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Column Two
News and opinion on all things KM & CM |
James Robertson
Step Two Designs
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Written by James Robertson Step Two Designs |
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Articles by Month: August 2002
Designing a communityChristine Perfetti interviews Derek M. Powazek on how to design for community. A quote from Derek about the meaning of online communities: "Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time." Throughout the interview, the central role of the users is highlighted, along with the challenges of providing them with a space they will want to use. Posted by jamesr at 01:47 PM
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Knowledge Management PrimerThe University of Toronto has published a Knowledge Management Primer, providing an introduction to KM in 14 modular sections. The main parts are as follows:
They also provide a good list of links to other KM resources. Posted by jamesr at 01:26 PM
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New intranets categoryI've just created a new category on intranets, to bring everything together in the one place. Not quite sure why I didn't create one in the first place, but it's there now. Posted by jamesr at 01:21 PM
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Optimising intranet ROIMike Parsons writes about how to determine ROI for intranets. A quote from the article: ROI with intranets and extranets can be hard to determine. Many of the benefits fall into the 'soft' category and therefore lack the weight of clear revenue improvements. However, there is much evidence to suggest the real impact intranets and extranets can have. The bulk of this article consists of small case-studies, compiled from other sources. While there is little practical advice on how to determine metrics, the article is still worth a read. [Thanks to Simon Willison's Weblog.] Posted by jamesr at 11:41 AM
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Australia's growth industries in the knowledge economyThe Department of the Parliamentary Library has released a research note on the growth of specific industry sectors in Australia, in the context of the shift to a "knowledge economy". To quote: [Thanks to Eric Scheid.] Posted by jamesr at 05:58 PM
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E-mail makes for customer non-serviceC|Net has published a summary of a recent Jupiter Research into customer service via e-mail. A summary: If you're looking for a quick response to a customer service question, don't count on e- mail, according to a new study. Only a third of the companies surveyed by Jupiter Research bothered to immediately acknowledge they had gotten customers' e-mail in the first place, sending an automatic response. Most of the companies did eventually respond to consumers, but don't hold your breath; only 52 percent got back within 24 hours, while 32 percent took three days or longer. Posted by jamesr at 11:53 AM
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Usability testing resourceThe Usability SIG has provided a Usability Toolkit, which is a collection of forms, checklists and other documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews. While the quality of some documents is a bit patchy, this is nontheless a huge boon for the usability industry as a whole, and a valuable resource for all practitioners (whether novice or experienced). [Thanks to ia/.] Posted by jamesr at 11:44 AM
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CMSs in e-learningelearningpost has interviewed Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible, on the role of content management in e-learning. Here is a sample of what he had to say: What's really important to me is figuring out what exactly you want from your learning system or information system. From my point of view, I have certain information resources that I would like to deliver to certain people in a certain way. That's not a technology question. That's not about what system I have. Rather its about what information do I have, who wants it and how do I deliver that information in the best possible way. Posted by jamesr at 11:34 AM
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XML: single sourcing lives?As a response to an earlier article, Norman Walsh provides his view on XML: One Input---Many Outputs. His conclusions:
This is an excellent discussion, and it's good to see that a bit of controversy is generating some thoughtful responses. Even if both sides are deliberately painting the issues in black-and-white, to prove a point... Posted by jamesr at 11:22 AM
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Usability testing a registration formMatthew Ellison writes up the results of usability testing five different versions of the registration form for the WinWriters online conference. This is usability testing at it's best. Here is an organisation of online help people using an ideal opportunity to test and challenge their approaches, on a concrete problem. The results are interesting, and they warrant reading the article in full. Posted by jamesr at 06:56 PM
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Design problems in healthMichael B. Moore talks about Top 10 Design Problems in health systems. This covers the usual suspects, but is useful in that it looks at things from a specific health focus. The main items covered:
Posted by jamesr at 06:21 PM
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Australian knowledge-based economyThe Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released today a paper exploring the role of the knowledge-based economy in Australia. To quote: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is responding to the needs of Australia's policy makers to better understand the economic and social dynamics of knowledge-based activity with the release of a new discussion paper today. I was particularly interested to read that the "ABS estimates that nearly 40% of the Australian work force today are 'knowledge workers', compared to 33% in 1989". I will endeavour to read through this, and summarise in the next couple of days. Posted by jamesr at 04:14 PM
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An interview with Louis RosenfeldBoxes & Arrows have published an interview with Louis Rosenfeld (co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web). Well worth a read. Something I don't agree with (I've written about this before): I’m very leery of combining an IA pitch with a usability pitch. Many prospects (and, unfortunately, many information architects) don't know the difference, and it’s important to correct this misconception. Not only is this a responsible, educational and helpful act on your part, it will also help you to distinguish yourself from usability specialists who might otherwise be perceived as competitors. Reducing the number of competitors is always a Good Thing. Something I definitely agree with: CMS present a golden opportunity for information architects. True CMS (as opposed to document management systems) require schema design, not to mention content modelling and workflow analysis. They often require metadata to support searching, browsing, and administration. All this design will have to be customized to meet the needs of a particular set of users and business owners. CMS vendors’ professional services groups usually can’t handle this melange of custom design and evaluation. That's where we come in. Posted by jamesr at 12:49 PM
