Articles by Month: November 2003

Announcing version 5 of The CMS Report

Tony Byrne from CMSWatch has just published version 5 of his CMS Report. To quote:

CMSWatch has just released the Autumn, 2003 version of The CMS Report, with updated analysis and product surveys. With this 5th version, we now offer the report in two editions: Standard and Enterprise. The Enterprise Edition is designed to address special needs and assess appropriate vendors for those considering large-scale, multisite, or otherwise cross-departmental installations. It also comes with a special comparison tool for demonstrating varying requirements across multiple CMS projects. The Standard Edition is designed to help CMS buyers with more modest and straightforward Web content management needs -- for whom the Enterprise packages and approaches are probably overkill...

Posted by jamesr at 10:30 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

ECM? Actually, they mostly want WCM

Tony Byrne reports on the results of a recent poll on content management, conducted by AIIM at their recent seminar series. Some interesting results:

The ECM industry's major trade association (and all-around cheerleader), AIIM, recently polled 333 end-user attendees at its CMS seminar series. AIIM uncovered a lot of interesting data. Not surprisingly, Records Management remains paramount in the face of serious compliance challenges. But for those technology buyers seeking foremost to achieve cost savings and greater customer value, web content management rises nearly to the top of their wishlists.

Posted by jamesr at 11:00 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Turning mind into matter

Thomas Davenport and H. James Wilson have written an article on business and technology innovation. To quote:

Any technology executive who wants to advance a slate of emerging technologies should become very familiar with ways to foster new business and management ideas. We studied this process for three years in more than 50 organizations, using in-depth interviews to uncover roles and processes for boosting an organization's performance through new ideas. We'll describe these roles and processes, and the steps managers and vendors should take to make ideas a reality. Then we'll outline some ways IT executives can become idea practitioners--those most likely to put ideas into practice. We found that ideas are cheap and plentiful, but implementing them is often very difficult.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Posted by jamesr at 07:24 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

CoP Theory Overview

Christopher M. Johnson has published a beautiful diagrammatic overview of communities of practice. Well worth a look. [Thanks to John D. Smith.]

Posted by jamesr at 03:21 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Q & A on Contentology

I've been interviewed for Contentology, and you can find the questions and answers on the site's homepage at present.

Posted by jamesr at 12:55 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

InformationScienceTheoryWiki

A new Wiki has come into the world: InformationScienceTheoryWiki. To quote:

Also a commenter on my blog suggested a wiki, and Tony Hughes and I talked about that as an interesting way to explore a new information medium and also build a resource that might be helpful to ourselves and others by gathering links, quotes, citations, and our own syntheses of what these theories are about and how they have been applied in our field.

[Thanks to Guide to Ease.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:50 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Knowledge management

Metadata, taxonomies and vocabularies

EdTechPost has published a Wiki page on metadata and taxonomies, with a number of useful links.

[Thanks to Catalogablog.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:39 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

Workflow or workclog?

Martin White has written an excellent article on CMS workflow, highlighting some serious issues. To quote:

As a basic principle, every workflow application should be justified as enhancing the value of the content to the user, and not as a way of "controlling" content in some authoritarian way. By now hopefully you've seen how workflow can mean extra work for all concerned. In the event, make sure there is a pay-off to the actual content contributor.

I agree with everything in this article, and perhaps this is an issue of the "emperor's new clothes" -- the more I look at workflow, the more I think you need less of it. I think it's time to stop driving the implementing of workflow from the vendor's featuresets, and start looking at how it can actually work in practice.

Posted by jamesr at 08:34 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

The importance of documentation

Peter Seebach has written an article on the importance of documentation. To quote:

As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to it, companies stop trying to maintain it -- why bother, if the users won't read it? This line of reasoning is dooming the future of documentation to failure. Documentation is important and needs to be taken seriously.

[Thanks to Tomalak's Realm.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:23 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Category Agreement Analysis

Jared Spool has published an article on Category Agreement Analysis. To quote:

CAA, like its big brother, card sorting, helps determine what the top-level categories for a site should be. Also like card sorting, CAA tells us what category structure is most natural to users.

Posted by jamesr at 10:13 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

KM models - mix & match

Denham Grey has written a blog entry on knowledge management models. To quote:

Clearly it is possible to follow a mix of these models. Organizations that have made good KM progress in my experience subscribe to parts of the Network, Philosophical and Community models with a little cognitive modelling thrown into the mix. The key drivers seem to be connections & relationships, trust, empathy, community, deep dialog and technology to capture persistent conversations.

