It’s tough out there if you’re trying to kick off a critical information management program. Whereas most clients I speak with want to significantly improve their capability in how they manage information, they find it tough to get funding for major programs of work This is where I believe some real benefits come through for MIKE2.0 - you can still get a comprehensive, highly relevant approach more quickly though reuse of the framework:

You can use the approach to drive cost reduction, through a comprehensive approach for:
• Technology and system consolidation
• Alignment of common information management programs
• Operational efficiency through better data quality and efficiency

You can reuse free content and improve delivery quality:
• A common, open framework that can be reused across all your projects
• A common, open framework for external providers
• Free collaboration technology

You can build momentum for your priority business initiatives:
• Make sure you have a fact-based business case
• Improve data and analytical capabilities to meet new business demands
• Prepare for major changes related to merger integration

I find businesses will spend money these days on information management - you just need a strong “case for change”. To read more, check out the extreme blueprinting and roadmapping approach to building a transformational IM strategy and some recent Case Studies.

A visit to the AIIM Roadshow 2009 in London, UK, helped me get a quick update on the state of the ECM industry. Doug Miles gave the key note presentation with results from a recent AIIM survey:

• Focus for investment in 2009 will be on Document Management, portals, Enterprise 2.0, Electronic Records Management and Search
• Document capture, MFPs, OCR, digital mailroom are falling behind in importance
• Software expenditure (i.e. license fees) will be up, services including training (which will harm associations like AIIM) are stagnating
• Most organisations achieve the expected return on investment (ROI) with their ECM investment, in particular with hard $ ROI; but interestinly enough, most overachieve their soft $ ROI - This makes ECM look like a pretty low risk investment compared to some of the other IT initiatives.
• 43% of organisation achieve a payback within 12 month on their document capture and digitisation projects alone!

Doug moved on to discuss Microsoft’s offering for ECM, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS):

• 12% of respondents stated that MOSS is their chosen ECM suite (enterprise wide)
• Collaboration is stated as the top reason to implement MOSS
• Although Enterprise 2.0 and Search are only 8th and 9th on the priority list, with ~25% of respondents working on that
• 5% and 22% of respondents stated that MOSS is compatible or works in parallel to other ECM solutions

We also got a bit of visionary (wishful?!) thinking:

• Focus for ECM should be on creating an “ECM Central”, a central capability as opposed to single purpose solutions
• Drive ECM towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via single sign-on (SSO), open source and open standards
• Provide enterprise search for retrieval across all repositories and systems
• And consider managing assets “in place” as opposed to endless migration efforts from one system to the next
• Interestingly enough, 35% of respondents want to migrate to a single system
• 34% will provide linkage between systems via portals
• and only 9% are considering or implementing enterprise search

We’ve recently added some new functionality to the MIKE2.0 site that will help our users have a more dynamic and personalized experience.  Go to the home page and you can drag-and-drop portlets on the site to give it a more indivual feel.  This is just the early stages and we’ll be adding a lot more functionality over the coming weeks.  You can see a bit more about what we’re building here.

Let us know what you think about the approach!

How healthy is your collaborative community? Well, measure it! You will have seen that we have introduced more analytics and activity portlets to omCollab, which you can find on the Home tab.

You can also check out the wiki statistics of MIKE2.0 via the following links:

1. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
2. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:Statistics?action=raw
3. http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/Special:ContributionScores

For an interesting point of view on how how quantitative social science is becoming more making mainstream, check out Steve Miller’s great article: Hopefully we’ll see more of these methods developed in an open and collaborative fashion through frameworks like MIKE2.0.   Something we haven’t done well enough is engage the academic community becoming part of the collaborative community?

Seen any great published work on this space?  Help add it to MIKE2.0 bookmarks ..

The social profile component has been enhanced to store data in a structured fashion to link to information management capabilities.

You can now tag your experience and the experience of others and look at the skills within our community.

Thanks to (Xiping) Kevin - who did a fantastic job in extening our social networking capability!

