Optimal delivery of content can be achieved through a variety of methods, but it is generally a blend of security and filtering via meta data that can drive the most return with the least amount of upfront effort and ongoing upkeep. In a portal environment various platform components have their strong suits and by combining the capabilities of enterprise portal and content platforms much of the groundwork for personalization can be achieved in a configuration-based manner.

In our discussion we will cover terminology and concepts, example scenarios and technical implementation strategies to help showcase how personalization of content can be achieved within a portal.

Foundation

To lay a foundation for our examination, the following concepts and terminology will help us to convey how various layers of technology interact to ultimately provide personalization to end users.

Security and Filtered Delivery
It is important to understand what content is sensitive and needs true security, opposed to simply targeted, filtered delivery. There is often times some confusion that in order for content to be delivered in a personalized manner it needs to have certain security applied to it. Often times it is more the case that they a variety of content is actually accessible to a broad audience, but only portions of it make sense given the context of a particular group of users. Essentially this means that some of the personalization will be delivered implicitly (filtering based on metadata) and or filtered explicitly (based on security settings applied to the materials to be evaluated for delivery).

Coarse and Fine Grained Security
In traditional portal development there has always been a discussion of where and how security should be applied throughout a solution. To help visualize the strategy, security has been placed into two camps – coarse grained and fine grained. Coarse-grained security secures large portions of applications at a page or collection of related functionality level. Fine-grained security dictates what buttons can be seen by the end user based on their role and security groups within those applications. Fine-grained security is ideally powered by a entitlement server technology that centralizes and simplifies access to the management of this detail. Fine grained security can also be used to describe row level visibility within applications, which is one of the finest levels of granularity possible. For the purposes of this discussion we will be focusing on security just above the row level and higher, starting with individual content items and working our way to large sections of content and application functionality. Using the terms fine-grained and coarse-grained help to drastically simplify discussions around security and set the stage for discussing personalization of content.

Pages, Portlets and Rows
Taking the above concept and refining it, we can turn the above information toward our challenges around personalization. It is no different from the challenge of implementing a traditional security model, however unlike content personalization, fine-grained application security is a must and has to be addressed before applications are released to an audience, instead of being an added value to an existing system. For the purposes of the personalization that we are discussing above, it turns out that we end up generally concerned with page, portlet and row level considerations to implement an effective personalization model. The former two are considered coarse grained, the later fine grained.

Example Scenarios

For the best return on efforts to setup personalization it is critical to catalog the information and applications that we wish to deliver to end users. For each item provide a description, note the intended audience and the level of security needed for the item, identifying if it should be accessible only to a particular group of users or a specific user. The line items in the catalog allow the portal and content teams to understand if Coarse (Site, Page, Portlet) or Fine (User) grained approaches are needed for the various areas of content. A visual chart later in this article will further detail Coarse and Fine grained technical implementation approaches in relation to portal and content technologies. Please see the following examples that highlight this cataloging method (please note that all company names are fictional)

A. Bits and Bytes Software, LLC Sales Team

Business Need
In an effort to increase sales effectiveness, B&B Software would like to provide a collection of documents entitled Northeast Sales Enablement Materials to be will be delivered within their corporate intranet that are geared toward a sales team within a specific geography. Unlike a company salary report, this sales collateral does not need to be secured, but we will want to make certain that it is promoted directly to the intended audience. This will allow members of the Northeast sales team to quickly access this collateral directly within the context their portal experience in a regional sales dashboard, without having to browse or search for it.

Implementation Solution
The Northeast Sales Enablement Materials should have meta data applied to them or inherited from a parent folder that they may reside in that indicates the geography that they are intended for. In the example above the content can be delivered via a portlet(s) that queues off of a preference set at the regional dashboard level, noting the region that is active. This indicator could be the region that matches meta data on the collateral or a start node id for a folder that contains that region’s specific content. It would also be possible to use profile information from a sales user’s profile to pass to the display portlet, alerting it to the relevant region. To provide the highest level of flexibility the sales collateral should be stored in a content management system within regional folders, that roll up to a parent folder that holds all sales collateral. This will allow an aggregate view of the content to be easily displayed if needed.

