Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

"Not as flat as it used to be": Globalization Hits a Roadblock?

Blogger: Craig Roth

I was having breakfast this morning before going to work to prepare for my telebriefing tomorrow on The Role of Enterprise Content Management in Content Globalization/Localization when I opened my Wall St. Journal (4/28/08 page A1; link) to read that nationalism may be thwarting globalization.  The article by Bob Davis points out that while globalization was supposed to be inevitable (hence the WSJ's reference to Thomas Friedman's famous globalization manifesto), nationalism and protectionism seem to be on the rise.

Trade talks are shelved.  Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restriction is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

So what do I say tomorrow about the need for IT organizations to get involved in content globalization and localization efforts?  I think I'm still on track in saying that there is a sharp increase in content globalization occurring and that IT can help.  It's possible that some expansion plans in industries that could be brought under state control (energy and foodstuffs in particular) could be put on hold.  But for other industries, the drivers of IT involvement in globalization efforts that I discuss in my telebriefing are still very relevant.  These include:

• Containing or reducing costs: Whatever degree of globalization occurs, there will be a need to contain globalization costs
• Clarification of central and local control through governance: If power shifts are occurring and barriers are rising between central and local branches, governance takes on increasing importance
• Timing/responsiveness: The uncertainty of the globalization landscape places even more emphasis on an organizations ability to react quickly to changes
• Safeguarding brand image: Increased nationalism means increased attention must be paid to local culture and customs, so proper translation and QA processes become more important for a deeper swath of content
• Improving consistency: As with safeguarding brand image, inconsistent translations will have increased risk of harming the brand
• Need to handle increased complexity: Potential increases in regulation will increase the need for complex workflow that can handle documents based upon content typing

I'm not a politician or economist, so I'm (way) out of my element in predicting what effecting nationalism, protectionism, and a global backlash may have on international relations.  The article isn't saying the slowdown is definite, but a possibility when certain threads in the news are connected.  But from an enterprise content management perspective I think the globalization storm is looking even more vicious than before.

Why GMail is Disruptive

Blogged by: Karen Hobert

Yesterday I was asked to comment on a series of blog posts my colleague Guy Creese recently made regarding Google Apps for the enterprise and how I felt about his commentary. For background here are links to the posts in Guy's blog, Pattern Finder:

1. Google Should Announce Google Exchange (April 8, 2008)
2. Stark Reminder: Gmail Is Still in Beta (April 17, 2008)
3. A SaaS Lesson for Microsoft: Simplify the Licensing (April 18, 2008)

The person who asked my opinion was concerned that Guy was being too biased towards Google in his posts and what I thought about his commentary, especially regarding the challenges he's posited to Microsoft. I think this is a great discussion and thought that I'd share it with you as well.

I actually agree with Guy’s observations on the situation. First, in my opinion, I don’t feel that Guy has ever sung the praises of Google or Gmail as an enterprise solution. I've always found his commentary to be thoughtful and he hasn't been afraid to point out the warts. Read the Guy's recently updated report "Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects?" if you want proof. However Guy has highlighted some very important dynamics that are making Google disruptive for enterprise e-mail vendors including Microsoft, IBM, and Novell.