Posted by jamesr at 08:37 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

The intranet gets serious: making knowledge sharing work

Gerry McGovern has written an article on making knowledge sharing work on intranets. To quote:

The intranet is beginning to restructure the organization in more ways than one. Content is now an asset, and the people who manage it need to treat it as such. Managing editors, and their team, understand how technology can facilitate effective publishing, collaboration and self-service focused application development.

Posted by jamesr at 08:31 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Making sense of learning specifications & standards

The MASIE Center has published the second edition of an e-learning report titled Making Sense of Standards and Specifications. To quote:

The area of learning standards is one of the most powerful and misunderstood aspects of the e-Learning revolution. As organizations make significant investments in digital learning content, they seek greater assurances of portability and reusability. Organizations also desire the ability to more easily store, search, index, deploy, assemble, and revise learning content. One goal of The MASIE Center's e-Learning CONSORTIUM is to lower industry confusion surrounding learning standards and to accelerate their adoption. Thanks to the hard work of the S3 subgroup, we are able to release the Second Edition of "Making Sense of Standards and Specifications." With over forty new pages of content, this new report focuses on the changes and learnings that have occurred since the First Edition was released in 2000.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Posted by jamesr at 10:53 AM | Permalink
Categories: E-learning

Let's have a content management party!

Lou Rosenfeld asks questions about non-vendor content management issues in his blog, such as:

What if we threw a party for content management community, but didn't invite the CMS vendors? Who would show up? And what would they talk about while tucking into the crudités, Doritos, and cheese balls?

This blog entry is an impassioned request for the community as a whole to take a break from discussion one-product-versus-another, and tackle the broader content management issues. Count me in Lou (I've been trying to achieve this goal for some time now).

Posted by jamesr at 09:39 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Working with Bayesian categorisers

Jon Udell has written an article on using bayesian filtering to automatically classify weblog entries. To quote:

We know that autocategorization succeeds in the narrow domain of spam filtering. Whether it can succeed more generally -- for example, by helping blog authors and readers manage flows of items -- is yet unclear. The raw tools are available, but until they're well integrated into authoring and reading software, it will be hard to get a good sense of what's possible.

An interesting experiment in auto-classifying, although the results show that we have a way to go until computers will take over from humans in this area...

Posted by jamesr at 06:21 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

The ROSE framework

Mark Hurst has written an article on the ROSE framework for usability:

• Results
• Organisation
• Strategy
• Experience

[Thanks to Common Craft.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:35 AM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

The intranet gets serious

Gerry McGovern has written an article on how the best intranets have matured. To quote:

Finally, organizations are getting serious about how they manage their intranets. The intranet is now moving out of an evolutionary, experimental phase into a more systematic, managed phase. It is being seen as an asset, a driver of productivity. However, return on investment measurement for the intranet still requires a lot of work.

Posted by jamesr at 08:31 AM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets

Keeping your website sorted

I'm in the newspaper today, being quoted on content management issues for the Sydney Morning Herald. I am (fairly accurately) quoted as saying:

"A website of any reasonable size needs a CMS - you can't do it by hand," he says.

"The imperative for getting a CMS is that today expectations for websites are high. All organisations are expected to have accurate, up-to-date information on their website as the norm."

Posted by jamesr at 08:27 AM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

uzCardSort

Andy Edmonds has published a beta version of a new open-source card sorting tool. To quote:

Card Sorting is a methodology for assessing mental/conceptual models by asking users to categorize a list of terms. uzCardSort is an open source, MPL licensed, Mozilla based tool for conducting and analyzing card sorts. It runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux versions of Mozilla and in other Gecko runtimes supporting XPInstall (sorry, no Camino).

[Thanks to Lou Rosenfeld.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:07 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

Guide to ethnography

Peter Van Dijck has created a wiki on ethnography, the study of human behaviour. Plenty of relevant material here for knowledge management professionals. Thanks Peter!

Posted by jamesr at 08:01 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

NOIE Better Practice Checklists

The National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) has chosen us to join a small panel of providers to develop further Better Practice Checklists, and provide other supporting services.

The current NOIE Better Practice Checklists stand out as succinct and practical views on a range of issues confronting government agencies, including usability testing, content management, metadata and more.

