Personal tools show the way in business collaboration

How will businesses collaborate in the future? This is the core question of a GigaOm Pro report released some time ago. It is titled 'Practical business collaboration: personal tools show the way' and was written by Thomas van der Wal and David Card.

Based on a survey of business managers, problematic areas around business content collaboration were signaled and directions for solutions are given in the report.

Much of today's collaboration still happens in email. 96% says they use email for internal content sharing and 92% for sharing with externals (and this does not correlate with age...).

Some companies like Atos are (planning on) banning email. Businesses are looking for ways to increase employee "productivity, accommodate or counter email limitations, and reduce costs". If a new tool addresses these topics it will probably be adopted quickly.

Searching and tracking documents is still a big problem for companies. Access or lack thereof to content is also an issue.

With email the size of attachments is an issue. And attachments create storage problems when sent around. Email is not optimal for file sharing. But email is, as mentioned above, still a central tool for many. The business managers state that the adoption of new collaboration tools will increase if they are connected to email.

Interesting fact from the survey is that 50% use personal tools to overcome the limitations of email and other collaboration tools, often without IT's knowledge.

What should the business tools of the future be like? They should be easy to use (w.r.t. file sharing), connect with email, support employee mobility and be secure. Looking at the current tool landscape there are many solutions that address these needs. But they are usually not enterprise but personal solutions, like Dropbox. I agree with the report, there's a business opportunity here.

The Sustainability Debate Paper Versus Digital [Océ Whitepaper]

The company I work for, Océ, has a clear track record as a sustainable company. Way before it became the hot topic it is in these days.

Every year we have a Sustainability Week to focus even more on this topic. During this week an interesting whitepaper was released. It is about 'All in Balance. Océ's eco-efficient and eco-effective approach to analog and digital document'. Reference is made to a paper I wrote with others about (personal) document processes.

I hope you enjoy the whitepaper. If so leave a comment below or here.

Requirements for Document Management Systems

Recently I was honored to co-write a paper with Olha Bondarenko and Ruud Janssen. It is titled: ''Requirements for the Design of a Personal Document-Management System" and was published in JASIST.

I think Olha's work in general and this paper in particular is very valuable for the whole information, content and document management industry.  Because it truly tries to understand how knowledge workers use information and documents. That knowledge is translated into requirements/principles for a document management system.

But you decide if Olha/we succeeded! I hope you like it.

This paper was written in the context of Olha's PhD research - which was finalized recently! - about personal information management. Her PhD defense will be on February 11 (at the Technical University in Eindhoven, The Netherlands). I hope to be there and will blog/tweet about it.

Tags van Technorati: information management,knowledge management,document management

Want To Publish a Paper, Review on Wiki First

My Dutch newspaper (NRC, Dec. 18, 2008) had a nice short article with very interesting content (- no link available, so I'll provide source link). The Journal RNA Biology is now requiring papers to be peer-reviewed twice. Once on Wikipedia. And once by the journal's own review panel. A summary of the paper must be submitted to Wikipedia first, before the paper is published in the journal.

I think this is good for the scientists wanting to publish an article. Who knows what kind of interesting corrections and extensions will be made to the central thought of their paper. And it's also good news for general public as well. Expert information (on RNA in this case) is published publicly and shared with us all.

It would be nice to see other journals open up as well!

I was also thinking this could or should be applied inside companies as well. In most companies employees write reports and they're submitted to an archive or document management system, after being formally approved by their manager. How often don't we run into incomplete, inaccurate information in these reports (that can't be changed after publishing)? If these reports would have been peer-reviewed lots of mistakes could have been eliminated. But, what do we do when we ask colleagues to peer review? We look for close and trusted colleagues (cf. a journal's own review panel). But who says they are the right person and most knowledgeable person to review the memo/report/etc.?

So, why not apply this same concept RNA Biology is applying to internal documents as well?

Tags van Technorati: wikipedia,wiki,document management,information management

Where Do I Share and Store My Information?

Introduction
Most companies have loads of tools to help employees share and store information. Because we have so many of these tools, it can be hard to decide where to share and store my information.
The company I work for also has this problem. I was asked to explain the differences between the tools and help our employees decide where to share and store information. As promised, I would share this with you. This is what I came up with. Please keep in mind this is focused on our situation. But I think and hope this could be of help for other companies as well. If so, let me know. If not, also let me know!

Situation
Every employee within searches, creates, collaborate and stores information. Several methods and solutions support these processes. However many employees wonder where and when to share and store certain information and what solutions are provided to support the above-mentioned processes.
This post gives our guidelines on storing and sharing information using these tools. This post intends to help the user select the right tool for his/her problem and to store and share information in the right place.
Process-related tools, such as PLM and ERP systems, are not in the scope of this post.

Information Processes
In this memo we distinguish the following information processes:

• collaboration: an employee shares content with other colleagues to improve, inform and peer.
• store: an employee stores the content in a certain place.

Two other important information processes, search and creation, are not in scope of this post.

Methods
In the digital domain, the above-mentioned processes relate to the following methods:
Collaboration Tooling is a general term which comprises all tooling that facilitates online collaboration. These tools offer document management functionality (versioning, etc), tasklist sharing, calendar sharing, discussion forums, wiki’s, blogs, instant messaging, news, etc.
A blog is a website, maintained by an individual or a team, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Usually all entries can be commented on by readers.
A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.