B. Our People’s Genome, Inc Research Directors

Business Need
A team of research directors at a pharmaceutical organization need to collaborate on certain items that detail drug development road maps. This content, unlike the above, does need explicit security, in addition to being available in a personalized manner within the context of the director’s portal experiences. In this case both meta data and security can be applied to this content, both allowing it to be delivered to the correct audience. In addition to the roadmap materials the portal will provide more implicit delivery of personalized content, showing news that is related to key terms identified within the roadmap documents. Unlike the actual development road maps, this is public information, but highly relevant to assisting in development and provided to help the directors stay up-to-date with all relevant information.

Implementation Solution
The drug development documents will be stored in a document management system and will have explicit security applied to them, letting only research directors access them. Within the collaborative space in the portal a portlet will present items for collaboration based on the node in which the documents reside in the document management system. The user credentials from the portal will be passed to this portlet that surfaces the documents, to ensure that only documents a user has access to are displayed. The listing of documents will also return meta data about each item. This meta data can be broadcast to another portlet on the page (via WSRP2 or JSR 286) which will display related drug development news based on the meta data terms from the documents.

C. Yummy Foods, Inc HQ to Franchise Communication

Business Need
Yummy Foods has seen excellent year over year growth of their organization through its franchises, but has begun to struggle with providing relevant content to enable it’s franchises to continue to grow sales in their respective locations. In order to solve this headquarters has decided to provide all of their franchisees with various marketing, sales and performance information through an portal intranet solution. It is important to note that employees of a store also have some access to this portal. To reduce the burden on the store owners, headquarters has decided to provide standard benefit information and various employee forms in the portal as well. Sales materials for the store owners are designed to be deployed at a national level, but marketing plans are designed for particular geographies. The marketing and sales materials should only be accessible by store owners. The marketing collateral requires targeted delivered to the proper regions, so as not to confuse the franchises and have them follow incorrect plans, although they do have the ability browse to see what other regions are doing. The performance information needs to also be secured and will be delivered to the franchisees through reports that are only for a particular store. In order to motivate franchisees to perform at a higher level, general financial information is also posted that showcases the highest performing stores within the organization. Only franchisees should have visibility into to this performance information.

Implementation Solution
In order to service the franchisees and the employees the portal is logically divided into 2 sections, one for employees, another for owners. The content management system supporting the portal is also divided into two sections in a similar fashion. Within the employee section benefit materials are stored with open access, as all users can browse, search for and open this content (please note that security could be placed on these items if the materials varied by country and the franchise organization operated globally). The remainder of the materials above are all delivered to franchisees via a dashboard page within the portal. Based on profile data for a franchisee a portlet within the dashboard will display the relevant marketing materials. This portlet takes the profile information about the franchisees location and executes a search query, combining the geography with a node ID that indicates the search should focus on the marketing materials area. The sales materials are delivered in a similar fashion, but pass a user’s identity into the search, opposed to just a geography. This will allow the search to respect the security of a franchisee and ensure that employees cannot access the content. Top Franchisee Performance information will be delivered in the same manner. Finally, the Franchisee Individual Performance is retrieved in a similar fashion, but each performance document in the content system will be secured on a per franchisee basis and will be displayed only to a single user.

Technical Implementation of “Personalization” for Portal Content

The following chart outlines various levers to drive content personalization within a portal. Note the Coarse Enablers and Fine Enablers illustrate where potential attributes that can impact the granularity of personalization reside within the stack. Each layer of the stack can influence the one below, with the exception of the directory service layer, which should ideally be consumed by each layer to form a consistent security model throughout the stack. If this is not possible, various parameters, preferences and metadata can be sent to the content integration provider (portlet code) to allow it to still provide content based on what a complete security integration would actually provide.

click here to view a full size chart

Generic Portlet Types that Return Personalized Content
The following samples outline approaches displaying a listing of content from a content repository within a portlet for a particular audience or specific user. For most use cases, a single, generic portlet can be used to return the appropriate items that can leverage the points within the diagram above, exposed as parameters to be consumed by the portlet. The parameters can be bound to a starting node in the content system (starting folder) and or used along with a query against the system to return documents within particular meta data. On top of this the actual user context can be passed back into the content system, which provides the finest level of granularity to the results that are returned to the end users. If correctly written or natively available, a single portlet can be used to fulfill all of these examples and can be deployed many times within a portal instance, configured slightly different each time though preferences to meet a particular use case.

