chieftech’s blog

The stakes a are high for Project Eden, the codename for a long term project to rollout a single electronic document and records management system across all arms of Australia's Defence forces.

The scale of the project is huge and the final cost is expected to lie somewhere between $A100m-$A500m.
Defence estimates it will need to handle 50,000 users within two years and up to 100 million new objects per annum. There will be users at up to 600 locations in Australian and overseas .

Defence has been evaluating vendors since 2006 and has missed previously announced deadlines for making a selection.

I felt very nervous reading this.

I've previously been involved in a very large electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) project for a large international mining company using one of the major systems, so I have a pretty good idea of what the ADF is trying to achieve. I also have a pretty good idea about the challenges, which aren't necessarily technological (and where there are, there aren't necessarily what you might think).

One of the things that concerns me about any implementation like this is that we confuse the desire for a single information system architecture (e.g. one logical EDRMS system to rule them all) with creating a homogeneous information environment that they will try to make everyone use.

This goes beyond simply making the EDRMS easy to use. The typical approach is to use a uniform user interface to meet that goal but all we really end up doing is meeting the lowest common denominator rather than actually satisfying different user needs. Similarly, we also risk ending up with a rigid information architecture that makes the conceptual information system architecture easier to implement, but doesn't actually fit how work is done.

Often these things look great to the guy designing them from his desk in a nice air conditioned office, but the view is very different once you are on the ground (or in my case, 500 metres underground).

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. I hope they are considering:

• The organisational change aspects and dealing with what I call the "what's in it for me gap" (a user-centred design approach is essential);
• Applying open information access policies within the ADF, with information restricted by exception and managed through activity monitoring and version tracking*;
• How they can apply a Web Oriented Architecture approach, and standards like CMIS, concepts like De-perimeterisation, and even new database architectures like NoSQL; and
• Learning from recent experiences of applying social computing techniques to how people organise, discover and use information (rather than just relying on taxonomies and mechanical search engine techniques).

*Radical I know, but necessary unless you want to end up with a more complex and expensive version of the existing file shares! This isn't about changing information security classifications, but about dealing with information, which is currently hidden by obscurity.

Mark Nash proposes a nice little social media triaging system (Critical > Delayed > Rejected).

It reminds me that I blogged about being ruthless with RSS feeds back in 2007, but since that time the volume and access to different information and activity streams has definitely grown. Unfortunately it is also a reminder that our personal information practices that ultimately define our ability to control information overload continue to lag.

I wrote another piece about living with email, touching on similar issues. While the technologies are different, the common themes are:

• Information overload is as much a result of poor information managament practices as it is about the volume of information created by the technology.
• Individuals can't deal with information overload on their own, it requires collective effort (there are a number of dimensions to this).

Unfortunately, at least in an organisational context, until we start taking information work more seriously I think many people will continue to find information overload an issue.

In the meantime, remember that its ok to be ruthless with your social activity consumption.

Business Information Managers

Twenty percent of business managers rated the information that they get from IT as poor, according to the Gartner Business Pulse survey conducted from June through August 2009*. "Information management has never been an explicit job role: IT manages the technology, business manages the domain, but who manages the information?" said Ms Logan. "Companies have allowed a huge gap to open up, and consequently, everyone has been the manager of their own information."

There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a "business and IT partnership" with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 percent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 percent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 percent in 2009.

Of the four roles (the other three: Legal and IT Hybrids, Digital Archivists and Enterprise Information Architects) I think this is one of the most important. The role is actually very familiar to me and I'm not sure if its a new role as such, but more of a recognition that IT serves a direct purpose in an organisation.

Its also interesting to think about it in the context of this CIO magazine article, which challenges the typical service orientation of the IT department:

"The alternatives begin with a radically different model of the relationship between IT and the rest of the business -- that IT must be integrated into the heart of the enterprise, and everyone in IT must collaborate as a peer with those in the business who need what they do."

I wonder what impact such a role would have on the adoption of Web 2.0 inside and outside the firewall?

Hat tip to Michael.

The Attensa StreamServer™ creates value by:

• Breaking down information silos by enabling information from separate systems and communities to be found, organized and flow freely throughout your business.
• Networking knowledge by enabling people to easily share insight and knowledge with others.
• Increasing awareness and efficiency by empowering users to benefit from large amounts of information and many interactions as opposed to being overwhelmed.

Attensa have announced the availability of Attensa StreamServer, their next generation enterprise information aggregator. I'm really pleased to see Attensa continue to innovate around this important area and I'll be taking a more detailed look at their new StreamServer product in the near future.

Hmm. I'm not entirely convinced about this, however there is an argument that if you want to ease the introduction of new information work practices into people's work routines then you need to go where the users are. I was a big fan of Xobni when I was last using Outlook regularly. However Twitter and LinkedIn are very different paradigms to integrate into Outlook - Xobni augments what you are already doing in Outlook with additional information, but tools like Twinbox (the example above) is introducing a brand new information stream in parallel to email.

I also wonder if integration with an enterprise microblogging tool might actually be the better use case for this kind of integration? For example, Socialcast is an enterprise microblogging platform and they have talked about providing plugins for Outlook and Lotus Notes (I'm not sure if they actually came to fruition).

On the other hand, Socialtext's Signals takes a non-email activity stream approach. Their desktop applications (a cross platform RIA) combines microblogging with notifications about wiki page edits, blog posts, comments, profile changes.

What do you think? Is an email client the right place for enterprise users to learn about microblogging or are we just reinforcing the email interface. Or perhaps we should just give people as much choice as possible?

Most of us have built and reviewed and rebuilt intranets using Waterfall project methodologies. It’s the process of understanding all of the requirements and risks first, developing specifications to describe them, and then implementing the solution. Using this approach, however, typically results in late and over budget intranets. This is because intranet projects are often plagued with changing requirements, unanticipated integration challenges, and usability annoyances that are difficult to accommodate in the fixed scope of the project

I can't tell you how strongly I agree with the recommendations here - its one of the reasons I've been a fan of the MIKE 2.0 methodology, to help break that waterfall approach failure cycle with not just intranets projects but any kind of information management, knowledge management or collaboration system implementation.
BTW I couldn't find the original article, so hat tip to Matthew Hodgson for sharing it.