Gilbane Group Blog: Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2005 Archives

April 4, 2006

Hot Topics for the Opening Keynote Panel at Gilbane SF

We hope to see you at our upcoming San Francisco conference. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the keynote discussion by including questions in a comment on this blog entry. Or you can visit the panelists blogs and make suggestions to them directly. Below is the session description with links to the panel member's bios and blogs or websites.

UPDATE: You can also now vote a list of questions we have put together. Voting also gives you a chance for a free conference pass to this or a future conference.

The opening keynote panel is open to both tradeshow and conference attendees.

Keynote Panel: New Technologies That Will Influence Your Content Management Strategies
The pace of information technology development continues to increase as organizations develop experience in implementing content applications, and as software vendors vie to incorporate their customer's feedback into product technologies ahead of the competition. As most enterprise applications become more content-oriented, content technology developments are coming from a broader base of suppliers and developers. In fact, most interesting new computing technologies will, or should, influence your short and long term content management strategies. Our opening panel of industry experts will look at both specific technologies and market trends. This will be a lively interactive panel with plenty of debate.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, Editor & Publisher, The Gilbane Report -- Blog
Panelists:
Dan Farber, Vice President, CNET Networks, Editor in Chief, ZDNet -- Between the Lines Blog
Bill Rosenblatt, Editor, DRM Watch
Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research -- Charlene's Blog
Gene Gable, Gene Gable Industries
Tony Byrne, Founder, CMS Watch

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 3, 2006

Learn about "Enterprise" Digital Rights Mananagement

Digital Rights Management (DRM) gets a lot of bad press about its use and misuse, much of it well-deserved. But there is a less controversial use of DRM technology for corporate applications. "Enterprise DRM" complements content management, firewalls, and other technologies in helping to ensure that sensitive information such as confidential documents, email, and application data do not fall into the wrong hands or get used in ways it shouldn't. Much corporate content needs to be managed according to certain rules (having nothing to do with copyright) that are outside the scope of workflow processes, and organizations are paying attention.

Our upcoming Conference on Enterprise DRM at Gilbane San Francisco is the first event devoted exclusively to DRM for corporate applications. The conference, chaired by Bill Rosenblatt of DRM Watch, will be a unique opportunity to explore DRM technologies and how they apply to a wide variety of business environments and technology architectures; several vendors will be on hand to demo their solutions. The program will include several case studies of Enterprise DRM deployments in such applications as financial services, human resources, high-tech manufacturing, and distance learning. The program will also feature leading analysts, including Rosenblatt, Jarad Carleton of Frost & Sullivan, and Trent Henry of Burton Group who will present a framework for analyzing Enterprise DRM solutions.

Executives from Enterprise DRM vendors, including Adobe, Cloakware, EMC/Authentica, Essential Security Software, Fasoo.com, Intelligent Wave, Liquid Machines, SealedMedia, and WorkShare will offer insights into technology and the market. The conference will feature panel discussions on technology issues such as Enterprise DRM for mobile devices, secure inter-enterprise collaboration, and integration of Enterprise DRM with content management.

DRM Watch and Gilbane readers can get a special $100 discount off the eDRM conference price of $495 by registering online with discount code "drmwatch".

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 2, 2006

CM Pros Spring Summit Program Posted

CM Pros has announced the final program for their Spring Summit, which is co-located with our Spring conference in San Francisco this month. Attending both events will really get you up-to-date on what others are doing with content management technology these days. There is lots of great content including keynotes from Bill Trippe, Ann Rockley, and James Robertson. From the CM Pros site:

"As awareness of the value of the customer experience increases, so too does the recognition of content -- and content management. With our theme of "Content Management and the Customer Experience" the Summit, which spans two half-days, will address the importance of effective content management in the customer experience context. View additional program detail, including presentation abstracts."

