I'm on vacation this week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in a little town called Buxton at the tip of Hatteras Point. As a result, I've had a lot of time to ride my bike and sit on the beach and watch the waves and wait for some Enterprise 2.0 Vacation Epiphanies. And as strange (and nerdy) as it may seem, I've actually had a few (epiphanies, as well as beers).
So here goes.
This is the summer that our last goes off to college, and we're on the verge of becoming empty nesters. I suddenly remembered years ago that I had written an article for the local paper on our beach experience. I wondered whether it was still around anywhere. So I did what anyone would do and did a search on "Mancini Buxton lighthouse," and voila -- there it was. From the Outer Banks News of September 1999, "A Traveller's Guide to Buxton." Not bad, if I do say so myself.
Epiphany #1 - Electrons really do live forever.
A huge challenge for organizations contemplating an E20 strategy is what to "do" with all the ephemeral, ad hoc content that results. For records managers (and lawyers), a nightmare scenario is all of the truly informal (even more so than email) content floating around and findable through a simple search years and years and years after its original creation (like my 11-year old article). So some sort of control structure is needed for all of this. But there is no surer way to kill an E20 project than to view it right off the bat from the control end of the control/access continuum. This whole question of the intersection of social with control needs a lot more work.
In chatting around with some folks on the beach and exchanging notes on where we work ("I run an association focused on helping organizations find, control, and optimize the information related to their business processes") a funny thing has occurred a number of times, especially in the context of thinking about the number of years that have passed since my traveller's guide above.
Epiphany #2 - People can actually understand what AIIM does.
For years, I would get somewhat blank stares when I talked about AIIM. I would usually need to prompt them with something like, "Think about taking huge amounts of paper and scanning them and then having them on your computer." Now, I increasingly get responses like, "You mean stuff like SharePoint?" or "You mean like on web sites?" or "There must be a lot going on right now with all the health records stuff" or "We don't even manage our personal stuff well, never mind at work." We're mainstream, folks.
Person X (names eliminated to protect the innocent) said, "We just had a conversation about what you do at work this week. We're a pretty large consulting firm, and a big problem is knowing what everyone is doing and reusing information from one client to another. One of the big wigs made a big point in a presentation this week of talking about our great knowledge management system. He just doesn't get it. It is nothing but a glorified shared drive that nobody uses or cares about. We would be far better off just starting over with some very simple stuff."
Epiphany #3 - You have to think about all the heavy, top-down approaches we took with KM systems over the past decade and do exactly the opposite.
Person Y said, "We are a 25 person consultant to insurance organizations. We were looking for a simple way to keep us all connected. So we just created a Twitter account that we all have access to, and we all direct tweet updates on what we're doing straight to that account."
Epiphany #4 - People will find a way to do E20 if we don't hurry up and give it to them.
Same Person Y also said, "We use SharePoint, but we're increasingly finding that in order to get it to do what we really want it to do -- and what we are trying to do is not all that complicated -- we are going to have to have someone on staff to manage it. That isn't what we were banking on. And why can't I access the information and look at documents from our SharePoint repository on my phone?"
Epiphany #5 - SharePoint is a good product and certainly an extremely hot product and getting better all the time.
But especially for small organizations, don't assume it's like a shrink-wrap product that works out of the box. As we've said many times, it's a platform upon which to build applications. If that's not what you are willing to buy into, there are many other options out there. And get some vendor-neutral SharePoint training, for crying out loud. And maybe the free AIIM e-book. As for mobile, reports indicate that the integration of Windows Mobile 7 and SharePoint is a big part of the mobile play that Microsoft will make later this year. We'll see. For now, the SharePoint apps on the iPhone by others are so bad they are comical.
And lastly, to bring this article full-circle, a comment from my daughter Erin (the one leaving for school -- James Madison University -- in a few weeks). "This application on the JMU web site says it only works in Internet Explorer. What's up with that? How can they do that? I don't even have that on my computer."
Epiphany #6 - The days of "you can use any browser you want, as long as it's IE" are over.
This was always an issue that bugged me about MOSS. There are tiers of "supported" browsers in MOSS, but if you want to do something as simple as document check-in/check-out with a non-IE browser, you basically have to use a workaround (I'm told this was corrected in 2010). I know all the vendors want to lock users into their platforms. But if the revolution in consumer technologies over the past decade has told us anything, it's that fewer and fewer people are willing to be locked in. This world view is carrying over into the set of consumer-like expectations that we bring to the enterprise. And that is setting the stage for some very interesting battles in the years ahead.