(Our) Current IT solutions
To support (our) employees the following solutions are provided:

• FTP servers
• Shared network directories (SND)
• Wiki’s
• Blogs
• Discussion fora
• Compass
• Sharepoint
• Document Archive/Vault

When to use what solution?
FTP servers are used to share (large) files, mostly with external parties. FTP servers offer no other document management (DM) functionality than storage.
Shared network directories (SND) are used to share (large) files inside en outside the organization. Shared network directories also offer no other DM functionality than storage.
Wiki’s are used to:

• dynamically and collaboratively work on the content of a document,
• build up an online and live knowledge base (such as a manual with working methods).

Usually all people have all rights to edit the content on the wiki. All edits are versioned.
Blogs are used to communicate and discuss personal (business) interests with all readers. All readers may comment on the posts, but the posts can only be posted and changed by the owner(s) of the blog.
Discussion forums are used to ask all readers a certain question or discuss a certain topic. All employees may start a forum thread and all readers may read and respond to the thread.
Compass is our corporate Intranet. Compass is not a collaboration tool. It is used to publish fairly static content on.
Sharepoint is a typical collaboration tool. It is used to manage projects and group initiatives. Sharepoint is used to share and collaborate on files (which contain content), tasks and calenders a.o..
Document Archive is our internal report and memo light-weight records management system. Finalized (Word) documents written in a template can be submitted to this archive, with or without approval (depending on the document type). This archive can be searched.

In summary
To give a clear overview of the different solutions, we summarize their commonalities and differences in the table below.

And this table as a diagram:

Diagram Where Do I Share And Store My Info

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sharepoint management)

Does this make sense?
I'd really like to know if you think this makes sense? Is it helpful and insightful? Is the diagram correct (- it seems to be too good to be true...)? Can it be used in other companies too?

UPDATE: just saw this picture, also a great visual in this context.

Tags van Technorati: collaboration,knowledge management,wiki,blog,sharepoint,information management

EMC also Focusing on Personal Information

Ran into this interesting news via Michael Sampson's blog: EMC started a company that will focus on personal information management.

I've always wondered why the large enterprise information management vendors never adequately addressed the personal information space. I found they basically said: use the enterprise system, even if it doesn't fit your personal way of working. Will Decho, the new company, truly address this gap? I'm really curious if they will and will follow this step.

Also refer to EMC press release and Decho site (which basically tells you Decho now 'only' sells a backup service).

Tags van Technorati: knowledge worker,knowledge management,content management,information overload

Using Flowgram

ReadWriteWeb had a nice overview post on "Slideshows 2.0". As I commented I was hoping they would also mention something about 'slideshare for the enterprise'. But this doesn't seem to exist...

However, Flowgram contacted me following my comment and we had a nice chat about my 'needs'. I'm really curious who will be the first to offer an enterprise 2.0 version of Slideshare!

Anyway, I didn't know Flowgram before and was invited to try it. Here's what I think of this webapp.

First of all, the user-interface is great and very intuitive! I didn't have a problem sorting things out and finding how I could get something done. It just works!

So, I just went on and made my first flowgram. (I didn't make it public yet, because it contain some stuff I don't want to share just yet.) The nice thing is Flowgram allows you to make a presentation consisting of all kinds of files (Office, links, RSS feeds, pictures, etc.). You simply select the file, it's uploaded for you, then you can reshuffle the deck, add audio to the presentation and you're all set. You can then share the Flowgram as-is, or in Youtube. The way they integrated all this and kept the whole process (from creation to distribution) is really great.

This is wonderful stuff for trainers. However, I was thinking how I could use it for my work. I tell you what I think later on.

First, some remarks about the features:

- You can add a note to a webpage. It would be nice if you could fix it to part of webpage. And you can't add a note to documents.

- It would be nice if you could add arrow(s) and circles to pictures and parts of documents/webpages.

- Importing a Word-doc went well, but it was presented in a way to small font. For pdf I had the same issue. When you're on that part of the presentation you can zoom in (Flash zoom), but this not saved.

- It would be very nice if you could uploads types of content and then download those types again (unpackage). Why this could be neat is explained below.

- Adding email to a Flowgram would be nice. Of course you can copy-paste an email, but to make things easy 'eml' import or allow 'forward to flowgram' could be added too.

- Youtube now has a feature to embed parts of the video's. Wouldn't it be nice if we could embed (parts of) a Youtube video in a Flowgram?

What I like about this tool is the fact that you can bundle different types of content (- keep things in context!). This is extremely important for knowledge workers and hardly supported by tools. That's one of the reasons we still work with paper... (More info on this topic can be found here and here.) For instance, when we're researching a topic we usually work with a combination of emails, Word and Powerpoint docs, webpages, etc. Using Flowgram, this can be done in one place.

However, for this to be useful, a user would also have to be able to unpackage a Flowgram to get the different files back in their original format.

Anyway, I'm going to keep trying Flowgram and see where this goes. Flowgram emailed me they're working hard on new features, also some of the ones I requested for.