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New weblog initiativeYou may have noticed that I don't tend to post much on weblogs themselves (I feel it is way too "introspective"). That being said, a new initiative has caught my attention: BlogMD. This has the following aims: The guiding principle behind the BlogMD initiative is that by creating standards in the weblog metadata "problem space", we can enable greater collaboration and interaction between existing applications, as well as paving the way for future, currently unforeseen metadata applications by reducing or eliminating much of the redundant, "reinventing the wheel" work currently involved in creating a new weblog metadata application. I think this is a great idea, and I look forward to see what comes of it in the near future. [Thanks to Andersja's blog.] Posted by jamesr at 12:00 PM
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Act KM meeting (Canberra, Australia)From Amanda Lee:
Posted by jamesr at 11:47 AM
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Fixing the Microsoft intranet?Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have written an article on fixing the Microsoft intranet. This is a huge system, with other 3 million (!) pages, and 8000 separate (and inconsistent) intranets. In other words, a mess. The approach taken was to develop a "portal" with a consistent taxonomy, and an improved search engine: So Microsoft?s MSWeb team heard the word and knew that the time had come for a more ambitious approach to improving MSWeb. The team?populated by an impressive mix of information scientists, designers, technologists, and politically savvy managers?began to consider what users meant when they called for better (or any) taxonomies. Instead of the traditional biology-inspired definition, Microsoft?s employees thought of taxonomies as constructs that would help them search, browse, and manage intranet content more effectively. While this is an interesting article, I would question whether this is tackling the core intranet problems. Are staff really much better off with an improved search engine, when there are still millions of pages, and thousands of inconsistent intranets? What of information overload? I would also question the quality, accuracy and currency of all this information. I would bet that a review of these pages would find that 75% could be deleted, due to innacurate, irrelevant or duplicated content. To me, this is all symptomatic of major cultural and process problems within Microsoft. No doubt, this is a product of the "internal competition" policy that held sway until recently. Still food for thought, and I look forward to seeing the next article in this series. Posted by jamesr at 11:34 AM
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The intranet market is brokenThere are a huge number of intranets within organisations worldwide. By Martin White's estimate, for example, there are over 300,000 intranets in the UK alone. Yet the intranet marketplace is almost non-existant. For example, there is only one blog devoted to intranets, less than a dozen serious websites, and no active mailing lists. What is happening here? Borrowing loosely from economics, what we have is a very inneficient marketplace. There is a need, and suppliers, but no easy mechanism for connecting the two. My thoughts on the reason for this:
Yet the need is certainly there. Intranets have the potential to deliver huge strategic benefits for an organisation, if they are designed and managed correctly. Thankfully the growth of content management systems seems to be providing an impetus for some businesses to re-evaluate their intranets. I have some ideas about what can be done to fix the intranet market, but I would be interested in receiving your comments before posting them. Posted by jamesr at 09:21 PM
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Meeting Martin WhiteI met Martin White of Intranet Focus last night, for the first time. He hails from the UK, and was in Sydney to present a pair of one-day seminars on intranets and communities of practice. We've communicated via e-mail for a while now, and it was great to finally meet him "in the flesh". It was also very reassuring to talk with someone else who has the same approach to content management and intranets, and who's business is heading in the same direction. As Martin put it: "Sometimes, I have to pinch myself and ask: why am I the only one to be doing this in the UK?". I know exactly what he feels like sometimes... Martin is a man who certainly knows his stuff, and we spent four hours talking about the challenges of intranets, CMSs, KM and search engines. Much food for thought, that I will have to go away and ponder. If you are in Europe or the UK, definitely talk to Martin about enhancing (or fixing) your intranet. Posted by jamesr at 09:00 PM
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RSS problemsI know I am not alone in having problems reading RSS feeds. Almost every day, my news aggregator (AmphetaDesk) complains about XML parsing problems in one of my news sources. This is just not good enough. It's a problem that needs to be fixed in the weblog software itself:
If it isn't valid XML, it isn't RSS. It's as simple as that. Some other posts discussing this problem: Posted by jamesr at 04:49 PM
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Small scale KMDavid Weinberger presents a range of KM ideas that can be done on a shoestring budget. These include:
This is a great little article, with simple no-nonsense ideas. A breath of fresh air after so many vendor "white papers". Posted by jamesr at 04:40 PM
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Nice to be appreciatedMy point of contact at the Area Health Service just sent through (out of the blue) a very nice testimonial on the project: We are very impressed with the report, its findings and recommendations and that I believe you achieved a finer detail or level in your consultation because of your approach and rapport established with all staff and consumers. So many people commented on the whole consultation process that there was a buzz and I hope there will be a continued interest, but you managed to achieve a level of trust and respect with these people by taking an interest in them, their work and their needs that brought out more information than we had anticipated. It's been a lot of hard work, but I'm pleased the end result, and it's good to see that my client is too... Posted by jamesr at 04:32 PM
