Fusion ECM

E20 & ECM - On Discipline and Dumps

2009-06-25T14:22:54Z

Enterprise Content Management systems are designed to house human created and consumable information. One of the challenges in recent years that ECM systems have faced is the explosion of content. Web and Enterprise 2.0 systems have lowered the bar to participation on and with the web. Participation in many cases means content creation. We participate in instant message (IM) conversations, we interact in discussion threads, we write blog entries, update wiki entries, and review everything under the sun whether books, movies, music, documents, projects or even each other. Those ratings, wikis, messages and participation are all content.

Organizations agree (in theory if not in practice) that such content must be managed. If not for competitive advantage and intellectual capital purposes then for compliance, risk, and governance purposes. Yet too many CIOs and IT managers try to short cut the strategic necessity and adopt a short term approach. All too often those short term approaches wind up as legacy systems - having grown far beyond their intent, use and ability to deliver a value to the enterprise. Often such systems and approaches end up creating liability for the organization. And thus shared file systems are born and live aged but tragically decrepit lives. Meanwhile vendors peddle siloed software and hardware solutions that address specific (tactical) needs but fail to be incorporated into an overall enterprise information management strategy. ECM systems can be part of the problem as much as part of the solution.

An Enterprise Content Management system that simply acts as a dumping ground for content from applications, people and systems will die a slow death by a thousand cuts. When too much chaos reigns in ECM implementations relevant information is diluted amidst a sea of junk. Simply laying out Euro or Dollars and thinking that your problems are solved is a recipe for frustration. Dumping grounds for documents will not help your Enterprise 2.0 projects. Dumps are not as useful, navigable, or referencable as planned cities. Sure you might find something neat or novel in a dump but the process is not repeatable and does not scale.

The point is that E2.0 requires purpose and ECM requires discipline for success. There is a human element to managing information that is all too often left out by technology vendors and overlooked by clients. Make sure that you are planning your development and that it coincides with your strategy. Make sure that your E2.0 systems are able to store content in a planned, repeatable, and reusable way, not dumped in a digital pile and forgotten.

Text Analytics and Enterprise Content Management

2009-06-05T17:35:31Z

Text Analytics is an interesting sub-genre of Business Intelligence. It does a lot but if I had to condense it to layman's terms, it figures out the important bits of some text you give it, transforms those bits, stores them, and mashes them up for Business Intelligence analysis with other bits.

Yawn.

But if you think about it this way it gets vastly more exciting: TA systems read your document and tell you what it's about. Hey, COOL! Now it is not all HAL 9000. Most TA vendors came out of (or are currently part of) the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence spaces. As such, they are used to talking about transforming inputs with ETL (extract, transform, load) processes, storing them and then running different reporting algorithms (OLAP etc) against the aggregate data sets. That works really well for structured data - stuff in databases, spreadsheets, and in surveys.

But what do they do with that bit at the end of the survey where it asks "is there anything else you would like us to know?" Do they have teams of college intern readers who manually index that free form data? No. That's where Text Analytics comes in. At least that was the overwhelming and pervading theme of the recent Text Analytics Summit I attended in Boston this week.

All of the vendors and case studies were about finding and accessing the "Voice of the Customer". Initially I thought, "Cool, they're getting into what the customers are saying not just what form data the customers are filling out". But it seems that this is ALL they are doing.

I was impressed with all of the vendors and technologies there (GATE, Attensity, Clarabridge, SPSS, Lexalytics, SAS, and Endeca to name a few). They are doing some very interesting things in the realms of document and topic categorization, grammar, dictionary, thesaurus and even sentiment analysis. (Is this free text customer review of my hotel good or bad? - COOL!)

But I was disappointed though that so many of them are focused on simple ETL for documents. It was like they were imprisoned by a traditional data warehousing/bizintel myopia and didn't/couldn't/wouldn't worry about the vast amount of unstructured (as opposed to lightly or slightly structured) content that is in need of being analyzed. I guess this makes sense since most come from the BI and Data Warehousing world. Still it seems to me that having a defined body of content in an ECM system would be a pretty exciting target for these companies. Instead they're all (ALL!) looking at things like survey responses. Don't get me wrong, being able to get at the free form text box at the end of a survey to pull out key words and phrases and whether or not the review is good or bad is cool. But it is still lightly structured content and therefore still closer to structured data than a web page, or product manual or contract.

