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December 06, 2012

A favor...

We're trying to create some buzz around the posts in this week's Digital Landfill.

Could my readers do me a favor and Tweet and/or post to Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook links to this week's posts? The more we can get the better. Anything you can do would be appreciated.

Thanks!

What steps should you be taking to "future proof" your information management career?

The Days of "Social for the Sake of Doing Social" are Over - Process Integration is Key

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

Posted at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

What steps should you be taking to "future proof" your information management career?

Technology has always been fast-moving, but it seems that there is a “perfect storm” of change right now. Cloud, mobile, social and big data are forces that create dramatic opportunities for improved business process, better employee collaboration and closer customer engagement. Meanwhile, content overload, security, litigation and compliance create huge potential risks for most organizations.

Increasingly, these new forces revolve around unstructured content - the information that flows through systems of engagement rather than systems of transaction. Because of these global information management trends, the career opportunities for “information professionals” have never been higher. Leading the way in these new uncharted waters provides a real chance for a knowledgeable and qualified information practitioner to raise their value to the business.

At the same time, though, there is also a risk for skills marginalization as the premium for pure domain-specific technical skills declines and the premium for a wider set of skills tied to the needs of the business increases.

In , Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson talk about the new challenges that arise relative to skills development once the exponential pace of technology reaches the point where jobs that were traditionally exclusively the province of humans (e.g., those requiring complex pattern recognition like driving a car, or those requiring complex communication skills like translation) can be done by "machines." They indicate that we are approaching a time in which mental labor is increasingly being done by computers. They compare our current time to that experienced in the 1700s and 1800s when steam (ie., machines) replaced physical labor, and they use the fable of John Henry, a steel driver who beat the machine but died in the process, as a way of illustrating the need to race with rather than against the machine.

Racing with the machine in the modern era requires an understanding of the power of networks. It requires imagination to understand how technologies can be combined to create new value. It requires technical knowledge, but also business acumen to put that technical knowledge into context.

About a year ago Information Week had this cover, which underscores the nature of the challenge facing information professionals. Either speed up the game, learn new skills, and connect to the business, or face increasing marginalization. Per David Foote, an expert in IT skills development, "Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams of limited range permanent staff for long-term initiatives. New models require smaller teams made up of multi-taskers and multi-dimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and 'political' skills."

A new whitepaper by AIIM (get it HERE) identifies a high demand for qualified information professionals who have a combination of business experience and a broad base of general IT skills, but who also understand how to manage content and information lifecycles. According to the report “Career Development for Information Professionals,” underwritten by Oracle, there is a recognition of the changes and challenges in technology at the moment, and a strong desire to update and broaden skill sets to meet the new demands.

According to the survey, the role of information professional is seen as vital to successful exploitation of mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies, and for many has become an aspirational mid-point between a technical specialist and business generalist. Currently, there is an optimistic view across all areas for employment in information management but the biggest change is a need for more information/data analysts and information architects, followed by project managers and business analysts. Taxonomy and metadata design, information architecture, standards compliance and governance were seen as the most difficult skills to find.

These technology changes present individuals with the opportunity to increase their value to their current organization, although 37 percent of respondents are expecting to move to new jobs within the next two years. A higher salary is the most prevalent motivation to change, but 22 percent of respondents rank an opportunity to work with different technologies as more important than better promotion prospects. The most popular step to developing skills was identified as certification, with 43 percent reporting to hold two or more business or technical certifications. AIIM’s training qualification is held by 22 percent and four percent have already passed the recently introduced Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam. Respondents identified the information professional role as the most important to the future health of business, with 30 percent considering themselves information professionals.

Recruiters in the survey see ideal candidates as having an understanding of the business, as well as knowledge of the cloud, social and big data analytics. In general, certifications are acknowledged as a more up-to-date indicator of competence than college qualifications, which underscores the value of business experience.

According to my colleague Doug Miles, “There is general agreement that improved information competency results in increased productivity, better decision making and improved collaboration, but the real challenge is that IT experience is struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in business."

Oracle's Christian Finn (Senior Director, Product Management) echoes this, “The increasing importance of analytics, big data, cloud, customer experience, mobile and social has created a need for a new kind of information professional. People who have the skills to tackle rapidly evolving business challenges through an understanding of these technologies will have a distinct advantage moving forward. Building knowledge and validating skill sets through a range of training and certifications, including the new CIP, can be a critical component of success for today’s information professionals, whether they are looking for a new job or trying to help their organization achieve its goals.”

