Information System

"Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of online knowledge marketplaces where you can sell your personal knowledge. You can see its roots in the crowd sourced Q & A trend that spawned sites like Quora, Aardvark, Stockoverflow and others. And sure, you can go to Google or Ask.com and get your questions answered for free."

-Jennifer Hicks, The Rise of the Knowledge Market, Forbes, June 27, 2011.

Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization.  Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.

"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."

- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way,  AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.

I like to keep things simple and prefer to use content management system (CMS) as the term used to describe the information system we use to manage all content. However, I will acknowledge that it is sometimes good to categorize a CMS by purpose. This differentiation of a CMS by purpose has given us subcategories of the CMS which include the enterprise content management system (ECM), the web content management system (WCM), and the social publishing system (social business system). In a press release this week, Alfresco introduced me to social content management, another new marketing term to describe a CMS with the purpose of managing social media.

Alfresco is tying to evolve the social content management system higher than the social publishing system within the information system food chain. If you ask them, a social content management system would do something much more than a social publishing system. I'm not convinced of that, but they do make a good argument.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. According to Alfresco, these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform with a goal to co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.

The marketing team over at Alfresco are pure geniuses. In this case Alfresco is using the social business systems as another catch phrase to describe what I know to be social publishing systems. Alfresco on the other hand identifies their product as as a social content management system that co-exist to manage the social content created by all these other systems. A CMS that is needed to clean up after the mess created by all these other social publishing systems.  I'm not sure I buy the argument that there is much difference between a social content management system and a social publishing system. But I will bite that social content management has a much better ring to it than social publishing system or any other term we use to describe the management of social content.

From now on when I describe a CMS for the purpose of managing social content, I'll likely use the term social content management instead of social publishing system. It seems to be a more fitting term for describing the direction the CMS is currently evolving toward. So hats off to Alfresco for pushing this term in their marketing. In a CMS world where ECM and WCM can exist, I see no reason why there can't be a SCM. On face value, there is nothing wrong with this logic. Except, of course, I like to keep things simple and prefer to simply call all these information systems a content management system. However, who am I to argue with progress.

In his well-known book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” which is regarded for its timeless insights, Robert Fulghum reviewed some basic lessons of life we all learned as children that are universally true, even at the places where we work and within our social interactions. There’s a reason we invest a good portion of our educational funds in early learning: what we absorb and come to believe during our formative years influences our thoughts and decisions throughout our lives.

If you haven’t thought about each of the ten timeless truths listed below in terms of your business process automation goals, it may be time to rethink your ECM strategy. The payoff for ‘getting it right the first time’ is significant.

Here they are, rephrased a bit to help you make the connection:

1. Remember that everything dies. Hamsters, mice, people, and even company projects have limited life spans. Routine business processes, too, ultimately outgrow or outlive their usefulness. Take time to put everything in perspective. What are your company goals? Are your processes still relevant and in line with your vision? Are there processes you maintain purely because things have ‘always’ been done a certain way? Is anything ripe for change?
    
2. Be prepared. Remember the first day of kindergarten? Probably not, but chances are good that you carried a backpack or bag with everything you needed to address the routine challenges of the day. If you’re investing in technology, give yourself and your staff the time and resources they need to be prepared. You can’t expect miracles from even the best software and hardware. However, if you give your people sufficient time for analysis, planning, and improvement, ECM technology can produce phenomenal results.
    
3. Play fair. Be considerate. Even if you’re starting with a small project, keep the company’s enterprise goals and other departments’ needs in mind. Although you need to remain dedicated to your own vision, being selfish about your needs, simply refusing to make your project transparent, insisting on your own way of doing things, and similar self-centered practices will hurt your company in the long run. You’ll also miss great ideas for improvement that others could offer. You may have terrific ideas and plans, but someone else’s contributions might help them to prosper more fully.

"There is no best content management system. But there is probably a good CMS for what you’re trying to do. You need to do your homework and find the right fit. It's not something you put on a wishlist for Santa to take care of."

- Irina Guseva, 10 Common CMS Implementation Mistakes, CMSWire.com, December 16, 2010

Life can be intense. Every day, employee dramas enter the workplace unsolicited. Some of the greatest workplace concerns we face as HR professionals, employees, and caring colleagues are making sure:

• Health needs are met and costs are covered as anticipated.
• Everyone is treated fairly by managers and co-workers, able to work without discrimination or harassment.
• No one makes (or must endure) threats in the workplace, idle or real.

Intentional wrongdoing, inadvertent employee mishandling, shoddy record keeping, or a manager or worker with a hidden agenda can devastate company finances, reputation, and employee morale. Noncompliance penalties, unemployment insurance, time-consuming training programs, lower productivity, and other HR costs can pull strongly on the bottom line as a result. So what can you do to:

… help staff members comply with corporate policies?

… improve confidence, trust, and satisfaction with your HR department and company?

… discourage workers from wrongdoing and prevent acts of poor judgment?

… protect your organization and its workers from engaging in and getting away with---or experiencing---harassment, unjust treatment, false accusations of such activity, or other harm?

… guard your organization against false accusations?

The answer lies in timely, complete, accurate documentation…along with the ability to organize, associate, and handle information appropriately, consistently, and quickly when you need it. The challenge: gathering it from diverse places including your HR software, document repositories, payroll systems, email, voice messages, and more, and maximizing its use everywhere it has value.

Communication is everything. The moment we’re born, the labyrinth of neurons in our brain starts processing and distributing information. Strong neural connections help our brains to expand their function so we can make smart decisions and reach our potential. Our well being relies on quick, efficient messaging. If the right connections aren’t made early on, our brains miss vital input that would otherwise instruct or protect us.

This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we're currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.

When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don't steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we're needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I'm personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.

Who really defines what is a CMS?

You do.

I'm more convinced than ever that CMS experts aren't really in the driver's seat when defining the content management system. Experts in the field of content management are more or less observant passengers that are there to help you not get lost and to point out the significant landmarks on the way. This journey takes you to places while you the customer remain in the driver seat with all the privileges and responsibilities of being the driver.

Over the past few years I've realized that my work preference is to keep things as simple as possible. Sometimes when defining information systems keeping things simple works while other times the system is new and remains too complicated to define. Thanks to my reply in a productive rant against CMS by Laurence Hart I'm not only understanding my aversion to being called a CMS expert but also my philosophy and role in defining what is a CMS. This personal philosophy is developing...

Scott Abel convinced me a few years ago on my own blog that the definition of a CMS is never static and always changing. We’re chasing our own tail when we get nit picky in our definitions of a CMS. Somewhere in all the marketing that has been done for terms such as CMS, ECM, and WCM…we have forgotten the difference between information system and information technology.