Reconnecting and the Zen of Seashore

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Last month I took a vacation. Unlike most of my vacations, it was only a week long. Also unlike most vacations, I actually got to do something on my own without the rest of the family.

imageDon’t get me wrong, I love my family, but we were in Virginia Beach. It was where I grew up and went to high school. One morning I took off to go for a run at Seashore State Park* where I had run hundreds of miles in my youth. During the run, I had a flood of memories which helped me through the run.

Even thinking back now, I am relaxing just thinking about that morning. I’m going to recount the morning and then wrap-up with the point of this post.

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Our Legacy Big Data Problem

imageA few days ago, I discussed how Big Data, as a technology, has relevance as a means to gain Insight. This is all fine and good, but is it a technology that we need in the Content Management space? Moore’s law seems to be keeping our data in good shape.

Except…

…inside every piece of content is information. It isn’t unstructured, it just isn’t in a structure readily interpreted by machines. That structure is what provides context and that context is the key to extracting insight.

Now extend that out to Petabytes. That is Big Data.

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My CIP Breakdown

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A few weeks back, I asked readers how they thought I did on the different sections on my Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam.image I was curious where people thought my weak points were based on what they knew of my experience, from reading my blog, and other sources. The goal was to see how my experience, shared publically over the years, matched-up with the exam.

Well, the results are in. As I write this, there are 23 votes but as one is from me, I’ll throw it out. Before I break down the voting, let me share the answers.

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Hyped Tech Lives Only to Solve Real Issues

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One of the joys of working for AIIM is attending a wide variety of events. In fact, one of the unexpected joys is is the board meeting.408234_10151195570639391_1800285567_n The reason is it brings a lot of smart people in one room to talk about the Information industry’s direction. Every single person there genuinely cares about the future of the industry.

As a result, we have a lot of good discussions on the drivers moving the industry forward. Last year, prior to my joining AIIM, it was observed that Big Data, Social, Cloud, and Mobile were emerging and important issues that Information Professionals are having to start addressing.

This year, as we reviewed the list to see if the items were still relevant, we turned these concepts on their head.

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Cloud May be Easier but Do Your Homework

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imageAt this point, just about everyone acknowledges that the simplified, cloud-based Content solutions like Box and Syncplicity are here to stay. There is a place for them in the Enterprise world and that place will grow as their capabilities grow.

What I’ve been hearing and seeing is a repeat of what I’d like to call the SharePoint Experience. People would just role SharePoint out because it was easy and expect everything to work. As we all now know, that wasn’t always the case.

Content Management, when done in a way to do more than just replace a file share, requires planning. It requires Change Management aspects to be considered. The impact to the business processes needs to be planned. Old content has to be migrated.

imageWhen SharePoint hit it big, this didn’t happen. Technicians just implemented it without considering the need to understand Content Management. Now, it is a different story.

As these new offerings are purchased and deployed, I’m seeing a lot of the same things. Instead of IT, the business users are leading the efforts. Sure, they don’t need to create an architecture or determine what customizations are needed, but they still need to plan.

  • How are we organizing content? Are we going to rely on tagging? Do we need to establish a simple Taxonomy?
  • What are we going to do about existing Content? Do we migrate or leave it as is? Are we bringing any structures from the old system over?
  • How do we integrate our business processes?
  • Speaking of integration, what about our other business systems?
  • How are we providing documentation, training, and support to our users?

These are common issues in Content Management and with a cloud-based system they may be simpler questions to answer.

The key to answering these questions is knowing that they need to be asked before the project starts.

Checklists of things to do aren’t going away, they are just getting shorter. They are becoming simplified but still require knowledgeable Information Professionals to lead the effort.

The goal of these cloud-based Content Management solutions is to take the simplicity of file sharing and add the functionality of Content Management. We all need to make sure that the result of this combination is the best of both worlds and not the worst.

Mobile and The Convergence of Personal and Work Life

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While breaking bread with a Box employee, Chris, last night, I had a revelation. Historically I’ve really only consider three types of workers that need a complete set of business tools on their mobile device.

  • Road Warriors: These people are never at their desk. Even if they don’t travel, they are always running between meetings at various locations.
  • Silicon Valley: Mobile is cool, we are cool, we have to use mobile. Doesn’t everyone use it?
  • Mobile Cult: They don’t live or work in Silicon Valley but they want to be that cool. Not only do they like to use their mobile device while at their desk, they carry it everywhere to show people. Have you seen their cool light saber app?

The point being that for the everyday worker, mobile computing was for our personal lives. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, books, games, and anything else to keep us entertained. Mobile work consisted mostly of emails and taking pictures of whiteboards.

The thing is, a funny thing has happened during the mobile revolution, our personal and work lives started to blur together into a single existence.

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AIIM, Associations, and My Career

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2012-08-13 20.13.51I recently renewed my paid membership in AIIM, the Global Association for Information Professionals, for whom I am also the Chief Information Officer. I have been a member of AIIM in some form going back to 2003. To the right is my 2003 welcome letter from John Mancini that I stumbled upon just the other day.

I’ve also been a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1998. This is a Computer Science based association. I interacted with them back in college but joined them years later because I liked their programs and I had the money to join.

The reason I bring this up is because Lane Severson asked me an important question when I tweeted that I had re-upped my AIIM membership. His question, You gonna expense that?

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AIIM’s Real World Cloud Strategy

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This morning I was on a call with a vendor. Doesn’t matter who it was. Suffice it to say they wanted to sell me IT services of some kind. The conversation was quite similar to conversations I’ve had over the past six months.

Vendor: I’d like to talk to you about X.

Me: No thanks. I’m getting out of that business, moving everything to the cloud.

Vendor: Oh? Who is your provider?

Me: We are taking different approaches based upon the application needs. [Some examples here.] If something changes I’ll be sure to give you a call.

It is amazing that they all think that going to the cloud is a one vendor style of approach. This leaves me wondering, are a lot of people taking that approach? Why?

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Translating Experience to the CIP

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When I took the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam back in January, I didn’t study due to a bet. This made the process more challenging than necessary. What I wanted to do today was see if you could guess which area I scored the lowest.

I’m not leaving you without any information. You can always look at what I’ve been blogging about for clues. There is also my LinkedIn profile which will tell you what I’ve done over my career. Finally, checking out what each domain area in the CIP exam covers should help you match that all together.

This of course, begs the question, what do you get for guessing correctly? That is a tough one. The poll is anonymous, so it will be hard to reward individuals…so let’s crowdsource. I’ll take suggestions for all readers (making me publicly confess some dark secret of some sort) and for those readers that share their correct guess in the comments prior to my announcing results.

I’ll run this poll for one week. At the end I’ll share the correct answer, the area that I knew the best, and what areas I missed a question. This should help people determine what areas they may be lacking knowledge in as a supplement to the Sample Exam.

Partners Still Critical for Software Vendors

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imageThis morning, over my morning coffee, I came across Lubor Ptacek’s thoughts on the End of the Partner Ecosystem. I started reading the article as a skeptic and I finished reading it confident in my disagreement. I quickly decided that I needed to take the time to refute Lubor’s points in a post rather than through Twitter.

Before I could find some time to write this post, Cheryl McKinnon tweeted that the Difference is that new [partner] ecosystem is developer/API driven, not sales driven. I think that observation, while accurate, only tells part of the story.

Before diving into that, let’s discuss what Lubor got right.

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