The one exception to this was Endeca's chief scientist Daniel Tunkelang who writes over at The Noisy Channel. He seems to "get" the bigger picture and the potential that TA has in conjunction with vast content stores. The others gave me assurances that they "could" do TA against an ECM stores (e.g. to output RDF triples of the entity relationships to each other and to the containing documents), and while I sincerely believe them, was left with the impression that they all kept thinking ("but why in the world would you want to do that?").

Sigh. I'll have to build it to prove it. I think this is a mistake for the TA software vendors out there. Doing ETL against lightly-structured survey and feedback form data so it fits in with the rest of your BI OLAP cubes may be low hanging fruit but it is still ignoring the digital dark matter of the information universe. There needs to be some thought leadership from within the TA community and finding it in the micro-incrementalism of Data Warehousing improvements is keeping these folks from taking the entire "enterprise information management" sector by storm. Stop working on better dashboards and start thinking about what the data you can get at can do when extracted, mashed, combined, categorized, related and parsed in new and novel ways. Some orthagonal thinking is called for.

Did Trickle Down Business Process Kill the US Automobile Industry? Can Enterprise 2.0 help save Detroit?

2009-05-29T21:23:42Z

Last month I wrote about trickle down business strategy HERE.

That post turned into an article on business agility in the post modern economy that published May 18th in the Business Solutions Group InfoWeek Special (in German only, link on lower right). The post itself is part of a much larger forthcoming white paper on business agility that covers Enterprise 2.0 technology, crowd sourcing in the enterprise, communication paradigms, social transmission of information and value, as well as information management and re-use.

Then comes a timely article in Wired Magazine on the demise of the US Auto Industry. What do they blame? The "Top Down Model". It’s trickle down business strategy strangling agility in the crib of innovation. The "Manufacturing, Retooled" image (HERE) is most telling. This is not only an interesting take on what the automakers SHOULD do vs. what they have done and continue to do today. Based on the past success of other companies like Toyota and Honda, the comparisons are stark and not unfamiliar. The first question is, can any of the Big Three US Auto Makers move with enough agility adopt a new business process that breaks or at least enhances / sits next to / augments the "Top Down" model? The second question is what are government regulators, bond holders and shareholders doing to demand this kind of agility?

The Wired article states:

Automakers will need to transition from a vertical, proprietary, hierarchical model to an open, modular, collaborative one, becoming central nodes in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. In other words, the industry will need to undergo much the same wrenching transformation that the US computer business did some three decades ago, when the minicomputer gave way to the personal computer. Whereas minicomputers were restricted to using mainly software and hardware from their makers, PCs used interchangeable elements that could be designed, manufactured, and installed by third parties. Opening the gates to outsiders unleashed a flood of innovation that gave rise to firms like Microsoft, Dell, and Oracle. It destroyed many of the old computer giants but guaranteed a generation of American leadership in a critical sector of the world economy.

This is not really different than embracing and facilitating the cultural shifts inside the enterprise presumed and hastened by Enterprise 2.0 social technology. The "Not Invented Here" syndrome has no place in an agile business or in agile teams within and between departments, partners, and the extended network.

The opposite of the "Not Invented Here" syndrome is crowd sourcing, collective intelligence and the ability to tap the enterprise "brain" in order to generate and consume better quality signaling if not better and more efficient decision making. But as you suspect, simply buying and installing some Enterprise 2.0 technology is not a panacea. The technology enables wide ranging contributions and idea incubation. The technology facilitates expertise identification, information re-use, contextual analysis and topical aggregation. It still takes people, driven by purpose toward clearly defined goals to power the Enterprise 2.0 technology on the rails of innovation. There is no crowd sourcing technology without first the crowd. This should be obvious since the Big Three were no strangers to technology. GM's FastLane Blog has been around since early 2005 yet, if the Wired article even comes close to the truth, the love of technology did not help translate into the kind of business agility that is helping other auto manufacturers survive the global economic downturn.

This is a time when the Big Three US Automakers are being forced to rethink the way they make cars, address the market, adopt mechanical innovation from outside the organization and incorporate ideas from everywhere into a salable asset - the new cars of the next several years. Widespread Web 2.0 adoption has clearly demonstrated that people are eager and willing to participate, sometimes for as little as "street credibility", recognition, and bragging rights. Enterprise 2.0 technology is designed to tap that desire to participate within the organization and then channel, strain, combine and deliver better information, more quickly to people more equipped than ever before to make immediate and accurate decisions.