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Final intranet recommendationsAll I've left to do on the Area Health Service project is to write the executive summary. The major recommendations have now been written, and reviewed. In bullet-form, this is what we identified: Strategic recommendations
Tactical recommendations
You'll notice that many of these recommendations extend beyond a direct focus on the intranet, and address cultural and process issues. This is not just the glib recommendations of a consultant. Instead, all of these have come directly out of the stakeholder interviews or usability testing, and are born from a recognition that the intranet does not sit in isolation of the broader business issues. Posted by jamesr at 07:06 PM
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Accessibility arguments revisitedHenry Poskitt writes about his experiences while working on the Irish National Disability Authority (NDA) IT Accessibility Guidelines. As a result of talking with a number of different organisations, his approach has shifted a little. To quote: This narrow focus [on extreme disabilities] is at the expense of a much larger segment of society, that have milder impairments such as partial sight, poor hearing, and poor language skills. The needs of this larger group can be more easily accommodated – resizable text, big tactile buttons, plain easy to follow instructions etc. are simple and inexpensive design steps to implement. This approach to design would be of benefit to us all – not just the impaired, think of the next time you try to get cash from an ATM while wearing gloves. The focus for development needs to be on how to make gradual and sensible improvements that cater for the many, as opposed to focusing on daunting Utopian solutions that breed in-action. A good article, presenting a view from someone at the "coal-face" of accessibility. [Thanks to WebWord.] Posted by jamesr at 01:02 PM
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Back from holidaysAs you may have noticed, I'm back. Norfolk Island was very pretty, and extremely relaxing. Much needed. All I have to do now is to catch up on my e-mails and weblog entries... Posted by jamesr at 10:12 AM
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Managing employee blogsRay Ozzie has released a draft of the Groove policy on employee weblogs. While encouraging personal weblogs by employees is an interesting and challenging way of connecting with customers, it does potentially expose the company to additional legal liability. This draft policy presents a sensible middle ground that spells out the responsibilities of the employee, instead of listing a huge set of restrictions and legal clauses. Posted by jamesr at 10:05 AM
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XForms nears releaseRobin Cover has written a useful summary of the news that XForms 1.0 has been released as a Preview Candidate Recommendation. This is a good specification, in principle. There is a strong need for a consistent way of creating and managing forms, across platforms and software. I will have to set aside some time to carefully read the specification, and see how it works in practice. Posted by jamesr at 10:01 AM
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Going on holidayTomorrow morning, I'm off to Norfolk Island for a much-needed holiday. I'll be back sometime on Sunday, although I may not get back onto my weblog until Monday. So I apologise in advance for the lack of posts for the rest of this week. I'll be taking a mix of sci-fi and knowledge management reading material, and a notepad. We'll see whether any great insight strikes me while relaxing in the sun... Posted by jamesr at 06:08 PM
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Intranet goalsI'm busy (very busy) writing the final recommendations for the Area Health Service project. One of the last activities we conducted was to sit down and determine a new set of intranet goals. The old goal was as follows: “To improve access and delivery of information to staff and customers through the effective and efficient use of technology”. While this was fine, as far as it went, it tended to focus the intranet on delivering static information, without addressing the broader issues. We have now replaced this with a more detailed set of goals, and this is the first draft version:
These are more than just "high ideals", they help to set the direction of the intranet, and how it fits in the context of the whole organisation. Posted by jamesr at 06:01 PM
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No demand for social newsI am busy writing up the final report for the review of the Area Health Service intranet and website. This is a draft recommendation that I thought might be of interest to the KM folks. Your comments? No demand for social news 'I don't have time to get involved in the social issues at the area level': staff person indicating they don’t read the social news, except in their local newsletter. As part of the stakeholder interviews, staff were queried about the type of news they value. Not a single participant expressed any interest in receiving 'social' news via the various newsletters, even when specifically asked about it. Instead, staff rely on their local social networks to hear about activities that are of interest to them. This could be conveyed via a local newsletter, face-to-face gossip, or e-mails. As such, the area-wide newsletters should not be used to disseminate social and community news. Instead, they should focus on conveying details on broad initiatives, projects and building works. Posted by jamesr at 01:05 PM
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Fixing intranetsIt's interesting how the same issues seem to come up in bunches. Over the last month, I have now talked without about five different organisations (mostly government) about the problems with their intranets. All are facing exactly the same challenges:
All of these organisations are looking to "revamp" their intranet, and perhaps install a full content management system. The question they want answered is: where to go next? This is something that I have tackled with the Area Health Service, and you can find my running diary on this project. The final report is due in the next week. I've also written up a KM Column article on the topic, and this will be released in September. This outlines a sixteen step process for renewing a corporate intranet. The very interesting thing: this is not a technology problem. Generally, it is a content, information architecture and usability problem. Culture and processes also need to be addressed. All of this needs to be looked at in a wholistic way, as the intranet does not exist in isolation from the organisation it serves. The good news is that it's not a big drama to fix the handful of major problems with an intranet, and I'm refining the process each time we do it. In fact, it should be possible to have a major impact on the usage of an intranet in only 1-2 months, without generating a massive project. More on this over the next few weeks... Posted by jamesr at 01:27 PM