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 9:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 29, 2006

New Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice

Some of you may have seen the press release from us yesterday announcing our new consulting practice focused on the needs of commercial and corporate publishers. Of course this is not a new area for us - Bill Trippe especially, has long been very active in the publishing space - but rather a dramatic expansion of our activities in an area we know well. It is great to be working with Steve Paxhia again, who will be running this practice. It will also be great to be working more regularly with Gene Gable, Thad McIlroy, Bill Rosenblatt, and Dale Waldt. Here is a description of the practice. We've already launched the practice, but most of our team and our partners will also be at Gilbane San Francisco, where we have a lot of content relevant to publishers including (but not limited to!) the new Automated Publishing track.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS survey

We've posted our results in time for the conference session on Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications tomorrow morning. Keep in mind this is an informal survey and only has 43 responses so far. We will keep the survey going and update the results.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Architectures and Architectures

In the course of two days of sessions here at the Gilbane Conference it is clear that, when it comes to compliance, we've overloaded the word "architecture." We have had a fair amount of talk in some of the conference sessions about "compliance architectures." We have also seen different technology architectures used to support compliance systems.

It is easy to understand why at least some of the people in the audience could get all of this confused. Sometimes it seems that even the speakers have the two "architectures" confused and wrapped around each other. The bad result that comes from this goes beyond a few confusing conversations. If there is enough confusion, the consequence is a misdirected approach to addressing compliance issues in individual organizations.

So... I'll take a crack at getting the terms and ideas unwound from each other. Think of these as "first cut" definitions--aimed at helping people who are just now coming to terms with compliance lingo to understand what is going on. If you can help out here--improving the definitions--please add some comments.

A "compliance architecture" is an organized expression of the compliance concerns and objectives for a particular organization. Think of it as a hierarchy of objectives, roles, requirements, and procedures that defines what an organization will do in its effort to govern its activities, manage risk, comply with regulations, and grow.

Compliance architectures are typically developed through application of a compliance and governance "framework." There are a number of frameworks that can be fit together in different ways to address different areas of concern. There is, for example, the COSO Internal Controls Framework, developed in the early 1990s, that focuses on controls related to operations and financial reporting. More recently, COSO has also created an "Enterprise Risk Management" framework that, as the name implies, provides guidance for a broader view of compliance and controls. For IT governance, there is the COBIT framework. Moving the other direction, toward a broader view of concerns including ethics, there is the OCEG framework. These different frameworks are not competing pictures of the world. Instead, they allow you to focus in close or move back more broadly, like twisting the zoom lens on a camera, and allow you to focus on different governance problems.

Technology architectures, on the other hand, are particular ways of connecting the different repositories of information within an organization and the different systems available for retrieving, processing, analyzing, and presenting the information in those repositories. Viewpoint and focus matter here, too. Depending on what part of the problem a technology vendor is addressing, the technology architecture that the vendor describes will cover more or less of the problem, in more or less detail. An organization's overall technology architecture should reflect the concerns and priorties in the compliance architecture.

One particular technology architecture that I have written about in the past is the "Compliance Oriented Architecture" -- a services oriented approach to compliance suggested by RedMonk. As I said in my earlier post, I think that the RedMonk work is important--but it also is a nice illustration of how confusing the nomenclature can be.

I don't think that newcomers are the only victims here. At the conference I have listened to presentations by people who--if asked--would certainly understand the distinction that I am trying to make here between the compliance architecture (objectives, roles, priorities, procedures) and the technology architecture. But as these speakers move between the two ideas, and blend them together, they end up obscuring an important requirement for success.

Here is that requirement: you need to begin with the compliance architecture. It is the architecture that helps the organization understand what must be done. Only then can you evaluate the technology architecture, which provides a part of the means to achieve that "what."

In real life, of course, the development of the two architectures is not strictly sequential. Compliance and governance requirements change as an organization grows, as rules change, as the organization learns more. The architectures evolve and adapt. The key is to remember, as the organization makes these changes, that you need to think carefully about the "what" before making decisions about "how."

Thinking of each the two meanings of "architecture" as distinct, involving different frameworks and different contributors within the organization, will help keep "what" separate from "how."

Posted by Bill Zoellick at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Software and IT Staff as Compliance Enablers

This morning I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at the Gilbane Conference that included Carole Stern Switzer of the Open Compliance and Ethics Group, Lynn Brewer of The Integrity Institute, and Michael Evans, Ernst and Young partner responsible for developing the compliance architecture within Ernst and Young. One objective of the discussion was to provide the IT people and project and product management people, who make up a substantial part of the audience at Gilbane Conference sessions, with some of the conceptual tools they need to help create more effective compliance and risk management programs within their companies.

