Articles, Content Management

This article, by Seth Earley, was published on CIOUPDATE.COM on September 30, 2011.

Keeping up with a fast paced dynamic business is challenging if not impossible for most IT organizations. Fortunately, there are ways to improve agility and provide better support to fast moving enterprises. 

This article, the last in this series, discusses four key strategies for servicing the agile organization:

Retailers manage a supply chain that is large-scale and complex. Products can come from hundreds or more vendors, and because each product comes with many attributes and associated content (both text and images), managing this information is complex and costly.

This article was published online at Baseline Magazine on May 3, 2011.

IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson computer has been hailed as a technology triumph – the ability of computers to understand human language and broad knowledge topics – not just facts and trivia but ambiguous language including puns, double entendre’s and idioms.

The technology is impressive and IBM has set its sights on many commercial applications in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.   Few organizations have the resources it took to build Watson - $3mm worth of hardware (off the shelf servers with almost 3000 processors and 1 terabyte of RAM) – not to mention millions in research.  Nevertheless, the question remains, does Watson embed a solution approach that enterprises can exploit or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise? 

A few clues lie in the nature of knowledge access and in some of the challenges that Watson team members discussed in articles and interviews.   First, here are some principles that Watson exploited:

This article, by Seth Earley, was published in the December 2010/January 2011 issue of ASIS&T Bulletin.

Governance is not a simple process of writing up some plans and policies.

Operationalizing governance requires the correct structures and working agendas.

The Missing Piece of Content Management
Information and content governance is frequently a missing piece of a content management plan. Think of building the new content management system (CMS) as building a new house. You design the layout of the house and requirements based on the needs of your family. Then you move into the house. In preparation for the move, you put all of your possessions in boxes and mark those boxes to indicate where they will be going in the new home. If you are moving into a larger home, you’ll likely take items that were in a single room and put them into multiple rooms.

This article originally appeared on DocumentMedia.com as "Pulling a McGiver" Parts 1 & 2

Faced with increasingly complex document and information management needs, many organizations are exploring so called ECM suites – Enterprise Content Management.

Business and technology landscapes have changed dramatically over the past few years. Businesses are reacting to customers and market changes more quickly, they are outsourcing non-core competence activities, and organizations are flatter and more decentralized. On the technology side, new tools and approaches have been developed, and entire architecture shifts are underway. With widespread connectivity and rapid pace of change comes the need to adapt and change business processes more quickly and to keep the underlying technical infrastructure aligned with how the business operates.