BizTechTalk

Enterprise 2.0 in 2008 - Announcing our Advisory Panel

I've been hinting at this for a while, but the cat is now out of the bag. Here comes 2008!

See our official PR below - the summary, we are thrilled to be working with a great set of people to help us steer our research (upcoming Q1 2008 - AIIM's Enterprise 2.0 Market IQ), and training program (late Q1 and into Q2), to make sure we aren't drinking too much of the kool-aid, and are hitting a deeper mark in Enterprise 2.0 than most treatments are giving these days. Hope it doesn't kill us, but looks to be a lot of fun and work. We'll see...

The official PR is below (and live on our main site).

Errata: Stowe - let me fall on my virtual sword that that somehow in the editing/writing process, we excised the E in Stowe (changed below) ... ah, the permanence and changeability of our own blogs and websites can at the least change this. A thousand pardons nonetheless! They don't call this the Read/Write Web for naught, eh?
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AIIM Assembles Industry Brain Trust as Advisers for Focus on Enterprise 2.0

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AIIM - The ECM Association
12/18/2007

Silver Spring, MD - December 18, 2007 - The AIIM Market Intelligence group has assembled an advisory panel consisting of some of the industry's foremost thinkers on Enterprise 2.0.

The panel is a veritable "Who's who" consisting of:

• Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School professor credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0 in 2006;
• David Weinberger, Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and author of "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder";
• Stowe Boyd, industry consultant, prolific blogger, speaker and coiner of the term "social software";
• Patti Anklam, knowledge management consultant and author of Net Work;
• Eric Tsui, Professor of Knowledge Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and also ex-Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific, Computer Sciences Corporation.

"We are proud to have this distinguished panel of advisers to help us with the development of our upcoming AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, but also a new AIIM Certificate Training Program on Enterprise 2.0," stated Carl Frappaolo, VP of Market Intelligence. "We did not want to provide yet another offering on Enterprise 2.0 that was either narrow or overly enthusiastic. By assembling this group of advisers we anticipate that our Enterprise 2.0 programs will reflect a broad spectrum of opinion and experience, bringing the past forward into the present and helping to define/create the future, showing the worthwhile uses of Enterprise 2.0."

Enterprise 2.0 is a concept on the minds of many business and technical managers alike, although early market research has shown that there is great confusion over this concept. AIIM is dedicating significant resources to this research project, making Enterprise 2.0 a major cornerstone of its activities in 2008. The resulting AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 and AIIM Certificate Training program on Enterprise 2.0 will cut through the confusion and provide much needed clarity, providing insights into where and how Enterprise 2.0 would be best used.

As part of this effort, AIIM will be executing an extensive market survey of business and IT managers. "The expert insights of our distinguished panel of advisers will be complemented by extensive research into real world practices and opinions obtained through the AIIM community of over 50,000 members - representing the largest assembly of content-savvy companies who could take advantage of Enterprise 2.0 solutions," stated Dan Keldsen, AIIM Market Intelligence Director. "This is a perspective that is much needed in order to accurately represent the reality of Enterprise 2.0, and not just unexamined promises and hype."

Save the Dates:

• AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 survey launches on January 7th, 2008.
• AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Certificate Training Program premiers at the 2008 AIIM International Exposition & Conference (Boston, MA on March 3, 2008).
• AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 report available the end of March 2008.
• AIIM Market IQ Webinar on Enterprise 2.0, discussing the findings of the report, will be held on Thursday, March 27th, 2008.

Early underwriters of the Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 program include:  EMC (www.emc.com), SpringCM (www.springcm.com) and Socialtext (www.socialtext.com).

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About AIIM (www.aiim.org) - The Enterprise Content Management Association

AIIM is the international authority on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - the tools and technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM enables four key business drivers: Continuity, Collaboration, Compliance, and Costs.

For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. Today, AIIM is international in scope, independent, implementation-focused, and, as the representative of the entire ECM industry - including users, suppliers, and the channel - acts as the industry's intermediary.

As a neutral and unbiased source of information, AIIM serves the needs of its members and the industry by providing educational opportunities, professional development, reference and knowledge resources, networking events, and industry advocacy.