The paper suggests there is a real opportunity for knowledgeable, qualified information professionals who can reconcile the advantages of cloud, mobile, social and big data technology with compliance and security risks. They can raise their value to the business by delivering improvements in business process, employee collaboration and customer engagement. For individuals looking to evolve into sought-after information professionals AIIM recommends:

Stay aware of changes in the IT landscape: information professionals are valued for a combination of known skills, business understanding and ability to match new technology to business opportunities.
Recognize that your salary and career prospects reflect current value, not past value, and take every opportunity to demonstrate new skills and champion potential business benefits of new technologies.
Keep your skills up to date and seek information professional certification to validate your knowledge of how information competence enhances business value, limits risk and reduces process costs.

The new AIIM White Paper is available at no charge at this LINK.

Posted at 04:43 PM in certified information professional | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: aiim, cip, information professional, mcafee, oracle, skills

December 05, 2012

The Days of "Social for the Sake of Doing Social" are Over - Process Integration is Key

If you haven't seen our new Industry Watch on Social in the Flow, you need to get a copy. Downloads are free.

I put a few thoughts on the findings together in the attached video. I think it will give you an idea of the richness in the full Industry Watch report.

In addition, I would also like to highlight a post by Deb LaVoy from OpenText on a related topic.

The post is 2013 Prediction: Social Business Tech will Stop Blaming Culture for Failure and highlights 5 key developments we'll see in 2013. It's well worth reading. My favorite quote? "In 2013, Technology will peek out from behind Aunty Culture’s skirts and lead." Here are the 5 developments to watch:

A language and a better feature set for “collaboration.”
Shifting from enabling “Social” to enabling “Complexity”
Social objects will grow to include teams, projects and processes
Measures of employee engagement will pivot toward measuring cognitive and emotional attachment to core business objectives
A rigorous understanding of how information flows

Posted at 05:02 PM in social business | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: open text, opentext, process, social, social media

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

OK. We all swore on Election Day that we didn't want to hear one more word about anything to do with the Presidential election. Living in a swing state (Virgina), we were treated to an endless onslaught of horrendous negative ads from both candidates, plus at least 5-10 robo calls per day. The calls were not lost on kids as young as first graders. A friend of ours who teaches first grade reported that a student came in one morning, very excited, and reported, "Ms. Willis, you won't believe it. We got a personal phone call at home last night from BOTH Mitt Romney and Barack Obama."

There is a story, though, that still needs more coverage. And that story is the role that technology played in the election. More specifically, how social technologies, big data, text analytics, and the integration of all of the above with plain old feet on the ground impacted the election.

One thing is clear regardless of political preference, the Obama folks ("Operation Narwhal") outplayed the Romney folks ("Project Orca"). Per Jed Wylie, couple of data points to consider:

Obama – 33 million Facebook likes and 23 million Twitter followers.
Romney – 12 million Facebook likes and 1.7 million Twitter followers.
Obama ran an email marketing campaign which had a list of 13 million highly targeted people on it. He emailed 20 times more than Romney and his open rate was 10.7% as compared to Romney’s 6.4%.

But the story goes beyond this. The full story includes the marriage of analytics, email marketing, social presence, and execution in the field via mobile technologies. I should also say that this post is NOT intended as a political post, but as a TECHNOLOGY post. Friends that know me know that I have THE most dysfunctional and schizophrenic presidential voting history imaginable. [Hint: I voted for John Anderson in 1980.]

Last week, AIIM's Executive Leadership Council enjoyed presentations focused on Big Data, and more specifically, the intersection between execution and analytics. These presentations (along with a previous set in Europe), will be the basis for a white paper early next year. (Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.)

All this Big Data talk got me interested in finding more about what actually went on in the Presidential election. Here are few of the best stories I have found. Enjoy. If I've missed a good article, post the link in the comments and I'll add it to the original post.

The Narwhal and the Orca - O'Reilly Radar -- 11/26/12

Best line: "If you follow technology, you don’t have to read between the lines much to realize that Narwhal embodied the best of the DevOps movement: rapid iteration, minimal barriers between developers and operations staff, heavy use of “cloud” technology, and constant testing to prove that you can handle outages and heavy load. In contrast, Romney’s Orca was a traditional corporate IT project gone bad."

When the Nerds Go Marching In -- The Atlantic -- 11/16/12

This article by Alexis Madrigal is the most detailed analysis I've seen of the Obama efforts.

Best line: "Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine."