a. Region-based Content – Returns a listing of items from the repository based on what high level navigation area a user is in queuing off of an attribute of the particular portal area. This area would generally be a functional section of the business like sales, marketing, research, etc.
b. Region-based Content 2 – Portlet similar to that above that queues based on meta data associated at a page level within a business are to which it is deployed within and executes a query against the content repository to pull back related documents.
c. User-based Content – Portlet that acts as a generic delivery vehicle based on profile attributes tied to a user account that are passed into it .
d. User-based Content 2 – Secure via explicit user group security at the portlet level with the parameters pre-configured for the actual portlet that is delivering dynamic information that is based on a pre-defined query for that user group. As an example, the preference could contain an ID that indicates a node in the content system from which to display a listing of content items from.

Taking Personalization to the Next Level
With all of the above being said, personalization can be taken a step further with some innovative content delivery solutions that have the ability to weigh what content to display to end users based on their interactions with the systems, as well as other data available about the user. This technology is very similar to that of Amazon.com and can be used to power a series of decisions for content delivery that are driven by behavior, making a user more likely to find information that is specifically relevant to their needs. Without having to make a large deviation in business processes for content management or technical architecture, a tool like Oracle Real Time Decisions or similar technology can be injected into the above approaches at a portlet level to further filter what content may be returned to the end user.

Final Thoughts
Personalization of content delivered through a portal does not need to be complex and can often be achieved by leveraging existing attributes from the portal and user, rarely needed to get more involved for most content. The largest impacts of personalization are also generally seen by implementation solutions using coarse grained personalization methods with minimal effort. These small investments can have a large impact on usability within a portal, reducing the amount of time that users spend searching for information and increasing their satisfaction with the portal service.

The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance

Let’s be honest – content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting. It is easy to quickly start producing content, but the challenge is ensuring that the environment is easy to navigate and use on the third week and during the third year.

What can be done to bridge this gap?

Over the next few blog entries let’s take a pragmatic, minimalistic view of a process that can help any team manage a wealth of unstructured information. Based on an earlier article that I wrote around Portal Governance, I am going to focus on using technology as much as possible to support the governance of content with minimal involvement from users. The only certainty about content production is that business users are not fans of maintaining content. Maintenance is overhead and is a long-term investment thats value will possibly not be realized under the current content creator’s watch.

To add context to how we will use technical tools in this process, each post will highlight one section of the content lifecycle process as outlined below

Content Lifecycle Stages
1. Request – Understand the education, purpose, resource and success criteria for content
2. Create – Determine access and workflow for content
3. Manage – Understand ownership and review cycles
4. Retire – Act on thresholds established during the request stage

Within each state we will also elaborate as to
1. Why – why would we entertain doing this?
2. How – the steps that are needed to make it happen
3. Impact – what is the net benefit or loss based on the process

Over the next few weeks we will dive deep into the stages and the minimal amount of time, effort and process within each to make some meaningful gains in the improvement of user experience and productivity in their search for information. It might be a stretch to say that we can make content governance exciting, but hopefully it can end up being painless and paying dividends.

Request Phase

For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material. This lowers the quality of end user experiences.

The good news is that by using a simple process in this request phase – we will not have to revisit this phase unless something drastic changes in the project. For each of the elements mentioned above in this stage, the why, how (technically focused) and impact are outlined with the intent of providing the most value to a small team.
read the complete Request Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Create Phase

In this installment of our Minimalist Approach to Content Governance we finally get to the fun part of the content creation process! Once the content requester has addressed the items outlined in the Request Phase it is time to setup and begin the production of content.

For this to be done correctly it is important the the content be assigned appropriate workflow and security information. As in our prior phase, let’s take a look at what can be done to streamline this process – as contributors are focused on getting information to their end users as quickly as possible. This often means that details around how to ensure that the materials are properly managed can be overlooked, but fortunately there are some techniques that leverage our content management system’s native capabilities to automatically take care of some of the details.
read the complete Create Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Manage Phase

Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not. This is why we thankfully have an opportunity to leverage meta data, security and other settings that have been applied or inherited in the prior parts of our governance process. In the interests of keeping this process pragmatic, there is little day to day activity that needs to happen here. Most of the activity that happens post creation will occur in the final “Retire” phase in which content may be archived or removed. The Manage Phase will focus on updating content and the meta data associated with it – specifically around ownership. Often times the largest issues with content ownership occur when a content creator leaves and organization or changes roles within an organization.
read the complete Manage Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

Retire Phase

Good news – the Retire Phase is actually more fun than the Manage Phase. During the Retire Phase our content management team should not have to track down content creators if the Request Phase of this process was completed successfully. The ownership meta data, success criteria and time stamp that was applied to the original content submission will help to manage content at the end of the content life cycle. The Retire Phase will provide the opportunity for us to prune irrelevant content items through archiving or deletion, keeping the content system clear of irrelevant information, streamlining users ability to browse and search for content.
read the complete Retire Phase on Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog

As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution.

