My experience is that many big, complex organizations need an approach based on Information Management Transformation – a radical change to how they manage their information that is referred to as Information Development in MIKE2.0. But transformation is hard and there is a need to show value quickly. I’ve seen agile development techniques work for Software Development; can they work for Information Development?

The idea behind Agile Information Development is to provide an approach to most quickly deliver Information Management engagements using the MIKE2.0 Methodology. Agile development processes can be difficult for information management engagements due to the complexity of historical issues. Agile Information Development makes use of the techniques in XBR, Continuous Implementation and Continuous Improvement and accelerates them further. These techniques are from strategy through to implementation.

To find out more, go to the Agile Information Development Solution Offering. It’s in the early stages, so please jump in and help out!

There are lots of great community sites for Information Management.  A question I’m often asked is “Why would I go to MIKE2.0?“, “What makes MIKE2.0 unique?”.   Below, I’ve tried to answer that question.

MIKE2.0 is a methodology for Enterprise Information Management. More than a traditional method, it’s really a complete framework: a common way of doing IM projects and logical best practices - linked into business issues and technology-specific solutions. Its scope covers the complete information supply chain within a company from how it is created, kept secure, accessed, presented, used for decisions, destroyed, etc.

As a community we haven’t quite figured out information management yet. The techniques are relatively immature and fragmented and the problems keep getting more complex. This is one of the reasons we see so many problems today in our clients. It is also why we see organizations that manage information well (Google, Walmart) being so successful.

I think our approach impacts the community in 3 significant ways:

By creating a standard for Information Development through a common competency. This is really what the community needs and due to the complexity of the issue, a complete framework is needed solve the problem. That’s our primary goal with MIKE2.0 and something no other consulting firms provides. We’re also using this approach as an organizing framework for open source technology.

Through the Integrated Content Repository, organizations create mashups to the MIKE2.0 standard and the best assets on the web. We call this approach Governance 2.0 and it’s a solution we can build for our clients.

As far as we know, MIKE2.0 is the world’s first open and collaborative methodology. It will be an interesting challenge for our community to see if we can actually build on this approach, which sits between a Wikipedia-style model and something you would see with code.

For a community standpoint, I think the approach is working. Every day we’re seeing more visitors to MIKE2.0 and getting positive feedback. We have a long way to go, but we’re getting there.

“It’s an unrealistic expectation for information to be right all the time”. Wow, that’s a statement, especially if coming from a high-level executive from a major information management company, namely Chris Livesey, IBM Information Management Director of UK, Ireland and South Africa, as heard at the Information on Demand conference last week in London. Is it really possible that the largest vendor of IM software and solutions is admitting that it can’t get information right? … yes and it’s probably a smart move. Information management is complex and its complexity increases with the size of the corporation. Large enterprises have a myriad of systems creating, storing, sharing and destroying information and all what Chris is saying is that it is unrealistic to think you can fix the issues in such a complex systems with a couple of IM projects or programme. And clients will thank and respenct him for this honesty…

Chris also went on to discuss what is on IBM’s IM agenda. It’s split in an “application agenda” and an “information agenda”, with the former including the good old SCM, CRM and ERP solutions and the latter the more recent and more innovative areas of customers profitability, dynamic supply chain, multi-channel marketing etc.

The expected revenue and growth for the respective areas highlight how IBM is carving up the market between these two agendas. And as usual, these would be important hints for the management and technology consultants, systems integrators and the likes on where to put their money.

IBM is delivering these solutions with “open standards and flexible architectures to enable Information on Demand” and presents (as expected) a formidable stack of software products to deliver this vision.

What suprised me was that there was no talk of collaboration, user interaction, knowledge sharing or even a word about Enterprise2.0?! IBM has an equally impressive product set for collaboration (Lotus Instant Messaging, Lotus Team Workplace, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr etc.). This should be included in their IM vision, not only for sales and monetary reason, but also for completeness of what IM can deliver to clients. Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration and Communities of Interest are on MIKE2.0’s agenda.

What’s on your IM agenda?

As you will have noticed (unless you are a new user), MIKE2.0 just received a major facelift. We have spent the last 6 weeks up until now introducing new, exciting functionality and a major improvement in the look at feel of the site. Here is a summary of the major changes:

• New integrated skin across the wiki, blogs and social bookmarking, enabling common navigation and common search

• Single sign on from your wiki account with bookmarks, so there is no need any more to log in twice
• Improved navigation menu on the MIKE2.0 wiki, giving you easy access to the key pages of the site

• New rating of bookmarks and commenting on bookmarks to bring out the bookmarks most valued by the IM community

• Social networking where you can share your social profile and connect with other practitioners and build the IM community
• Upgrade of blogs to Wordpress 2.5 with improved blog post management functionality

You will have also seen a new “Partners” feature box on the bottom left. We want to thank our supporters and would like to give them an opportunity to feature their site. If you are interested in becoming a supporter for MIKE2.0, please get in touch with the MIKE2.0 Leadership Team.