Visit the AIIM Market Intelligence blogs of:
Carl Frappaolo, Vice President of Market Intelligence at Taking AIIM http://www.takingaiim.com and
Dan Keldsen, Director of Market Intelligence at BizTechTalk http://www.biztechtalk.com.

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Contact:

Beth Mayhew
Director of Marketing
301.755.2681
bmayhew<at>aiim<dot>org

Carl Frappaolo
Vice President, AIIM Market Intelligence
617.933.2584
cfrappaolo<at>aiim<dot>org

AIIM - The ECM Association
1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100, Silver Spring, MD 20910, 301.587.8202

The Un-Usual Suspects

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at our (AIIM), Advisory Trade Member Executive Summit in Chicago on 9/12/2007.

Embedded below (or via slideshare.net) are the raw slides for my portion of the kick-off - for those who wanted a copy, or are interested in some of thoughts I'm having these days on the "old world" of ECM, and the "new world" and future state. This was a "hyper keynote" of 43 slides, which I believe I managed to do in about 12 minutes. I did not capture the audio at the time, so am playing around with a post-edited version with audio (and animation) so you can get the full effect.

As always, would love feedback on the presentation (particularly if you were there - as the slides themselves don't tell the entire story), and your thoughts overall on the impact of open-source, SaaS (software as a service), wikis, blogs, and RSS - all in an "enterprise" context, rather than individual/personal context.

Enjoy! Discuss?

Link to presentation - or embedded version below.

Sowing the Seeds (of Innovation)

Dan Keldsen interviewing Dr. Alex Pattakos and Elaine Dundon, of The Innovation Group based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico (www.SeedsOfInnovation.com and www.SeedsOfMeaning.com).

Does your organization, or for that matter, you, have fertile ground to plant the seeds of Innovation? Is it possible to innovate in the public sector? (hint, yes!) How does the drive to meet quarterly numbers drive out, or possibly, foster, innovation in a publicly held company? What is the process or processes that support sustainable innovation, and how can you find the beginning thread within your organization to fully embed innovation in yourself and your organization?

The organizational development, marketing, business and psychiatric backgrounds that Alex and Elaine bring to this discussion are well worth your time.

As comes up in nearly every conversation, every blog entry, or any other output you may see or hear from me, there is *absolutely* more to innovation than simply slapping a label on a product or company and stating a claim to innovation. Learn how to begin - the conversation starts now!

MP3 File

Re: In praise of a blank page

I receive the occasional e-mail announcing new "Lenses" (semi-structured web pages) from the fine folk at Squidoo from time to time, and bit on the hook tonight.

Seth Godin (marketing guru, has had a nice run of 7 books, and seems to just burst with ideas that sprout as soon as they hit the soil) is the man behind Squidoo, and so I rapidly latched onto one of his Lenses (anyone can author these, it's a nice platform, feature rich, and easy to use - different than a blog, but Web 2.0 in look and feel) and stumbled back onto his blog...

The most recent entry was titled "In praise of a blank page" - which is a great eye-catcher/attention-getter, as at least for me, it spawned thinking about tying the fear of blank pages into the mind killer that it can be for idea generators, painters, musicians, writers, etc.. But no, he's talking about a friend's book cover that seems was so inappropriate (mediocre) that leaving it blank would've been a better approach. I could easily see that happening...

But what REALLY caught my eye - his riff on refusing to ship/create unworthy products. He's been discussing making remarkable products, services, etc. for years now, and there is plenty of life left there - but the final paragraph is what got me, as it takes me back to one of the most interesting podcast interviews I've done so far, with Matthew E. May at Aevitas, and discussing his book titled "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation."

Seth discusses kanban, which in a Japanese car factory, gave workers permission to stop the entire assembly line to fix a problem, no matter how big or small. The counterintuitive piece there is that in giving that power to any worker to push the big red button that grinds everything to a halt, production doesn't drop through the floor (overall) as you might expect, but that quality goes up, process times shrink, workers feel more empowered, and improvements pile on top of each other so subtly that no one notices (particularly outside the company) how much improvement has piled up until WHAM, it looks like INNOVATION (Big I) from the outside, and people wonder what happened.

