Enterprise

A recent article in ComputerWorld discusses observations made by a Denmark-based analyst regarding wikis in the enterprise.  The analyst points out that wiki technology alone won't deliver if the organization cannot overcome obstacles in its own culture as well as the lack of true content management in a wiki.

One issue is the hype surrounding wikis or the blind faith with which they are approached, said Jespersen. "People often look to Wikipedia as a free form where everyone is contributing, and why could we not do the same with our organization?," she said, having observed wikis entering the scene to compensate for an intranet that has fallen to the wayside. But, she said, technology alone won't resolve that issue.

Jespersen lists three myths surrounding wiki implementation that might make some organizations rethink the expectations they've built around their platform.

The three myths given about wikis in the enterprise are:

1. Myth One: Wikis will motivate employees to contribute content.
2. Myth Two: Employees know how to contribute.
3. Myth Three: Wikis will always provide the information employees need.

Myth three is of special interest to me. The analyst points out that although search is a selling point for wikis...the search capability found in wikis are often not as good as those found in content management systems.  She goes on to explain that given there is little structure built into wikis, "it is difficult to
structure this information to make it findable the next day even."

Make no mistake, Wikis provide an organization with a fantastic tool for employee's in an organization to learn how to collaborate.  I believe organizations often underestimate the paradigm shift needed in their own culture for their employees to properly contribute to a centralized knowledge base.  Wikis and other social publishing tools have proven to be a valuable tool for the collaboration component needed in information systems.  However, eventually wikis fall short of what a more well rounded content management system can provide an organization.

Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web,
but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for
organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls.

Andrew Conry-Murray has written a good article in InformationWeek about the integration of collaboration software with enterprise content management.  The article is titled, A New Approach To Collaboration And Enterprise Content Management. The article focuses specifically on Microsoft's Sharepoint and Alfresco's Share being utilized with or sometimes replacing the traditional ECM products.

 

ECM products like Documentum have come a long way from their origins moving certain content through specific business processes, such as loan origination or check processing. This is still their primary role, but ECM vendors are broadening their scope to help companies manage new content types and encourage collaboration. Where does that leave your choices?

 

Companies will always have a mishmash of content repositories to deal with, so it makes sense to build a software layer that can reach into all them to apply uniform policies

 

I have only one complaint about the article, the article is poorly titled.  The process and workflows being described are not a new approach for enterprises, but rather an ongoing approach for bringing collaboration tools into an enterprise's content management system.

Many of us had originally thought that bringing Enterprise 2.0 into our organizations would be as easy as installing software on the server.  What we're finding is that for many of our workers, collaboration of content within an organization sometimes requires signficant changes to our business culture.  New ideas and new approaches are always welcomed.  However if you really want to see true collaboration in the enterprise, it is not always new approaches that are needed but a recommitment to the Enterprise 2.0 projects you started months ago.

It has been a long time since I had anything to report about eGroupWare, an enterprise groupware package.  It also doesn't help that I haven't used the software for about a year.  However, eGroupWare 1.6 Final was released last week giving us some new news.

New additions and improvements in eGroupWare 1.6 include:

A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications.  With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs. Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.

"Our prediction, though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped — a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment.

The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever-changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace."

John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I not only liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

Seth Gottlieb, Content Here, recently turned me on to Sacha Chua and her blog.  Sacha is an Enterprise 2.0 consultant and application developer for IBM and she also happens to be a very good blogger.  What makes her blog interesting, besides being well written, is her posts on corporate use of social technologies given from the perspective of her generation, the Millennials (latest hip word for Generation Y).

While some organizations are still debating about introducing Web 2.0 technologies to their employees, this newest generation now entering the workforce is likely to expect that such technologies are already available to them for use in their daily work tasks.  While the use of information technology is often viewed by companies in terms of staying competitive and a requirement for implementing strategic plans, the technologies are also increasingly becoming an essential tool for the human resources department.  If you're expecting to attract and keep bright educated Millennials such as Sacha within your organization, you then need to better understand how people in her work cohort are likely to process the work given.

Last December, I mentioned my excitement about Drupal's project lead, Dries Buytaert, along with Jay Batson starting a company called Acquia. While it was known that the $7 million startup would focus on Drupal for the enterprise, what was not known was the products and services that would be offered by the company. In a press release today, Acquia finally unveiled its roadmap to commercially support Drupal.

The company announced the two initial products and services it will be offering, Carbon and Spokes. Carbon is Acquia's commercial supported version of Drupal which will focus on social publishing applications. Spokes is an update will be an enhanced update notification sercice that provides "site owners personalized alerts with actionable recommendations". At this time I'm, not clear as to whether Spokes will be available for just Carbon or for all Drupal distributions. Both services will be available through a subscription offering.

Alfresco Software released a press release on the results of a survey by them intended to help determine "how companies evaluate and deploy open source and proprietary software stacks in the enterprise". There is some very interesting numbers summarized in the press release that should be of interest to not only using those Alfresco products, but to almost anyone using enterprise software. Some of the more interesting numbers and statistics pulled from the study:

• Operating system: “Users evaluate on a Windows laptop and deploy on Linux” – 41% of evaluations were on Windows, dropping to 26% for deployments, whereas 51% of deployments were on Linux.

• Linux: “Ubuntu and Red Hat pull away, SUSE remains flat by comparison in the US” – Ubuntu 24%, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 21%.

• Windows: “Users stick with XP and 2003, Vista lags at 2%” – XP 63%, Windows 2003 28%.

• Databases: “Sun still shines on MySQL” – MySQL 60%, Oracle 14%, MS SQL Server 13%.

I especially find it interesting that while open source MySQL is the dominate database used on the enterprise, two propriety database systems (Oracle and MS SQL) follow. I wonder where PostGresSQL falls on the list? But wait, there are two points I want to make about this study.

First, the business world no longer survives solely on propriety software. Secondly, these numbers reflect something I've just concluded recently...those arguing for propriety-only or open source-only systems don't have a clue what is really going on in the world of IT today.