Step Two Designs has been asked to develop four additional checklists on the following topics:

• Selecting a content management system
• Implementing a content management system
• Intranet guidelines
• Improving search engine design

NOIE also has the option to call upon our services in the future to present workshops, or give talks at conferences.

It's great to have the opportunity to work with NOIE, and to publish further material to support organisations in tackling intranet and content management projects.

The Better Practice Checklists are a natural extension of our whitepapers, and the work conducted as part of the NSW Government Review of Content Management.

Posted by jamesr at 04:47 PM | Permalink
Categories:

Three column CSS layout generator

CSS Creator has published a tool for easily generating three column CSS layouts. To quote:

The CSS layouts are based on an excellent 3 column CSS layout designed by Douglas Livingstone. The generator will create a CSS layout that has fixed width left and/or right columns with a dynamic width center column, all the same height with header and footer.

Browsercam Screen Captures show the layout working well in most browsers. Netscape 4 displays the columns in place minus the background colors, all other CSS capable browsers available for testing work well.

[Thanks to logos.]

Posted by jamesr at 12:57 PM | Permalink
Categories: Web development

On search: Result ranking

Tim Bray has written another of his excellent entries on search, this time on result ranking. To quote:

If you're searching a big database, unless you're lucky you're usually going to get a lot more matches to any given query than you want to look through. So it really matters what order that result list is in. Google got to be famous in large part because they do a good job on this; the stuff near the top of their list is usually about what you want, and if you don't see what you need near the top of the list, it may not be out there. Herewith some remarks on how to go about sorting result lists. In general, the news is not very good; however, there are some promising techniques that are under-explored.

Posted by jamesr at 10:25 AM | Permalink
Categories: Search tools

Information architecture references

The University of Minnesota Duluth has published an excellent set of information architecture references, to a wide range of articles, sites and tutorials.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

Posted by jamesr at 08:42 AM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

The Hub: Interaction design

A new site has been recently launched called the Hub, focusing on the multi-disciplinary field of interaction design. To quote:

Interaction design takes place at the connection of technology and personal interaction with products, environments, spaces, platforms, services, social networks.

Each of these areas has its own way of talking about interaction design, and too frequently, they don't cross over. Much existing conversation in the interaction design community takes place within traditional boundaries: graphic designers talk to graphic designers, architects to architects, web and software to the same.

But what if we could envision a way to bring these disparate disciplines and groups together to discuss the commonalities, the design problems we have in common? What if we could create common language?

That's what we're here to do. The Hub offers a place for discussion and reflection about the state of interaction design today.

[Thanks to Lou Rosenfeld.]

Posted by jamesr at 05:22 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Transitional volatility

Noise between stations reports on a document published by David Danielson on transitional volatility. That is, what happens to users when a site is partially redesigned. To quote:

Notes on Transitional Volatility (PDF) by David Danielson (2003), also the topic of his master's thesis. It's a rare, rigorous look at the common guideline to 'make navigation consistent' in a world that has big websites where the navigation must change from time to time. His finding showed that complete consistency is not always the best route.

Essentially he studied how users reacted to changes in the navigation appearance from page to page. He tested use of three versions of one site, each with a different navigation scheme. The 'full overview' had a full site map-like outline in the left nav, the 'partial overview' only listed the second and third level categories for the currently selected top level category, and the 'local context' listed the second level choices for the currently selected top level category plus the third level categories for the current second level category (see screen shots in the paper). Users were given directed-search tasks, or low complexity fact-finding missions.

Posted by jamesr at 02:13 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design

Flowing and positioning: Two page models

John and Holly Bergevin have written an article on flowing and positioning in CSS. To quote:

In doing web design work, it is likely you have heard terms such as "Normal flow" and "CSS Positioning." However, if you are accustomed to using tables for controlling the placement of page elements, you may be slightly hazy concerning what these terms actually mean. If so, it's time we got down to some basics on the ways web pages are visually constructed on the screen by current browsers.

[Thanks to Simon Willison.]

Posted by jamesr at 02:53 PM | Permalink
Categories: Web development

Float: The theory

John and Holly Bergevin have written an article on using CSS floats. To quote:

If you are like most people, the whole issue of Floats is rather intimidating. The theory is difficult to grasp, and on top of that, the bugs are rumored to be numerous and nasty. Well fear not, because we will walk through the concepts, some of the bugs, and the practical uses of floats, in nice easy stages. Be assured that you will suffer no ill effects. Rather, a vast new world of positioning will open up before you. Onward!

