Congratulations to Linda Burman, Emma Hamer, Joan Lasselle, and Travis Wissink, newly elected by their peers to serve on the board of directors of Content Management Professionals. They will step in for retiring directors Seth Gottlieb, Erik Hartman, Samantha Starmer, and Scott Abel, who resigned his seat on the board to fill the role of CM Pros executive director. Continuity on the board is provided by current director Mary Laplante, now serving the second year of a two-year term.
CM Pros members will have an opportunity to meet with the directors at the upcoming spring Summit, April 13, in San Francisco following the Gilbane conference on content technologies.
Year: 2007 (Page 32 of 45)
In my previous entry I wrote about the effect of working in a foreign language. I think that we will see interesting developments in tools and services targeted to people who need to work in a language other than their native language – simply because this is a rapidly growing group. Obviously there are more and more non-native English speakers using English daily at work. But as European call centers relocate to Poland and the Czech Republic, we will also see more people using German as their second language.
An interesting question is: what will happen in China and India? According to Wikipedia, India has 23 official languages (one of them is English), 800 spoken languages and 2000 dialects. In China, there are 6 to 12 main regional groups of Chinese, according to classification. A friend of mine said that China could choose English as their official langauge, just like in India. I am not quite so sure. With about 800 million Mandarin speakers, maybe we will all be learning Mandarin in the future.
Anyways, I checked the most popular blogs from Technorati, . The top 30 “most linked to” blogs included 8 blogs in a language other than English. To me, this is just a reminder that there is a world outside English.
The recording from our February 14th webinar, “Integrating Translation and Content Management Workflows” is now available here. Many thanks to Steve Billings, Senior Solutions Engineer with Idiom Technologies, and David Smith, President of LinguaLinx, for joining me for the conversation and of course, to the participants for attending.
We informally polled participants during our last webinar on globalization business drivers and published the results here. In this webinar, we asked the question again. Here’s the results:
We also added a new poll specific to integrating translation and content workflows. Here’s the results:
Clearly the subject of this webinar was right on for participants, with 21% citing “integration of CMS (content management systems) and GMS (globalization management systems) as the number #1 headache. The good news is that there are a number of market approaches to cohesive workflow integration for translation processes. We’ve provided details on our definitions of Levels 1-3 here. Steve and David presented a typical customer scenario involving all three integration levels during the webinar. Check it out.
Last week’s FASTforward 07 event, sponsored by FAST Search, was a great opportunity to immerse ourselves in search and the state of our collective efforts to solve the knotty problems associated with finding information. (The escape to San Diego during an East Coast winter freeze was an added bonus.)
Much of the official program covered topics “2.0” — Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Search 2.0, Transformation 2.0, Back Office 2.0. Regular readers know that the Gilbane team generally approaches most things “2.0” with skepticism. In the case of its use as a qualifier for the Web, it’s not that we question the potential value of bringing greater participation to Web-based interactions. Rather, it’s that use of the term causes the needle on our hype-o-meter to zip into the red alert zone. This reaction is further aggravated by the trend towards appending “2.0” to other words, sometimes just to make what’s old seem new again. We note, without comment, that O’Reilly Media’s conference in May has been dubbed Where 2.0.
We listened carefully to the 2.0’s being tossed out like Mardi Gras coins at FASTforward last week. One voice that stood out as a great reality check is that of Andrew McAfee, associate professor at Harvard Business School. In his keynote talk, “Enterprise 2.0: The Next Disrupter,” he presented a definition of Enterprise 2.0:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
The important word in McAfee’s definition is emergent, which is not the same as emerging. McAfee also outlined the ground rules for an enterprise that can legitimately lay claim to the use of the 2.0 qualifier. Read the FASTforward entries on his blog for his own eloquent summary.
In addition to his talk on Enterprise 2.0, McAfee also participated in a lunch presentation on research conducted by Economist Intelligence Unit on executive awareness of Web 2.0 and in a limited-seating roundtable on 2.0 topics. Both are briefly described on his blog.
In short, McAfee’s work is recommended reading for anyone interested in separating 2.0 market hype from potential business value.
Another highlight of FASTforward for us was keynoter Chris Anderson on “The Long Tail” and the application of Long Tail theories to search and content life cycles. By pure happenstance, the Gilbane team shared a limo to the airport with Anderson. In his day job as editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, he and his staff are experiencing significant levels of frustration with the publishing process — specifically, getting content out of a leading professional publishing tool and into the web content management system. While we found his Long Tail talk interesting, the conversation in the limo reminded us that solving some basic business communication problems is still a challenge. It was a thought-provoking way to end the week.
For more on FASTforward ’07, check out our enterprise search blog.