How does one define a great technical solution?  The best technical solutions solve a business problem with the least amount of technical effort.  This includes effort from a full lifecycle standpoint – design, development, implementation, education, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of the solution.  A few years ago I worked with a company that demonstrated this point so clearly that I had to highlight it in this post.

This particular organization lends money to low income families at below market rates to aid them in home purchases.  For a few years they had been using portal technology that from a development standpoint was focused on business users.  This technology required little programming to allow them to further develop their extranet and intranet environments that connected their customers on the lending and purchasing sides of their business.

A need arose within the organization to provide executives with a summary of call activity from their sales team to judge the effectiveness of various calling campaigns.

The IT team spent time deliberating over what course of action to take to solve the business problem.  It was decided that the executives could be best served via a dashboard that would roll up various pieces of performance data around these calls made by the sales team and surface the information via their existing intranet.

The following two options were arrived at assuming that the requirements gathering for the solution was already complete, irrespective of the technical solution

Solution 1

Extend their base CRM system to support tracking this data and develop an integration to aggregate and present the data.  This solution would require the following development efforts

1. Extend the data model of the base system to account for the new reporting needs
2. Develop a presentation layer to gather the relevant information for the business users based on this data model
3. Create a presentation layer to allow executives to view and sort the information
4. Integrate the presentation layer into their intranet
5. Complete a quality assurance cycle on the solution and resolve any issues found with the technological implementation

Solution 2

Use an out of the box – MS Access like – portal component that is already available to capture and present the information.  This solution would require the following development effort

1. Configure the data model and forms relevant for the data collection around the business needs
2. Configure the presentation layer for the end users to expose the required reports

The above comparison might be deemed biased, but it is important to note that in the 2nd solution data would now be entered into two distinct systems by the sales team and the organization will not have complete control over the presentation format beyond a series of basic, caned reports.

After lengthy deliberation the IT team was strongly in favor of using the first solution due to it giving them full control and confining all sales team activity to the CRM system, but estimated the time to completion at around four months of effort.  This effort would detract from having their developers work on core offerings within their extranet to drive business leads to the sales team.  The development and QA time, not to mention possible adjustments that may be needed after an upgrade of the underlying system also added to the overall “cost” of the integration.

The first solution would require around 8 hours of effort to configure and 10 minutes from the sales team each week to summarize their call activity, which would be required regardless of the technical solution selected.  It would be created on top of an out-of-the-box technology and require almost no quality assurance testing, but require the sales team to end their day outside of their CRM system and leverage the intranet for summation of their calls.

In a perfect world we would have the deep integration of the first solution, married with the ease of development within the second solution. Unfortunately that was not feasible and the business team was requesting a solution as soon as possible from IT.

Ultimately the IT team went with the second option.  If more complex needs arose that the configuration based solution could not meet they would have to revisit the solution, but for now they were able to meet 100% of the business needs with this stop-gap effort in a very short time span.  Given the limited effort and accuracy in addressing the problem, this had tremendous positive impact with the business.

This example of success is perhaps one of the most powerful, pragmatic solutions that I have come across in my enterprise software work.  This is an extreme example, but hopefully there might be a space within your organization that allows you to provide this same level of success with minimal effort.  Using simple, configuration-based approaches to development whenever possible is an outstanding way to provide value.  They may at first seem too lightweight and due to their technical ease may be overlooked at first pass by a development staff, but never count them out for their ability to provide a big win for your business teams.

In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an organization. People are hard pressed to deny the “cool” factor of these new tools, but these suites inherently pose some tough, critical questions about their business value. Between the practical application of these technologies, challenges around governance and security, and issues around education and adoption, it is easy to see where an organization has to think long and hard about implementing these tools and ask important questions:

• Where do these tools fit into the enterprise?
• How can we govern the usage of these tools and manage the data generated by these tools?
• How do we leap the user education hurdle?
• How can these tools generate business value, thereby justifying a potential deployment?