What’s in the works? We want to provide single sign on with the group blog so that you can comment without having to enter your name/email address every time. We are also looking to improve how we showcase some of our key contributors. And we would like to improve office integration and WYSIWYG editing functionality.

In the mean time, enjoy the new site, tell your colleagues about it or blog about it.

I also want to say a special thank you to the people who made this major facelift happen: Alex Papadopoulos, Aran Dunkley, Jarrod Poynton, Pete Dakin and Sean McClowry. Thanks for your hard work.

Yours,

Andreas Rindler

Solution Architect for MIKE2.0 Collaboration Platform

As part of MIKE2.0, we believe we are presenting a unique perspective in the area of standards development. Our approach is to create a collaborative community for the development of standards for Information Management, including those that apply to Capital Markets.

Some interesting work around open source and open standards is developing in relation to market data:

• Market Data Definition Language (MDDL) is an extensible Markup Language (XML) derived specification, which facilitates the interchange of information about financial instruments used throughout the world’s markets. A community is build around MDDL, including a wiki-based development environment.

• FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming data) protocol is emerging standard used for the distribution of market data. Some of the steps being discussed with the open sourcing of FAST could be seen be particularly beneficial to this standard as it continues to evolve.

With open content and collaborative technologies, it’s easy for these projects to work together and we’ve starting doing this through MIKE2.0 with references to these projects.

If you want an enhanced editing experience and you’re using Firefox, try installing wikEd. Its a WYSIWYM editor that provides functionality such as copy-and-paste from word.

For now we’re having a using-driven installation on the MIKE2.0 site but may provide it for a general release.

1. Log in.

2. Figure out which skin you’re using: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:Preferences (or any other wiki instance), 2nd tab is “skins”.

3. Edit http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/User:firstname.lastname/mike2.js

Add the following text to the end of the page (it’s OK if it’s empty to begin with):

// install [[User:Cacycle/wikEd]] in-browser text editor

document.write(’<script type=”text/javascript” src=”‘

+ ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Cacycle/wikEd.js‘

+ ‘&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript”></’ + ’script>’);

4. SHIFT + Reload the page, the editor should be there.

As an example go to: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/User:Sean.mcclowry/mike2.js

This approach could also be installed on other recent versions of MediaWiki that provide user-enabled scripting (such as BearingPoint’s IM Collab environment).

For more information, go to the wikEd home page.

Web 2.0 is a collection of standards, technologies and techniques.   While there are some differences in approach between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, most of the elements are the same.  Many industries can benefit from an Enterprise 2.0 approach and an objective comparison model is a good way to explain the benefits to a business community.   Refer to this post on FastForward to get a best understanding of this model and how it can be applied. 

For more detail, refer the following links on MIKE2.0: 

• The Enterprise 2.0 Solution Offering
• An inventory of Enterprise 2.0 articles
• Enterprise 2.0 bookmarks

Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?

In this post of fastforward, I talk about a bottom up approach to social networks - using information to enhance and collaboratively form new social networks of participants with common interests. The post discusses this model of application web 2.0 concepts in the enteprise - enterprise 2.0.

This is one of the things we are working on in MIKE2.0 - we think it should really help in building a methodology for information development.

Organizations typically suffer from a lack of standards around information management. They develop standards on their own although they may use external reference materials. The issue is that most of the standards are definitional, but not validation-based. That is, the standards may say how a data warehouse model should be developed or provide a policy about how reference data should be synchronized.

What is missing is the validation step against these standards. What would be valuable are validation tools that test areas such as complexity while the solution is being developed. When we have simple tools like those used for W3C Markup Validation Service it will be a big help in the industry.

Climate change is increasingly a mainstream issue. There is growing momentum to address the issue at a number of levels, in the corporate sector, with private citizens and within government.

There is, however, a real danger with the trend towards carbon neutrality that is analogous to the poor systems designs. As described by the United Nations, climate change is just 1 of the 36 areas of Sustainable Development. An Information Development approach can help:

• Understand the impacts of decisions and how they impact other areas of Sustainability (e.g. how a programme that helps reduce a retailer’s carbon footprint by stopping imports from Africa impacts other areas).

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Collaborative Business Intelligence platform to make objective decisions. Decisions can be based on a historical evidence and make us of historical models. Policy analysis, researches and the public can share different forms of information as part of the process.

• Information Sharing across different organisations, involving operational and analytical information. Enablers include open and common standards, search and collaboration. Some information can be anynoymised while other content can seen by both parties.

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Measure progress based on standard metrics. We need standards because when we don’t account for what we produce, we may get unexpected issues. Information Quality issues are analogous to the pollutants we see from poor sustainability design.

The Information Development approach to Sustainable Development can be applied to design the interaction points between the different areas. It also means the ability to make fact-based decisions, share information between systems and provide easy access to information from complex, federated sources.