CIO’s, Collaboration and Search
I spent a little time at two conferences this week: Collaborative Technologies, and the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Both were good events with interesting content. There were multiple discussions where I wrote entire articles in my head, but of course I have no time to write them down. Of the few sessions at each event that I was able to go to there was a fair amount of overlap, which is interesting in itself. Here are some quick notes:
Collaboration was popular at both events.
The Google Enterprise Group keynoted both events. (Matthew Glotzbach, and Dave Girouard).
“Design for the end user”, “keep it simple” were heard often at both events – and not just from Google.
Both events had at least one major rant about the productivity-destroying power of meetings. (37Signals’ Jason Fried, and MIT’s Michael Schrage).
An interesting presentation about today’s actual organizational relationships: a combination of networked nodes, pyramid and diamond shaped, i.e., complex (NetAge’s Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps).
Evidence that IT does contribute to productivity from MIT’s Eric Brynjolfsson. Had a million questions about the research, which involved something like 1000 case studies, might follow-up.
CIO’s from Commonwealth of MA, BT Retail, Monster, and Orange all said IT budgets are going up, although Orange said it will cycle back down in 3-5 years. There is no more room to cut and IT is now seen as business enable/driver not only back room. I think it was the MA CIO who said that now “IT is Operations”.
CIO’s from Dunkin Donuts, TAC, and especially State Street, and CHEP said there was a long way to go before IT and business were truly working together, although it sounded like it was better than average in their own organizatons.
Discussion about Google-like search vs searching tagged and organized text. One questioner said the DoD had given up on XML tagging years ago. Which is of course wrong – what they did was to back-off forcing a single DTD and tag set on everyone, but the approach of tagging was been steadily growing. In fact at our own conference last week in DC we heard from senior officials at many agencies (for example CTO at the GPO and the Deputy CIO at NASA) who are enthusiastic (and realistic) about tagging.
“The Semantic Web is doomed” was heard more than once and this was at MIT! Of course they are right that the whole idea is flawed, but it was a bit surprising to here it here. (MIT’s Schrage was one the naysayers as was Fast’s Bjorn Olstad, and maybe MIT’s Tom Malone). This came up in Tom Malone’s panel on “Liberation Technologies” (e.g., blogs , wikis, RSS, collaborative tools, and user-driven content. Will content become open source in the same way that (some) code is? The CIO audience voted by a slight margin that technologies were more controlling than liberating. However, many voted both ways. There was a funny but long argument between the ever-vocal Schrage and Howard Dresner on whether email was a collaborative technology.
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 59 of 94)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
Just kidding!
But it was fascinating how much interest there was in blog, wiki and RSS technology at our conference in Washington last week. Just as in the private sector, there is both more use of these technologies than most people realize, and strong interest once people hear about what other organizations are doing with them. See conference chair Tony Byrne’s comments on this in his article for Intelligent Enterprise magazine about the conference.
XML, and search were two other areas of intense interest.
This was a very gratifying event: the conference attendees were 90% government, and they were deeply engaged in the use of content technologies.
Since we have our conference on Content Technologies for Government in Washington this week I probably will not get to Tech-Ed which is at our new convention center here in Boston, even though it is less than 2 blocks away. But if I had the time, I would be there scouting out the new WinFS beta and the intriguing Project Orange, (which may be relevant to the previous post on Viper). Mary Jo Foley has a list of the top 10 things to watch for there. She and others have pointed to this post for some clues on Project Orange.
Ross Mayfield reports that Socialtext has hooked-up with Dan Bricklin “…(inventor of VisiCalc) to exclusively distribute, redistribute and co-develop wikiCalc“. The wikiCalc beta has been released as an Open Source GPL distribution, and Socialtext will be releasing wikiCalc “under a more liberal and commercial friendly distribution”.
This is potentially very interesting as many existing enterprise wiki users are collaborating on projects where an integrated spreadsheet could add significantly to the utility of the application. We’ll be watching to see how enterprises pick-up and use this combo.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that talks between Adobe and Microsoft over the inclusion of PDF creation in the upcoming release of Office have broken down, and they speculate that Adobe will file an antitrust suit as a result. The issue is that MS was planning to include PDF creation for free, which is obviously a direct hit at Adobe’s Acrobat revenue. If you have been following Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification) development as we reported here, you won’t be too surprised.
It is too early to know exactly how this will play out, but anyone with applications or workflows that depend on heavy use of both Office and PDF needs to keep this on their radar!
UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has more info on this.
One of the publications I find very useful and always relevant is Knowledge@Wharton, produced by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out this timely article, Microsoft’s Multiple Challenges: Is its Size a Benefit or a Burden?
Excerpt: “Microsoft announces that it will spend about $2 billion to fend off rivals such as Google and thwart Sony’s video game ambitions, and the company loses more than $30 billion in market capitalization in a day. Fair trade or overreaction?” My favorite quote? Wharton finance professor Andrew Metrick’s comment that “$2 billion to Microsoft is like a pimple on an elephant.”
Certainly true, but the investment demonstrates the range of rivals Microsoft faces in retaining its “titan” status for the long-term.
As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.
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