Once you are able to address these points and understand what makes sense for your enterprise, you can identify where these product sets can provide value. You’ll be able to see that harnessing these tools makes it possible to accelerate knowledge work through the capture and presentation of information through user-authored spaces. It will also be possible to calculate an objective return on investment by measuring key performance indicators that satisfy the justification for the toolsets. Ultimately, this allows you to unlock value from enterprise knowledge management for your organization, granting you new levels of knowledge sharing and efficiency.

Fitting Into the Enterprise

A medium- to large-scale enterprise has an electronic mail solution along with a host of vertical applications implemented to address core needs like procurement, financials, and other common line-of-business needs. These tools run the gamut in the way they allow users to produce and manage an organization’s data.

Email is the essence of unstructured data and, conversely, vertical applications manage and host rigidly structured data. In organizations where knowledge work is occurring, these tools fail to provide a platform to act as a workspace to facilitate the dynamic, ad hoc collaboration around business challenges.

Although written from a sales and marketing standpoint, Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail details dormant economic value that goes unaddressed by large systems. Only when a vehicle exists to cost-effectively address niche needs will this value ever be realized. We’re continually presented with projects that have technical solutions falling somewhere between unstructured email and highly structured vertical systems like SAP. Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies support the needs in this middle ground that never could have been managed or cost-effectively addressed before.< /p>

This middle ground, or “whitespace,” has traditionally implied custom development effort, and generally it took six to eight months to develop a solution for even the smallest of business problems. When business users need a tool to manage this middle ground, it is not feasible to justify custom development, and the business makes use of the only tools at hand to tackle the problem. These have traditionally been email and other tools that are not well suited to knowledge management work.

User-driven product suites shine under these circumstances and provide a framework for teams to quickly create and manage these situations. When business users are able to identify a need that the traditional application space does not address and quickly satisfy those needs with these toolsets, value is realized because they do not need to engage development resources from the IT arm of the organization; instead, they can respond at near real-time speed. This allows IT to focus on more strategic projects around their core business that do require precious resources, and business users can work efficiently within a managed space in the enterprise.

Governance

With highly dynamic collaborative tools, mitigating fears of misuse is not a trivial matter. Within most organizations, any electronic information outside of email and casual office documents requires some degree of formal regulation.

Often, a battle ensues between business teams and technology management teams as to how best to use the tools. To make the most of the toolsets and to obtain the greatest business value, a reasonable, but not overzealous, level of governance must be placed around them. When we think of governance within a highly dynamic collaborative environment, some basic principles can be followed to smoothly manage the processes, while still allowing business users to create value.

Like a traditional IT initiative, obtaining executive- or departmental management-level sponsorship is crucial to the success of the initiative. Just because the toolsets enable fast solution development does not reduce the need for sponsorship. In addition to the sponsorship, the purpose of the deployment needs to be clearly defined. It is not enough to deploy a project with the toolset just because of the features available within the toolset. Feature-driven projects are destined to fail.

After the solution is in place, it will need to be maintained. This means that a clear owner must be defined for the outputs of the project. This owner will need to obtain any requisite training to support and enhance the solution going forward.

Based on the purpose of the deployment, it is essential to identify what information will be committed to these spaces. Will a space contain information that is sensitive and in need of being secured? Who will have access to modify, edit, or add information to this space? What level of auditing needs to be put into place? Knowing the answers to these questions upfront will allow you to set up the correct access permissions to enforce business policies within the workspace.

Finally, a plan for periodic review of the project’s outputs needs to be defined. This review acts as a checkpoint to make sure that not only technical but also business process rules are being adhered to. The review should also contain procedures and metrics that measure when a space should be discontinued due to nonuse.

Outside of security, at the end of the day, much of the governance with toolsets that pose a low barrier to entry will boil down to business processes. People in organizations need to be responsible for their actions at a business level beyond the technology. This is where a clearly defined plan based on the above elements is crucial if people are to succeed with enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Education

User-driven products that provide expedient gratification with regard to the reduction of daily burdens and processes have exceptionally high levels of adoption. Public examples of such systems underscore this trend, including the social networking site MySpace and blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress; these are definitive examples of tools that self-educated users have quickly adopted and gained value from, without extensive formal education.