• Organizations are fed up with e-mail costs: costs for licenses and resources are skyrocketing and IT managers are looking for a cheaper more cost manageable solutions. Google Apps is extremely attractive to companies that are frustrated with the cost of maintaining e-mail. This is a very emotional issue and the reality of running an enterprise on Gmail becomes a secondary priority when facing a huge IT savings (and CIO cap feathers) in these economically strained times. Licensing and system management complexities are a big complaint with respect to Exchange. Even hosted Exchange services are more costly than other hosted e-mail options. For example, the average per user, per month cost of hosted Exchange is ~$15, contrasted with hosted Zimbra or other e-mail which is around $5 per user per month. That’s a $120 per user per year difference. So Guy’s point about Google’s simplicity model is very valid and its turning heads of IT decision makers who are looking for ways to solve e-mail cost problems.
• Decoupling e-mail services from clients is a good thing for customers: Guy’s point about using Gmail as a messaging engine but letting end users work within Outlook is very compelling to organizations. IT is finding it difficult to meet the demands of users who are familiar with Outlook and the demands of the business to manage costs. As Guy mentions, Google is very close to having a solution for customers in this position. This is a dynamic that could be very disruptive to Microsoft and other enterprise e-mail vendors. E-mail vendors such as Novell, PostPath, and Zimbra have created Outlook connectors for their mail systems so users can keep working in familiar tools. After all it doesn’t matter to users if the e-mail back end is Exchange, Gmail or something else, just as long as the e-mail is being delivered and received. Removing the need to convince end users to use a new e-mail client means that you only need to convince IT that a platform move is a good idea. Big win.
• You get what you pay for: I don’t think Guy’s post on Gmail still being beta is a retraction of his earlier post – after all his earlier post made the point that he felt Google was on “it’s way” and is not “there” yet. The post is a valuable warning that “you get what you pay for” in these circumstances. That any organization needs to enter into this e-mail business with open eyes (OK, I’ll stop with the aphorisms). The real question is what are the trade offs for moving to Google? Since this decision is placed in IT's hands it’s hard to argue against the substantial cost savings that Google represents. IT should do its homework to know what is lost for that savings and then turn the decision around to the business. Is the business willing to loose certain assurances that the current system provides in order to save the money, such as a Gmail outage?

Some customers that we’ve spoken with have said that Google Apps is 10% the cost of their current e-mail system (Exchange or other). A 20% savings might not be worth the effort and disruption of changing the e-mail system and the organization can likely manage to squeeze out a 20% savings from within their current environment. However, an enterprise would be negligent if it did not investigate something that might mean a 90% savings. That is what is making Google so disruptive. It isn’t a foregone conclusion that the customer will switch to Google but they at least should do their homework and find out what they are getting for their money. This investigation will likely include looking at other hosted options, including hosted Exchange. The problem Microsoft is facing is a market perception that Microsoft is more expensive. Right now Microsoft is offering entitlements for customers for its hosted services; however that doesn’t address how it will make Exchange less expensive over time. If hosted Exchange could beat Google’s price (say $40 per user, per year) then Microsoft would likely find itself inundated with phone calls for the service.

I also agree with Guy’s reaction to the numbers provided in the Cemaphore Systems' MailShadow Press Release (March 26, 2008). They indicate that something is going on and that people are looking for answers. I agree with his assertion that Google Apps is grounded in the SMB market and that most enterprises are probably looking at Google Apps from a “kick the tires” perspective. Like Guy, I expect that Google Apps will fall short of enterprise requirements. That said, enterprises may find that certain segments of the workforce, those non-information workers who don’t generally use Office, might be fine using Google Apps (or maybe just Gmail). I expect that large enterprises are looking to Google or other hosted options to provide e-mail services to those users while maintaining more robust e-mail services, such as Exchange, for users who need more than basic e-mail. Being able to integrate the two platforms (e.g., common directories, centralized management) will be paramount to these types of customers.

The Impact of Moving from Final Versions to Early Drafts

Blogger: Guy Creese (cross-posted on Pattern Finder)

An excerpt from page 13 of the 2006 Burton Group Collaboration and Content Strategies report, "The Copernican Revolution in Content," bears repeating:

Content management has moved upstream in the creation process over the years. In the past, secretaries typed only important documents, such as major memos and contracts, since it was too expensive and time-consuming to type ephemera. However, as employees began typing e-mails, they started to document unformed thoughts, while blogs now capture thought snippets and distribute them to potentially millions of readers. Wikis are literally works in progress.

While capturing work-in-progress content helps employees collaborate, it also brings with it an increased compliance burden. Rather than locking up a set of file cabinets containing important documents, enterprises must now archive memos, spreadsheets, e-mails, instant messages, pictures, and a host of other digital content. Furthermore, depending on content type, this can become a complex process. For example, a company may retain e-mails for two years, but contracts for seven. This means that if a contract is e-mailed, the archiving system must store the contract and the e-mail separately, so the contract does not vanish when the system destroys the e-mail transaction.

Generating content earlier in the process also means that enterprises must offer a spectrum of control. While companies must ensure that final versions of documents are secure and cannot be altered, such control is anathema to wikis, which exist just so scores of employees can modify them collectively.

