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…)!

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

“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?

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.

I have been writing quite a bit lately about the topic of Governance 2.0/Networked Information Governance, including an earlier post in this blog. Networked Information Governance = Information Governance + Enterprise 2.0. The idea for the name came from an excellent article published by Paul Strassman in 2001. At the time of its authoring in 2001, networked business models were continuing to grow in popularity, from the military to the most agile Fortune 2000 organizations. What it pre-dated was the radical advances in collaborative technologies would occur over the next few years to bring together “informal networks” that are so relevant in the application of governance. When it comes to bringing the informal network together with a formal approach, technologies and techniques from Enterprise 2.0 are a great fit: collaboration, search, tagging and aggregation are the keys to bridging the gap.

I wrote a more detailed post on this subject on FastForward and recently posted on presentation on slideshare.

It’s been a lucrative five years for consultants in information management with new work being as easy to win as saying the word “compliance”.  Executives are more than willing to sign-up new consulting engagements based the need to meet their compliance and regulatory requirements.  The trouble is, this type of information management engagement breeds a defensive rather than a confident enterprise.

A defensive organization believes that data needs to be locked-down, that risks need to be taken out and the analysis resulting from any dataset should be predictable.  Of course, any regular reader of this blog would know that we view data contained in large enterprises as complex and displaying all of the attributes of chaos mathematics which means any attempt to remove surprises from data is a fruitless endeavor.

A confident organization, on the other hand, recognizes that data is complex and chaotic but seeks to gain benefit from that complexity.  Rather than be afraid of randomness, they use the techniques of MIKE2.0 to identify the risks and then focus on monitoring and measuring.  In general, I observe a strong correlation between the confident enterprise and the adoption of Web 2.0 techniques and principles.  The confident organization believes that there is more value in collaboration and is willing to sponsor individual innovation.

A good example of why this is so important can be seen in social networking sites such as Facebook.  With the rapid growth in their use by a new generation of consumers, service providers ranging from telecommunication and financial services right through to government, need to come to grips with both the technology and the cultural drivers behind them.  Consumers are becoming more confident in sharing quite detailed information about themselves in a way that they expect others to pick-up.  Increasingly it will make no sense for providers to ask individuals to provide data about their relationships, locale or other details when those are already available in the public web.

In fact, one of the reasons why Facebook is so powerful is its ability to interface into custom applications.  Imagine the impact if you wanted to sell these consumers a new financial or telecommunications product and you made it possible to apply online from within Facebook!  More importantly, you can give the individual a sense of control by allowing them to privately share critical information with you and then maintain it in a form with which they are comfortable – perhaps for a multitude of providers.

Obviously there are challenges in this type of initiative, but good use of data measurement, reconciliation and parsing approaches allow it to be done.  The question is whether your enterprise has even considered whether it’s worth doing?  You can bet it won’t be long before your competitors do!

Michael zur Muehlen from the Stevens Institute of Technology was recently interviewed as part of the AT&T Techchannel roundtable on Web 2.0. During the interview he used BearingPoint’s Information Management initiative as an example of Web 2.0 in action and directed viewers to our open source site. You can view the program on YouTube (part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIm5txBm1YA, part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5it8oBMbPrg).

Even if you have already used MIKE2.0 resources, it is always worth re-visiting as new materials are being constantly loaded. Some examples of new additions to MIKE2.0 include material supporting data mart consolidation, role and skill mapping, eDiscovery, understanding the information implications of hosted CRM, protecting your enterprise content and XBRL.

There is huge interest from clients in enterprise search, with the focus being how to create useful applications that go beyond documents or web pages.  Increasingly, we’re seeing organizations that have invested in metadata for regulatory compliance discovering the value of this asset using search technologies and techniques.

The original web experience was intended to be click-based navigating via a number of hubs to any point in the internet, but the last five years has seen the majority of users move to a language-based approach starting with a site like Google or Yahoo.  The example I often use is the rain radar, often when setting out to a meeting in a city I’ll check to see if rain is coming.  In Melbourne I can navigate from the www.bom.gov.au website to the radar but it’s faster for me to type “Melbourne weather radar” into Google, with the added benefit that I can use the same interface when I’m in Auckland, Singapore, New York etc..

At work, users are still in the late 90’s relying on incomplete intranets and a poorly maintained web of links.  The problem is primarily access to the structured repositories and even more importantly access to the structures of those repositories (ie., the metadata.

In many cases, banks have been the early adopters of metadata repositories followed by insurers and then the very large government departments.  The main driver for these repositories has been compliance and (for banks) risk (Basel II).  These repositories are enormously rich in content, but extremely difficult to interface to the rest of the organization’s information.  Search can be the solution and I recommend the following three steps:

1. Interface to metadata repositories
In a bank, a user should be able to search for “Risk Weighted Asset” and find not only the relevant documents but also a list of the systems and databases that contain relevant data as well as appropriate controls, processes and business rules.  It isn’t difficult to build interfaces between structured metadata and the search tools.

2. Interface to master data
The next step is to build an interface that allows the user to type “Assets Walmart 2005″ and find, via the metadata, appropriate queries which can then be launched in a BI tool (eg., Business Objects or Cognos).  This is part of my view that search should be the kick-off point for all information analysis.  Again, this sounds difficult but really isn’t, you can use the metadata repository to define the dimensions of search and emulate hints (ie., “Did you mean xyz”) to help if the user is almost on target.

3. Better analysis of the quality of search
The search index increasingly becomes an asset in its own right.  Using the techniques in MIKE2.0, we can use do constant health checks on the usability and relevance of the search index itself.

In the wake of a recent adverse court finding for a major media company in Australia, I was interviewed by The Age on the business dangers of email.  I argued that communication within and between companies should be embraced rather than feared, but proper governance inevitably meant that one-on-one emails were not the best way to manage this unstructured content.

You can read the full article at http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/teamwork-avoids-dangers-of-oneonone-emails/2007/09/09/1189276544211.html or listen the podcast at the same site.