We’ll see what happens in Detroit < fingers crossed >.

A very special thanks to my colleague Jason Zolzcynski for his great work helping me with this article.

Light Blogging for End of Fiscal Year & Memorial Day

2009-05-22T23:14:31Z

It's been a light blogging week due to the end of our fiscal year (close now!) and preparations for the Memorial Day holiday here in the US.

Best to all and a thanks to the families of those who sacrificed all for us.

Announcing the Enterprise 2.0 TV Site

2009-05-15T19:30:53Z

I am very happy to announce the launch of Enterprise 2.0 TV. This is a rich web site with video, blog, podcast and case study content on all things Enterprise 2.0. I am happy to say that I will be blogging for them as well with original content that you will be able to find only there.

Check it out, register and ENJOY!

Semantic Web, Kinetic vs Potential Energy, and a Discussion with Bex Huff

2009-05-15T15:17:23Z

If you don't read Bex Huff's blog, you need to. He is one of the most thoughtful critics of web hype out there. He also knows a thing or two about Enterprise Content Management. I don't always agree but I always digest his points, you should too.

Lately we've been exchanging thoughts on the impact of Wolfram|Alpha, new search, and links to the still-being-defined-and-emerging Semantic Web.

I agree with Bex that the spin up about things like "Google killers" etc is hyperbole and probably used much the same way purposefully inflammatory blog posts are used: to spark a reaction.

I agree that there are a bazillion ways to describe and represent relationships and that there is no single magic bullet when it comes to search, assembly, compositing and relevancy. That's why I'm such a fan of the mashup and channel distribution methods (tailor info / info structure to the channel through which it is being distributed).

Where Bex and I disagree is on the scope of *potential* for things like linked data, RDF and RDFa, ontologies and the nascent semantic web. To put it in potential energy terms, I think SemWeb tooling and technology is poised near the summit of a great steep mountain. I get the impression that Bex sees it as atop the hill in my back yard.

When the ability to get at data imprisoned in documents, pages and information objects *in an organic and hands-free* way AND when the ability to describe concepts and relationships is generally available/accessible then this whole SemWeb thing starts to unleash its potential energy.

Things like RSS haven't begun to see their true killer apps / utility because, today RSS basically gives us another way to consume the same thing (kind of like corecontentonly=1 in UCM).
But when RSS can syndicate and associate pieces of content and combine them according to ontologies and link them automatically in ways we had not conceived of - that is the vision that keeps we believers pushing that SemWeb boulder up the hill - always increasing its potential energy. (Sisyphean jibes can go here I guess)

Tangible Benefits of E2.0 - Part 3: Real Examples

2009-05-13T21:52:17Z

In Part 1 of this short Tangible Benefits of E2.0 series, we covered the bad news around E2.0 and ROI and Adoption.
In Part 2 we covered the good news from the research and theory angle. We saw that scholarly and researched proofs are emerging to prop up the soft benefit claims of better collaboration, increased team efficiency, and increased ability to innovate. These kinds of soft proofs are still emerging as THIS article on 7 ways E20 will cut costs demonstrates.

Now in Part 3 we cover the good news from the anecdotal (case study) angle. In some cases the actuals are rather prosaic (as suggested by the 7 ways article linked above). I mean, who gets excited about the cost savings from reduced printing costs? Well here are four brief anecdotes of where Oracle Enterprise 2.0 technology played a big role in achieving real results for real people doing real tasks.

For instance, one insurance company used to photograph paper claims, convert those to microfilm, and reference claims with an arduous process of hunting through microfilm and comparing claim information to the benefits books that were relevant at the time. Today using Oracle Enterprise 2.0 technology, that company automatically captures paper claims and makes the electronic versions available to teams of claims processors who can work much more quickly and efficiently against dynamically managed claims queues. Furthermore, the company is designing the next phase of the system by spiraling their current solution up and out as claims can now be automatically mashed up with benefits information, annotated and redacted as necessary by claims staff for compliance and made available securely to claimants who can interact with their claim, and follow its progress. The a long linear business process became short, quick, and dynamic.

A real estate development organization wanted to better share information between people, systems and process. Property development is an information and feedback intensive process but using the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 technology for clearly defined purposes, the sales and CRM group is able to leverage best practices from other completed deals, systems have a single logical location to query for information and people are empowered to share and cooperate in ad hoc ways. They actually do cooperate because it makes their tasks easier and their outputs better quality.