Two years after writing this, I find that people still miss this pattern: the shift from businesses (1) creating only final versions to (2) creating the full spectrum of documents, ranging from early drafts to working versions to officially published documents. Since this shift occurred slowly--it's a three decade span between the heyday of typewriters and the arrival of wikis--it's not surprising that people still don't recognize the change. However, once you convert to this worldview, a whole bunch of Aha! moments take place.

For example, this helps explain the explosion in digital content that needs to be searched and backed up. When secretaries held sway, not a lot got written down. Now that everyone has turned into a typist, the entire corporation can generate content, not just 5% of it. Furthermore, not only has the group that creates content exploded in size, but the range of content has expanded as well: from final memos to drafts to e-mails to blog posts to IMs.

In addition, a lot of the management concern about things such as blogs and wikis comes from the fact that unformed thoughts are now written down. In the past, a lot of employees would blurt out, "Well, that's a stupid idea," but they'd do so in the cafeteria or around the water cooler. While the sentiment would be passed along informally, there was no official record of it. This has changed with the arrival of blogs and wikis, and that leads to a cascade of secondary effects: employees' feelings being hurt, warring factions breaking out, and potential liability if those comments are discovered in a court case. Thirty years ago it was normal and acceptable to have "offhand comment amnesia"; now, with digital content being created all the time, that's impossible.

Finally, the area in the market that's hot are the products that help people collaborate and generate early drafts: things such as blogs, wikis, search, and social networks. While free products such as Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice.org help enterprises save money, they don't necessarily make employees more productive. Based on thirty years of practice, we now know how to generate working and final versions; it's creating early drafts in a productive fashion that we're still trying to figure out.

Is Managing Information Overload Just Self-Discipline? No - Some People Can Actually Do Something Real About It

Blogger: Craig Roth

An article in today's WSJ by Lee Gomes (4/16/08, page B1, You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone; (Hit Spacebar Now)) has a tidy summary of a statement that tends to make me cringe:

The biggest drawback to the experience involves the sheer proximity of the Internet and the constant temptation it provides for the aforementioned thumb to wander away from the realm of timeless literary art toward a cheap, quick-information fix in the form of email or blogs. This is one of the cultural problems of our time and I don't have much to offer in the way of solutions, save to nag everyone about steely self-discipline.

While Mr. Gomes is referring specifically to the itch to check email or blogs, I've seen the entire attention management issue framed this way as well: that information overload and info-stress are like the weather in that everyone likes to talk about it but no one ever does anything about it.  Why waste much time talking about the dangers of our always-on, go-go culture if all you can do about it is nag people to buckle down and change their behavior?

I can understand that the average information worker feels that dealing with the overabundance and addictive nature of information (just as with food) is a matter of self-discipline.  But there are a handful of people in any organization that can take action to impact the productivity and stress of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of information workers.  I'm talking about CxOs and the IT owners, stakeholders, and champions of attentional technologies.  Cornering the folks in the corner office about Information Overload can pay dividends.

Enterprise Attention Management (EAM) pulls together the various puzzle pieces involved in the information overload issue and lays them out in a conceptual architecture that provides a view (a cross-section really) of the myriad technologies and processes involved.  Once laid out in this fashion, EAM can be applied to a specific organization's situation.  For a demo of how this works, see my entry that applies the EAM to personal attention management and then think about doing that for the organization as a whole.

If you're one of that handful of people I mentioned, you can take real action - actually do something about information overload for scores of people in your organization.  For example, if you're the owner of the e-mail system, you can enable filtering rules, teach people how to use them, or place them on your list of evaluation points for an email product evaluation as your situation warrants.  If you're a CEO or head of a large division you can lead by example in how you send out and accept communications (e.g., using appropriate channels, not accepting electronic interruptions during meetings, demanding full attention for short periods of focused collaboration).  If you're in a position to roll out RSS technology you can accelerate its entry into the organization.  These are just a few examples.  Each is only a small piece of the puzzle, which is why the EAM conceptual architecture is important for laying out how all of these pieces interconnect.  And how they apply to each organization is different.  But only when they are laid out in the context of attention management can strategic direction become evident.

Oracle Getting Deeper Into Records Management

Blogger: Guy Creese (cross-posted on Pattern Finder)

Oracle announced two records management products yesterday at Collaborate 2008: Oracle Universal Online Archive and Oracle E-mail Archive Service. Built with Oracle's ContentDB technology, the Universal Online Archive is a place where enterprises can archive digital documents. ("Online" in the name refers to the fact that it stores digital (online) versus paper (offline) documents, not that it is a SaaS-based service.)