Correction! (on Friday, April 6)

Just received word from Matthew E. May - updating me live from a plane before the "all cells off" call, who was TXT MSGD by a friend (I'd guess Ralph Bernstein, at Productivity Press - as Seth has made the correction now as well) about this post...

Seems both I (definitely) and Seth (yep) confused the terminology here. It should be Andon, not Kanban that we're talking about.

I'll drop in the correction here, straight from Matthew:

Kanban is something Toyota borrowed from the US grocery industry. It's a request. It means "sign card." It's what makes Just In Time work. Grocery markets and bakeries need fresh produce and run on a JIT basis. Toyota saw how it worked in the 50s and used it. It's a customer request essentially. When you go to the store and see the "Out of stock, Time to reorder" card...that's a kanban. In a Toyota plant no work is performed until the Kanban is empty and calls for it. It's a pull system.

Andon refers to stopping when there's a problem and dates back to Sakichi Toyoda's quest to build a loom that would automatically stop when a thread broke. Whenever something goes wrong you pull the andon cord. In newer plants now it's a Dell flatscreen that goes to a team leader's BlackBerry. But the line doesn't stop. Unless the problem can't be fixed by the next station. It's a call for help. You never want to stop the line if possible. It works like the stop cord on a bus. The bus stops at the next stop, or safest spot if it's an emergency. The andon is pulled thousands of times a shift...but line rarely stops. Heck, there's a Camry coming off the line every 57 seconds!

So... sorry about that folks, slight (ok, large - or larger than I'd like at any rate - the dangers of blogging at midnight) mixup in the terminology here, but the underling point remains the same, planned or unplanned disruptions will happen in your business, quickly responding and adapting is the key. Allowing and encouraging workers to acknowledge and fix problems as they happen (within the stop points Matthew describes above), constantly, always, is the way to keep the system and it's output not just running in the short-term, but continuously improving over the long-term as well. Always much to learn here - and I'm certainly not a Lean expert!

And now that the correction has been made, if you are interested in Lean Thinking, and need some definitions to grab onto, you may want to grab a copy of LeanSpeak (available as ebook or hardcopy - Seth would be so proud!). There is also of course the Lean Enterprise Institute, across the river from me in Cambridge, MA, which has quite the collection of Lean books, training, seminars, workshops, a thriving community, and more!

Thanks Seth, for bringing me back to those concepts, and raising them once more, in your classic attention getting style, and Matthew, thanks again for doing the interview with me (and supplying the correction!). Great conversation, and a great, easy to understand book. We could all use more of both.

Powering The Long Tail with Invisible Crowds

When do communities become crowds? When do crowds become mobs? What makes any of these smart or dumb, loud or silent, useful or painful?

What is "The Long Tail" (www.longtail.com - blog for the book by Chris Anderson) and how is it changing the way people find information and interact with it? Is you website built for people to "bowl alone" or for the Invisible Crowds scampering about, to help each other by exposing the information/products they've successfully found?

Emergent behavior and automatically adapting systems are clearly changing the way that search and navigation can and will be done - and the revolution is at hand!

This is an interview between Dan Keldsen (www.BizTechTalk.com) and Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote (www.baynote.com), a search and navigation solution provider.

Are you using Baynote or other similar systems, tying in Web 2.0 directly into the operations of your marketing/sales engine? Leave some commentary here, trackback from your own blog, or call me at 781-268-0716 and leave some audio commentary, which I will post back to the blog, and continue this conversation!

MP3 File

Permanent Innovation (ii2007 Session Teaser)

An interview with Langdon Morris of the Innovation Labs (www.innovationlabs.com), and author of the book, Permanent Innovation (www.permanentinnovation.com). Langdon will be speaking on this topic at our April 2007 event, Innovation Insights (or ii2007 to those in the know). In this 10 minute interview we discuss 3 of his 10 Principles of Innovation. If you find this interview interesting, don't miss Langdon's session at the event - see www.ii2007.com for more details on his session, and the other 20 or so sessions on Innovation topics from a wide variety of industries.


MP3 File