[Thanks to Simon Willison.]

Posted by jamesr at 02:50 PM | Permalink
Categories: Web development

Designing customise-centred organisations

John Zapolski and Jared Braiterman have written an article on designing customise-centred organisations. To quote:

Organizations increasingly view usability and user-centered design to be a key ingredient in creating high quality products. Designing for ease of use is a well-accepted goal, even if many organizations have far to go to create user-centered products. Even with the present downturn in the economy, more companies, from new media to established banks, have larger usability and design teams than ever before. Should we be content that we have come so far?

In this context of greater corporate presence, how should user-centered design advocates evaluate whether the field has achieved success? We suggest two questions as possible criteria. First, are the products and services we build becoming more innovative in serving our customers' needs? And are we, as professionals, confident that our activities are as effective as they can be?

Posted by jamesr at 11:39 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management, Usability & user-centered design

Whole of Victorian Government Web Content Lifecycle and Content Management Roles

Multimedia Victoria recently published Whole of Victorian Government Web Content Lifecycle and Content Management Roles, which supports the earlier report. This new reports looks at two areas:

Web Content Lifecycle
The flowchart provides a diagrammatic view of the typical lifecycle for web content as 5 stages: Develop, Quality Approval, Publish, Unpublish and Archive. The lifecycle process and associated actions, content status and content management roles are detailed as part of the flow for web content.

Web Content Management Roles
Typical web content management roles and responsibilities within Victorian Government Agencies are described and recommended for facilitating the successful and efficient management of web content during the content lifecycle.

Posted by jamesr at 03:20 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management

Moving CoPs ahead

Denham Grey has written an blog entry on communities of practice, and their future. To quote:

Think it is time to return to CoP basics. We need to take CoPs to the next level by increasing their participants learning, awareness and innovation potential. This is the crux of the issue and the real source of value.

Posted by jamesr at 02:08 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Multiple Internet Explorers

A technique has just been discovered that allows multiple copies of IE to be run on a single machine. Why is this interesting? Well, it allows sites to be easily tested for compatibility with earlier versions of Internet Explorer, without having to resort to some sort of "virtual PC" solution.

Posted by jamesr at 08:16 AM | Permalink
Categories: Web development

On search (the series)

Tim Bray has published a table of contents for his articles on search. There is a lot of useful stuff and plenty of insight in here...

Posted by jamesr at 08:11 AM | Permalink
Categories: Search tools

Australian Government Endorsed Supplier

I'm very pleased to announce that Step Two Designs is now an Australian Government Endorsed Supplier, under the arrangement managed by the Department of Finance and Administration (more information).

This indicates our commitment to working with the Australian government, on both intranet and content management system projects, and we look forward to further opportunities in these areas.

Posted by jamesr at 08:05 AM | Permalink
Categories:

Group initiation and member perceptions

Lee LeFever has written a very interesting blog entry on group initiation and member perceptions. To quote:

Tom Coates (Everything in Moderation) pointed to a psychological study done in 1959. The bottom line of the study is that people who go through more "harsh" group initiation process are more likely to have a positive perception of the group.

Aronson, E. & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181

As Tom points out, this could have implications in the online community world. In this case, a community builder may consider the effect of their registration process on the perceptions of members. From the conclusion reached in the study, you'd think that an easy way to increase member satisfaction would be to make the registration process more "harsh".

Posted by jamesr at 05:50 PM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Email lists and message boards Where's the middle ground?

Lee LeFever has written a blog entry about the relationship between e-mail lists and message boards. To quote:

I think organizations that have people (customers and/or employees) who aren't high-tech, but could benefit from many-to-many online communications need this "middle ground" technology. They need a way to provide a simple interface (implied email) to "push" the value and they need a "place" (message board) that helps them manage it.

This is a very relevant issue for all communities of practice and intranets...

Posted by jamesr at 05:46 PM | Permalink
Categories: Intranets, Knowledge management

A comic on focus groups

The OK/Cancel team have drawn a small comic on focus groups. This definitely matches my experiences with focus groups, and is one of the reasons that I recommend against relying on them as a source of useful information.