The product interrelationships are as follows. Oracle's Universal Records Management serves as the policy engine; Oracle Universal Online Archive serves as a high-volume repository; Oracle E-mail Archive Service is the archiving interface for getting e-mails from Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes, and SMTP-based mail systems into the Oracle Universal Online Archive. Oracle says that e-mail is the beachhead; it will offer other archiving services over time to make it easier to archive documents from other systems (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint, file servers, production systems).

I'd say there were two interesting tidbits from the pre-briefing I had last week. First, Oracle is mentally splitting content into three buckets: active content (controlled by Universal Content Management), transactional content (controlled by imaging and process management), and historical content (controlled by Universal Online Archive). While I would split it into draft, active, and historical buckets instead, I applaud Oracle's larger view. Too many vendors concentrate on talking about one or the other: active content (content management vendors) or historical content (backup, information lifecycle vendors). At this point, no one talks about draft content (blog and wiki vendors should). Second, Oracle noted that within Oracle, active content (which it defines as having a 30-day life) is a much smaller percentage of documents than that of historical content (which it defines as having a 5-year life). A stat worth keeping in mind from both a security and disk cost point-of-view.

Salesforce.com Now Selling Google Apps

Blogger: Guy Creese (cross-posted on Pattern Finder)

Salesforce.com is announcing rather breathlessly--using the headline, "A Dream Come True for Your Business"--that it will start reselling Google Apps. Henry Blodget, in Silicon Alley Insider, characterizes the deal as, "Google-Salesforce Deal Shows Google Not Insane, Microsoft Disruption Continues." A more accurate headline (and analysis) would have been, "Google-Salesforce Deal Shows Google Apps is Struggling, Microsoft Disruption Continues."

Fourteen months after announcing Google Apps, Premier Edition, Google still has not convinced a major corporation to install Google Apps enterprise wide.  I've heard rumors that Genentech has decided on Google Apps, but the connection there is that Dr. Arthur Levinson, the Chairman and CEO of Genentech,  also serves on the Board of Directors at Google.

A year ago, Google announced Google Apps Premier Edition to great fanfare, and the cheap price ($50 per user per year) meant that Google got its foot in the door at many corporations. But Google then found that enterprises, after listening to the sales pitch, slammed the door on their leg. It isn't that enterprises aren't listening--they didn't shut the door completely--but at the same time they aren't opening the door wide, welcoming Google in, and signing the necessary paperwork.

There are a number of reasons for this wariness, but they all come down to the fact that Google Apps is missing certain features expected by large corporations: e.g., an offline ability to work (which Google is fixing by stages), records management for documents (Google has a solution for e-mail), and role-based administration (which Google says it's working on). In other words, the strong Google brand hasn't been able to overcome product shortcomings. (That Google was figuring its brand would overcome any objections was brought home to me one day when a client told me that when they told Google that they wouldn't be buying, the Google sales rep blurted out, "But you have to--we're Google!")

This is not to say Google Apps hasn't been successful--it has been in the SMB and education markets, where requirements aren't as stringent and the price isn't as high (Google Apps Education Edition is free). But Google hasn't been able to sell Google Apps to the Fortune 500, and that's frustrating it.

Consequently, it's changing its sales strategy. The first thing it did was sign up Capgemini to support and recommend Google Apps, but the only installation I'm aware of through that partnership is an internal installation of Google Apps at Capgemini itself. Then Google came out with Google Apps Team Edition, which bypasses the IT gatekeepers and encourages business users to ultimately gang up on IT and demand the solution's installation. (I can't imagine that strategy has won a lot of friends in IT departments. They're probably sitting there thinking, "Google is doing evil.")

The latest gambit is to have Salesforce.com sell it. Salesforce has a much larger sales force, and is also much more enterprise savvy. Also, the integration within the Salesforce.com application is quite nice. However, this is an installed base play--non-Salesforce.com customers won't be touched by this initiative.

Google Apps is a supreme disrupter and creating a whole new market sector in the process. But until Google figures out how to talk to the enterprise and offer a product it needs, it's going to be stuck at the door--and companies already in the door (e.g., Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft) are going to be working hard to get a signature before Google does.