A software company was struggling with its CRM system. Support staff couldn't easily share critical solutions they had learned or fixed for other customers and the company was reacting too much to out of control problems. By implementing the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 platform support staff are able to create and share their solutions in-the-flow of their daily work. They are able to analyse and predict and solve trouble before it gets out of control. They are able to interact with each other in an asynchronous way to boost their efficiency and collaboratively create better solutions for their customers.

Finally, a University had literally hundreds of websites without any common management, consistent branding, or even code base. The systems were jumbled and confused and created without any oversight or cooperation. Using the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 platform technologies they were able to consolidate and make consistent their web presence, management, and standardize on a set of tools for the University. Students expect a great deal of interactive capabilities with each other, their teachers and the community. The Oracle Enterprise 2.0 platform gives the University both the infrastructure for the collaborative student experience, allowing decentralized and ad hoc management of the different websites while keeping all the information and management logically centralized and socially enabled.

What all of this means is that purpose-driven approaches are able to successfully adopt enterprise 2.0 technologies to gain the benefits that the pundits and early adopters said they would. It also means that real world and immediate problems are able to be solved with a strategic approach that leaves room for growth without locking out new possibilities.

This is the core and the truth of business agility in our current global economy. Reality, is often mundane and prosaic. Your bank account interest is prosaic. But compounded interest over lots of cash or time gets very VERY interesting. We sit up and take notice. So don't write off the ordinary sounding results. The ordinary is also the firm and the solid, the reliable, the able-to-be-taken-for-granted. It is upon these foundations that the exceptional stands.

Analyst & Industry Round Up of the Open Text & Vignette Wedding

2009-05-13T21:22:24Z

Following is a snapshot of analyst reactions to the news of Open Text and Vignette: Thanks to Joely Urton for the legwork on this entry!

Guy Creese calls it like it is: Burton Group, Open Text Is Putting Vignette Out of Its Misery by Buying It
* "In the dot.com era, Vignette was unstoppable. . . . I remember spending a day at Vignette at the height of its growth and being shown the multiple fussball tables for developers, the many flavors of microwave popcorn, and the conference rooms full of Aeron chairs. At that point, I knew Vignette was heading for a fall, and told them so. Incredulous, they basically told me I had no grip on reality. Two years later, when the dot.com bust came along, it turned out I was right and they were wrong."

*"Vignette has never really recovered from those days. Competitors began offering somewhat similar web content management systems for a lot less money, and the portal business became a lot less trendy as well. So Vignette has survived, but it was only a matter of time before the company got bought. Now we know who the buyer is."

Kas Thomas notes the following: CMS Watch, Open Text Buys Vignette: Investment or Impulse?

* "Nothing about Open Text's spending sprees makes a great deal of sense. Open Text has made many acquisitions over the years, and (by and large) the various acquired pieces have resisted assimilation into a coherently integrated whole. Will Vignette be different? Probably not."

* "On business fundamentals, Vignette is a troubling case. Merely rationalizing administrative employees isn't going to make the Vignette line profitable again or reverse dwindling license revenues. And the Open Text purchase isn't likely to send a "buy" signal to potential customers who still have Vignette on their short lists."

Stephen Powers: Forrester, Can Open Text Turn the Page On Vignette's Recent History?

* Open Text already has a very good WCM from a previous acquisition of RedDot. They will have some rationalization to do on which one to move forward with or how to position RedDot vs. Vignette's WCM offering.

* On paper, there's some interesting integration opportunities such as with Open Text's digital asset management product and Vignett's video analysis and delivery offering (from it's Vidavee acquisition.) But Open Text has not proven that they can integrate well or quickly.

Kathleen Reidy: The451Group, Thoughts on OTEX + VIGN

* "Open Text loves a bargain and apparently this one was too good to pass up. Backing Vignette’s cash and short-term investments out of the deal, Open Text only paid 1x Vignette’s trailing twelve-month revenue."

* "Open Text will maintain Vignette much as it has Hummingbird - keep the products mostly separate, try to hold onto the maintenance stream, cut Vignette’s costs."

* "I don’t buy into product or technology-based reasons for Open Text wanting to own Vignette. There’s tons of overlap."

* "There will undoubtedly be some Vignette vs. RedDot struggles at Open Text over which is the WCM line of choice. Interesting since WCM is only a sideline for Open Text in the big ECM picture anyway."