ORCA, meet Narwhal. This is how it's done. | RedState -- 11/9/12

Best line: "The Democrats’ Operation Narwhal had fields offices and volunteers locally in each of the 50 states. While many Republicans laughed at the Obama Event Registry, and “Have dinner with Michelle and Barack,” the Democrats were collecting email addresses and demographic data so that they could target people with specific emails on specific issues. On election day, they turned out the vote. And the Republicans, we got ORCA. Beaten and eaten by a grown-up Flipper."

Obama’s White Whale -- How the campaign’s top-secret project Narwhal could change this race, and many to come -- The Slate -- 2/15/12

Note the date on this post. Sasha Issenberg wins my "pre-cog" (for Phillip Dick fans) award.

Best line: "This year...as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obama’s team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obama’s views on the issue. From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did...This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizen—the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteer—into a single, unified political profile."

The day a Narwhal killed an Orca -- 11/9/2012

This piece is by a Republican poll watcher and describes the problems experienced in the field by those trying to use Orca.

Best line: "In theory, on Election Day we would be using using tactical nukes against Narwhal's ground troops. They would never know what hit them. In practice - as first tries of technologically complicated systems usually are - Orca was a disaster."

Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics -- ProPublica -- 11/29/12

Good background on the integration of public consumer behavior databases with voting records.

Best line: "To pinpoint voters who might actually change their minds, the Obama campaign conducted randomized experiments, Slaby said. Voters received phone calls in which they were asked to rate their support for the president, and then engaged in a conversation about different policy issues. At the end of the conversation, they were asked to rate their support for the president again. Using the results of these experiments, combined with detailed demographic information about individual voters, the campaign was able to pinpoint both what kinds of voters had been persuaded to support the president, and which issues had persuaded them."

-- 11/12/2012

Article is by Marc A. Thiessen from the American Enterprise Institute

Best line: "How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?...In the coming months, Republicans will spend a lot of time studying why they lost and debating whether they should reposition themselves on issues like immigration. Those are discussions worth having. But they won’t matter one iota if the GOP can’t find a way to join the Democrats in the information age. In 2012, the Republicans were like a bag phone to Obama’s iPhone — when they needed to be a Samsung."

Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win -- 11/7/12

Best line: "But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. 'We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,' he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official 'chief scientist' for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions."

Under the Hood of Team Obama's Tech Operation -- Mother Jones -- 11/15/12

Best line: "Using digital analytics, Team Obama was likewise able to squeeze every last cent out of supporters in ways unimaginable only four years ago. In 2008, with the help of a Google alum named Dan Siroker, the campaign had begun using A/B testing—sending variations of an email or a web page to different groups of people to measure the relative effectiveness of each. In the latest election cycle, that ethos extended to pretty much everything the campaign did, from fundraising emails (sent out in 26 varieties and then analyzed for patterns) to the online donation landing page. By turning its donation process into four steps instead of a single long form, the campaign boosted fundraising from its donations page by 15 percent."

Nate Silver's Five Thirty Eight blog has a host of data-centric posts on politics. Worth looking at.

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Click here for a copy of our white paper on consumerization of IT, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT.

Posted at 12:14 PM in certified information professional, e20 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: elections, Narwhal, Obama, Orca, Romney

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

[Note: We will be doing a webinar on this topic, primarily for NA and SA audiences given the time of day, on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 pm Eastern time. We'll be doing a second webinar, at a time more convenient for European audiences at 2 pm British time on Thursday the 13th.]

As many readers know, about two years ago a Task Force of AIIM members worked with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm, among many titles) to build out a "future history" of the content industry. The intention was to think about how enterprise information technology was changing in the wake of the influx of consumer technologies. (See Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT.)

The core "story" went something like this...

Organizations spent much of the past 3 decades building out "Systems of Record."

Technologies evolved a great deal during this first phase -- from mainframes to minis to PCs to the internet -- as did the core objects being managed -- from financials to department processes to documents to web pages. However, at the core of this migration was a continuing focus on building Systems of Record to document who did what to whom, when, and in what context. The transitions looked something like this:

In this world, IT was at the center of deploying enterprise systems, and innovation tended to flow down from large organizations, eventually reaching consumers.

Using another Geoff Moore diagram from , during this period the Content Management business was very much a "complex systems business," operating on the left "hump" of the diagram below, focused on relatively few customers, dealing with complicated and mission-critical business processes.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) in 2007, and the industry began to change. The left "hump" started to shift to the right. Price points began to change as "content management" became an increasing part of the core infrastructure of the organization. Large vendors from the world of complex content management systems initially dismissed SharePoint as "not really ECM" and then struggled to find their role relative to SharePoint as the SharePoint wave intensified. In addition, a host of new enterprise players emerged, built upon a pay-as-you-go SaaS model, led most notably by Salesforce.com.

