I was dubious about attending this session.  The subtitle was ‘Putting Hypertext to Work on the KM 2.0 path’ which seemed destined to send me into fits of yawning but I hung in there and got some interesting bits and pieces out of it.

The main point was that we are moving from information that is document based to information that is based upon activities and relationships.  For example, as well as using subject tags for information people are now tagging based on time related tasks, activities and their own emotional reactions: @toread; @tobuy; @fun.

In addition, the more information is structured the more tightly it is connected to a point in time.  In contrast, raw information retains the context.  Hence blogs, wikis and project workspaces can provide more information than documents published to an intranet or into an EDRMS.  Where documents do exist knowing who authored these merely gets you picking up the phone faster.

So, here’s the challenge for those of us that are into archives and records. We can’t turn back the tide and change how people work.  Nor have we had much luck compelling people to publish their documents into an EDRMS or onto an intranet.  How do we need to be changing our thinking to accommodate these ways of creating and describing information while still allowing for records to be managed where this is needed?

My biggest takeaway from this session was the statistics from Intel about their social software tools.  1% of users author and comment  often, 9% occasionally author and comment, 90% find value in editorials etc.

I suspect that the 90% is overstated – does everyone read this stuff or do many people just ignore it? However, regardless of the accuracy of the statistics, there is an interesting point here.  This is that we shouldn’t be too alarmed if not everyone is contributing.  In a sense these observers are merely leveraging the work of others.  I subscribe to a number of blogs because their authors act as filter for me, sorting a lot of information and summarising the results.  Because my interests are aligned with these blogs they act as both time savers and discovery tools.

This paper really hit a hot button for me.  How and where do documents fit into all of this Web 2.0 stuff?

This was part paper and part demonstration from the Singapore Armed Forces.  They started out by identifying the key activities of knowledge workers, boiling them down to four: writing papers; attending meetings; attending courses; and communicating.

They built an enterprise system to support their knowledge workers comprising a learning management system, a content management system, an enterprise search engine, a knowledge mapping tool and a collaboration portal integrated all integrated their EDRMS Livelink.

What struck me most of all was how clean and easy to follow their interface was.  The user home area was split into three columns. The first column contains a reference space for news, feeds etc.  The middle column is the workspace for email, my documents and my learning.  The third column is the sharing space for blogs, wikis and shared workspaces.

Very simple but with lots of power packed into it.

The main open source components are JOOMLA for communities, forums, blogs and wikis, MOODLE for learning management and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

The focus of this paper was federated search. Federated search works across multiple repositories – typically the extranet, EDRMS and intranet – and returns the results together.  The user interface presents the results either sliced by repository (top 3 intranet searches; top 3 EDRMS searches) or by relevance using tricky behind the scenes algorithms.

The key challenges faced by vendors developing search tools are:

·        De-duping (removing duplicate entries)

·        Developing algorithms that generate useful relevance rankings

·        Reflecting the security models present in each repository

When a tool meets these challenges then a vendor has a ‘viable’ federated search tool.  However, that doesn’t account for that nasty thing: human behaviour.  Letting humans at your repository can really stuff the accuracy of the search tool.  The nasty things that humans do include:

·        Changing content types

·        Adding and removing directories

·        Creating new workflows

·        Creating versions

·        Opting out of metadata

·        Changing taxonomies

All of these can conspire to seriously challenge your search tool.

I thought this presentation was both alarming and compelling.  

Yves Noble told us about how Capgemini (a global IT services provider) is moving from its EDRMS to a more interactive and people oriented system.

Here’s the alarming bits:

·        In the 8 years or so that their EDRMS had been in place they’d experienced a 20% year-on-year decline in usage

·        The average age of documents was 3.5 years

·        Their EDRMS was generally considered to be complex and confusing

So, they had a simple idea – to copy what works on the intranet.

They chose open source technologies based purely on cost.  With 80,000 employees in 30 countries the cost of proprietary software was too high.  Interestingly, in their high level evaluation sheet open source had many more marks against it than the two proprietary tools they considered.  In particular, they identified clear risks around available expertise, vendors, internal skill base; and deployment.  However, despite these negatives the dollar imperative was too strong to ignore.

