Content management

December 15, 2011 - 10:43 GMT

SharePoint taxonomies are new and exciting. For the first time a widely adopted content management tool can manage and leverage taxonomies and provide for some semblance of vocabulary control,

This is a good thing in many respects and, perhaps, a bad thing in others. For the first time, many large enterprises are looking at classification structures and consistent organizing principles like taxonomies and thesaurus structures as strategic assets and enablers for a wide variety of systems and applications. There has always been some attention paid to data standards but these processes can be so esoteric that even experts have been known to stare glassy eyed into space while data architects wax on about their latest project. The problem is that these things are far removed from the business and are abstract by nature.

SharePoint brings taxonomies to the masses, so to speak, by showing how they are used to make content more findable, useful and valuable. Taxonomies impact every aspect of content processes. And now SharePoint 2010 provides powerful new tools for entire enterprises to muck them up on a scale not previously imaginable. There are hundreds of newly minted "taxonomy experts" who are term store mechanics with little understanding of enterprise taxonomy programs. There are librarians recently turned loose only to run amok with enormous taxonomies dumped into the term store. There are numerous groups positioning to control their own vocabularies and not be held to the corporate standard.

2012 will be the year of the out of control SharePoint taxonomy.

December 15, 2011 - 9:56 GMT

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?

October 18, 2011 - 11:04 GMT

How can you tell the difference between an introverted records manager and an extroverted records manager?  The extrovert stares at your shoes when they talk to you.

That’s actually an old accounting joke and the subtext here is that records managers are boring because records management is boring.  The last thing that people doing cool knowledge management, dynamic content, or search projects want to consider is records processes.  Boring!

The topic brings to mind the old days of file rooms and file clerks.  But these are not the old days and there are reasons now for all information management professionals to care about RM.    Records are created by everyone, everywhere, on all kinds of devices.  A record can be anything that is used in the course of executing a transaction, performing day to day work tasks or that is created in support of a transaction.  That means that we are all creating records.  Records processes are distributed and ad hoc and in most organizations not well managed due to the fact that evolution of technology has happened more quickly than processes can keep up with. 

Here are five reasons why you need to adopt a records management perspective:

September 22, 2011 - 7:02 GMT

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.

August 22, 2011 - 3:52 GMT

The heart of Web 3.0 is semantics.  Semantics focuses on what one means to say, not just what one actually says.  Semantics is the difference between salient search results and an unfocused aggregation of … stuff.  Algorithms used by search engines are an effort to discern the meaning and rank relevance against users short, ambiguous, approximation of intent expressed in their search queries.  Web 3.0 semantics represents a significant advance over current search technologies because it attempts to look at meaning inherent in the content itself

To understand how this works and the role taxonomy plays in this search for meaning a little review maybe helpful.  Taxonomy categorizes information into a unified structure and controls the language to describe those categories.  Under this definition, the contributions of taxonomy are labeling, designing content, providing navigation patterns, and managing the relationship among content units.  These roles for taxonomy are essential to successful site development, especially as sites are increasingly dynamic, drawing content directly out of content management systems, and increasingly socialized to the point that systems rooted in databases are no longer able to scale to meet the storage demands.

Taxonomy is an integral part of a content producer's tools kit for adding metadata to their site.  Metadata presents an interpretive model for understanding content data, or the types of data actually evaluated by search engine algorithms.

August 12, 2011 - 3:35 GMT

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.

July 11, 2011 - 11:35 GMT

"You ain't seen nothin' yet." So says an IDC report on the growth of information.  The statistics cited by IDC included voice, radio, print and TV as they transition to digital formats. The number? 35 trillion gigabytes. That's 35 exabytes. An Exabyte being one thousand billion billion. But, how much, exactly, is 'too much' information? Is there really such a thing?

Consider that back in the 16th century, around the time when the printing press was invented, the world was undergoing an information explosion. People wondered, how could anyone possibly read all of those books? It was quickly determined that we didn't need to read all the books and what was needed was simply an index of all the available books. This evolved into today's library system where all books are accessible--if and when needed.

This so-called "information overload" problem will be solved in the same way - by creating lists, classification structures, bibliographies, reference materials and all sorts of dynamic, curated content. The best web sites have the capability of anticipating what users need and assembling that content dynamically - something we refer to as Content Choreography™ - the ability to coordinate, weave and present content into new information products and services based on the needs of a diverse set of users all operating on the site at the same time. And of course, to combine, curate, and choreograph content effectively requires metadata, taxonomies, consistent organizing principles tuned to audience, task and problem.

March 22, 2011 - 8:43 GMT

 

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. 

February 15, 2011 - 10:43 GMT

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

November 04, 2010 - 8:07 GMT

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:

September 29, 2010 - 12:44 GMT

In this month's article on information agility (via CMSWire) we take a look at the so-called problem of information overload and how the real challenge lies in creating appropriate filters that improve findability. 