Participatory Surveillance: Co-mingling Intimacy & Exposure

I recently came across two articles independently that actually come together quite nicely. Leisa Reichelt is credited with establishing the term "ambient intimacy" and has coined a new term she refers to as "ambient exposure" (see the first citation below). Both concepts and the perspective she provides as context came out when I went back and re-read something I had come across earlier (see the second citation below).

The idea of interacting within in a mediated public space (such as Twitter) is clearly an exercise in participatory surveillance. A similar situation arises with services such as Friend Feed. In both cases, I have people "following me" on Twitter or subscribing to my shared activities on Friend Feed, whom I do not know at all. In some cases, this works out well - sometimes the notification that I am being followed causes me in turn, to follow that person if they seem to have some mutuality with my interests. In some ways, these types of mediated public and the ability to establish some level of mutually assured surveillance (reminds one of the cold war term "MAD"), can promote some amount of homophily. 

On the other hand, as Leisa rightly points out, it can make one feel uncomfortable as well. Especially when you are followed/subscribed to by someone that you cannot in turn, establish a similar level of surveillance. The sense that there is an unequal power distribution in the relation can lead you to block that person from following you for instance (as I've done at times in Twitter). This situation can lead people to seek certain "walled gardens" (e.g., Facebook) within which they feel more comfortable to share information because such interactions are within a closed circle of trusted relationships whose ties perhaps reflect real-life connections.   

Article snippets and citation links below:

Ambient Exposure

It’s been more than a year now since I first wrote about Ambient Intimacy, and in that year it seems a whole lot has gone on.

.....

All of these changes in the past year have gotten me to thinking about something that I’m going to call Ambient Exposure. Exposure in terms of disclosing information of course, but also exposure in the way that a trader might think of it - a vulnerability, a risk associated with taking a position that could, potentially, result in loss or harm.

.....

In the same way that we are not necessarily good at or able to forecast the impact of choosing to add someone to our contact list, we are similarly perhaps not good at anticipating the impact of sharing particular types of information with others.

disambiguity - » Ambient Exposure

Participatory surveillance

In the following I suggest using the concept of participatory surveillance [5] to develop the social and playful aspects surveillance. First, online social networking is related to the traditional hierarchical surveillance concept. Second, the aspect of mutuality will be studied. Third, I will elaborate on the idea of participatory surveillance with regards to user empowerment, subjectivity building and information sharing.

.....

Empowerment, subjectivity building and sharing

In the following, I will call attention to two aspects of surveillance in the context of online social networking which are missing or underdeveloped in the previously discussed concepts. These are the idea of user empowerment and the building of subjectivity, and, second, the understanding of online social networking as a sharing practice instead of an information trade. Together, these two aspects, along with mutuality, makes up what I call participatory surveillance.

As mentioned earlier, a hierarchical conception of surveillance represents a power relation which is in favor of the person doing the surveillance. The person under surveillance is reduced to a powerless, passive subject under the control of the “gaze.” When we look at online social networking and the idea of mutuality, it appears that this practice is not about destructing subjectivity or lifeworld. Rather, this surveillance practice can be part of the building of subjectivity and of making sense in the lifeworld.

.....

Online social networking can also be empowering for the user, as the monitoring and registration facilitates new ways of constructing identity, meeting friends and colleagues as well as socializing with strangers. This changes the role of the user from passive to active, since surveillance in this context offers opportunities to take action, seek information and communicate. Online social networking therefore illustrates that surveillance – as a mutual, empowering and subjectivity building practice – is fundamentally social.

.....

The practice of online social networking can be seen as empowering, as it is a way to voluntarily engage with other people and construct identities, and it can thus be described as participatory. It is important to not automatically assume that the personal information and communication, which online social networking is based on, is only a commodity for trading. Implicit in this interpretation is that to be under surveillance is undesirable. However, to participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself – or your constructed identity – with others.

Accordingly, the role of sharing should not be underestimated, as the personal information people share – profiles, activities, beliefs, whereabouts, status, preferences, etc. – represent a level of communication that neither has to be told, nor has to be asked for. It is just “out there”, untold and unasked, but something that is part of the socializing in mediated publics.