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Weblog aggregation toolThere's a tool that I've been quietly using for the last month to aggregate news feeds from 36 different sites. It's AmphetaDesk, and I would recommend it for anyone who doesn't already have an aggregation tool. So what does it do? Well, you copy-and-paste the URLs for the RSS feeds into the system, and it goes away and collects the most recent articles. These are then assembled into the one results page, making it easy to scan through and identify items of interest. I haven't mentioned this up to now, as I wanted to give it a "road test", to see how well it peformed in practice. My conclusion: it's good, very good, even. It is still in an early form, and there are a number of extra features I would like to have, but it certainly meets my core needs. Best yet, it's free. (Although you can contribute to its maintenance, if you like.) Posted by jamesr at 01:14 PM
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Content Management conferences (Sydney, Australia)There have been an absolute flood of conferences and workshops organised for the latter part of this year. While they are all very interesting, I wonder whether there are enough attendees to go around. Anyway, I've fallen behind in noting these, and I'm just starting to catch up now. IQPC is presenting a two-day conference on: Strategic Website Content Management ARK Group is presenting a two day workshop on: Struturing Content Through Taxonomies (Note: I'm not involved with either of these, just trying to keep people informed.) Posted by jamesr at 05:45 PM
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Bechmarking KM in law firmsStuart Kay has conducted an interesting review of the state of KM in U.S. and UK Law Firms. A quote from the article's introduction: Law firms are already sophisticated managers of knowledge. They have to be - that is the nature of their business. In some respects they are therefore justified in thinking that 'knowledge management' is merely the latest fashionable term for describing their existing knowledge sharing initiatives. However, most firms could significantly improve the way in which they manage their knowledge. Though knowledge is the core of their business, it is surprising how many firms are resistant to investing in improving its collection, storage and dissemination. A number of key differences were found between the attitudes in the UK and UK markets. For example: US: Many firms in the U.S. are waiting for the 'killer app' that will, in one swift installation, meet all their knowledge sharing needs. This is highly unlikely to happen. It would require artificial intelligence of a degree of sophistication that is neither available nor immediately foreseeable. Hopefully in Australia, we are more in the UK mould than the US "technology-centric" approach. Time will tell. Posted by jamesr at 05:10 PM
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Single sourcing is wrongTerje Hillesund presents a very challenging viewpoint on why Many Outputs - Many Inputs is right, and "one input, many outputs" (single sourcing) is wrong. This is discussed from the context of XML and publishing systems. Despite the somewhat confrontational style of this article, Terje presents his points clearly and backs them up with plenty of supporting material. To quote: Without arguing the powers of XML, I will in this essay warn against computer scientists and conversion house salesmen telling publishers that XML will bring them into a relatively uncomplicated era of one book - many formats. XML will not change the fact that new electronic media give rise to new genres, new presentational principles and new distribution channels. XML will rather add to the diversity of publishing and lead publishers into a challenging state of "many outputs — many inputs". And:
I confess that despite evangelising the benefits of single sourcing, there have always been nagging doubts, born of practical experience with the limitations and issues. I have already given up the idea of "content reuse", so perhaps "single sourcing" needs to be the next to go. Posted by jamesr at 01:14 PM
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How does your IA and usability team operate?Saul Carliner has written an extensive and considered article on Business Models for Information Design and Development Departments. In this, I would include: interface design, information architecture, usability and techwriting. He presents six ways in which these teams typically operate:
This is useful, as it helps to clarify questions such as:
Posted by jamesr at 12:52 PM
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Applying contingency designMatthew Linderman has written an article on Making Mistakes Well. This talks about the need for websites to handle gracefully user errors and problems, and how a failure to meet this need drives away customers. To quote: Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It's error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, and customer service that helps visitors when a problem occurs. Yet no matter how much testing and quality assurance has gone into a Web site, customers will encounter problems. And, Web sites consistently fail their customers at crisis points. Several key guidelines are presented:
Posted by jamesr at 12:40 PM
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Usability of windows helpDonna Timpone wrote an article a while ago that asked the question Is your help system usable?. While this is back in the days that Windows Help was still the default, and HTML was just on the way in, it still has many valuable lessons for current solutions. What I find interesting is apparent shift away from online help, in whatever format. I've heard few mentions of it recently, despite the steadily more complex software being released. I note with some concern that Microsoft Office, for example, seems to be have provided less help with each new version. Online Help still has a valuable role to play, even for web applications, and as this article highlights, it needs to be integrated with other forms of training and communication. Posted by jamesr at 12:31 PM
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Usability for documentationVesa Purho has written an article on usability heuristics for documentation to complement the many lists of heuristics for web interfaces. The following key attributes are identified:
This article dates back to 2000, and focuses on product support documentation, but is nonetheless relevant for most documentation projects. Posted by jamesr at 01:18 PM
