After one and a half years we have achieved a major milestone for the MIKE2.0 community:

Congratulations to the 1000th MIKE2.0 user!

It was Janegriffin who registered today, 13 November 2008, at 06:06. Thanks Jane!

Alright, so while we are at it, how has the MIKE2.0 community developed over the last 1.5 years? A quick check in Google Analytics tells us that we have had 66,337 absolute unique visitors with 101,092 visits!

And now you will ask: So who was the first user then!?

Well, there can only be one: Sean McClowry with a staggering 8,953 edits to date according to Mr. MySQL. Keep it going, Sean!!

I had the pleasure of meeting Maria Villar at the IBM’s Information on Demand Conference where she presented on her new book - Managing Your Business Data. Its a great book for someone looking to make the “case for change” for treating information as an asset across the enterprise, building a culture of better information management and establishing roles and responsibilities for better data management across the organization.  There’s a wealth of information in there - and its something a business leader can understand just as well as a technologist. I particularly liked blending the conceptual (Maslow’s needs hierarchy for data management) with the pragmatic (lots of cases studies).

Maria tells me the book will be on Amazon soon but in the meantime you can order direct from the publisher at the link above.

The UK Cabinet Office just completed an innovative competition called ‘Show Us A Better Way’. The government produces massive amounts of data on crime, on health, on education. This competition is looking for innovative ways to use this information, e.g. in mashups, and to release more value to the public.

The MIKE2.0 community also submitted a proposal, based on our experience with setting up MIKE2.0 and using omCollab:

MyGov Personal Government

Tell us about your ideas (leave a comment…)!

In the current economic environment I expect we are going to hear a lot about the need for greater openness, transparency and better information.  Too much regulation has been shown to hamper innovation, but free markets have their issues too – we’ve had 6 global collapses in the past 15 years after all.

I’m not sure what the right balance is, but Governance 2.0, which I mentioned in an earlier post and is one of the solutions in MIKE2.0, might indeed become a hot topic.

IBM’s many eyes product is pretty cool - its a way to visualize information and comes with a number of tools you can used for textual and more structured information.

Here’s many eyes run against a wikipedia article that describes MIKE2.0:

This is just one view (a wordle) but many eyes give you many ways to visualize the data.

And to see something really interesting, check it out against some of the latest political dialogue.

But many eyes is far from a toy.  There’s some real power in being able to connect semantics to analytics.  My favorite is from another technology - GapMinder: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Have fun with many eyes for now but watch this space - I think we’ll be see it grow a lot more!

The EDM council has recently published a piece of primary research on the executive view of data and its relationship to current operational practices. The report is based on interviews with heads of data management at 20 global financial institutions. The key message is that while data is being seen as a critical player in meeting business, operational and compliance objectives, the majority of organisations are still in a “clean and consolidate” mode, trying to deliver the initial migration of content from their multiple business silos into centralised authoritative source systems.

The report then touches on the executive view of data management, the business view, funding and governance issues and implementation. Key actions to consider are:

• Build your credibility on execution capability within the organisation
• Be transparent to the business with operational metrics and SLA’s
• Get metadata management right
• Federated centralisation of business processes and operating model
• Prove each component of EDM with a ROI

For a full copy of the report click here.

After months of hard work it’s finally here: omCollab, the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform that powers MIKE2.0 and our BearingPoint internal collaboration site. We have packaged up Mediawiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks (a fork of Scuttle) into a single collaboration platform that can be used to host powerful online communities on the web or inside organisations. It’s a comprehensive collaboration platform which combines the following features in one single, integrated platform:

• Wiki
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Mashups
• Search

Please see omCollab Homepage for full details.

We have released omCollab to the open source community because we want to build the world’s most powerful open source Enterprise 2.0 platform. We will continue to invest time and effort to improve omCollab as it powers MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management. We hope that we can get the open source community engaged to help contribute to omCollab.

If you want to know where we are going, what features we are planning to build and maybe offer your help to achieve this, please check out the omCollab roadmap.

Finally, if you just want to check out omCollab for yourself or maybe even power your online community with it, go to the omCollab download and installation page

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?