For those who want to know more about the technology, business drivers and market dynamics surrounding Enterprise 2.0, there's a new study by the AIMM Enterprise Content Management Association that profiled the state of Enterprise 2.0 adoption among organizations. But what really stood out to me was that boomers, Gen-Xers and millennials are all likely to champion Enterprise 2.0 in their organizations. CIO magazine also ran a nice story on the generational myth.
Survey analysis confirmed that generational affiliation does impact attitudes and experience with Enterprise 2.0, but not as much as one might be inclined to believe. Additionally, in some cases, the "positive" attitude or more aggressive adoption was affiliated with the "elders" of the enterprise.
We attribute this to the fact that unlike Web 2.0—which is very "social" in the purest sense—Enterprise 2.0 is about "socialness" in support of specific business goals and objectives. Thus, in situations where Enterprise 2.0 can illustrate a potential benefit to the success of an organization tenured business professionals are more apt to place a premium on it.
However, if you compare the attitudes of younger workers with the "elders" toward Enterprise 2.0, you'll find that there are still critical differences. For instance, the study found that millenials are far more enthusiastic about the speed of communication enabled by Enterprise 2.0, while the enthusiasm of Gen Xers and Boomers is tempered by the risk of business-related communication. So in other words, millenials are likely to overenthusiastic about the technology, leading to an inclination to deploy Enterprise 2.0 in "an ad-hoc or rogue manner without an enterprise strategy".
To an organization, whether you're a library implementing internal wikis for collaboration among reference librarians or a sales force considering social CRM, this means getting all your employees on the same page. Millenials are often looking for more experience in implementing Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, while Gen-Xers and boomers tend to be more risk-averse and lack the understanding -- due to lower exposure to Web 2.0 -- that's needed to manage any strategic implementation.
I think as enterprise 2.0 technologies mature and a greater number of millenials enter the workforce, these generational differences should be ironed out. It's not easy for those who did not grow up working with social software to appreciate its value or even understand why things are the way they are. After all, it's not something you'll learn just by attending a class or a workshop. It has to be a part of the way you live and work.
It's the time of the year for tech and business journos to converge at Asia's biggest information and communication trade show, CommunicAsia. Like previous years, CommunicAsia 2008 will focus on cutting edge technologies ranging from Long Term Evolution, the successor to HSPA, to Web 2.0-enabled IPTV. Of course, there will also be plenty of talk on telecoms business models in areas such as mobile entertainment and fixed/mobile broadband.
On the surface, the packed conference program in this year's show seems like there is a lot to take away for the first-time visitor. But for regular attendees, you'll find that most of the topics are more or less similar to those in previous years other than the ones I mentioned earlier.
This isn't surprising. Given that the show is staged every year, you can't really expect drastic developments in the state of the industry. But at least, from the conference tracks, you can tell that the industry is maturing each year -- at least we're not talking about 3G vs. WiMax anymore. People now understand the pros and cons of both technologies in the markets they play in.
I've reported on CommunicAsia for three years now. Looking at these webcasts again brought back fond memories and nightmares. It feels good to be in the thick of the action, but not the stress over location shoots that came along with it.
Singapore's National Library has become the latest cultural institution to put up its photo collection on Flickr.
Some of these photos, organized into 12 sets, are also available on the Singapore National Album of Pictures (SNAP), a microsite comprising contemporary and historical images ranging from architecture and the arts, to personalities and recreation spots. Through Flickr, the library can hopefully encourage users to contribute to the collective memory of Singapore by tagging and commenting on the photos.
For images such the St. Andrew's Cathedral, users are given a link that leads them to the National Library's Infopedia site for more information on the magnificent cathedral.
The photos on the National Library's photostream, however, are still in copyright. That explains why it isn't part of the Flickr Commons project, which requires institutions to rightly claim "no known copyright restrictions" on the content they share.
Since its inception, Flickr Commons has seen participation from the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum and more recently, Sydney's Powerhouse Museum.
There are some interesting photos in the National Library's photostream, such as this one below depicting a pair of siblings posing with some audio equipment and vinyl records.