* "A bargain can still bring headaches and there will be WCM competitors lining up to benefit from uncertainty (not that many WCM players seem to spend much competitive energies worrying about Vignette these days)."

Toby Bell provides the most sanguine view: Gartner, Win ‘Em, Wring ‘Em, and Wean ‘Em

* Toby believes that Open Text is only interested in Vignette's enterprise seat-holders while acknowleding that Vignette has had challenges holding onto its install base. In fact, only the tried and true core audience remain w/ Vignette. If staying true to Open Text's formula for acquisitions, then very likely Vignette's enterprise install base will be cross-sold & up-sold Open Text breadth of capabilities into a more interesting "ECM future."

*"With yesterday’s announcement of its intention to acquire Vignette, Open Text has reminded us that standards and practices in typical software M&A don’t always have to apply. You don’t have to intend to leverage the actual technology or brand or channel or partner ecosystem. You just need to leverage seatholders."

*"Open Text seems to have wisely waited until the falloff of potentially more fickle customers and prospects had been completed. . .VIGN’s value to Open Text is not the technology, it’s the seats. The very plushy ones of large enterprises with global potential to look at one of its own (now) incumbent suppliers to provision other user needs. And, Open Text has options for those enterprises in spades."

*"Now it remains to be seen if - having won and wrung value from many other vendors’ customers - it can wean them off last year’s (or even last decade’s) models and move them toward an interesting ECM future."

Lastly, Alan Pelz-Sharpe chimes in that this may be good for Open Text shareholders but not for customers: CMS Watch, Why Open Text bought Vignette -- the real story

* "I don't like the deal or the strategy at all. Here's why.....In the corporate realm (as every other) there is only so much love to go around. And when when you have a portfolio of overlapping products something has to give. You can either try to somehow glue all these new technology codebases and offerings together with all your existing products -- or you leave them alone to run as standalone solutions. Gluing them together is just not feasible on this scale, it cannot be done regardless of what the marketing from Open Text might like you to believe. All you can really do is to slash costs where possible, leave the technology pieces alone as much as possible, and milk the product and customer base as cash cows. That is a great thing from a shareholder's perspective, since the maintenance streams alone from some of these products will bring home the bacon for another decade at least. If you're a user or buyer of that particular technology piece though, that sucks."

There is other great (for subscription) analysis from Jim Murphy of AMR
and Gartner's official opinion. There are lots of others as well. But what do YOU think?

Tangible Benefits of E2.0 - Part 2: The Good News

2009-05-08T22:00:13Z

In Part 1 this short Tangible Benefits of E2.0 series, we covered the bad news around E2.0 and ROI and Adoption. Now in Part 2, we cover the good news from the research angle.

In Part 3 will will cover the good news from the anecdotal (case study) angle.

Good news comes in two flavors, research (proof/support) and anecdotes. Research is important because it seeks to remove extraneous factors to get to the heart of the matter. Where E20 is concerned, such research is important because it removes contributing factors that may skew reports of success. Working with your 2 best friends on an E20 project that you are all passionate about may yield success but it may not be reproducable for others. That ability to assure or reasonably predict success (or failure) is what research is designed to show.

So is there any scholarly, quantitative and qualitative (both are important) research that helps bolster the case for Enterprise 2.0? Yes. And more is coming in every month (with the academic publishing cycles). I will point out several such studies.

The Journal of Product Innovation Management (issue 26) from March of this year has 3 scholarly articles that all directly consider or indirectly touch upon the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 technology and approaches to collaboration. These are quantitative and qualitative scholarly research papers, peer reviewed and with all the trappings of academe.

One article presents evidence that frequent and open communication enhances team collaboration.

Another finds that technologically enhanced synchronous and asynchronous communications (think chat, team spaces, discussion boards, shared calendars, web conferences and file sharing all on a common platform) creates a deeper sense of shared identity among cross functional team members (think people with different managers). This shared sense of identity is critical to achieving common purpose and being able to have super-speed collaboration and innovation.

The third article goes another step further in exploring how everything from social networks to water cooler talk to going out to the pub together facilitates knowledge sharing. Such knowledge sharing is key to discovering novel ideas and innovative solutions.

Yeah, we had a good time at Collaborate

2009-05-07T21:57:55Z

Oraclenerd (a blog you should definitely be reading) evaluates my session. WIN for ECM. WIN for BillyCripe. Win for Oracle.