Posted by jamesr at 04:13 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

The interdependence of the structure, information and presentation dimensions

Peter J. Bogaards has written an article on the three aspects of documents: structure, information and presentation. To quote:

Every paper and digital document shares three basic dimensions: structure, information and presentation. Although these dimensions are always interwoven, some people in the digital world mostly focus on document structures (e.g. information architects), some on the information they contain (e.g. marketers and writers/editors) while others specialize in the (interactive) presentation aspects (e.g. visual designers and Flash developers). The mutual dependence and interaction of these dimensions is the next level of design and does not regularly get the proper attention. In order to better understand the relationship between these dimensions, let us look at each of them separately, and how they inter-relate.

Posted by jamesr at 04:08 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, Interface design, Usability & user-centered design

Metadata and search

The results of a recent Dublin Core workshop on metadata and search have been published, and it makes for interesting reading. To quote:

The pre-conference workshop "Metadata and Search" addressed the challenges of using metadata to help users find information, particularly when using site- or domain-specific search engines. Discussions of this specific problem rapidly grew to encompass numerous related areas, including the costs and benefits of creating metadata, integration and interoperability, methods of metadata creation, quality issues, and information architecture. Here we summarize the workshop, identify key themes and insights, and suggest directions for future developments in practice and research.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

Posted by jamesr at 04:05 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture

The art of usability benchmarking

Scott Berkun has written an excellent article on usability benchmarking. To quote:

One common concern raised by managers and engineers alike is this: how usable is enough? This question, and the absence of an easy answer, is often the first defence people offer against investing in usability and ease of use. The smart usability engineer or designer has at least one response: the usability benchmark. By capturing the current level of ease of use of the current product or website, a reference point is created that can be measured against in the future. It doesn't answer the question of how usable is enough, but if the benchmark is done properly, it does enable someone to set goals and expectations around ease of use for the future.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

Posted by jamesr at 04:01 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design

Work on networks

Clay Shirky has written an annotated bibliography on recent work on networks (both social and business networks). To quote:

Much has changed and much is still changing in the way we understand networks. In particular, thanks to work in the last five to 10 years, we have a much deeper understanding of the way human networks work and a much greater ability to visualize those networks. We can finally begin to predict how networks will behave over time.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Posted by jamesr at 06:59 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Learning strategies

Jackie Dobrovolny has written an article on the learning strategies used by adult learners. To quote:

The model presented in "A Model for Self-Paced Technology-Based Training" specifies that adult learning begins with and is sustained by self-assessment and self-correction (metacognition). The model also indicates that in addition to metacognition, adults consistently use the following learning strategies: reflection, prior experiences, conversations, and authentic experiences. Here are specific techniques adults use when they apply these five learning strategies.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Posted by jamesr at 06:56 AM | Permalink
Categories: E-learning

Can XML drive taxonomies and categorisation?

Bill Trippe has written an article on XML and taxonomies. To quote:

When it comes to a specific question, such as, "How does XML support taxonomy development and usage?" the answers that come forth can be far-flung, disparate, and confusing. The waters get muddied further if you tune into all the announcements from the vendors, industry groups, and analysts who have opinions about such matters. What you might call a taxonomy, a vendor might call a thesaurus, or vice versa. What one vendor accomplishes automatically, the next one might accomplish with some manual intervention, and so on.

Posted by jamesr at 05:50 PM | Permalink
Categories: Information architecture, XML

Choosing the right CMS authoring tools

My KM Column article for this month is on choosing the right CMS authoring tools. To quote:

November KM Column: There is no single best authoring environment provided by a content management system. Instead, the authoring tools must be matched to the job at hand to ensure they are easy and efficient to use.

As ever, your feedback and comments are very much appreciated...

Posted by jamesr at 05:01 PM | Permalink
Categories: Content management, James' articles

Information gathering template

Denham Grey has published a simple information gathering template for use in knowledge management projects. It identifies the following key areas:

• People
• Places
• Problems
• Promises
• Principles
• Patterns
• Products

Posted by jamesr at 09:36 AM | Permalink
Categories: Knowledge management

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

Usability.gov has published a set of comprehensive web design & usability guidelines, consisting of a massive 128 page, 39.2Mb PDF book. To quote:

The primary audiences for the Guidelines are website designers, managers, and others involved in the creation or maintenance of websites. A secondary audience is researchers who investigate Web design issues. This resource will help them determine what research has been conducted and where none exists.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Posted by jamesr at 05:17 PM | Permalink
Categories: Usability & user-centered design, Web development