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.

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.

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!

I recently participated in a podcast to talk about why I’m involved in MIKE2.0 and how information can be turned to a company’s advantage.  In summary, too many organizations are only looking at information from a defensive perspective with a focus on compliance.

Compliance in general, and for many organizations, Sarbanes-Oxley in particular, are topics that get a lot of management attention.  The core of the work is to define business processes and to identify control points.  When I look at the results from most companies, I see vast quantities of process documentation, often in Microsoft Visio, which has been printed into fat binders and placed on the shelf.  Compliance achieved!

You don’t need me to tell you about the benefits of living documents.  Any analysis which sits on the shelf is out-of-date before it is even printed.  There have been many discussions about engineering systems on the back of the process documentation, however few approaches have been truly successful as inevitably there is a separation of some kind between the applications to run the process and the documentation.

I, my colleagues, and most people involved in MIKE2.0 advocate a different approach.  Start by looking at the way you measure compliance, which is looking at the data which comes out of each control point.  If the data is complete then the navigation between control points is actually of much less consequence (different people do their jobs differently).

When we take this data-driven approach, we also find that a complete analysis of control points also generally shows that the most valuable information held by the company is general identified.  It should come as no surprise that controls provide a live feed of business crucial activities – Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)!  Now we can support multiple applications providing the same data, but doing it in different ways (often this corresponds to product systems) and we can free-up business units to find creative ways to achieve the best possible business outcome.

The key to doing this successfully is to take an Information Development approach.  If governance and business supervision focuses on the outcomes (measured through the control point data) rather than process steps then the company is generally more agile, able to integrate new business units more rapidly and is staffed by empowered executives.

I recently attended IBM’s Information On Demand conference in Las Vegas, including meeting with IBM’s Information Management CTO, Anant Jhingran.  Anant and IBM understand the necessity of separating the content away from the application, I suspect this is why they are happy to stay out of the application space and why they are so supportive of SOA, specialist XML vendors and other forms of open communities.

Two of these XML vendors that I find particularly interesting in this context, because of their support of this “ecosystem” style of approach, are JustSystems and CoreFiling.

JustSystems, who have perhaps been known in the past as a Japanese “office” software company, have made a major push in the XML space with products like xfy which allows organizations to build process flows and dynamic datasets without having to build the full system.  We find this attractive as it supports the Information Development approach of allowing prototyping focused on the content, then building a process, providing a content test platform and then (in production) providing a place to review content and manage content irrespective of the application that manages the process flow.

CoreFiling have been one of the early XBRL providers.  XBRL is the emerging business reporting XML standard and is gaining rapid acceptance (particularly with regulators, hence its attraction to organizations with significant compliance obligations).  CoreFiling provide products, such as SpiderMonkey which will supports the dynamic development of metadata (or taxonomies) across multiple applications and user groups, which is critical if the Information Development philosophy is to scale beyond small workgroups.

MIKE2.0 uses “small world” measures to assess data models (see Small Worlds Data Transformation Measure). The challenge many users have found is that for large models, it is very difficult to calculate these metrics. Thomas Isaksson has created an open source tool and provided the code on SourceForge which automates the process , supporting any RDBMS for which you have a JDBC driver or ERWin (via CSV output). 

We hope that this initiative will further the encourage the adoption of these data model metrics and help demystify the traditional modelling process. Please take the time to use, test and extend this beta code.

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.