Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 55 of 71)

More on “engage and collaborate” vs. “command and control”

March 30, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 2 Comments

In response to a semi-rhetorical question I posed in my post on Enterprise 2.0 research last week, Niall Cook comments:

You ask: “…what will be lost or gained in the process of force-fitting the “engage and collaborate” functions and culture into the “command and control” of top-down IT directives?”

Simple. The users.

Well, yes, but it is more complex than that. Just as there are good and not-so-good uses of, e.g., wikis (or any technology of course) in enterprises, there are also good and not-so-good uses of policies, procedures, and organizational structures in enterprises. While I agree that there is usually way too much command and control, there are situations where it is just what you want (nuclear plant safety procedures, etc.). We are in the early days yet of figuring out where and how all these 2.0 technologies can be usefully applied, and what corporate culture changes will result.

Part of the debate is continuing with a bit of back and forth between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport.

Google and Microsoft debate Enterprise Search in keynote at Gilbane San Francisco

March 30, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Join us on April 11, 8:30 am at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for Gilbane San Francisco 2007

We have expanded our opening keynote to include a special debate between Microsoft and Google on Enterprise Search and Information Access, in addition to our discussion on all content technologies with IBM, Oracle & Adobe.

You still have time to join us for this important and lively debate at the Palace Hotel, April 11. The keynote is open to all attendees, even those only planning to visit the technology showcase. The full keynote runs from 8:30am to 10:15am followed by a coffee break and the opening of the technology showcase, and now includes:

Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update PART 2
Google and Microsoft are competing in many areas on many levels. One area which both are ramping-up quickly is enterprise search. In this part of the opening keynote, we bring the senior product managers face to face to answer our questions about their plans and what this means for enterprise information access and content management strategies.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Jared Spataro, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search, Microsoft
Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Search Appliance, Google

See the complete keynote description.

Gilbane San Francisco 2007
Content management, enterprise search, localization, collaboration, wikis, publishing …
Complete conference information is at http://gilbanesf.com/07/conference_grid.html

http://gilbanesf.com/07/

New Research on Enterprise Social Software Use

March 24, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Finally there is some quantitative research on enterprise use of blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. to complement the very informal surveys we have taken, and the work done at the University of Massachusetts. Reports from Forrester (CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0) and McKinsey (How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey) published this week provide interesting, though not surprising, data. The McKinsey report is free with registration, and the Forrester report isn’t expensive.

I haven’t read the Forrester report (119 CIOs), but the executive summary focuses on their finding that most CIOs want to buy enterprise social software in suite form from large vendors rather from the smaller specialist software vendors. This fact itself is of course totally predictable, but it raises two interesting issues. First, just what are all the larger vendors, as well as midsize (e.g., content management vendors) doing about all this? (Short answer – all are doing something, but the details are often vague.) Second, what will be lost or gained in the process of force-fitting the “engage and collaborate” functions and culture into the “command and control” (last week’s post) of top-down IT directives?

The McKinsey report (2847 executives, 44% C-level) found “widespread but careful interest” in “Web 2.0 technologies”, and that they are strategic and will be invested in. I think their conclusion might be a little overly conservative given their findings. For example, 77% of retail and 74% of high tech plan to increase investment in these technologies. Note, however that McKinsey includes web services as a “Web 2.0” technology which not everyone would agree with.

See comments on these reports from Nick Carr, who points out where the Forrester and McKinsey findings differ. And see Richard MacManus’ comments on what the Forrester findings mean for the startups in this space.
For a couple of vendor perspectives, Socialtexts’ Ross Mayfield covers these findings here, and FAST’s Hadley Reynolds talks about some similar research they have been working on with the Economist here.
Also (while not commenting on these reports) Andrew McAfee provides some info on how he is seeing enterprises using these technologies.

Enterprise 2.0 & Content

March 17, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Dan Farber has nicely pulled together a couple of points in a post that suggest the inevitability of “Enterprise 2.0”.

Dan references a post by Euan Semple that has been picked-up by Ross Mayfield, Tim O’Reilly and others, and a post of his own where he reports on some of Don Tapscott’s research: “…the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control.”

In addition to the demographic fundamentals, there is some kind of a parallel here with the evolution of information technology where the rigid structured data in relational databases is now dwarfed by the unstructured or semi-structured content in content repositories and websites. And also with the increasingly distributed IT function.

(rigidly) structured data -> unstructured data or content
(rigidly) structured organization -> unstructured organization

Do these parallels make Enterprise 2.0 more certain? Well, the fundamentals (the demographics and the new expectations and behavior) are true in a very real sense already. But of course this doesn’t mean that any particular Enterprise 2.0 products or technologies or best practices or methodologies or organizational reengineering will work. Dion Hinchcliffe has an extended thoughtful response that reinforces the fact that wikis etc. are proliferating behind the firewall, but also cautions that enterprise IT is a complex and controlled environment where enterprise 2.0 tools need to find a post-adolescent home.

Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle & Content Technologies at Gilbane San Francisco

March 15, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

We have a great keynote panel lined-up for Gilbane San Francisco next month. If you want to know what the largest software suppliers are doing and developing for enterprise content applications, whether content management, search, collaboration, or delivery, you won’t want to miss this panel of senior executives who are leading the content technology efforts at these companies. You won’t find a line-up like this elsewhere. Here is the keynote panel info with link:

Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update
We open each of our conferences with a panel of content technology and market experts. The panel is chosen to address the most important strategic issues technical and business managers need to consider for both near term and long term success in managing content and content technologies in the context of enterprise applications. The session is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). Before embarking on a content management, search, publishing, collaboration or globalization strategy or project, you need to understand not only the vertical and horizontal solutions from the technology suppliers that address your specific content-oriented business applications, but also what the major platform providers are doing and how their offerings fit into your plans, or not. In San Francisco this year we look at what the largest software suppliers are doing that will affect enterprise content strategies both directly and indirectly. This is a session you won’t want to miss.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Paul Taylor, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect, Enterprise Content Management, IBM
Kumar Vora, VP, Product Management, Enterprise & Developer Solutions, Adobe
Rich Buchheim, Senior Director, Enterprise Content Management Strategy, Oracle
TBD, Microsoft

If you can’t make the full 3-day conference, remember that the keynote is open to all “exhibit-only” attendees as well.

Two Gilbane Group Presentations this week

March 6, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Both Mary Laplante and Tony White are giving presentations in two different webinars this week, sponsored by Astoria and AIIM respectively. There is more info on our Events blog here and here.

Keeping track of ODF and Open XML

March 4, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The last time I posted on this topic I claimed the controversy over the two applications was no longer interesting. Unless you have to deal with standards organizations’ politics this is still true. However this does not mean that there are not good reasons to keep up with developments of new tools and new (governmental) decisions on adoption of one of the two applications. (Note the use of ‘applications’ is deliberate and correct both from a standards perspective since both ODF and Open XML are ‘XML applications’, and from a product point of view since a decision to use one or the other is, from a practical point of view, a product decision). All our coverage with links to most other historical coverage is here.

For recent updates see:

An interview with Microsoft’s Tom Robertson, by Mary Jo Foley
Comments from Microsoft’s Brian Jones, and a podcast of a conversation between Brian and Jon Udell
Comments from Novell’s Jeff Jaffe’s blog, and
The latest features of ODF from OASIS.

New CM Pros President – Congratulations Mary and All!

February 27, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The new Content Management Professionals board of directors has chosen their officers for 2007. Congratulations to all – especially our very own Mary Laplante, who will be the President. The full lineup is:

Mary Laplante, President
Linda Burman, Vice President
Emma Hamer, Treasurer
Joan Lasselle, Secretary
Travis Wissink, Director at large

For more information, see the CM Pros site at http://www.cmpros.org/, and join CM Pros for their Spring Summit meeting in San Francisco in April.