No matter how small your organization or domain, you are going to need tools to find content sooner than you think. Starting with a small amount of content you should already be thinking about what its purpose is, why you would need to find it again and under what circumstances. Trying to retrofit a search strategy and structure to a mountain of disconnected content, is not only very difficult but it is costly. Waiting means that human intelligence, which could have been applied to organizing content well as the supply grew, must be applied later to get it under control. Adding meaningful context around old but valuable content is a very laborious intellectual process.
Growing an organization successfully means tending to not only the products you are creating and selling. It is also about creating an environment in which your growing work force is well supported with a knowledge framework that keeps them centered and confident that content they need to do their jobs can be found quickly, efficiently and accurately.
I am frequently asked by other consultants if I can give advice on how to organize personal files and records. This is hard to answer because my own methods fall short of where I want to be. But in any new project or venture, I try to get a good sense of how content needs to be organized. I do create metadata using a controlled list of terminology. I also have a couple of search tools that I leverage to produce readings for clients on a special topic, or to put my hands on a specific document, article or Web site. Early stage companies need to think about how to safeguard the results of their work and how it will be made accessible to workers on a reliable basis. There are inexpensive search tools that are great for managing small domains.
Invest in tools, invest in someone to manage the tools, and plan to continue to invest in the resulting infrastructure of people and tools as the organization’s content and needs grow. Content management and search are overhead expenditures you must make early to prepare for growth and sustainability.
That reminds me, I keeping wondering how many enterprise search vendors use the technologies they build and sell to support their rapidly growing enterprises. That’s a great question to ask your potential search vendor as you decide what tools to procure for your enterprise. Get them to tell you how they use their tools and the benefits they see in their own enterprise. If they aren’t at least using their own search technology in their customer relationship management and technical support knowledge-base operations, think carefully about what that might mean concerning ease of deployment and utilization.
OASIS announced that its members have approved version 1.1 of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. The result of a collaboration between advocacy groups for the disabled and open source and commercial software vendors, this new version of the standard provides key accessibility enhancements to ensure that the OpenDocument format (ODF) addresses the needs of people with disabilities. OpenDocument 1.1 supports users who have low or no vision or who suffer from cognitive impairments. The standard not only provides short alternative descriptive text for document elements such as hyperlinks, drawing objects and image map hot spots, it also offers lengthy descriptions for the same objects should additional help be needed. Other OpenDocument accessibility features include the preservation of structural semantics imported from other file formats, such as headings in tables, and associations between drawings and their captions. The new version of OpenDocument reflects the work of the OASIS OpenDocument Accessibility Subcommittee, which is made up of accessibility experts from IBM, the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI), RNIB, Sun Microsystems, and others. The Subcommittee’s recommendations were incorporated into the OpenDocument specification by members of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee, which includes representatives from Adobe Systems, IBM, Intel, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and others. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/, http://www.oasis-open.org
Here’s some interesting news from IBM that caught my eye — new enterprise mashup technology, QEDWiki from IBM labs. To quote from the press release, it seems that wikis can front-end business process redesign initiatives.
QEDWiki, which is based on Web 2.0 technologies, is applicable for business situations. IBM’s Enterprise Mashup Technology breaks down the barriers of traditional application development and provides a framework that uses information from the Web and wiki technology to allow people to create a customized application in less than five minutes. For instance, many businesses rely on weather conditions when planning daily operations. QEDWiki can help a logistics manager plan the most efficient way to send rock salt, shovels and snow blowers to the Northeast to stock the store in time for a forecasted record snow storm. By using the enterprise mashup maker, the manager can “drag and drop” weather reports, online maps and the company’s national hardware inventory data into an application that will show which stores will be effected by the storm and which stores need inventory. The technology can quickly enable a store manager to prioritize product deliveries to meet customer demand within a small timeframe.
Per chance, wikis provide a more intuitive presentation of information than simple lists. This is going to be an important development for collaborative technologies. Moreover, mashups when linked to wikis can facilitate rapid application development–quickly putting up an ad hoc information sharing environment and then tweaking it, on-the-fly.
But all this begins by having access to well-tagged, self-describing content. The hard part is designing the underlying information architecture, developing the relevant content schemas, and tagging all of the content and their varied contexts in the first place.
If so…
The LISA Forum Asia in Beijing on March 12-15 will focus on buyers/end-users of globalization services. Entitled “The Globalization of China 2.0,” the program features some of China’s international expansion leaders alongside high-tech multinationals such as Microsoft, Huawei, Cisco Systems, Nokia, Adobe Systems, TIBCO Software and IBM.
The program includes sessions such as “The Basics of Going Global: Understanding Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation,” “Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems,” and “How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes.” Register here.
For those of you not going to Beijing, note that the LISA Forum’s highly-popular globalization audit session will also run at Gilbane San Francisco on Tuesday April 10th during pre-conference tutorials.