Meanwhile, back in the bigger IT market, another revolution was brewing.

Over the past 5 years, consumer technologies have taken center stage relative to innovation and migrated into the enterprise, with far-reaching implications for how organizations use and deploy technology. These new technologies focus on interactions and conversations rather documents and records and on Systems of Engagement rather than Systems of Record.

So after a long period in which there really was no "consumer" play in the document/content space (the right volume operations "hump" in Geoff's business architecture model), suddenly one appeared. The focus was not traditional transactionally focused content management, but rather the provision of previously unavailable information management tools for the individual, built upon social and mobile technologies and optimized for the cloud. These were companies with freemium to premium models like Box, Google, Evernote, DropBox, FilesAnywhere, and Yammer.

These new volume operations players had a very different financial model than those from the complex systems world. Per Michael Moon from gistics.com, complex systems players focus on making their money on capital expenditures and professional services, with most of the money captured in the early stages of a project -- it is not unusual for 70% of the total revenues for a project to the captured before implementation even occurs. On the flip side, Systems of Engagement (and the mobile devices that go with them) are brought into the enterprise by the business rather than IT, and with far simpler pricing and deployment models. The models typically focus on operating expenditures and capturing the majority of revenues after implementation via an annuity stream.

Initially, IT organizations responded to this dichtonomy by either: 1) denying the problem existed (kind of an IT policy re the Dropboxes of the world of "Don't ask, Don't tell); 2) mounting massive resistance and opposition to these tools; 3) allowing adoption, but assuming they would someday get around to the question of integration with existing Systems of Record; and/or 4) some combination of the above.

So the question for this blog post is: What comes next? What are the next chapters in the story of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.

We spent some time at the AIIM Board meeting last week exploring this topic, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts.

The complete story of the next phase in our future isn't written yet, but I would offer that it will center around the "controlled collision" between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement and will include some version of the following 10 elements:

CIOs are beginning to adopt mobile-first and cloud-first strategies for new applications, especially for customer-facing applications, changing the traditional development process.
The key to understanding the future role of social technologies in the enterprise is that they will increasingly: 1) be a feature of Systems of Record, not a separate system; 2) either become integrated into core business processes (i.e., the honeymoon period of "social for social's sake" is over) or decline in importance; and 3) ultimately converge with email into a single system.
Via migrations from the "right hump," core document and collaboration technologies are now becoming available via the cloud to a host of organizations that heretofore relied on a chaotic mess of file shares. The trick will be to avoid simply taking c drive and file share digital landfills and moving them to the cloud.
True document collaboration (vs. either the poor Word "Track Changes" approach or the chaotic, little editorial control Google Docs approach) will become increasingly important.
Effective adoption of social technologies is not just a function of turning them on. Defining use cases, outlining expected behaviors within these use cases, and effectively managing change have just as much to do with success as the technology (check Social in the Flow for details).
The "we will never put important information in the cloud" and "we must choose between the cloud and on-prem" militancy is evolving into an awareness that the future lies in a hybrid environment in which information is managed across a continuum of platforms and devices.
The concept of synching from the early days of email (remember when we needed to actively manage what we did in email when "connected" and when we were not?) will become increasingly important in thinking about the cloud. As organizations think about strategies that integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement, that link Saas enterprise applications like Salesforce.com to behind the firewall information repositories, and that allow for responsible deployment of social and BYOD technologies, the cloud will increasingly become the "place" in which synching occurs, with ultimate control by the System of Record.
In our desire to reassert control, we need to remember than the needs of the business to get things done will always trump our corporate need for control.
The Chief Marketing Officer will own more and more elements of the "controlled collision" and will be increasingly important in the intersection between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.
The SoR and SoE "collision" places an increasing premium on those who have skills to help manage this collision and understand the full picture, namely Information Professionals.

What do you think? What comes next in the "story?" Post a comment and let me know.

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Might be of interest...

Posted at 08:01 AM in 8 things, certified information professional, Compliance and records management, e20, Industry statistics and research, information certification | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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December 06, 2012

A favor...

What steps should you be taking to "future proof" your information management career?

December 05, 2012

The Days of "Social for the Sake of Doing Social" are Over - Process Integration is Key

Big Data, Operation Narwhal, Project Orca and the Election of a President

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?