The low barrier to usage can be attributed to the toolsets’ small, but often highly used feature sets. For users experienced with complex enterprise applications, this is a refreshing change. At first seemingly confining, the limited feature sets allow for maximum usability. Tools like Basecamp from 37signals also embody this ethos, providing a small, but often used feature set. This drastically reduces the need for education and increases the rate of adoption and speed at which value can be delivered.

That being said, it is beneficial to offer formal training classes to outline the available functionality of the tool and review how it might be applied through an examination of a series of use cases in order for the end users to obtain the greatest benefit. Once an initiative has been able to conform to the governance requirements for a project, a quick boot camp-style training curriculum led by an experienced user or company teacher is an excellent way to jumpstart the project in an effective manner with minimal resources.

Value

Given the current unmanaged whitespace within organizations, these tools provide substantial value from both a business and information technology management standpoint. Business users are able to realize new value by quickly reacting to their current and emerging business challenges, and authoring solutions for them. Blogging and wiki-style mechanisms provide an excellent platform to facilitate knowledge transfer and knowledge management not possible before, allowing for the actualization of all-important tacit knowledge. Information technology management groups can benefit from cost savings by consolidating some existing, moderately used applications and from a never-before-possible degree of auditing within the whitespace.

Complex decision making

Tools that allow the business to paint a canvas of dynamic collaborative functionality allow for an endless possibility of “applications” to be created. Imagine a situation in which a major decision needs to be made among a number of players from across the business. The decision might hinge on information from a CRM, ERP, or custom application. This critical data can then be incorporated into a space where users can contribute to a wiki or share documents and various other artifacts around the data to ultimately make a decision or select a strategy on the matter. This would have historically happened in a disjointed way across email where the process would take longer and the knowledge work potentially would be lost beyond the final decision.

Collection of tacit knowledge

The creation of a low barrier to the collection of tacit knowledge cannot be understated and can have a direct impact on the bottom line of a business. Imagine a vendor consulting group that is helping to increase product sales. Ensuring their field methodologies, such as best practices and critical product issues, are easily captured and shared among resources, can have a direct impact on deployment success. This deployment success translates literally to increased customer satisfaction, which, in turn, increases product sales.

Value through iterative contribution

User-driven authoring really shines when we examine how quickly we are able to realize value throughout a project. User-driven collaborative frameworks accelerate the time in which business value is delivered due to the ability to iteratively author. Unlike building with traditional software, requirements do not need to be completed for the business to begin constructing a solution. This allows business users to continuously focus on small, high-value components, which lets them realize value early and often throughout their process.

Cost savings and control

As IT departments attempt to keep costs down and monitor what transpires within their systems, controlling application sprawl is a top priority. We can look toward these new tools to act as a platform for consolidation of existing, lightly used legacy applications. This reduces cost not only from a server perspective, but also from a code maintenance perspective. Potential “would have been” custom development initiatives can now be handled through the framework. This can also stunt ongoing development maintenance costs as development efforts can now be directed at furthering core elements of the business and not providing the “one off” solutions that the user-driven collaborative suites now fulfill.

To measure the value that the suites deliver, key performance indicators such as email usage, the amount of resource and time to onboard a new employee, and the length of time to resolve a problem or complete a research assignment can all be captured. Additional quantifiable justifications can include servers and the knowledge, staff, and time to maintain many small, infrequently used systems.

Final Thoughts

Enterprise 2.0 collaboration suites are an investment in an organization’s production capacity. The possibility of being able to harness and navigate whitespace within organizations through business user-authored environments is an exciting, powerful vision. To drive these efforts and expose new business value, both education and governance must form the pillars that the newly created solutions will stand upon. In addition, a business champion must be able to firmly grasp these concepts and understand that value will not be delivered on the basis of the toolset’s features, but on solving key business problems and using the toolsets to manage the solution. With this foundation we are on our way to unlocking the value of enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies.

* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch 03/05/2008

It is time to revisit business analysis basics and be careful to make sure we have not started focusing entirely too much about the perceived need for these tools, opposed to a specific need. These tools are powerful and attractive, but we really need to understand if and how these technologies should be leveraged – pinpointing where they can alleviate business pains. In the work that I have done with a range of enterprise software deployments there is a consistent trend demonstrating successful implementations result when done to address a specific need, tools that were put into place because the technology was in vogue failed. Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise fit the same bill. Do not look to implement them because eWeek magazine or another publication has labeled it as the thing that other IT executives will implement this year.