The image caption says the the girl on the right goes by the name of S. K. Tan. The boy on the left is her older brother. The vinyl records also include a compilation of "RTS Talentime Finalists". Interesting facts, but who is S. K. Tan?
That's where the power of social software lies. By sharing the images with the community, cultural institutions can now uncover nuggets of information lost through time.
Hopefully, S. K. Tan will step forward and tell us her story behind that picture on Flickr. And the talentime finalists too.
June 25 update: The NLB has just put up an "official" photostream on http://flickr.com/photos/snapsg/. According to a spokesperson, the snapnlsg photostream will be used as a teaching and learning tool instead. See comments below for details.
A group of current and former tech journos, including myself, have just started Techgoondu, a new tech blog to provide some counterbalance to the stuff that you read in Singapore's Apple-loving mainstream press, or things that don't even make it into the headlines at all. We think there's a void to be filled, and hopefully we'll grow big eventually.
Librarianship has been an undervalued profession for far too long, no thanks to the the conventional stereotype of librarians sitting at a reference desk answering questions. It's not surprising, given that a lot of work librarians do is away from the public's eye.
Recently, a relative was shocked to learn that I was in library school. If he knew the problems that many enterprises face in managing all the information that goes around in their organizations would require the expertise of a librarian, I bet he'll be equally shocked. IT and librarianship are two separate fields to most people. Not until you look at look at some of these standards in enterprise resource management (ERM) taken from a list posted on Information Zen:
Creating & capturing records
- ISO 12033 Electronic imaging - Guidance for selection of document image compression methods
- ISO/TS 12022:2001 Electronic imaging – Guidance of document image compression methods
- ANSI/AIIM TR15-1997 – Planning Considerations, Addressing Preparation of Documents for Image Capture
Classification
- The Design and Implementation of Record - Keeping Systems (DIRKS) methodology developed by State Records New South Wales and National Archives of Australia. This is the most fully developed methodology for reengineering records management systems, including the close relationship with business change and the functional approach to BCS.
- ISO 2788, on Documentation, entitled "Guidelines for the Establishment of Monolingual Thesauri", dated 1986(E) but under review.
Storage, search & retrieval
- ISO 15801:2004 Electronic Imaging – Information stored electronically – Recommendations for trustworthiness and reliability
- ANSI/AIIM TR25-1995 – The use of optical disks for public records
Information retrieval protocol (ANSI Z39.50/ISO 23950)
Migration
- ISO 14721:2003 Space data and information transfer systems -- Open archival information system -- Reference model
Digital preservation
- PADI – Preservation and Access to Digital Information
- Digital Preservation Coalition
File Format Information Registry Initiatives
- PRONOM
- Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR)
- Library of Congress Format Descriptions
- ISO 19005-1:2005 Document management -- Electronic document file format for long-term preservation -- Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)
- ISO 14721:2003 Space data and information transfer systems -- Open archival information system -- Reference model
Many of these standards and technologies have been developed by the library and archival community and being used anywhere where information needs to be managed. Faceted classification, conceived by the father of library science, S.R. Ranganathan, is being used in enterprise search and retrieval systems. In some ways, the development of knowledge management has put librarianship in the limelight. Suddenly, a profession that has been ignored for a long time is being acknowledged again - I hope.
The things discussed on the Information Zen group on enterprise search and information organization and access says:
Topics include findability, taxonomies, metadata, search - how to find, inventory, and analyze your content (documents, records, and organizational information).
Isn't that what librarians do?
As I am preparing to wrap up this program, I'm still amazed at how many library students continue to shun these seemingly technical areas of librarianship. Most are contented with being in the service aspects of the job. There's nothing wrong with that, but having a good knowledge of these things is important for librarians to move forward into the digital age; and I don't even think you need to be a techie to grasp some of these concepts.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why libraries these days seem to be repurposing technology and innovation from others, and not doing enough to take the lead that they've taken before. That needs to change if libraries are to continue to stay relevant.