How To Become an Oracle UCM Rockstar

2009-05-06T23:14:59Z

Here is the presentation I gave at Collaborate 2009 on How To Become an Oracle UCM Admin Rockstar.

Of course the music is missing but it was BOOMING! at the conf.

How To Become An Oracle ECM Rock Star

View more presentations from billycripe.

Top 10 Components for Oracle UCM

2009-05-06T23:12:33Z

At Collaborate 2009 (Oracle IOUG Conference) I gave a talk on the top 10 components for Oracle Universal Content Management. The components were selected for a combination of vision, buzz-worthiness, interesting-ness and utility. Some were from partners, some from independents, some from Oracle. Congratulations to all!

They were selected only by me. What do you think of them?
Here is my list.
10. UCM Digaset Desktop by John Sim of Blue Studios. RIA for Oracle UCM. Adobe Air and a future in Google Gadgets = just plain cool!

9. Amazon S3 File Store Provider by David Roe of Ironworks Consulting and Content On Content Management blog. UCM storage in the cloud. Niiiiiiice.

8. UCM Clean Content Component by Oracle. Data Mining, Scrubbing and extraction from unstructured content items.

7. CollabPoint by Fishbowl Solutions. Full on team collaboration on the Oracle UCM platform.

6. PicLense Viewer, RSS feeds, & Light Window components by Oracle. Free unsupported viewers that bring the sexy back to content.

5. Site Studio 10gR4 by Oracle. Full on product in a component? Yes!

4. Tagging, Ratings & Folksonomy (PDF) by Oracle. Unsupported sample component available. White paper at the link. Bring on the user feedbacks.

3. Real Time Decisions integration component for WCM by Oracle.- No link on this one because it is THAT cool. Predictive Analytics and Rules for delivering persuasive content to all your web site visitors.

2.Folios Crawler Component by Oracle. vital infrastructure for delivering folios structure and content as a result set for ultimate flexibility while tapping UCM Folios for ultimate usability.

1.TIE!!! Samples Components by Oracle. Totally Free but Totally Unsupported samples for what you can do with Oracle UCM. From Native File Indexing to Multi-sort to the How-To components these are a must have in your UCM Component Kit!

Tangible Benefits of E2.0 - Part 1: The Bad News

2009-04-30T20:01:06Z

For a long time enterprise 2.0 advocates and pundits have been proclaiming the benefits of the emergent technology, the approach to daily work and the culture of participation. In some ways this is to be expected. The proponents usually have a stake in persuading others that this new shift is worth making. The early adopters want others to take up the same technology because it yields network effects and helps to assuage fears that they might have made a mistake.

But after a while we should start hearing success stories from the field. We should start seeing empirical evidence that the pundits were right...or wrong. Fortunately the evidence is coming in and there are two important findings that emerge, one positive, one negative.

In Part 1 of this short Tangible Benefits of E2.0 series I'll cover the bad news. Part 2 will cover the good news.

OK, Bad news first. Organizations that are simply implementing social networking, wikis, blogging, collaboration, and social marketing technology are *failing*. Most of you should be swallowing hard right now. Hand wringers - cue the wringing. But closer analysis suggests that there is something missing here. Much of the failure is coming from organizations jumping on the band wagon without any idea of where it is going or how to drive it. Simply implementing technology for technology's sake will never work. It's like having a whole team of fantastic footballers who are great at passing and moving and have got the fanciest footwork there is but have no idea that they are supposed to make goals. Sorry, but that team will always lose!

If you are only looking to "buy some E2.0", go home. Study up some more. You are more likely than not to fail and that will make my technology look bad and you wont want to buy any more from me. And therein is the first lesson learned: Purpose is Preeminent. Don't bother with the technology unless you have a business problem it is designed to solve. A corollary is that the solutions should not be fundamentally disruptive. Disruptive technology thwarts user adoption by changing focus and attention to the technology itself rather than on the purpose the technology is supposed to serve. Keep solutions "in-the-flow" of daily routines and task execution to better secure adoption. Keep the technology as transparent as possible for the end user to better capture the network effects that are desired.

Trickle Down Business Strategy

2009-04-28T16:39:09Z

In most traditional business practice both the source of signal and the lines of transmission are well defined. Ideas come from the top. People with job titles that are acronyms define and bless the signal, the message, the solution, the direction. Organizational hierarchies, reporting structures and chains of command define the transition, adoption, execution and motion patterns.