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Towards a storytelling architectureTom Reamy has written a two-part article for KMWorld exploring the use of storytelling in an organisational setting. Part 1 provides a background to storytelling, while Part 2 discusses how to establish a "knowledge architecture" around storytelling. These are practical articles, packed with useful insight and tips. Well worth a read. Posted by jamesr at 12:46 PM
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KM that saves livesThomas H. Davenport and John Glaser write about a project at Partners HealthCare in Boston. This looks at addressing the challenge of getting doctors the information they need: How can physicians stay on top of what they need to know about 10,000 different diseases and syndromes, 3,000 medications, and 400,000 articles added to the biomedical literature each year? The answer was to the embed the knowledge into the IT systems used by the doctors to fill proscriptions and order tests. This is a really interesting project, and I think it points the way to where all healthcare systems should be going. Posted by jamesr at 12:13 PM
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10 tips for shared purposeChristopher M. Avery has written an article on 10 secrets to a shared purpose. This outlines some tips on how to build an effective and cohesive team:
Posted by jamesr at 11:51 AM
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KM for lawyersLucinda Schmidt has written an article for BRW on Law's new tools. This looks at the use of intranets in law firms, as well as the impact of knowledge management more broadly. To quote: Knowledge management is not a new idea for law firms; they have used sophisticated precedents databases and libraries for years. What is new is the growing push for acceptance of knowledge management as an integral part of the way a law firm runs its business, rather than as an isolated administrative function. And another good quote: "It is not just about getting the document right or collecting all the information. That is under control. Now they realise there is so much more. It is fine to have really good precedents, but for proper knowledge management you need cultural change towards sharing ideas and knowledge." At the end of the article, there is also an interesting summary of a recent survey of 16 big law firms on their implementation of KM. [Thanks to Intranet Focus Blog] Posted by jamesr at 11:10 AM
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Usability testing completedApologies for the lack of posts over the last few days. I've been incredibly busy running usability tests (3 days of 5 per day) at the Area Health Service, while sick with the flu. Looking forward to the weekend. The usability testing went well, I think. We had a huge range of users, everyone from managers, community representatives to the apprentice gardener. Overall, it didn't reveal any startlingly new information. It did, however, confirm the views developed during the usability evaluation of the intranet and website. For example:
Key tasks, such as finding a leave form, or booking for training, were almost impossible to do. Unless they had already had exposure to these sections, users universally struggled for up to 10 minutes trying to work out how to do them. It was really interesting to see the mismatch between user success and opinions. Almost every user described the intranet as "pretty easy to use", despite struggling to find even the simplest of information. (Some users went around in a loop four times looking for the right page.) This highlights that you can't rely on user feedback to characterise the usability of a site. Some observations and thoughts that surfaced during the testing:
The only thing left to do now is work through the 115 pages of raw material, and develop the final report. A task for next week. I'll also report further on the results of the tests over the coming days. Posted by jamesr at 10:55 PM
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Frustration not an issueOne of the key questions used in the stakeholder interviews for the Area Health Service was: "What is the most frustrating administrative task that you have to do?". It was expected this would identify a raft of administrative and organisational hassles that could be addressed by the intranet. Instead, here are the soundbites I collected relating to this issue:
In short, being part of the public service, staff simply took for granted that administrative tasks are difficult and inefficient. In fact, the word "frustration" did not, in general, generate any immediate recognition or associations. This was a big surprise, as it is typically taken for granted that the intranet should be used to automate common administrative tasks, as one of the first steps. Instead, the following recommendation will come out of this review: There is little short-term value in focusing on using the intranet to streamline organisational or administrative activities. Instead, the following activities are likely to generate greater immediate benefits:
More broadly, I think this highlights the value of stakeholder interviews as part of any knowledge management project, just to challenge the current set of assumptions. Posted by jamesr at 06:05 PM
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Card sorting completedThe card sorting session yesterday with the Area Health Service went well, and generated some good results. The high-level structure of the intranet has already been identified as one of the two biggest barriers to usage (the other being the search engine), so all eyes were on the results of the session. Of course, this will hopefully be the first of several card sorting sessions, with additional sessions including other primary user groups: clinical staff, admin, etc. The main menu items they came up with were:
They also added two extra main menu items, to provide additional ways of finding information targeted at specific user groups:
The session was a lot of fun as usual. Interestingly, the group was very egalatarian, with all participating equally. They walked away feeling pretty satisfied with themselves, and I think this will be the talk of the corridors for the next few days. We started preparing for this at about 10am, and had the categories prepared and cards written (including a quick bite of lunch), by the time the users arrived at 1:30. They finished up by about 3pm, leaving us a small amount of time to prepare for the usability testing next week. Posted by jamesr at 06:50 PM
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Usability: common industry formatThe previous article made reference to the Common Industry Format for usability. This has been developed by NIST and is now an ANSI standard. They list their accomplishments as:
I have to ask: how is it that this stuff stays so quiet? I have read a lot of usability books, and have never heard this mentioned. Maybe I've just been reading the wrong material... Posted by jamesr at 06:36 PM
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Usability contactI've just come across a reference to a site on how to specify, test and report usability, as part of a contractual arrangement. This is a good idea, in principle, and I think an evaluation of usability should be included as part of every software development project. As to how well it works in practice, I guess I'll just have to try it out in my next project. Posted by jamesr at 06:33 PM
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Focus groupsBill Shackelford has written an introduction to focus groups in the context of developing an e-learning system. There is some good stuff in there, although I personally disagree about his thoughts on the prototypes (he doesn't believe in them). Posted by jamesr at 06:26 PM
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Small is beautifulTom Weiss has written an article on why small is beautiful, when selling a CMS. The article discusses the current state of the market, future trends, and the impact of small-scale solutions such as weblogs. He states: With the market becoming more competitive, everyone is looking to cut their costs, and many consultancies are doing this by dispensing with the commercial CMS and bundling their own product in with implementation services. Posted by jamesr at 06:08 PM
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XHTML 2.0: why?Kendall Grant Clark has written an article summarising the changes incorporated in the new XHTML 2.0 draft. He identifies the major new features as:
I was far from excited when I read all these changes. In fact, I think they are deeply misguided, for a number of reasons:
In short, I would ask: what is the need that is driving this new version? Is the world crying out for HTML's problems to be fixed? I think not. Instead, this is just a bunch of "standards" writers, who are keeping themselves in a job. Let's get all browsers implementing the current standards (CSS 1 & 2, DOM 1 & 2 & 3, ECMAScript, etc) before creating more sources of incompatibility. Posted by jamesr at 05:57 PM
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An XML version of framesThe W3C has just released an initial working draft for XFrames. This is intended to replace current HTML frames, in the process resolving many of the problems with the current approach. You can read a good summary provided by Robin Cover. These are the usability problems this spec is supposed to solve:
My take on this: it's great that the problems with frames are finally recognised by the W3C, but it's too little, too late. If history is anything to go by, this W3C spec will be ignored like most of their recent releases, and it will have absolutely no impact on the world at large. Oh well. Posted by jamesr at 02:10 PM
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Smarter content managementVictor Lombardi discussing taking web publishing to the next level, and creating a smarter content management system. This is built around the core concept of the publishing system knowing something about the nature of the content, and taking automatic steps based on this. This is what Victor is talking about: If we can provide pre-determined rules for the system to assemble the content components, we could simply enter the content and let the system do the rest. For example, a company that makes products could create a rule that states, "Whenever a new product description page is published, create links in the sidebar to related white papers, support documents, and local retailers." On the page for a particular white paper, a corresponding rule could state, "If a new product description is published and is relevant to this white paper, create a link to it in the sidebar." Rules could be created hierarchically, so that sub- rules could determine what links appear in the sidebar and sub-sub-rules determine how each link in the sidebar is displayed. [Thanks to ia/.] Posted by jamesr at 01:59 PM
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Day 8 of a content inventoryDonna Maurer is still working away on the content inventory for the intranet she manages. I'm finding this blow-by-blow diary very useful, as it gives an idea of how long a big content inventory takes, the issues encountered, and the benefits provided. Posted by jamesr at 01:52 PM
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New book on topic mapsAddison-Wesley Professional has just released a new book titled XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web which they describe as a "complete introduction and application guide to the world of topic maps". I haven't seen (or read) this book yet, so I can't provide a review. You can, however, find a lot of info on Robin Cover's pages. Posted by jamesr at 01:45 PM
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Perfecting healthcareAs part of my recent work, I stumbled across a project by Hunter Health called Perfecting Healthcare Delivery. This is truly knowledge management in action, and it combines the best of storytelling with personas. The project focuses on Maggie, a fictional 75-year old Hunter resident, who needs to make use of the hospital facilities. By putting a face to the the community, the project aims to re-evaluate the entire healthcare system from a user-centred perspective. In this way, a range of issues and problems can be identified whole the entire patient interaction, not just relating to a specific service or system. According to Hunter Health, a similar program in Swedent looking at patient inflow had these results:
Already some interesting results have come from the project, and I think this idea could be applied in a number of different sectors and industries. Posted by jamesr at 07:27 PM
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Second day of stakeholder interviewsNear the end now of another long day of interviews at the Area Health Service. I've now talked with everyone from the senior executive, through admin and lower management, to clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and allied health). What is interesting is that, despite the hugely different roles, responisibilities and working environments, some key themes are turning up again and again. These include:
I've also expanded out my questions about people's social networks, and seem to be making more headway now. Despite that, sessions have generally dropped to 45mins each, which might be due to increased experience or efficiency on my part. I certainly think that a good stakeholder interview can be squeezed into 45mins if required, with the full hour providing more than enough time for a chat at the end. Posted by jamesr at 06:52 PM