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

Social Networks: Making Sense Out Of Terminology

Blogger: Mike Gotta

Any examination of how social networks can be leveraged by organizations should include agreement on terminology. Terms such as social networks, social networking and social networking analysis (SNA), are referenced in a variety of manners without widespread agreement (at least to me), as to precisely what such labels mean. To ensure clarity for myself, as well as for people involved in projects related to social networks, I'm using the following definitions. Please feel free to comment - especially if you are experienced in this field (I'm hoping these definitions are concise enough without being too conceptual). These terms reflect the work of David Knoke and Song Yang (Social Network Analysis) and John Scott (Social Network Analysis) in addition to the work of Linton Freeman (Development Of Social Network Analysis) along with some influence from Robert Cross (Hidden Power of Social Networks), Martin Kildruff and Wenpin Tsai (Social Networks and Organizations) - yes, I've been busy reading and learning:

Social Network: A social network is composed of a collection of actors where some actors are connected to each other by one of more relations. The emphasis on a network that reflects a social structure forms an underlying assumption. Understanding social networks requires analysis of the structural relations between actors and the patterns of interaction among actors. Once comprehended, the influence of social networks on the perceptions, beliefs and actions of its participants can be better comprehended.

Actors: Entities within a social network are referred to as “actors” (also referred to as “nodes” or “agents”). Actors can be individuals, collections of individuals treated as an entity (e.g., a group), organizations (e.g., a company), or nation states. Actors have two types of data associated with them: attribute data and relational data.

Relations: A relation (synonymous with the terms “ties” or “links”), is a type of contact or association that connects actors. A relation between two actors is called a dyad. A triad occurs when there relations among three actors. It is important to note that a relation is not an attribute of an actor but a joint property of the actors in a dyad. Ties between actors can vary. Some ties may exist for purposes of friendship, advice or mentoring. Other ties may exist because of an authority context (e.g., team member related to a project manager) while other linkages may be driven by boundaries of some type (e.g., a council of managers from different lines of business where each actor (i.e., manager) represents a different organizational sub-group within the enterprise).

Attribute data: Attribute data is that information which characterizes that entity (i.e., the data that is independent of the actor’s interaction in a social network). In essence, attribute data is owned by that actor. Some examples of attribute data include: attitudes and opinions, occupation, and gender.

Relational data: Relational data consist of data that a result of a connection. Relational data is a jointly owned property among the actors as a result of their association. Some examples of relational data include: kinship, friendship, boss/subordinate, project team membership, group association, etc.

Note: A relation is depicted as a line on a sociogram (or social graph). A relation is not a node - only actors are graphically depicted in that manner.

Centrality: The concept of centrality, in simple terms, attempts to identify those actors in a network that appear to be highly connected. This is often referred to as “directed” centrality which looks at the number of direct incoming and out-going links. There are other ways of determining centrality. “Betweeness” centrality looks at actors that may not have a large number of direct links but they are in a position that lies between many other actors. “Closeness” centrality is somewhat self-defining - it applies to actors who are a short distance from other actors in the network. Centrality often leads to a discussion on the type of nodes (and roles they may play) within a social network:

• Connectors: are actors that have a large number of links directed towards them such that they function as a central hub.
• Brokers: are often actors that have a high degree of betweeness such that they are in a role of influence where they can acts as gatekeepers and filters for various relation flows.
• Boundary spanners: are actors that provide links between otherwise independent collections actors
• Peripheral actors: are nodes that are somewhat isolated and not linked to one another, there are often considered not active participants but may still play a key role (e.g., subject matter expert)

Merger + Social Computing = Should I Pay Attention To BEA?

Blogger: Mike Gotta

The answer is yes in the long run but no in the short run.

There is a dual reality here: Oracle will eventually acquire several credible social computing tools (Reality #1 - some of BEA's stuff, especially Pathways, is really good). However, it is not clear at all, how those social computing technologies will be positioned, integrated and/or discarded (Reality #2 - a lack of transparency creates uncertainty which is a legitimate customer concern to postpone any buy decision or direction on continued deployment). 

These two news items, announced merely four days apart (see below), should be a stark reminder. Until the dust settles, I would rate any move to adopt BEA's social computing tools as high risk until product road maps are aligned with Oracle's social computing directions. Ditto on the collaboration and content fronts. Business and IT strategists need to be informed as to what components within the BEA platform survive vs. their Oracle counterparts. This includes knowing what tools will be retired and how similar products will converge over time (or not - perhaps some will remain separate but equal (another duality which might be hard to rationalize but BEA has two portals so it's been tried before).   