I hope to clear the air in this post by outlining the virtues of each tool (specifically tagging, blogging and wikiing) and through a series of questions add clarity to where they would make business sense and allow the virtues to be realized.

Tagging
Social tagging technology excels at handling large amounts of unstructured data that is not served by traditional knowledge management systems (i.e. folders upon folders buried in a large, somewhat static hierarchy). Given this power it needs to be considered as part of an overall knowledge management strategy for information workers, but it also needs to specifically address some pain or a specific need of the business.

As information volumes continue to rapidly expand in the enterprise it is very difficult to organize and catalog assets, even with the support of full-time librarians. Additionally, in a world of M&A and constantly shifting organizational structures, it can be all the more important in helping people to reign in and make sense of this data. It is not uncommon for users to spend an extra fifteen minutes searching for an article within traditional search engines when they could not explicitly state their query to return satisfactory results. By contrast, tagging technologies have allowed them to see what other, related categories materials might fall into, speeding their searches drastically. Here are some questions that may help your organization determine if tagging would support the business by meeting specific business needs.

• Is your company currently experiencing quantifiable issues finding documents or other digital assets within your network? Is it a big enough of an issue to act on?
• Is a technology like social tagging something that your organization’s culture would embrace? Is the user base directly asking for it? It is important to keep in mind that tagging will only benefit end users if they are willing to contribute to the tagging of document. As enterprise tagging matures it is likely that it will gain acceptance in much the same way instant messaging has within the enterprise.
• Is there any research or knowledge intensive work at your organization that tagging may accelerate through more effective discovery of information?
• Are there opportunities to use this technology to help external customers more easily do business with your company?
• Would it be possible to designate someone to own and manage the platform from a business standpoint at a department or enterprise level?

Blogging
Blogs are great tools to rapidly publish and share expertise within an organization. Unlike email, a blog posting persists and is generally visible to a large audience which is able to engage the author in a dialog with comments or questions for everyone to see. Unlike a discussion forum, a blog posting provides detailed information around a particular topic, rather than a brief comment or question. A blog is also generally associated with a single person, allowing them to gain recognition in their organization or respective field. In your organization it might be a software developer, operations specialist or researcher that is able to provide a significant amount of value with this tool.

It may sound strange, the key to enterprise blogging is not about creating blog entries to be consumed by the entire enterprise, but about providing a single, unified platform that specific business participants can use to write posts for discrete audiences. Blogging within departments or to specific niches where the information is most relevant is the most valuable use of the technology. One of my prior postings (Niche Cooking for Portal Success) details a philosophy aligned with this approach which will work equally well for blogging. The following questions will help you to identify if it makes for your organization to deploy this technology.

• Do you have experts in your organization that have pointers that others would benefit from in a measurable way?
• How often would there be something that someone would blog about that people across the enterprise could really benefit from? Our foremost needs revolve around what it takes to get our work done, so any blogging that takes place in an organization has to help meet this need. With rare exception anything else is not providing value that can justify putting a platform into place and taking the time to manage it.
• Would connecting with customers, partners or external constituents add value for your business? Would it be worthwhile enough for the investment?
• Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to their blogs during work hours?
• Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?

Wikiing
Due to the allure of ubiquitous knowledge capture and propagation, a wiki deployment requires an extra amount of careful thought as to why and how it will be deployed to the enterprise. Given the potential, as demonstrated publicly by Wikipedia, many companies entertain having a wiki tool whose content expands into all sections of their business. This risk is that this generic, organization wide deployment, would most likely bring little business value to the enterprise and leave people wondering why they ever made an investment into the technology.

Similar to blogging technology, Wikis are going to be most effective when deployed for a very specific reason. A deployment could occur within a department, across departments or even with areas outside of or around the company, but should always tie back to a specific need that the tool is supporting. Wikis do an excellent job of helping knowledge workers collaborate on projects or support a function or process, by capturing tacit knowledge, sharing “facts”, presenting methods and or publishing best practices. Instead of being done by a single user, a Wiki allows a team to work together – enhancing and updating areas to evolve with the business. There is no better “living document” than a Wiki. Take a moment to think about the following questions to see if a Wiki might make sense for your business.

