Lauren’s report on enterprise blog and wiki use has been getting phenomenal attention. We have decided to probe a little more into actual corporate use of blog and wiki technology with a survey. We’ll pull the complete results together for our conference in San Francisco in April, but will also publish some of it on our site as it comes in. Take the survey!
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 76 of 77)
The Content Management Professionals organization (CM Pros) is looking for an Executive Director.
The role of the Executive Director is key to the success of Content Management Professionals. This position has been held by Bob Doyle, who has put a tremendous amount of work into the organization. He will be stepping down from this role to participate in CM Pros in other ways so we are looking for a new Executive Director.
The position Executive Director is appointed by the Board of Directors and is largely a volunteer position, but an honorarium will be provided. It is expected to require 10-20 hours of work per week. The ideal candidate will be a proven leader and seasoned professional manager who will take overall responsibility for building and expanding the organization.
For more information see the job description.
Please provide your response to board@cmprofessionals.org by March 18. (disclosure: I’m on the board)
This is becoming a hot topic. Perhaps there should not even be a “?” in the title, but it is still very early in the market and adoption stages. In our newest report Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? Lauren Wood investigates (and finds some happier outcomes than the one mentioned by Leonor!). We’ll also be covering it at our April conference in San Francisco. From our intro to Lauren’s article:
“… Most of the discussion about blogs is centered around their affect on mainstream journalism, their power as a new communication channel and voice of the people, and how this will impact society. All this is interesting, but what does it have to do with implementing content or knowledge management, or enterprise collaboration applications? IT, business managers, and even analysts can be forgiven for thinking “not much”. In fact, we have been skeptical ourselves.
But, being dismissive of blogs and wikis because of how they are most often used, and talked about, today is a mistake (PCs and web browsers weren’t considered as serious enterprise tools at first either). What is important is how they could be used. They are simply tools, and many of you will be surprised to find how much they are already being utilized in business environments. For this issue, Contributor Lauren Wood provides a straightforward explanation of what they are, describes how they compare with content management systems, and reports on some telling examples of how blogs and wikis are currently being successfully used in enterprises.”
For those of you tracking the evolution of Microsofts’s Commerce Server, Content Management Server and Sharepoint, there is a tantalizing statement on Ryan Donovan’s Commerce Server blog.
There is also a good 2-part article on MS Content Management Server, SharePoint, and MS Commerce Server integration at CMSWatch.
We published our lastest report KM as a Framework for Managing Knowledge Assets to subscribers over the weekend. Here is our Intro:
As long-time readers know, “knowledge management” (KM) is a topic we have mostly avoided, especially during the peak of the hype surrounding it in the mid-nineties when even CRT displays were being marketed as “knowledge management solutions”. We also did our best at the time to convince document management vendors that repackaging themselves as KM vendors was a big mistake. Eventually, vendors ended-up adopting the other, more reasonable choice, i.e., “content management”. (For more on this evolution see Vol 8, Num 8: What is Content Management?).
In spite of the mostly negative things we had to say about KM, we did recognize there was a real, identifiable problem that a combination of business practices and processes, with the help of a little technology, could address. In fact, and this was part of the cause of the vendor frenzy, businesses thought of many of their information management problems as knowledge management problems. You can argue that the concept is flawed, but you can’t tell the customer they don’t have a problem.
Today, the idea of KM is much more respectable – there is less hype, and a lot more understanding of the role technology can legitimately play in helping companies better manage their knowledge assets. Contributor Lynda Moulton is one technologist and KM expert that has helped KM become reputable. Her advice in this issue is valuable, current, and hype-free.
We have just posted the program for our Spring conference in San Francisco. Thanks to all who submitted a record number of great proposals – we wish we could accomodate them all. We are working on the Amsterdam conference now and there is still time to submit speaking proposals. We are co-locating this conference with XTech 2005 (formerly XML Europe), so proposals the complement XTech topics would be great.
Tim Bray is skeptical of enterprise and/or group blogging. I have also been skeptical, but now think there is something there, though just what remains to be seen. One barrier to enterprise, and group, blogging is the perception that blogging is only for personal journals or a new tool for both professional and amateur journalists. This is understandable given the state of today’s blogosphere, but it is a mistake to conflate the use of a technology with the technology itself. Obviously we think a group blog on business and technology issues is a good idea since we started one, but we also suspect our effort will evolve in unexpected (and some planned) ways.
There is an enlightening discussion going on between Lou Rosenfeld, Clay Shirky and others on the utility of folksonomies as used by Flickr and del.icio.us, vs. subject-matter-expert developed taxonomies. As one of the commenters has pointed out, this is not an “either/or” issue. Certain applications where the scope of the content and users is bounded will benefit from the discipline of a carefully architected vocabulary. Other applications where the scope of either the content or the user community is less well-defined will either suffer or, more likely, the users will ignore the prescriptions (this is why the “semantic web”, if I understand it at all, is hopeless). The key issues are related: cost and adoption (cost is usually a function of adoption, not development), and I think they both would agree on this point. How these approaches might work together is trickier and well worth exploring. In any case, this debate provides a condensed lesson in many issues that most enterprise content managers have probably not thought through, but even those that have should check out this thread.