One of the questions raised from the audience toward the end of the discussion asked about the "enablers" of an effective compliance program. Lynn Brewer's answer was interesting. Her observation has been that companies that are making really effective use of compliance, rather than just treating it as a checkmark, are typically ahead of the curve in terms of investing in and integrating IT systems into the compliance effort. Both Lynn and Carole Switzer argued that one of the key "enablers" is the early and active engagement of people doing hands-on work on the IT side of an organization.

These comments from two people who have been taking a broad look at compliance efforts across many companies are similar to observations--from a different perspective--that have been showing up on a couple of technology-oriented blogs over the past few months. For example, James McGovern, Enterprise Architect for The Hartford Financial Services Group, has written a call to action for people working on the technology side of organizations to become actively involved in compliance work.

James Governor makes an argument similar to Lynn Brewer's, but with a twist. In a piece titled "Compliance Projects Need Architects and Operators," he argues that system architects "should be brought into compliance initiatives as professional skeptics" and that system operators are most likely to be the people at the "intersection of business process and data governance" who are in the position to push back when data security or integrity is compromised.

One of the points emerging from the discussion here at the conference this morning was that, even though this engagement of technologists in the compliance process is important, it often won't be easy. In many companies, compliance and risk management used to be owned by the legal department. That is changing, and companies are increasingly likely to understand that compliance initiatives and responsibilities cut across departments and disciplines. But there is still a tendency to see the IT staff as implementers of the compliance system, rather than as important contributors to fundamental questions about compliance architecture concerns, objectives, and design.

My own view is that the ability of IT staff to insert themselves into the early stages of this process will require them to move beyond the role of being professional skeptics and gatekeepers. Governor is right that those roles are important, and it is also true that those roles are familiar and comfortable for many IT professionals. But IT's ability to get engaged in the compliance process at the ground floor, shaping program objectives and priorities, will require moving beyond saying "No" to saying "Yes," actively affirming the importance of good governance, compliance, and risk management. Being an enabler means putting your shoulder to the wheel and helping to push. On the basis of the questions and concerns raised in the sessions here at the conference, it is clear that there are a number of IT people who are looking for ways to make that commitment and effort.

Posted by Bill Zoellick at 7:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Live-Blogging: John Yunker and Eric Silberstein

John Yunker is speaking on globalization, as part of the session, Content Management Globalization. John's a great speaker, and has a very useful blog, Web Globalization News.

Eric Silberstein is the founder of Idiom and an expert on DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Eric and I have done a couple of webinars recently on DITA and globalization, and his presentation today is a more comprehensive version of the one he has given in the Webinars. Eric is also an excellent speaker, and has a lot of credibility on this topic. Click here for the Idiom-sponsored white paper on DITA, and click here for Robin Cover's resource page on DITA.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Live-Blogging: A Look at Some Technical & Management Challenges

I am sitting in on the session, A Look at Some Management & Technical Challenges, which is moderated by Seth Gottlieb of Optaros. The speakers are Ann Rockley, Jan Johnston-Tyler, Hardware Writing Manager at Juniper Networks, and Scott Handley, Master Technologist at Hewlett-Packard.

Some technical difficulties to start, reminding me of something Leo Kottke said warming up for a song. "This song begins like a like of my songs, with a lot of tuning."
Jan Johnston-Tyler's presentation has the clever title, "Content Management After the Bubble"
Jan: Content management used to be an arcane science. Then the internet happened.
Jan: Putting the "business" back into the business case for a CMS means relying on real metrics.
Ann: Don't pick the tools first. Figure out what you need first, and then match the tools.
Ann: CM project should be in line with organizational goals
Ann: Business groups shouldn't do CM implementations on their own. They should partner with IT. (Indeed, I would say IT is typically leading the charge these days, and not leaving many departments or business units to do this on their own.
Scott is giving a really nice presentation on how to plan for content that needs to be published, updated, and (eventually) retired.
Good discussion of controlled vocabularies and who should build them. Experts don't always realize that the average visitor to the web site may not know the highly specialized vocabulary the expert knows so well.
Scott's HP case study is based on DocBook.
Last question: How to demonstrate ROI? Scott: the support staff for the internal publishing has been halved over 5 years. ROI for future enhancements may be harder to quantify.
Excellent turnout for the session, everyone seemed to stay, and lots of questions and applause at the end. Clearly, people enjoyed hearing about a real implementation.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2005

Keynote Debate: Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange?

