chieftech’s blog

User participation is now an established feature of the economy, spreading from product development and software to a much broader base of activities, such as marketing and manufacturing, and sectors, including social media, automotives and cosmetics, among others. Early analyses of user participation pointed to the importance of building large communities, creating effective incentives for participation and implementing more flexible forms of organization. Looking back a few years later, the good news is that active participation continues to spread. The bad news is that harnessing participation is more difficult than we thought. Stimulating a continuous flow of high-quality contributions should be the focus of companies that want to take advantage of user participation.

Well, actually, if you've been hanging around knowledge management and collaboration for a while you wouldn't expect it to be easy :-)

I still think Clay Shirky sums this up best - you need:

"a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users"

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.

Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.

Good quote from JP.

Just a thought: Curation is not the same as creating content, in the way for example that a pro-blogger earns a living like any other advertising driven channel. So with that in mind, I wonder, can someone make a living (a job, a business, etc) from being a digital curator? Or is it something that is purely social and altruistic?

In other words, can we buy this kind of trust and are we willing to pay for it?

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 agreement is significant to Google as it has spent more than two years trying to court the university to adopt Gmail for staff members. But the university was hesitant to move staff members on to Gmail due to regulatory and cost factors.

They were concerned that their email messages would be subject to draconian US law.

In particular, they were worried about protecting their intellectual property under the Patriot Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Mr Bailey said.

"In the end, Google agreed to store that data under EU jurisdiction, which we accepted," he said.

The university had to comply with state laws, which mandated that data had to be stored in NSW.

Google was not going to build a local data centre anytime soon so Macquarie had to maintain an offline archive of data at the university, he said. In the past, Macquarie was concerned about the cost of relaying large files to and from the US, where Google's data centre resides. But this been resolved thanks to the Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARnet), which the university is a member of. "AARNet peered with Google (and Microsoft) which means it won't cost us anything more," Mr Bailey said.

A $2 million limited liability was increased to $10m in case Gmail stopped working. "You need proper recourse if your free email service stops working."

Its important to note how Macquarie Uni resolved their concerns about moving staff mailboxes to Gmail... a combination of getting their off shored data managed under a more friendly jurisdiction, creating their own archive to comply with local law, data peering and risk management through increased financial liability provisions. A good checklist for other large Australian organisations that want to go down the same path?

I doubt this cultural shift will be paid for by better advertising models. Advertising is based on capturing attention, typically by interrupting the broadcast message or by being inserted into the content itself. Trying to reach information flow is not about being interrupted. Advertising does work when it's part of the flow itself. Ads are great when they provide a desirable answer to a search query or when they appear at the moment of purchase. But when the information being shared is social in nature, advertising is fundamentally a disruption.

Figuring out how to monetize sociality is a problem. And not one new to the Internet. Think about how we monetize sociality in physical spaces. Typically, it involves second-order consumption of calories. Venues provide a space for social interaction to occur and we are expected to consume to pay rent. Restaurants, bars, cafes… they all survive on this model. But we have yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol.

Danah Boyd's actual presentation at the Web2.0 Expo of this talk didn't go down very well*, however her unedited crib notes are well worth reading.

*We've discussed the value of conference twittering before on this blog and this certainly is an example of when the back channel doesn't work to anyone's benefit. It is particularly disappointing where a presenter walks away feeling like she did. If you aren't prepared to say it to someone's face, then don't say it online.

NSW Government, through the NSW Government Chief Information Office (GCIO) and NSW Procurement (NSWP), is issuing this Request for Information (RFI) to the ICT Industry seeking options for alternative delivery and acquisition models for the provision of software solutions that meets Government’s needs and objectives.

The New South Wales Government is keen to investigate all potential alternatives to acquiring and using common enterprise software applications and solutions, across a broad spectrum of categories, for Government Agencies.

Vendors and their partners, both small and large, are encouraged to respond to this Request for Information with their products and solutions based on the categories described in the document under “current thinking”, outlining how their offerings interoperate with other solutions and how the use of their solutions can better meet the Government’s objectives.

This is an opportunity for the ICT industry to provide innovative solutions to be used as input for a potential second stage, more formal approach, to the market for a range of options by which Agencies can procure software products, solutions and/or related services to meet their front line service objectives, in the most cost effective way.

Industry is encouraged to respond to this RFI to ensure their views are considered in the development of future procurement strategies, including vendors able to offer open source solutions or Software as a Service

Unfortunately, unless you are registered on the NSW eTendering system you won't be able to access further information about this Request for Information (RFI). However, this RFI is more interesting than it might look - on the face of it, the NSW Government is saying we are open to new (and more cost effective) ways of acquiring enterprise software. I wonder if Google will be responding, as the NSW Government is already a client?

However, it would be great to see the NSW GCIO office also look at the process of how they go about acquiring software, and not just look at the basis on which the software is provided because the RFI process is still likely to limit who responds. Also, one of the powerful features (and influence) of the open source movement is that it has allowed organisations to try before they buy rather than the poker game like approach taken by government IT procurement processes.

Government 2.0 has seven main characteristics:

• It is citizen-driven.
• It is employee-centric.
• It keeps evolving.
• It is transformational.
• It requires a blend of planning and nurturing.
• It needs Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities.
• It calls for a new management style.

Without access to the research note, its a little hard to know exactly what Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio means by this list of characteristics - particularly her his point about 'Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities'.

However, its interesting to note that we have also proposed a pattern-based approach for one of the Government 2.0 Taskforce projects we (Headshift) are currently working on.

In the Toolkit Blueprint we talk about two types of patterns:

• Software deployment patterns - for the technology used for online engagement; and
• User experience patterns (although we've focused on some principles in the first instance, because we could write a book to cover all the possible UX patterns involved!) that are applied to that software to promote participation.

To us, a pattern-based approach makes a lot of sense as a way of dealing with the complexities of applying Web 2.0 tools to online engagement. I wonder if this is similar to what Gartner means too?