Content management

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

I recently taught the four day Information Organization and Access course.  I enjoy teaching and it’s a great way for me to stay connected with customer projects and stay fresh. 

Interestingly at the end of the second day, one of the attendees complained that the course was too theoretical and not sufficiently practical.  I was incredulous at this statement and was so shocked I did not know what to say in response.  Not practical?  This is what we do for our clients. How could it not be practical?

But rather than get defensive or write this individual off as an anomaly (I had not ever heard anyone say this before), I decided to find out what would make class more practical.  I asked each person to write down what they expected to learn that they had not.  What was going to make this practical?

The results were interesting indeed.  I had covered every topic they mentioned, many with examples.  So what was missing?  They wanted the class tailored to their problems.  It would also be nice to have one of the client taxonomy frameworks  I showed as an example to build on.  Basically it would be great if they could come in and solve their taxonomy, metadata and IA problems in the four days. 

It would be great if we could do that but as we reflected on these ideas it became clear that it really was not practical to do this in a public class.  As we discussed the details, we could see that we did in fact cover most of the components that they were mentioning.  The reason for the first comment about theory was simply this:  I had overloaded them with information with no clear plan of attack.  They did not see how to organize the content into a practical set of steps to apply to their own situation.

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

In this blog post I’m going to talk about a couple of the likely pain points in your product master data world –places where your product data is far from frictionless against your business processes and goals.  Specifically, your world of products (and how they are organized in relation to each other) and your vocabulary standardization rules for re-formatting what your suppliers send to you as product data.

Our experience with clients has resulted in a proprietary methodology for implementing product master data projects – built from common, repeatable process steps.  This post is just a tiny snippet from that methodology.  I’m planning that future posts from me will call out for conversation other steps and processes in taking a methodology-based approach to these kinds of projects.

Your Village, Your Map and Your Compass

If you are a large retailer embarking upon a product data quality cleansing project you have taken on a large and complex business task.  It truly does take a village to implement Oracle PDQ.  In fact, it takes an organized, savvy, well-guided (which is where methodology comes in) village.  Where, then, to begin? 

·         First, approach your product data and what you want to do with it (and what you want it to do for you) strategically. 

·         Second, have a methodology-based approach. 

·         Third, know your pain points for your product data.

You will likely be in unknown and unfamiliar territory.  Without a map?  Wide-eyed and map-less, even?  Not entirely.  Methodology is your map.  And your compass?  That is your product data strategy. 

This week I have had the privilege of teaching the information organization and access (AIIM IOA) course at a combined meeting of the Joint Task Force North, The Dept of Homeland Security, The US Army North and the US Northern Command.

From the JTF site: “The Joint Task Force North http://www.jtfn.northcom.mil/ is the Department of Defense organization tasked to support our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies in the identification and interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the continental United States. “

“Transnational threats are those activities conducted by individuals or groups that involve international terrorism, narcotrafficking, alien smuggling, weapons of mass destruction, and includes the delivery systems for such weapons that threaten the national security of the United States."

One of the primary goals of this mission is the capture and dissemination of knowledge throughout a network whose mission is the protection of the United States.  I was told by the head of the knowledge management organization, Dr Rick Morris, that my contribution would go directly to improving the security of the country.  I have to say that I am truly honored to be making such a contribution to our nation. 

Also from the JTF site: “JTF North’s homeland security support role is articulated in its mission statement:

What format should I be publishing my content in? This is a question we come across a lot in our work. Business documents exist in a wide variety of formats from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF to web content and everything in between. As publishing models continue to evolve, distributed authorship capabilities are increasingly being offered to a wider, more disparate set of business users. This decentralized approach, while pushing document management directly into the hands of business owners, also supports its rapid publication and delivery to consumers.

I'm now back home in Montreal fighting jet lag (yawn) after a great week at the J.Boye 2009 conference in Aarhus, DK. It was a great experience I hope to repeat. Perhaps my favourite event was the last one - the town hall debate, reserved for the die-hard attendees who hadn't run off to the airport. In this session, we were given 6 statements to consider and vote upon, after hearing from two "debaters" who represented the pro and against. In this case, we had the "good doctor" (David Ott, attendee from World Health Organization) and the "panda" (Neil Morgan, attendee from Word Wildlife Federation).

This is a seriously fun session that not only drew lots of laughs (I'll point out the memorable quotes), but also some intense debate. Here's a recap for those who missed out, but also this can serve as a checklist at J.Boye 2010 to see if our predictions came true. (You can also watch the video)

#1. CMS is a commodity.

Pro (Ja): Sure, "CMSs are like water - get it from one company or another, it's all dirty". (Janus Boye) There's not much difference between all the systems and vendors, so it'll eventually be like choosing a brand of shampoo. Lather, rinse, repeat every 3 years.

Against (Nej): CMSs are actually quite different - there are some that are industry-specific, scenario-specific, there are no real standards governing their architecture. You need the appropriate tool for the appropriate task - choose wisely.

Result: AGAINST - CMS is NOT a commodity. It'd be interesting to count how many in the audience were vendors... Let's see how we feel about this one after the web idol contest in 2010.

The final draft has been submitted... Mark your calendars...

The Information Management Best Practices 2009 book is going to publication this week, in hopes of being ready for launch at the J.Boye Conference in Aarhus, Denmark, Nov 2-4. I'll be there, giving a talk on SharePoint IA, but also to lend a hand with the book launch activities.

I'm proud to have a chapter in this book, with co-authors Seth Earley & Charlie Gray (CMS & Taxonomy Strategist, Motorola), on one of our most in-depth and successful projects - integrating taxonomy with CMS at Motorola. The best practice covers the steps below in great detail, offering practical advice and screenshots from the actual implementation at Motorola.

Early last month, OASIS announced the approval of the Unstructured Information Management Architecture Version 1.0.  This standard creates an open method for accessing unstructured information - that is, any information that is created by and for people, and is not inherently machine-readable (e.g., not data).  UIMA can potentially become very important since it provides a standard mechanism to exchange metadata for all types of unstructured content - documents, web pages, email, voice, images and video.

As we all have heard repeated in the marketing messages of every content-related software company, over 80% of the data we run our businesses on is unstructured.  In our business we help our clients tame their mountains of content by classifying it.  Often we rely on technologies like auto-classification, entity extraction, and other analytics to tag content with metadata.  Metadata helps us bring structure - and in turn semantics or meaning - to unstructured content. 

Of course, each of these systems has its own API and its own methods of expressing the metadata it produces or consumes.  This is where UIMA comes in.  In the introduction to the UIMA standard, the team at OASIS describes a typical workflow in which various analytics packages may need to interact:

An interesting problem was posed to a mailing list I am a part of...

Imagine that you have been using a single hierarchy to structure and organize your information for years, and it has been very successful up until now...

But now it is time to move to a different content management system, and not only that - business has changed (of course), and not every way of organizing and understanding the information could possibly have been anticipated. (Or perhaps you did anticipate some, but for practical matters limited the amount of metadata you might apply to content.) So you have new ways that users want to search and navigate, but never considered these at the start. What do you do?