Cisco's expensive TelePresence may be out of reach to most companies for now, but it's still a fascinating piece of technology that could change the way we work across time and space. Compared to traditional video conferencing, you'll feel that that the person you're talking to is just right in front of you in a telepresence session. I experienced it myself for the first time at Cisco's Singapore office, where a group of journalists spoke to some folks from Cisco Hong Kong.
One of the criticisms against teleworking is the need for us to interact with real people in the flesh. There's just something lacking in current video conferencing products that just doesn't deliver that kind of experience. The telepresence market has great potential. Apart from Cisco, other players like Polycom, Tanberg and HP are offering similar solutions. But until prices (a few hundred thousand USD for a single installation) comes down, it's still cheaper to fly your employees across the globe.
Recently, I came across this video where Cisco CEO John Chambers demo-ed his telepresence product on stage in Bangalore last year. The demo made use of London-based Musion System's display technology, a transparent foil stretched across the stage. Chambers beamed his San Jose-based colleagues, who appeared as holograms that were so real you couldn't even tell the difference that they were located somewhere else.
A recent Gartner report noted that social software, web mashups, multicore and hybrid processors and cloud computing are amongst the ten most disruptive technologies that will shape the information technology (IT) landscape over the next five years.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to those who have been tracking corporate IT in the last few years. Large enterprises have been the first-mover in experimenting with some of these technologies such as social networking and mashups. Others are still concerned with the security implications that these applications may bring to their IT environments and are taking a wait-and-see approach. In comparison, the benefits of multicore processors (multi-threaded applications and virtualization) should be clear to most organizations.
Security concerns aside, social software presents the ability for organizations to tap into tacit knowledge of their employees. For the longest time, IT has been too preoccupied with systems that focused on managing explicit knowledge in the form of information stored on database servers. As long as you get information into the hands of workers whenever they need it, they'll be able to gain the knowledge to do their jobs well. This assumption overlooks the difference between information and knowledge.
Information needs to be contextualized by its user for it to be meaningful. When that happens, it becomes knowledge which is hard to detach from a person's head. This makes managing knowledge harder much harder than managing information. That's why most so-called knowledge management systems are really just focused on organizing and providing access to information assets. This approach isn't going to create a learning organization that we had hoped for.
How then do we expose the knowledge work undertaken by employees? Since knowledge is created through conversations, the obvious way to make it easy for employees to look at the conversations that surround each piece of information, whether it is a document, spreadsheet, database or memo. Only then will an employee be able to understand how the information came about and the knowledge creation and often social processes behind it.
In an IBM research article on what it calls a socially translucent approach to knowledge management, the authors noted:
One of us once interviewed accountants about how they would use a (proposed) database of their company’s internal documents. A rather startling theme emerged: the accountants said that they’d love to access the documents — so that they could find out who wrote them. As one explained, ‘Well, if I’m putting together a proposal for Exxon, I really want to talk to people who’ve already worked with them: they’ll know the politics, and the history, and they can introduce me to their contacts. None of that gets into reports!’ How curious: the accountants wanted to use a data access system to access the people who produced the data. It was only through the people — and the social networks they were part of — that the accountants could get the knowledge and social resources they really needed.
IBM's proposal is to create digital systems that, by making users and their activities visible to one another, we can engage our social intelligence. Its work is still in the experimental stage, but the results seem promising so far. Babble, the proof-of-concept system, was designed to show text conversations taking place within a company as well as the density of participants. If you see a crowd forming, there's a chance that you'll be curious about what's going on and may want to participate. There are other intricacies in Babble which are well-described in this paper.
In some earlier posts, I talked about participatory librarianship which calls for libraries to facilitate conversations among users. Dave Lankes, the brainchild behind this concept, has given presentations which showed mockups of interfaces that mirror what Babble is trying to achieve. While the idea is compelling, I doubt participatory librarianship will come to fruition in a practical sense anytime soon. Most of it is just in the conceptual stages, and besides, there just isn't enough innovation going on in the design of library systems right now that's even close to Babble.