If BEA persuades me otherwise - I'll post my updated thoughts.

BEA Announces Stockholder Approval of Merger with Oracle Corporation

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Apr. 4, 2008 – BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS), a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced that at a special meeting of stockholders held on April 4, 2008, its stockholders adopted the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated January 16, 2008, among BEA, Oracle Corporation and Bronco Acquisition Corporation, pursuant to which BEA will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.  Approximately 99.9% of the shares of BEA common stock entitled to vote and present at the special meeting were voted to adopt the Agreement and Plan of Merger, constituting approximately 68.6% of the outstanding shares of BEA common stock.

BEA Systems Releases Platform for Enterprise Social Computing

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 8, 2008 --The new release of BEA AquaLogic® Interaction 6.5 delivers the industry’s first full-fledged social computing platform, with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business – project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems - that are often shared inefficiently through e-mail. The release also introduces improved usability designed to empower knowledge workers to more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a highly flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools.

New features include:

• Social profile pages: energized end-user profile pages, with new features that are designed to allow users to communicate their status and enable social networking and activity-sharing;
• ActivityService™ and new extensibility points for harvesting user interactions: a new REST-based API designed to allow systems to publish activity updates to a centralized service that can render those updates in end-user profile pages;
• Comprehensive RSS production and consumption: a comprehensive notification and subscription service that supports RSS generation to track new activity on common objects, as well as immediate or summary email updates. Additionally, the release features an RSS crawler, to import content into the search index and knowledge management framework via RSS;
• Additional usability improvements: these include human readable URLs, one-click page creation and edit menus, simplified wizard menus and more;
• Infrastructure improvements: these include support for .Net Framework 2.0 and IBM DB2

BEA Systems Releases Platform for Enterprise Social Computing

Governance Isn't Maintenance

Blogger: Craig Roth

Web governance has been a topic of great interest to me for years now because it's a topic of great interest to my clients.  This is why we gave governance a starring role in our new Microsoft SharePoint Infrastructure Planning and Governance workshop.

I feel that Microsoft has woken up to the importance of addressing governance when it comes to SharePoint, a piece of infrastructure that is notorious for often being deployed (or evolving) in a wildly ungoverned fashion.  But when I look at the actual guidance being published outside of Burton Group, governance often seems to just mean maintenance.  For example, this CodePlex page on Governance and Manageability is 95% about manageability in my definition.  A site recycle bin? Management.  Splitting larger databases into smaller ones? Management. Arguably some of the other items listed here could assist with a governance effort even if they are not governance themselves.  For example, usage and storage metrics reporting could be used to check against a policy that a division shouldn't exceed 10GB of storage. 

For many years now I have been putting forth the view that web governance uses people, policy, and process to resolve ambiguity, manage short- and long-range goals, and mitigate conflict within an organization.  Technology only fits into this insofar as it supports a process that is needed to assist with compliance with the Statement of Governance.  The real value of governance is that it helps to pre-decide who wins in arguments before they come to a head (that's the "mitigate conflict" part of my definition).  Details about how to use the admin console to check for orphaned accounts or apply a template to a series of farms are unlikely to cause frothy arguments and are best left to separate maintenance manuals that can be approved and maintained on a different cycle than the Statement of Governance. 

The reason I get picky about what is governance versus maintenance is that the documents are often created by separate people as part of separate efforts and are on different update cycles.  A governance document may state that it's important that information on the website be kept fresh, therefore all web pages have to be updated every 180 days.  If it then goes on to describe which tools site administrators should use to run an aging tool or how to set site settings to expire documents then that information is likely to get out of date, be harder to find by admins who don't want to sort through all the high level stuff, and make the document too onerous for non-techies.  A second reason is that governance documents tend to be lopsided if they are created by techies that like filling it with topics they know a lot about and ignoring high-level, non-technical concerns.  A third reason is that anyone who asserts that they've written a statement of governance that just sprinkles a few platitudes about scope, goals, and policy into a detailed manual for maintenance and manageability is going to look foolish when the groups that truly understand governance (enterprise architecture teams or other higher level governance teams that have written higher level guidance) see the results.