" and managerial productivity concerns, findability of content, and information-centric processes and productivity), which EMC provides via Documentum, eRoom, AskOnce, TrueArc,  Legato  and Authentica acquisition).

Add a portal and/or Web Content Management solution such as Vignette (a next acquisition?), re-surface Enterprise Search (where has AskOnce disappeared to in the EMC stack?), address the mobile/untethered market (on both security and information access overall), and support all operating systems from Windows, Unix, OS X and Linux, and EMC will essentially own the entire solution, tied together in Business Process Management via  the ProActivity acquisition (in 2006).

At one time it would've seemed absurd that EMC could come remotely close to this unified vision, but it seems a real possibility at this time, and only getting more real as the days roll on. What had started out looking like an oddball acquisition strategy from it's storage roots has over time looked to be brilliant maneuvering towards dominance and complete ILM solution ownership by EMC.

This most recent acquisition, Tablus falls within the realm of content security.  in this regard. the path taken by EMC mirrors the content security definition and strategy that we have been touting in AIIM Market Intelligence research, and in our former work at Delphi Group. (This is the topic of our upcoming AIIM Market IQ, scheduled for release in early October.)

Put succinctly, content security is a full life-cycle policy-based approach to securing content at its source - and in dynamic use or context. This approach to security minimizes risk, while simultaneously maximizing secure collaboration and knowledge exchange.  The promise of content security (as defined) comes as the result of business strategy and (granted) a potentially complex technology strategy. Between the rise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and platform independent standards, as well as "all in one" solutions such as EMC is pursuing, the coarse building blocks for full information management is essentially a clear possibility, and the rest of the story is in the hairy work of true "off the shelf" integration between all of the components that EMC has acquired, and the ongoing system integration premiums that early adopters in the "whole solution" are going to experience.

It is interesting to note that while EMC is not the only solution provider building an ILM platform, they are ahead in the strategic acquisition race, and this is significantly different than the approach that companies such as Microsoft and Adobe are taking. Where MS and Adobe are creating a loose-knit partner ecosystem which puts all of the risk (and fun) in rounding out specific capabilities in a market space out in the hands of the startups looking to push the boundaries and innovate at the edges of a particular set of business/technology issues, EMC seeks to own the entire "information stack" itself, in theory offering better integration and faster time to deploy. More expensive in the short-term for EMC, and with higher risk for EMC, but this plan seems to be bearing significant fruit thus far.

This is a fascinating area of the broad information management business - the idea that security is FINALLY being addressed not just at the device or network level, but to information itself, in a dynamic real-time manner, is a key issue that gets to the heart of how organizations should handle their information assets.

Stay tuned as we dive further into this area of the market in our forthcoming Market IQ (Intelligence Quarterly) on Content Security, being released early Q4 of 2007. It's high time that the world of traditional information security and business management of information tied together...