I am liveblogging the Keynote Debate between Microsoft and Sun on what is the right strategy for information interchange. The panelists are Tim Bray, Director, Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture, Microsoft. Jon Udell is moderating.

Actually Frank Gilbane is moderating, and not Jon, so we will hear some of Jon's thoughts as well
Frank: the session is really about strategies for sharing, preserving, and integrating document content, especially document content with XML.
Frank gave some background about the European Union attempts to standardize on Microsoft Office or OpenOffice
Tim elucidated some requirements of your data format. (1) Technically unencumbered and legally unencumbered (2) High quality (and a notable aspect of quality is allowing a low barrier to entry). Tim: "As Larry Wall (the inventer of Perl) noted, easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible)."
Jean predicted that by 2010, 75% of new documents will be XML.
Tim agreed with Jean that 75% of new documents will be XML by 2010, but asked how many of them will be XHTML (as opposed toa more specialized schema, I assume).
Some agreement by all that electronic forms are an important aspect of XML authoring, but Tim thinks the area is "a mess." I'm paraphrasing, but Tim commented on the official XForms release, "Well, it's official."
Jean commented that XML-based electronic forms are made more difficult because forms themselves require consideration of graphical user interface, interactivity, and even personalization to a degree. This suggests forms are more complex than documents. (And this reminds me of a comment Mark Birbeck made about there being a fine line between an electronic form and an application.)
Good question from the audience. So much time has elapsed since SGML got started, and we are still only have XSL-FO (which this person was not happy with). What does this suggest about how long it will take to get better, high-quality typographically sophisticated output?
Tim would suggest we are seeing some improvement, beginning with better resolution on the screen.
Another commenter weighed in, suggesting that format is important and format does convey meaning. Would like to hear that the tools are going to get better.
Frank: when do you need a customized schema?
Jean: best way to safeguard your data and systems is to have an XML strategy. You can gain efficiencies you never had before. Also suggested that the Microsoft schemas will not somehow trap your content into Microsoft's intellectual property.
Jon's takeaways: (1) software as service (2) XML-aware repositories and (3) pervasive intermediation (the content flows in such a way that you can intermediate it)

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2005

Survey on Enterprise blogs and wiki use

Our survey on enterprise blogs, wiki and RSS use was out of commission for a few days because the vendor of the survey service upgraded their software and broke a few things. The short survey is back online now. We'll be posting the results next week during our conference in time for our session on the same topic. BTW, we are going to open this session (Wednesday morning 8:30 -10:00am) to anyone who is there, even if their badge is only for the technology demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday. So come by and blog it!

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 6, 2005

Using XML in Enterprise Content Management: Technologies and Case Studies

As part of the conference next week, I will be doing a tutorial on XML and how it is currently used in content management applications. There is plenty to talk about. While there are few "pure" applications of XML content management, XML is used, in varying degrees, to manage and represent the content, the metadata, the supporting data, and the configuration data in many content management applications.

We will spend some time talking generally about how XML is used in content management applications. Much of the focus will be on a series of brief case studies--example applications really--discussing how successful projects use XML today.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 5, 2005

Sun & Microsoft on Open Document Formats & XML Strategy

It wasn't too long ago that all document formats were proprietary, and vendors that sold authoring and publishing software had a really unfair advantage over their customers because it was so difficult and costly for organizations to convert their content from one proprietary system to another. It was the granddaddy of descriptive markup, SGML, that led the way to the infinitely improved situation we have today with seemingly universal support for XML, and tools like XSL, XQuery etc. So, if most major software applications support reading/writing of XML, including the 800 pound gorilla of office documents Microsoft Office, hasn't the issue of proprietary formats gone away?