Their solution comprised:

·        Drupal – for CMS

·        phpbb – for forums

·        Mediawiki – for wikis

·        Google search – for search

They also have links with their other tools including the regional portals and the corporate communications portal so this is probably not the ‘one solution to rule them all’ but is an interesting start. 

Note: this is early days so while there are good indicators of success in the short term, it is hard to predict the medium to long term impact. 

They have developed no training, suggesting to users that they just dive in.  For some of the tricks and quirks users themselves have created a ‘how to’ wiki.

Lessons:

·        People love getting rid of institutional control

·        Users are creating content in unexpected ways

·        Community moderators are taking their roles seriously

·        Auto-administration is not a dream – people are voluntarily alerting and cleaning up the parts that are not right

·        Moving from email to instant messenger and collaborative tools

·        Easy to deploy

·        Simple, intuitive, fast, cheap

Challenges:

·        Transparency is a concern as is IP protection and security

·        Redefining and/or requiring the role of Knowledge Manager

·        Measuring the actual impact

·        The generation factor

·        Push back from IT over the lack of vendor support

·        RSS savvy users are not so common

·        People getting used to switching from document folders to tags and folksonomies

·        Getting connected with the outside world and involving clients

Dave Pollard’s paper focused on how KM is (and should be shifting) from a discipline that requires very structured tools and technologies to one that is more fluid.

The slide deck is here: www.slideshare.net/davepollard

I found his discussion of the Gen Millennial fascinating.  This generation, used to using instant messenger and texting, has a focus on conversation not on content.  This can lead to ‘true enough’ thinking where an answer doesn’t necessarily have to be well researched or grounded in fact but rather if it is validated by enough of my peers it can be true enough and hence sufficient.

Oddly enough this echoes the book I’ve been reading while travelling lately: True Enough by Farhad Manjoo. I’m not quite through it yet.  The point he makes that has really struck me so far is that through the internet we gravitate to the opinions that reflect or support our own.  In the face of many voices, saying the things that I intuitively agree with, my own position is reinforced regardless of objective fact.  A little scary and perfectly human.

This keynote was based on John’s book ‘Innovation Nation’.  He argues less that America is in crisis around innovation but more that it is becoming the boiled frog (‘boiled frog’ is the Charles Handy metaphor for situations that worsen gradually so that you don’t realise you’re in trouble it’s all over – the frog is boiled and hence dead).

While John was talking about America the points seemed to be applicable to New Zealand.  Innovation blossoms in diversity hence multi-disciplinary approaches to innovation are often what are needed for success.  This means that if you are an innovative country or company you will need different actors at different parts of the value chain e.g. sales, technology, design etc.

It is possible for countries to focus on just one part of the value chain and get extremely good at delivering that element. So, the good news for NZ is that scale is not necessarily an indicator of success but rather that knowing and focusing on the area of the value chain we want to be good at is important. 

In a global economy to even be a contender what is needed are talent, resources and infrastructure.  John points to the nations who are both buying and acquiring talent.  In one year, China graduated 600,000 engineers and scientists, compared to America’s 70,000.   In addition, China is also seducing top scientists to work there.

Countries are adopting diverse strategies for innovation.  The suggestion is that America’s future lies in being a systems integrator.  In pulling together the design, technology and business inputs from the global supermarket for innovation talent. 

So, for NZ the message is:

·        Have we and should we make the decision to be an innovation economy?

·        Are there particular parts of the innovation value chain that we should be concentrating on?

·        What are we doing about talent, resources and infrastructure?

So for the company I work for I think the message is:

·        That we do a lot of innovation (relative to our size) and yet we don’t really work our way through the value chain in anything other than a random serendipitous way depending upon individual interests, time and priorities.

·        That we need to think, for any innovation endeavour, about whether we have all the multi-disciplinary elements that we need.

·        Are there opportunities for us, on a very small scale, to use the global supermarket?