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First day of stakeholder interviewsWell, I'm very tired now, having completed 5 hours of stakeholder interviews, with 30 minute gaps in between. Overall, the questions held up pretty well. I haven't been successful in determining social networks, but the information gathering behaviours have been clearly identified. As hoped, we have also identified a lot of other issues that are prventing wider usage of the intranet (primarily around availability of PCs, culture and available time). One idea that occured to me after the first interview was to start documenting soundbites. These are brief verbatim comments from users about specific issues. I now have over a page of these, covering a wide range of topics, and they are incredibly powerful. This is storytelling in action, and I think these will be the most valuable product of the whole stakeholder interview process. The plan is now to sprinkle these through the final report, underlining the points being made, and making it all concrete. Posted by jamesr at 07:20 PM
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What are the goals of a CMS?I've just published the latest article in my regular KM Column series: What are the goals of a CMS? Related articles: How to evaluate a content management system Don't forget that you can sign up to the papers announce list, to find out when new articles are released. Posted by jamesr at 06:15 PM
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Stakeholder interviewsI'm back working with the Area Health Service tomorrow. The next three days will consist entirely of stakeholder interviews, finished up with a day of information architecture activities (card sorting). We've taken a different tack with the interviews than previous approaches. In the past, focus groups were convened to discuss how the intranet is used, and what changes could be made. This time, instead of focusing on the intranet, we'll be investigating what information is needed by staff. To this end, we'll be asking a range of questions:
This is really a simple form of knowledge mapping, trimmed to fit within our time and budget constraints. I have five one-hour sessions scheduled for each day, so it's going to be pretty exhausting. Hopefully though, by the end of this, we will have a clearer idea of how the intranet can help staff to do their daily work. Of course, it's going to be a challenge to facilitate answers to these quite difficult questions. I'm looking forward to refining my interviewing skills, and fully expect to revise the set of questions at the end of each day. I'll report further as we make progress. Posted by jamesr at 12:45 PM
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Powerpoint presentationsFor those of you who didn't make it to my talks this week, you can at least download the Powerpoint presentations:
Posted by jamesr at 12:12 PM
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Step-by-step to blogs in businessBlogroots devotes a whole chapter to Using Blogs in Business. This is the most comprehensive discussion I have seen of how a weblog can benefit an intranet. Various key weblog proponents are interviewed, samples and screenshots are provided, and case studies explored. Simply excellent. [Thanks to elearningpost.] Posted by jamesr at 11:32 AM
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BC&C newsletterThe Fall edition of the Berkeley Computing & Communications newsletter contains an article on the The promise and perils of content management systems, written by Pat Soberanis. I managed to get a few quotes in this, along with a couple of others from the content management field. Posted by jamesr at 11:22 AM
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Weekend rantBeing one of the few speakers at Open Publish to talk about business goals, processes and people issues has really crystalised my thinking about a few issues. Thus the weekend rant: I think the days of technology-focused CMS vendors is over. Nowdays, organisations are looking for a complete business solution that will provide them with real long-term value. Simply delivering a software package, and hoping for the best, will not achieve this. Instead, all content management system vendors need to understand a range of support approaches, including:
I know of one particular vendor (who shall remain nameless) who developed an amazing content repository: very fast, powerful searching, lots of other good features. They did this over five years ago. Yet, they are terrible interface designers, and have no conception of real-world usability or information architecture. The solutions they deliver are technically superior, but are amongst the most confusing interfaces I have ever seen. My message to them: learn fast, or sell up. It is simply not professional to think you can be simply good coders when you are delivering content management solutions and web interfaces. Not that I'm letting the consultants off the hook either. In the tender for the Area Health Service, I competed against a number of the big names in usability and information architecture. The problem is, each of these organisations is incredibly narrow in their focus. If they specialise in usability, they don't do information architecture, or vice versa. The thing is, rarely is a client actually looking for "usability". Instead, they are looking to "improve their intranet", or some other similar goal. Meeting this need involves a number of different disciplines. I would go one step further and say: there should not be separate consultants for usability and information architecture. On the web at least, the two are so tightly tied together, they should be treated as one discipline. I've got all that off my chest now. Your thoughts? Posted by jamesr at 10:59 AM
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Why I still like DTDsDocument Type Definitions (DTDs) are the mechanism provided within XML to allow the structure of a document to be defined. It allows things like "each chapter has a title, followed by one or more paragraphs" to be specified. This is very handy when it comes to building publishing and content management systems. In recent times, there has been a strong push to replace DTDs with "more advanced" alternatives. The most well-known is W3C's XML Schema Language. One of the big benefits of these languages is that they provide data typing. That is, you can say "this is a date", or "this is a number". Which is, in principle, a good thing. Trouble is, the way the W3C language has been implemented is mess. Very complex, inconsistent, and really only serving the needs of the database crowd, not us publishers. Amelia Lewis has written a thought-provoking article on the issues with the W3C Schema datatypes. If you are into XML, this is well worth a read. Posted by jamesr at 05:24 PM
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Another intro to usability testingAndrew Starling presents a outline of usability testing in practice. While this is probably not as new for us as it is for their web developer audience, it still covers plenty of good material. Topics covered include:
