There is no doubt that fuelled by a compelling business need, a portal solution can provide real business advantage. However provisioning a portal when it is a content-managed site that is required, will result in the most expensive website or intranet that an organisation can build. What then should those organisations ...
Blog category: Information management
July 5, 2006 by James Robertson
The real cost of email in organisations
Much has been written about the impact of 'email overload', in terms of the productivity cost and impact on attention spans for staff. There is another very real cost of the reliance on email: the duplication of information management activities. 'All staff' emails are often used to send out new policies ...
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June 12, 2006 by James Robertson
Succeeding at IA in the enterprise
I've just had an article on succeeding at IA in the enterprise published on Boxes and Arrows. To quote: Working within the enterprise, we are confronted with new challenges. There is a lack of clarity around needs and goals, organisational issues are paramount, and the real challenge is making things ...
May 31, 2006 by James Robertson
Why defining requirements is not good enough
Patrick Cormier has written a blog entry on the importance of having an integrated information management plan. To quote: It is not good enough to adopt, as a starting point, "we need a content management system", or "we need a document and records management system". Other starting points are equally ...
May 24, 2006 by James Robertson
Email and content management
Seth Gottlieb has written about email and content management, highlighting the problems that email overuse causes, as well as discussing some possible solutions. To quote: Never to be one to rant without a solution, here are some tips to solve the information management problem. I refuse to believe that the ...
May 17, 2006 by James Robertson
Web 2.0 meets the enterprise
Howard Greenstein has written an article on web 2.0 in the enterprise. To quote: An umbrella term for an emerging core of technologies, trends, and principles, Web 2.0 is not only changing what's on the Web, but also how it works. Many believe that CIOs who understand these new applications ...
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April 4, 2006 by James Robertson
Rethinking EIA: becoming information ecologists
Rob Fay has written an interesting article on rethinking enterprise IA. To quote: This post attempts to rethink EIA and argues that information architecture need not be constrained to designing structures and managing content as it relates to the Web or for any electronic system for that matter. Instead, I ...
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March 3, 2006 by James Robertson
Tips for enterprise content management project success
Brian Buehling has written an article discussing tips for ECM project success. To quote: In recent years, there has been much debate on various approaches to solve the enterprise content management (ECM) and publishing problem. Initially, most of the discussion revolved around technical issues ranging from the selecting the best ...
March 2, 2006 by James Robertson
ECM is dead – long live ECM!
Alan Pelz-Sharpe has written an article about the future of ECM. To quote: As of today most firms spend little or no time studying content flows within their organization. They look instead to existing ECM vendors to offer solutions for their enterprise. Yet these ECM projects seldom ever scale out ...
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February 28, 2006 by James Robertson
Ajax arrives for the enterprise
Christopher Lindquist has written an article discussing the use of Ajax in the enterprise. To quote: But while clothing trends come and go, Ajax looks like it may stick around, offering Web developers a means to create rich clientlike applications on webpages without resorting to huge amounts of code or ...
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February 23, 2006 by James Robertson
Avoiding coupling in your portal implementation
Robert Bogue has written an article about avoiding coupling in your portal implementation. To quote: Portals, which are necessarily at the heart of an ever-changing array of programs and solutions within the organization are especially vulnerable to coupling. It starts out simple at first: the special notice that one application ...
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February 18, 2006 by James Robertson
Federated records management – the next check-off box?
Priscilla Emery has written a blog entry introducing "federated records management", a concept I haven't come across before. To quote: Federated RM can be extremely useful for those organizations that have a variety of document repositories in place and don't want to have to go through the hassle of migrating ...
February 2, 2006 by James Robertson
Why vision documents stink
Scott Berkun has written a short article on why vision documents stink. To quote: At a talk yesterday I asked an audience of program managers how many of them had read a vision document. Most of the 100+ in the room raised their hands. I then asked how many had ...
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February 1, 2006 by James Robertson
Taking a business-centric approach to portals
Enterprise portals (generally known as just 'portals') rose to prominence several years ago. Complementing or replacing earlier technologies, portals promise to deliver a more coherent information management platform, and a more seamless user experience for staff. Now that the early hype has died down, it is not surprising to find that ...
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January 22, 2006 by James Robertson
Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?
The need for improvements in information management systems and practices within organisations is great. Spend half a day talking with a random selection of staff, and the list of desirable fixes and enhancements will be lengthy. Whether it is the need to log into three different applications to complete a single ...
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January 11, 2006 by James Robertson
The death of enterprise software
Joe Lamantia has written two interesting blog posts on the death of enterprise software. The first post looks at increased competition from smaller players in the market. To quote: For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences -- and correspondingly low ...
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January 6, 2006 by James Robertson
Business and IT must work together to manage new “web 2.0″ tools
Dennis D. McDonald and Jeremiah Owyang have written an article on bringing the business and IT together, when addressing new (web 2.0) technologies. To quote: Significant opportunities to meet market and customer needs are emerging as corporations harness the next generation of "Web 2.0" tools and applications. Many business units ...
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January 3, 2006 by James Robertson
Information management as a unified discipline
Patrick Cormier has written an excellent article on integrated information management, outlining the many different facets involved. To quote: Until quite recently, Information Management (IM) practitioners have practiced their craft in isolation. Typical stereotypes and perceptions often portrayed records managers belonging to the basement, IT specialists in high paced I ...
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November 30, 2005 by James Robertson
Managing key information
When planning an information management strategy, there can be an overwhelming volume of documents and other content to address. Within even a single business unit of a typical organisation, thousands of documents are created in a given year. While it would be desirable to have all of these managed to the ...
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November 8, 2005 by James Robertson
Enterprise usability
Jakob Nielsen has written an article on what he calls "enterprise usability", which addresses the broader issues and challenges of software (etc) in an organisational setting. To quote: Complex rules often cause enterprise usability problems. For example, airlines are notorious for the complexity of their fare structures. This causes individual-user ...
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November 2, 2005 by James Robertson
Enterprise information architecture in context (revised)
James Melzer has published a revised version of his enterprise information architecture diagram. To quote: Back at the beginning of October I spoke at the 2005 East Coast IA Retreat on Enterprise Information Architecture. The talk was about using the language of Enterprise Architects to talk about IA among enterprise ...
November 1, 2005 by James Robertson
10 principles of effective information management
Improving information management practices is a key focus for many organisations, across both the public and private sectors. This is being driven by a range of factors, including a need to improve the efficiency of business processes, the demands of compliance regulations and the desire to deliver new services. In many ...
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October 6, 2005 by James Robertson
Eight problems with your firm’s strategic plan
Hank M. Harris has written an article on problems with strategic planning. To quote: I have seen many planning efforts involving a facilitator who knows nothing about the industry (for example, a generic management consultant) or one who knows too much (a former practitioner). For lack of a better approach, ...
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