• Does your business have undocumented processes or knowledge that could help a specific department or function perform more effectively if captured in a Wiki format?
• Is there a simple place where new employees could go to learn during an on-boarding process? As policies, procedures or reporting structures and processes change within an organization a Wiki does an excellent job of making sure people can get up to speed.
• Does an identifiable bottleneck exist with some members of your organization that could be alleviated if they were able to share their knowledge collectively with other employees?
• Given the categorization that a Wiki imposes would it make existing knowledge more accessible if placed into the a unified format that a group could manage and edit? Since a Wiki can be an authoritative place for a collection of related materials it requires far less maintenance than a series of disparate files to maintain, enhance and manage.
• Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to the Wiki during work hours?
• Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?

Final Thoughts
There is not doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting them with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point. Hopefully some of the above questions can help your organization to focus, clarify and be successful with where and how these emerging technologies can benefit your company.

The next wave driving business value via tagging is here and it is being done through creative design and deployment. At this point the value proposition of tagging enterprise artifacts by and for knowledge workers is generally understood. Given this, it begs the question as to what additional value an organization can gain if they have invested in or plan to invest in an enterprise tagging platform. With the recent release of enterprise tagging technologies our options have become even more expansive as to how we can interact with our data by way of an extensive REST / JSON based, platform independent API . This new flexibility offers the possibility to leverage tagging as more than just an add-on or nice to have feature, but as the core component for dealing with data within a business application.

Traditional Challenge

Just as a folksonomy provides users a way to impose structure on unstructured data like a flat document collection, with some creative design decisions tagging can be extended to components of a business application that to date have historically not been able to benefit from the dynamic nature of community wisdom – only because of the way in which they were traditionally designed and developed. With a creative approach to application design we can now explore the use of tagging as the foundation of an application, rather than just a tool to augment existing data. Seem crazy? Let me explain.

For this discussion let’s focus on the application needs of the fictional technology analyst company, Socrates Research Institute (SRI). SRI is getting ready to provide a new release of a major research application that they are developing for their business users and reflecting on the challenges presented by their prior version.

The research application was designed on the basis that SRI had a set idea of things that they would like to capture around various research topics. Over time SRI found it very challenging to maintain the system given the quick market changes that can occur within research that SRI conducts. Emerging market trends and new technologies often forced SRI into a position where their prior application left them incapable of tracking and filtering on new data since they were bound by the static design of the system. SRI now knows that they will want to filter and collect data over time in categories that could rapidly change and they will need to adapt to situations that they cannot currently anticipate. SRI is hoping that beyond initial development they can do this without intimate involvement from IT.

New Approach

Driving the SRI research system by way of tagging will make it open ended and able to meet the rapid pace of emerging business needs. Data will now be applied by way of user defined attributes at runtime, enabling a limitless amount of sorting, filtering and consumption of the research without involving IT. How is this done you may ask?

1. The actual research itself will be collected on specific products that they are providing analysis on by way of a reference. In this case it will be a hyperlink to a product page on a vendor’s web site submitted through browser toolbar that interacts with the tagging engine API.

2. For each one of these products, tags will be applied that supply the type, price range, vendor and other information for that product. These tags will be made mandatory and selection will be enforced through the application interface, calling back to tagging REST APIs.

3. Beyond these tags all other information will be applied at the discretion of the research teams. Any additional data from the vendor around their product (PDFs, web pages, etc) can be pulled into the system and auto-tagged, saving time and effort.

Now it really starts to get interesting… once the data is applied to the object of research there are an expansive set of views that can be created on top of this data based on the filtering capabilities for searching tagging data. This means that IT can develop a single component that will allow users to define set views around products, research events and any other criteria that may be collected based on the context that the component is used in.

Ultimately the data can be presented based on filtered queries to give the end users very traditional application views, even though the data is stored within the tagging engine. This can include filtering different views of the data to provide context sensitive interface, drilling down into the data to provide more refined views and reporting on data that may be relevant to a certain, product, event, market condition, etc.

Final Word

There are many possibilities for application design and development using a framework as I have outlined above. Leveraging a tagging system as an application platform allows for a highly dynamic, user driven, application experience – while cutting down on development and maintenance costs. If you are curious about seeing how this approach might work for your next project, drop me a line and I would be more than happy to brainstorm around it.