Despite claiming to be a practical overview, the article still makes usability testing seem a lot harder than it needs to be. For example, it claims that usability testing should only be run by a behavioural psychologist, and that testing should be done in a full-blown testing lab (video cameras, etc). In some spots, the article seems more like a promotional piece for the usability group, rather than a genuine introduction. Still, any article that helps to explain what usability testing is about can't be a bad thing. Posted by jamesr at 05:14 PM
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Marketing government websitesPtricia Daukantas summarises a discussion at the recent US FedWeb 2000 conference on how to market government websites. In all, they came up with 93 individual suggestions about how to bring greater traffic to public sites, many of them building on the not-for-profit status of the organisations. Posted by jamesr at 05:04 PM
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Redesigning a site on usabilityA little while ago, the Usability Professionals' Association initiated a project to redesign their overgrown website. For a bit over a year know, this has been making steady progress, primarily via a range of online communication methods. You can see where they are up to on this page. There's some interesting techniques at work here, and some practical results. I'd like to see a lot more detail (this is an ideal application for a weblog), but it's better than nothing... Posted by jamesr at 05:00 PM
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Prototyping optionsChris Farnum writes about what an IA should know about prototypes. This is a good article, which spells out a range of prototyping options and when to use them. It also presents some good practical advice on how to go about prototyping. Posted by jamesr at 04:42 PM
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Storytelling technologyThe single most interesting talk I saw at Open Publish was by Bob Jansen on "Electronically Publishing Oral Histories". This presented his work on building an interface for capturing and presenting information in a narrative (storytelling) form. The demonstration he gave was from a project at the Sydney Jewish Museum (I think that's the correct name). This presented the story of a holocaust surviver, in her own words. This was presented simultaneously in several forms:
This was a compelling and thought-provoking demonstration. It's really good to see that there is still some true innovation in the field of information delivery, and I can see a lot of application for this approach in a corporate environment. For more information on this, visit Turtle Lane Studios. Posted by jamesr at 11:05 AM
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Thoughts on conferencesI'm finally back in the office, after a whirlwind tour of three talks in three days, in two different cities. I thought I would take the opportunity to summarise my thoughts on the conferences, and how they compared. IIM 2002 There were a lot of talks on knowledge management at this conference, in addition to the usual content management and records management presentations. What I found really interesting is that almost all speakers highlighted the importance of people and processes above the technology aspects. I find this terribly encouraging, and I think it shows that a new level of maturity is spreading across the industry. Gone are the days of "quick fix" technology implementations, with cultural changes being recognised as critical to long-term success. Of course, there are still a few pockets left. I found myself strongly disagreeing with the comments of many of the panel members, who were discussing how to implement integrated document management systems. One question from the audience was "How do I get the business involved in the process?". One panel member indicated that he found it practically impossible to get the business groups to "take responsibility" for IT systems, and that this was the fault of business management. My take on this: IT departments have consistent crushed any business involvement, or lied to the business about the real issues. Is it any wonder that the business is now reluctant to get involved, now that the trust has been broken? Open Publish 2002 In comparison to IIM 2002, Open Publish focused very narrowly on how to maximise publishing systems, in isolation of all other issues. Talking to Tim Kannegieter (Standards Australia), his presentation on knowledge management was received by stunned silence. I know this wasn't due to Tim's speaking style, as I have seen him present on many occasions... There were few, if any, talks on the importance of people, processes or cultural issues. The concept of meeting business goals and strategies was also sadly missing. Instead, there were plenty of talks on how to use XML to build better workflow or publishing systems, optimising PDFs, and doing dynamic document assembly. I chatted with one attendee who asked me: "What should I chose: SGML, XML or Framemaker?". When asked what they wanted to get out of these technologies, she expressed the view that the conference was "telling her that she had to upgrade to these systems". I found it very disturbing that the only message coming through from the conference was "implement new technologies, because they are new". I would like to think that these narrow approaches are dying out, and that the concept of IT in the broader business picture is growing in stature. Still, I think we have a long way to go yet... Posted by jamesr at 12:14 PM
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Requirements for new productsRyan Olshavsky has written an interesting article on the role of requirements definition in the process of creating a brand new product. He highlights the risks inherent in building a new product, and gives solid reasons why "seeing what sticks" is a costly and fuitile approach. He also briefly touches upon the value of personas. A good article, well written and to the point. Posted by jamesr at 11:51 AM
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Balanced scorecardI haven't had, up to now, a reason to investigate the Balanced Scorecard methodology. I've now discovered that the Area Health Service that I'm working with is just starting into a major Balanced Scorecard implementation, and that this will underpin all their strategic planning. I therefore need to learn more about this, and quickly. So it was interesting to come across an article by Andrew Pateman on why the public sector should be using balanced scorecard. Now, this article is pretty light-on, with a fair bit of "sales pitch", but it still makes some interesting points:
Posted by jamesr at 11:36 AM
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