Virtually every company is thinking about how to drive digital growth, getting more and more visitors and maybe even establishing something like an online community driven by forums and social networking type functionality. VCs still believe that the number one driver for valuation of a digital business is number of visitors. So how to do you really drive digital growth? Here are my top lessons learned from projects in the media and comms industry:

1. Make sure you have SEO compliant coding of the website
2. Employ SEO and online marketing specialists to drive traffic
3. Use site visitor analytics to understand their behaviour on the site and to adjust your content and navigation accordingly
4. Perform a connected customer analysis to understand what is hot in the market, what are people talking about etc. to adjust your content accordingly
5. Execute on focused 3rd party deals to drive traffic and brand awareness with specific relevance to your site
6. Create sticky applications like tools and games to increase hits per user, visit length but also get additional users by allowing them to share the tool with others
7. Drive cross sales between your offline business and digital, eg with deals or links related to your offline products that drive traffic to your website
8. Configure a site search engine with solid categorisation and predictive functionality to drive traffic through search visits
9. Write good and dynamic content to drive repeat traffic
10. Use personalisation features to engage users with ‘their’ site
11. Drive organic SEO by cross posting on other sites that have high page rank value
12. Pay bloggers or review sites to write about your site or, even better, specific contenton your site
13. Use of rich media and multiple channels (e.g. mobile access) to drive enhanced customer experience and traffic

Just my two cents…

One of the questions we’ve been getting lately with MIKE2.0 is … how do I help?   Its great to hear this as we could certainly use it!

We’ve listed some overall ways here and in this context, the areas where we could really use help include:

• Best practices information security
• Best practices in business intelligence
• Best practices in search
• Best practices in content management
• Success stories from a business perspective using IM
• Requirements templates, ROI models and product-specific best practices

These could be architecture patterns, lessons learned or product reviews.

The easiest way to contribute, however, is to add bookmarks or engage in forum discussions.  Bookmarks are a great way to add content from others sites and link it into the MIKE2.0 framework.

And of course we could always use development help with omCollab.

We’ll work on making this list more clear - any suggestions on how to do this best are welcome!

We’ve been working omCollab, the technology that supports MIKE2.0, for quite a while.  The whole approach is free and open source. You can get the code from here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab

Our goal is to not only to build a better platform for MIKE2.0.  Its to provide an integrated product that meets the requirements for enterprise collaboration and will support our key initiative at www.openmethodology.org and the concept of an integrated framework for information development.

A couple questions for this group:

1. Do you think its a good idea?

2. Do you have any recommendations on open source assets we might want to bundle into omCollab?

3. Does anyone want to help?

What to find out more?

• The planned roadmap is here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/OmCollab_roadmap
• You can add bugs/feature requests here:http://waterloo.openmethodology.org/trac/omcollab/
• Join our forum discussion here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4

One thing we’ve noticed over the past 2 years is that we’re building a solid “read” and “user” community around MIKE2.0 but we don’t have nearly as many contributors.

Whereas this is a common struggle for many wiki communities, it is arguably even a bigger hurdle in MIKE2.0 due to the method based approach. 3 of the biggest reasons why contributions have been difficult are:

• The impression (which is somewhat true) that it is tough to write wiki articles for MIKE2.0 – it’s seen as being kind of like writing a white paper.
• The nature of how people come to the site. The majority of users arrive on MIKE2.0 via search. They came to the site looking for something, not to add something.
• It’s not clear how people should help. Although there are wiki redlinks and stubs, its not immediately obvious – especially if someone has very limited time.

So we’re aiming to get people used to writing a bit at a time and engaged in a manner that allows them to interact better in a transactional fashion (e.g. a simple question or forum post). From this approach, I think we’ll get better results in terms of people writing. You can participate in the forum here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/

We’ve also built a discussion group in linked in.  While there is some overlap in terms of the functionality of these discussions forums – there is definitely value in getting plugged into the 30M members in linked in. You can join this group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=936087.

We’ll also work on integrating this into our site better in the future.

Enjoy!