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Content Choreography - The Art of Dynamic Web Content
Submited by Jbartlett on
August 12, 2011 - 4:35 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.

How Xobni Solved Some of My Pet Peeves With Email
Submited by searley on
March 28, 2011 - 5:06 GMT

I don't usually rave about specific technologies but Xobni is one of those tools that I can no longer work without.  When I teach courses on information access, I tell my students to build functionality that solves critical problems and that becomes a “must have” tool.  Build the things that users will scream about (or at least complain loudly) if you take them away. 

Xobni fits that requirement.  I had to remove Xobni once due to a problem with Outlook and kept missing its ability to find contact information, the contents of email messages, conversations that I had with prospects and colleagues, and, my favorite, the ability to locate messages when you don’t know the format of a person’s email address.

Is SharePoint 2010 the "One"?
Submited by searley on
February 15, 2011 - 11:43 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.

Information Overload & Improving Intranet Findability
Submited by jeff on
September 29, 2010 - 1:44 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.

Taxonomy in Extreme Places
Submited by slemieux on
September 23, 2009 - 12:18 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.

Presentation Zen - Slideshare's Nemesis?
Submited by slemieux on
September 18, 2009 - 12:27 GMT

I've been thinking a lot about powerpoint styles lately... Fall conference season is soon approaching and I have to build a bunch of presentations. However, I recently read Slide:ology and now I'm tormented:

Do I make it useful or pretty?
Do I go for presentation eye candy or pithy leave behinds?

If you've read any of the Powerpoint philosophical treatises (e.g. Presentation Zen or Slide:ology - both great books), you've learned that MUCH less is more when it comes to slides. Use lots of images. Use few words (there's a range of opinion between 5 words and 3 bullet points). If you've perused presentations by some of the conference gurus out there, you'll see that a lot of them are largely just an image with a handful of words at most. Picture of a tree, picture of some birds, picture of a frustrated office worker...

Collaboration, Groove and SharePoint - History Repeating Itself?
Submited by searley on
May 19, 2009 - 8:00 GMT

I just read that Groove is being renamed as SharePoint Workspace 2010.  For those of you who are not familiar with Groove or its history, I'll take you back to the early 80's. 

Ray Ozzie is the visionary behind Groove and currently the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft (a role he took over from Bill Gates).  At University of Illinois (as many know, home to the NCSA  which created Mozilla, the first web browser on which Internet Explorer is based) Ozzie worked early iterations of some of today's knowledge management,  collaboration and social media applications (discussion forums, message boards, e - learning, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games.

The Fractal Nature of Knowledge
Submited by searley on
December 03, 2008 - 10:57 GMT

Here is the question posed by Arnold King (http://arnoldkling.com)

"I am interested in the phenomenon of knowledge specialization.For example, in medicine, there are many more specialties and sub-specialties than there were 30 years ago. My guess is that if libraries are still using classification systems, there should be a lot more categories. My guess is that major universities have many more departments than they did 30 years ago. I think this is important in economics because I think that businesses and economic systems have become harder to manage as a result. In short, the leaders tend to know less about the specialized information that is further down in the organization, because the amount of the latter is increasing (I conjecture). I would like some quantitative indicators of the rate at which new knowledge categories or sub-categories are being developed. Do you know how to even go about searching for such indicators?"

I spent some time thinking this over. I may have ranged too far from the question and I know I am preaching to the choir here, but thought the issue of economic value creation and knowledge categorization would benefit from a bigger picture perspective. The problem with the question is that knowledge is fractal in nature. It is endlessly complex and classification depends on scale and perspective. It’s not a matter of “there should be more categories… “; there are more. It simply depends on where you look and your perspective.

Hype cycles revisited - taxonomies under the gun
Submited by searley on
July 07, 2006 - 1:55 GMT

My last post discussed the idea that knowledge management has gone through the hype cycle and people are abandoning the term for more fertile buzzwords. According to Gartner, taxonomies are now at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” headed for the “Trough of Disillusionment” in the hype cycle, which begs reflection on the concept of taxonomies.

All sorts of projects come to us as “taxonomy” projects: Information architecture, content management, portal, records management, document management, integration projects, metadata management, search tuning and integration, workflow management, even organizational change projects. And of course Knowledge Management.

The bulk of my career has been in these areas with taxonomy being a natural part of the process. In the past I was called in to do “x” with x being any of the above and taxonomy being a work stream. Now, because we are so well known as taxonomy experts, we are called in to develop the taxonomy components of large multi vendor projects.

There are a few ways to think about this.

Taxonomy affects each of these areas and needs to be integrated into multiple applications and contexts

We are looking at these client requirements and in some case deciding that though taxonomy is essential, the focus of the project is in implementation of one of these initiatives. The customer is calling this a taxonomy project, but it is really a document management project, etc

For whatever reason, “taxonomy” has become the preferred term and seems to be understandable and resonates with managers. This is good for the most part.

Knowledge management - is the hype over?
Submited by searley on
June 21, 2006 - 1:36 GMT

There's been some talk about knowledge management becoming a thing of the past...

KM is not passé, but has been through the hype cycle. To quote Gartner Group, I would say we are on the “plateau of productivity” meaning organizations are more realistic about what they can achieve with KM and the vendors have for the most part abandoned the term for more fertile buzzword territory.

Encouraging participation in communities or repositories
Submited by searley on
June 13, 2006 - 9:54 GMT

Someone on the Taxonomy Community of Practice (TaxoCoP) recently wrote about methods to improve usage of knowledge management repositories. The challenge of encouraging and measuring participation is a tough one. You might build a terrific application with a great taxonomy and people may not use it.