We might call this trickle down business strategy.

Trickle down business strategy has failed. It has been outmaneuvered. It simply cannot keep pace with the momentum and quickly shifting direction of our post-modern global economy. This is because trickle down business strategy lacks agility. Proponents of trickle down business strategy should have seen this because it has been in the tea leaves for ages. Smaller organizations have consistently out-innovated the corporate behemoths. Smaller businesses consistently beat their lumbering competitors in speed to market. But until recently, both the big corporations and the small start-ups failed to correctly identify the source of the agile advantage. As a result, as small businesses became successful they replicated the innovation structure and organizational hierarchy of the larger corporations they desired to become. They then lost their competitive advantage and became that lumbering beast they once competed against.

Small organizations are able to produce signals quickly and efficiently because of three key features:
• Collaborative Signal Generation. Familiarity and institutional informality create an environment where signals (ideas) easily flow, morph and are evaluated.
• Organic Transmission. Transmission patterns are only loosely defined (if at all). Destinations are generally known, routes are ad hoc.
• Transparent Evaluation. Decision making authority and accountability are implicitly recognized and transparent.

Smaller organizations do not require the institutional formality of larger organizations because people generally know who each other are. If not known personally, then people are known by reputation and shared connections. Contrast this with larger organizations or overly formal organizations where sheer size means that introductions and communication of titles (and thereby pecking order) are among the first agenda items in meetings.

Smaller organizations typically have only loosely defined chains of command and then usually only for business necessities like HR reviews and hiring authority. In smaller organizations ideas are more easily shared and communicated among people with different titles because there is a shared recognition that the ideas pertain to the business, not to a reporting structure. Managers do not get bent out of shape if their directs communicate with other working groups without first consulting them. Contrast this with larger organizations where chains of command are strict and where the accepted truth is that all good ideas flow from the top.

Smaller organizations also have a key understanding of where decision making authority lies. Because of the ease of participation in creating signal and transmitting signal people understand that, in the competitive evaluation of ideas, decisions (sometimes difficult ones) must be made. In general all participants are OK with this because they have participated in the process. They understand the decision calculus and, even if they do not agree on the outcome, they understand how the decisions were made. Contrast this with larger organizations where even if employees are allowed to have input, they rarely know who actually makes “the decision” or how or why such decisions are made. This has a chilling and wilting effect on the signal generative powers of the organization. No one likes throwing their ideas into a black hole and hoping to one day see something come out the other end – wherever and whenever that may be.

Unfortunately the three factors above morph all too easily into factors revolving around people and personalities rather than organizational effectiveness. As successful small businesses grow, all too often those three factors become trickle down business process that goes something like this:
• Formalized Signal Generation. Institutional formality requires that ideas from the original successful people are to be evaluated and implemented. They were right before, they’re probably right this time too.
• Defined Transmission. Transmission patterns are explicit. Ideas come from the top.
• Edicts from on high. Decision making authority and accountability is explicitly defined in formalized job roles and that role is probably not yours.

As the small businesses grow their ability to maintain their agility shrinks. Business practices that revolve around individual experts do not scale. They are eventually overtaken by a smaller organization that is more agile and are left wondering where they lost their ability to innovate and lead the market.

What large organizations and organizations growing into that large stage have failed to recognize is the benefit that they gain by growing. Larger organizations are able to tap into a human resources network effect that is simply unavailable to smaller businesses. This network effect states that the more participants there are in a system, the more valuable that system becomes.

By this account, big business should always be trouncing the smaller upstarts. But network effects are predicated on participation. If the employees of big business are bound by trickle down business process network effects are thwarted.

Enter Enterprise 2.0. The path should be clear.

UPDATED: Free E20 ECM WebCast RECORDING

2009-04-27T16:51:01Z

UPDATE:
View the Recording HERE

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UPDATE:
It went great, thanks for asking!
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I will be doing a free webcast tomorrow with our friends from DTI and TEAM Informatics.

The session is entitled: "Business Agility - Achieving the Value Multiplier with Oracle ECM"

I will be kicking things off with the keynote at 7AM Pacific - 9AM CENTRAL - 10AM Eastern
and then DTI and TEAM will dive into specifics and proofs.

Dial in info: +1-877-698-7943 (US, Free) International: +1-706-679-4876
password for the web conf and phone conf: nas2

Go HERE to register (free) and I'll see you online tomorrow.