Just started reading in a book: The Trusted Advisor. It’s not a new book, but was on my wishlist to read for quite some time.

It’s good to be focussed on your projects and current activities. But, at times, it is also helps to “zoom out” if you will and reflect on your role in the broader context within those projects, the concerning employees and organizations. And, even further broadly scoped, what the main “ingredients” are that make new ways of working really possible. Trust is, in my opinion, one of the most important aspects in this.

I try my utmost best to gain and build trust and create strong relationships with employees (or in that sense, they become my colleagues) of the organization(s) within my projects. I’ve just started reading, so no review yet. But the beginning looks (or: reads) very promising. I hope I get inspired by it and learn a lot.

As you all already know, Microsoft released SharePoint 2010 and thereby really entered the mainstream of ECM. There are already enough blogs and whitepapers that cover the new and improved features of this version. So, I’m not going to go in to those aspects.

No, What really caught my eye was the AIIM industry watch SharePoint – Strategies and Experiences.

An interesting and thorough piece of work. Interesting because, it states that the number of SharePoint implementations is soaring, and deployments are going round and about. “A high degree of Market penetration”, as Gartner states it.

Yet, the true benefits of these implementations, aren’t always realised.

What interested me was the fact that SharePoint remains predominantly an IT implementation. Information Management or the Business aren’t really consulted, nor do they have a real say in the fit for purpose-ness. This gave me a flashback to the old (or quite often still current) days, where file share was the way to go. In the file share paradigm, IT was Information Management and governance was “access or not”. File shares blossomed and, thus, grew out of proportion. Within that paradigm the main “items” used: folders and documents. Result after years of use: a spaghetti of information structures (or chaos, as one might say) existed.

Now lets take that mind-set of items and structures and shift to the SharePoint paradigm.

SharePoint is an impressive and utterly flexible platform. If you want it, you can have it. The pitfall of flexibility is being over-flexible. On the file share the same problem existed, but there you had only two types of items to “worry” about. In SharePoint, that’s a hole different ballgame. Yes, you have the folders and the documents, but you also have sites, site collections, libraries, lists, calendars, discussion boards, content types, wiki’s, charts, collumns, metadata (managed or not), webparts, lay-out, et cetera, et cetera.

What you have, is an utterly flexible system. What you have, is the risk of “uber spaghetti”, “File shares to the exponent”.

A very important part of SharePoint is Governance; Microsoft states this quite distinctly. And that’s exactly where the statement ends. On Technet there are spread sheets and tools abundant to (start to) implement the system. But a coherent approach lacks. Thus, on the one hand you have the business, on the other “the tool”.

THE most important thing you have to do, to be able to successfully implement SharePoint, is to first align the Business Needs with IT. Translating the way the Business does its work (or wants to do its work; there’s a subtle, but ever so important and difficult to manage difference), to the platform and its mode d’emploi.

If you skip this step (what quite often is the case), you’re wandering into the realm of chaos. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. The bottom line: one cannot skip this step. Is it hard? Yes. Does it take time? Yes. Do you see the results instantly? No. Can you quantify it in advance? No (if you can, you didn’t skip the step).

SharePoint is like a wild bronco, and a powerful specimen for that matter. But a horse is only useful to us humans, if it’s tamed and does our bidding (of course, bidding in the form of a respectful partnership).

As you tame your horse, you also have to tame SharePoint.

Our approach? First, do the deep dive in to Business, identify its ambition and recognize its strategy. From that, go in to its processes, talk to enough employees, ask feedback, do workshops, encounter enough business units. Then, create overview and form the overall strategic work concept, translate this to the product that needs to be realised. Thereby, don’t go totally awol. Stay in tune with the IT system, its do’s and don’ts, but don’t get drawn into the functionality (yet). Then do the implementation; so that system follows business, and not the other way round.

This approach is a form of walking a tightrope. It takes a lot of experience in the field and substantial knowledge of Business Processes, People behaviour, Information Management and IT systems. It requires being the ultimate intermediary.

Mind you, if you take up the glove, and are willing to walk the distance, afterwards you’ll be glad you did.

My advise: Don’t just buy the horse, but tame the beast.

Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch has been on my mind this week. In my opinion: a must read. Besides the IT impact, it also looks at Cloud Computing and the networked world from a social-economical point of view. For instance: the similarity and difference between the shift into the Industrial Age and the shift into the Information Age is explicitly made.

But, I’m not sure if I totally concur with the proposed negative effect on doing work and the erosion of the financial strength of the middle class.

Without a doubt, when shifting into the industrial age, the way of doing work and business changed completely. Forever. Part of this was the introduction of the efficient production process and the big corporations (as we still know today). Economy of scale.

Because of this (but not only), the middle class flourished and became wealthier. Workers got more, and bought more. And, this new and readily available thing called “electricity” meant never before seen products. Which were sold. More production was needed. Bigger salaries. Et cetera, the virtuous circle is clear. (I’m leaving the big depression out of this, which you might not agree uppon). This process gave a more healthy spread of the wealth.

The statement that is given is that when the Information Age enters its mature state,the effect on the middle class will be totally different. The middle class will financially lose ground and the rich/poor ratio will skew; like it did before the Industrial Age. Perhaps even more (one signal is the Long Tail paradigm seen “dark”, were everybody can join in for nothing, and only a happy few take all the apples. I.e.: YouTube.).