If you are in charge of protecting your organizations content/document assets, you better not be thinking your problems are over. If you are involved in sharing content with other organizations or among applications, you already know how difficult it is to share information without loss -- if it is that difficult to share, how easy will it be to migrate to future applications?

Our keynote debate in San Francisco next week is all about helping you understand how to best protect and share your content. While there are some differences between the Microsoft and Sun positions represented by Jean Paoli and Tim Bray, I think they agree more than they disagree on the critical issues you need to consider. We'll be looking at different aspects of the issue including technology, licensing, cost, and complexity vs. flexibility. For some background see Jon Udell's posts here and here, and the Cover Pages here. Both contain links to additional info.

I almost forgot... What does this have to do with my earlier posts on the future of content management and Longhorn? Well, Office applications, like all content applications, should benefit from an operating system that can manage content elements and attributes that could be described in XML. Would this make document interchange easier? I don't know, but it might be fun to explore this question in the session.

If you have a specific question you would like us to cover on the panel, send me an email or add a comment to this post and we'll summarize what happens.

UPDATE: Jon says he is in Jean's camp on custom schemas and Tim's on XHTML. At our Boston panel I think all of us agreed - of course neither Tim nor Jean were there. Jon is tagging his posts on the conference with gilbaneSF2005.

We are using the category and (more wordy) tag Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2005 for all our SF conference postings.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 4, 2005

The Future of Content Management

In an earlier post on Longhorn adoption, I talked about the need for an operating system that provided support that went beyond simple file management to include services that content applications could leverage. Will Longhorn's WinFS do this? Will other operating systems?

One of the questions we'll be asking our panel on the Future of Content Management at our conference next week, will be "Where in the software stack is the best place to provide basic content management functionality, e.g., content elements with attributes and metadata?" With senior strategists from Oracle, Interwoven, FatWire and Mark Logic on the panel we ought to get some interesting discussion going. If you have a question you would like to see us address, comment on this post or send me an email.

In my next post I'll look at how this question relates to one of the fundamental issues underlying the keynote debate on XML Strategy and Open Information.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 3, 2005

Content Management Professionals' Spring Summit

The non-profit Content Management Professionals organization, an international community of practice, is holding their Spring Summit in San Francisco on April 11. The Summit is being held at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco in conjunction with our Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies.

Activities at the Summit include small-group, roundtable discussions focusing on the strategy and practice of content management and the role of those who are engaged in this discipline. CM Pros members leading roundtables include:

- Erik Hartman (Netherlands) on the enterprise content management poster and CMSML (CMS markup language)
- Hilary Marsh (Chicago) on the content in content management
- Ann Rockley (Toronto) on making the content management business case
- Mira Wooten (Mountain View, CA) on content management networking
- Rahel Bailie (Vancouver) on the human factor in content management
- Seth Earley (Boston) on doing successful taxonomy projects
- Shuli Goodman (San Francisco) on effective governance models to support enterprise content strategies
- David Warwick (Australia) on organizational compliance and the role of CM systems.

Update: Full Summit Program and schedule.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 2, 2005

Ask the Content Management Analysts

We open our conference in San Francisco in a little over a week with a panel of analysts who focus on content management. These were very popular and fun sessions at our Boston and LA events. We will have plenty of questions for them as usual, and we hope to see many of you there to ask questions in person. But for those of you that can't make it, you can still send us your questions and we'll provide some kind of synopsis on our blog. These are smart, opinionated people, so don't be afraid to ask the tough questions. You can comment on this post so the panelists can all see, or send me an email.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 1:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 17, 2005

Enterprise blog & wiki limitations; new enterprise RSS blog

There is some additional detail on what blogs and wikis don't do for you from somone who is using them in an enterprise environment that Lauren interviewed for her report at Corporate Blogs and Wikis: Benefits and Limits.

It is to early to tell anything from our ongoing survey on the use of enterprise blogs, wikis and RSS, but so far it is surprising how low the use of RSS is. Speaking of RSS, there is a fairly new blog focused on enterprise RSS that looks worth tracking.

Both are good background reading for our upcoming conference session in San Francisco.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 8:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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