Information management agility is about being able to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. But what if there's just so much information that we are caught in a battle trying to find the things that are relevant to achieve our goals? There is a way to get past this information overload and improve findability.

We’ve been hearing about the problem of information overload for years now. The exponential growth of information within our organizations is deemed as so problematic that it negatively affects employee productivity and ultimately results in increased levels of operational costs as a result of an inability to easily sift through it all.

February 24, 2010 - 4:28 GMT

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.

November 24, 2009 - 8:23 GMT

Subtitle: The Future of Taxonomy... Ad Nauseum

This year's Taxonomy Bootcamp conference was much like years prior: full of great information, knowledgeable speakers, and a ton of self-doubt/-defense/-definition. Which is ironic: professional organizers who struggle to classify themselves. There were at least 3 major sessions dealing with the taxonomist's identity and future (in a 2-day conference with a single track, that's a lot), which left me feeling a bit estranged.

The opening session by Patrick Lambe discussed the identity of the "new taxonomist" in the field, using results from a survey of members of the Taxonomy Community of Practice. His findings were unsurprising to me at least: 

November 09, 2009 - 9:11 GMT

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.

October 12, 2009 - 7:18 GMT

"How many content types should you have?"

This is the question that came up in a conference call last week on SharePoint architecture. This organization had implemented their corporate portal on SharePoint 2007 and was interested in going forward with more portal sites but had some concerns about the approach to information architecture they had undertaken.

I answered what I would answer no matter what technology it was - "Only as many as you really need to implement the appropriate level of metadata, workflow and templates." Which is of course vague, as most good consultant-ese is. I followed up with some stats: when we work on web content management implementations, we typically end up with about 10-15 content types for a site of medium complexity. We always try to keep the structure simple and number of content types few for many good reasons, ranging from ease of content structure management to content publisher user experience.

The folks on the phone were quiet for a minute... You see, the previous consultant they had worked with had a bit of a different (read opposite) approach. The philosophy they described was that SharePoint content types should be created to the maximum degree of granularity (e.g. one content type per library) so as to reduce the need for content publishers to select a content type and tag metadata values. For example, if you had a site for human resources forms, you would have one library and content type for medical forms, one library and content type for dental forms, etc. Each content type would be extremely specific and require little tagging. "If you need 30,000 content types, then so be it" is the idea. (insert eye twitch.)

September 29, 2009 - 7:40 GMT

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 EarleyCharlie 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.

September 23, 2009 - 11:18 GMT

How often do you get to be immersed in a completely alien work environment?

As a taxonomist, I get to learn about so many different domains through my work, from mouse genetics to greeting card manufacturing. Each company has its interesting quirks and workplaces...Like the toy manufacturer, whose workers had their cubicles adorned with all sorts of inspiration and materials: multi-colored fur, googly-eye collections, pictures of themsleves as superheroes... 

But this week, I got to experience something completely different.

We just started a content strategy project with a semiconductor equipment manufacturer which aims to help their service groups (the folks who fix the machines) get the right information at the right time. This is an interesting project involving issues around technical writing and information architecture (DITA), integration across many different knowledge systems and databases, and getting information to users in a less than hospitable environment - the clean room.

April 07, 2009 - 5:51 GMT

Oasis

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:

November 09, 2006 - 11:52 GMT

I have been presenting at several conferences in the past couple of weeks (10 sessions in two weeks) and I am still getting the same situation over and over again. I had an attendee in a workshop on a content management maturity model say: "I am not sure where to start. It feels like this is so overwhelming. Can't we buy the tool first? That's what my boss wants me to do." I can understand why this is a first reaction to the complexity of content management. There are so many issues and factors to consider. From business problems to content architecture, existing systems that require migration and integration, user needs and scenarios, meta-data standards, taxonomy development, work-flow processes, governance, change management and so on. The first time you are going through this, it is overwhelming. But choosing a tool before understanding exactly what you need can create at least three major problems:

August 14, 2006 - 6:28 GMT

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?

August 08, 2006 - 8:34 GMT

I wanted to post a preliminary note about our new Jump Start calls planned for September and October. Each series will consist of 4 - 90 minute calls each with 2 - 3 presenters who are experts and practitioners in their fields. Here is the tentative schedule:

Content Management Jumpstart: Each Monday 1:30 - 3:00 EST September 25th through October 16th - Topics will include:

  • The basics of content management
  • Building a content management business case
  • Content management frameworks & governance
  • Integrating content management with business processes
  • Tagging, metadata and taxonomies
  • Content publishing models & reuse
  • Personalization & targeted content
  • CMS selection & deployment
  • Web content management & syndicating content
  • Global content management

Search Solutions Jumpstart Each Friday 1:30 - 3:00 EST, October 13th through November 3rd - Topics will include: