Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 57 of 73)

Gilbane Group update

April 27, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Of course I had every intention to blog about the highlights of Gilbane San Francisco, but our attention has already moved to our upcoming Washington, and even our Fall Boston conference. Here are some quick notes on what’s new:

There was a lot of activity at Gilbane San Francisco, but what got the most press was the second part of our opening keynote where we had Google and Microsoft facing off over enterprise search. A little web and blog searching will turn up some of the reaction.
Join us and CMS Watch in Washington DC June 5-6 for Gilbane Washington. That’s right, a little over 2 weeks away. The instructions for submitting proposals can be found at: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html. We will be covering our usual topic areas with a focus on content and enterprise web technologies (including versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.). If you’ve never been to our Boston conference you can view all the info from the 2006 event at: http://gilbaneboston.com/06/. For this year’s conference see: http://gilbaneboston.com
We have 2 webinars coming up in the next 2 weeks:
- Webinar: Bill Trippe talks with Minette Norman of Autodesk. Wednesday, April 25, 2:00 pm EST. Registration is open. Sponsored by Idiom.
- Webinar: Bill Trippe and Michelle Huff from Oracle discuss multi-website content management. Wednesday, May 2, 12:00 pm EST. Registration is open. Sponsored by Oracle.
See our latest case study: Building an Enterprise-Class System for Globalization: Autodesk’s Worldwide Initiative by Senior Analyst Bill Trippe
See our latest white paper: Strategic eMarketing: Converting Leads into Profits, by Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone
Remember we have 8 blogs in addition to this one (see the links in the left column) all of which have recent content, even the CTO Blog, which was quiet for some time has a new entry from Eric Severson.
Reminder: All our blogs support multiple types of tagging as well as comments and trackbacks. Subscriptions to all of them are available via FeedBurner which provides additional features. We are adding additional FeedBurner plugins, for example, as of yesterday you can even “Twit” items from our News Blog if you are into Twitter (see http://feeds.feedburner.com/ContentManagementNews). I am not sure how useful this is, but was easy and free to add and I know some of you Twitter.

Gilbane San Francisco is this week

April 9, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

I haven’t been very good at blogging about this conference as it has been a busy Winter and early Spring. In any case, there is still time to join us, especially if you are in the Bay area. Registration is still open online as of this post, and is also available on site at the Palace hotel through Thursday. If you can only get away for one day, make it Wednesday for the keynote with Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The technology showcase is also open on Wednesday (with a reception) and Thursday.

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.