This week in links - week 23, 2009

"CIOs: It's Strategy Time" by Michael Idinopulos:

Most CIOs I talk to want to spend more time on strategy--not platform strategy or application strategy, but business strategy. The fun part of their job isn't about keeping the lights on or the servers cooled. It's about using technology to fundamentally improve the way their companies do business.

Managers outside traditional IT strongholds are realizing that wikis, blogs, social networking, micromessaging, and other forms of online collaboration are dramatically changing the way people interact with each other. Most of the early Enterprise 2.0 implementations were driven by non-IT experimentation. Use of Enterprise 2.0 tools has been heaviest in precisely those knowledge-intensive industries that traditionally discount the strategic value of IT.

As Enterprise 2.0 matures, we are entering a strategic phase. Companies are moving beyond their early, ad-hoc, unmanaged experiments, and trying to figure out how it all fits together--not just for an individual department or project, but for the company and its customers. As one client told me last week, "We've done more to advance the company's strategy today than I have in the past year."

If you're a CIO, your company is looking to you to show the way. How will Enterprise 2.0 change the way you do business? What benefits can your company realize? How will this change the way you collaborate internally? How will it change your interactions with customers?

This is a golden opportunity to move out of the back office and drive your company's business strategy. Are you ready?

"6 Observations from AIIM State of Industry survey -- Good data for presentations" by John Mancini:

#1: Organizations need help in creating an effective governance structure for their ECM initiatives.

#2: Organizations are concerned about and need help in architecting how the pieces of an ECM architecture fit together.

#3: Organizations have experienced the consequences of mismanaged information and need help/tools to manage this risk.

#4: Organizations need better tools to quantify ECM benefits.

#5: Organizations need help figuring out what to do about SharePoint.

#6: Organizations need help integrating their internal and external infrastructures; WCM still largely disconnected from ECM.

"How Email Inefficiency Reduces the Quality of Group Input" by Ric Roberts at Swirl, published on Stewart Mader’s blog Future Changes:

Email works great for short messages intended for one person, where you just want to alert the recipient to something, and no further discussion is required. But when you start to include more people, and they all start chipping in with their responses, email starts to break down as an efficient medium.

Using tools which provide you with central hub for communication (such as a wiki), instead of directly contacting each individual person, allows you to reduce the number of connections involved. This, in turn, reduces the number of interruptions and the number versions of the document that are generated, making the discussion much more manageable. Furthermore, if the article is in a wiki, then it becomes search-able by all the users of the wiki too, so other people can find it again in the future. This is not the case if it’s stuck in someone’s inbox.

"Search is a Waste of Time" by Anthony Bradley:

Let’s face it, searching is mostly a waste of time. I don’t like searching the house for my keys, I don’t like searching my closet for the right shirt, and I don’t like searching my systems (or the Web) for information. All of these are a waste of my time.

I want the information I need delivered to me when I need it and where I need it. I don’t want to have to look for it. Do you? Then let’s end the search madness and start pushing for something more. This is, for me, the best use case for the semantic Web. Understand what I’m doing and proactively deliver to me the information I need. Of course this requires all applications to be context aware and semantic-enabled (add this to the enablement list; web-enabled, service-enabled, WOA-enabled, mashup-enabled, and social media-enabled).

Can you imagine high quality and relevant information delivered to you when and where you need it or even applications that anticipate your information needs? There would be no need to search. What a wonderful world that would be.