This got me wondering. Is this true for all? Make no mistake, I think there’s a clear-cut case for the media industry: newspapers, music, films, et cetera. It’s being overwhelmed with free and readily accessible information, sharing and amateur production(s). The real deep professional’s part gets lost in the shallow waters of information overload (although, “gets lost” doesn’t mean “dissapears”).

In fact, one can state that: everything that can be virtualized or digitized can succum to the zero cost of (sharing) information-paradigm.

A small, non exhaustive list of industries:

- Automotive

- Consumer Products

- Energy & Utilities

- Financial Services

- Healthcare

- Industrial Machinery

- Nonprofit & Public Sector

- Retail

- Technology

- Telecommunications

- Transportation Services

And Media

I’m a strong believer that the true digital (and networked) world in which we live (and which will further mature), combined with the steep increase in abundance of bandwidth, will have a massive impact in the way we do our work and how we organize our industries and business (although, a shift to IPv6 will be mandatory). A signal as “going in to the cloud” is one of them (let’s try to use this phenomenon to take on the energy problem the world faces?). Another one is the further and more swift rise of the knowledge worker and the service sector.

But, does this mean that all the industries and its workers as we now know them are threatened in their existence? (Here, I over-dramatize the statement to try to make a point). My statement: Does every industry, as summarized above, “suit” the thesis presented?

If not, what will be the effect for the middle class and the way of work? Will there come another (not anticipated?) positive spiral to next nirvana (again, dramatized)?

What’s your opinion?

Being a consultant in the field of Enterprise Content Management and Knowledge Management (or is it now called E2.0?), one tries to keep a sharp eye on the next thing on Strategic Technologies. Recently, I’ve had the luxury of getting some air instead of being swamped by my projects, so I plunged into the subject again (not sooner, unfortunately); trying to get the latest essence from the overall Information Randomness out there.

As Gartner stated earlier this year, Cloud Computing is, and will be, hot. Hmm: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. It feels like its to a going to the top of the hype and the labels are rolling over each other and screaming for attention. What ever happened to Mutually Exclusive labeling (or for that matter: Outsourcing)? I mean: SaaS is also seen as a form of Green IT. Okay, that’s true, but an information architect would have sleepless nights trying to find the mother of this taxonomy… I’m still thankful for the rise of the folksonomy as an augment on that one.

Any way, don’t get me wrong. In my humble expertise and experience I’m a believer of the notion that the big switch (as Nicholas Carr eloquently puts it) is tantalizing for organizations (or, for the normal human being at home, it’s already in full swing); but is it growing out of proportions? I mean, just a few years ago the statement that you do KM when you “put all knowledge in an IT system” (logically!) turned out to be cutting a few corners, to say the least…

Going from hindsight to foresight, I read that leaders in the field are putting up some warning flares to neutralize the phrase “it’s just like getting electricity out of the wall” a bit.

First of all: if it were true, why don’t we all have it then? Secondly: If you go to Nigeria, as a colleague of mine did, you’ll find out that getting electricity out of the wall isn’t a commodity as one would suggest! Finally, as I stated in one of my Tweets, Cargo transport isn’t “just moving something from A to B” either… If you peal the outer layers of the business process, one can see that hauling cargo is infinitely more complex.

The “danger” of using the methaphor like that, is that it might end up oversimplified and then, overhyped.

In my experience I find it remarkable that patterns of (over) hype-ness and oversimplification don’t fade away but tend to rejuvenate with every new instance of the “next big thing”.

Why not really find the benefits of a shift to off-premises information systems? Try to find a correct translation for a business; not a one size fits all. Maybe not all companies should ride this wave (or “stop” at IaaS?). And finally let’s say that “doing Cloud Computing” doesn’t always mean instant “lower IT-costs” or “higher efficiency”. In my opinion it’s a strategical endeavor, and a complex initiative, just like any other one on that level.

Cloud Computing: “It’s not an instant plug-in. But it can be very electrifying”.

Recently I used Flickr to search for some beautiful photo’s. I used different tags and indeed I found amazing pictures. What I also notices was that the photographs Flickr returned didn’t always correspond with the tag I used to find them (for instance, use the tag “search”).

This notion got me wondering. If you tag an article, photo, blog, et cetera, there are always tags that are in the bulls-eye and there are tags that are in the outer ring. The underlying principle: the more tags you add, the more likely the chance of finding the tagged item.

This is true, but in information retrieval there’s always a trade off between Precision and Recall. What you want is high on both (get exactly what you want, and a lot of it), but that’s difficult to achieve. As a matter of fact: the more outer ring tags there are, the more noise you get. If every user gives an abundance of tags, the noise gets bigger. Tom Gruber used two pictures in a presentation, that explains this quite beautifully.

“Noisy” Tagging

“Clear” Tagging

Folksonomies thrive on the abundance of tagging, but can there be a thing as “overtagging”? Is there a zero-sum game in tagging that leads to a higher recall, but lower precision?

Conceptual Search engines like Collexis give you the opportunity to score the tag for relevance, thus letting the user sit behind the driver seat for the weighing factors. I’m not familiar with the algorithm used by Flickr, but whether or not it weighs the tags for relevance, I do think that overtagging is not a virtue. If each user tags its items “as spot on as possible”, the total tagosphere would prosper from it.

Does this mean that Flickr should build a Taxonomy of Tags? No, it doesn’t (that’s old paradigm thinking), it’s just that to much of something is never a good thing. What it does mean is that their should be a governance structure to the tagosphere that lets it grow as emergent as possible, but not out of bounds.