mind this - by Lars Plougmann

For everybody else's eyes only

Traditional access control or authorisation regimes allow you to set up rules so that content stored in a particular place can only be accessed by people with particular permissions. The approach has never quite met the requirements of professional services and other businesses and it is likely that the model will need radical rethinking to cope in a world where tags and other metadata, rather than folders, are used to navigate information.

In knowledge-based industries the value of sharing information is so immense that a 'for your eyes only' approach to authorisation impedes productivity and innovation. Requirements for confidentiality in professional services and other businesses is often linked to information barriers (aka Chinese walls).

Authorisation rules based on information barriers are very different from the traditional drive/folder/group permissions. We need access controls to deal with rules that can be expressed as 'content tagged with client A cannot be viewed by people tagged with client B'. The underlying exclusion principle and the dynamic nature of this kind of authorisation regime make it difficult to represent in permission schemes that follow the file structure paradigm.

The collaborative tools that are put to inspiring use on the open internet need authentication and authorisation in place before they can migrate to the enterprise. Or better still, they need to integrate with existing authentication and authorisation infrastructure. But what if the organisation's existing permissioning infrastructure does not reflect the way information barriers are put in place and content is profiled?

Tags: enterprise 2.0 permission information barrier professional services authorisation tagging compliance

How to avoid mysterious golfing cart accidents

Last month, I wrote about how companies without intranets are adopting wiki platforms. This week, I met with a client who wants to replace their existing intranet with a wiki. There are many reasons to make that decision, but two stand out:

• To cut the publishing cycle from days or weeks to minutes or seconds thus ensuring that the content is more relevant
• To move from content nobody wants to read written in corporate speak to information about what is really going on written in a human voice

The importance to the client of human voice reminded me of The Cluetrain Manifesto where I dug up a quote that sums up the intranet discussion nicely:

"The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There's no going back. If a company doesn't recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents."

What the authors saw years ago is starting to happen (the intranet bit, not the golf cart accidents).

Tags: intranet wiki human voice The Cluetrain Manifesto golf cart accidents

The email capacity battlefield

While people struggle to keep their email archive below imposed storage limits at work a battle is raging in the market for free web email products. The latest development is Yahoo's announcement that their free webmail service will offer unlimited storage in near future.

Google's Gmail started the capacity race in 2004 by offering gigabytes of email storage. The following year, Google started increasing the storage limit on a daily basis to give the illusion of unlimited storage. But the fact is that if your percentage utilisation is increasing (i.e. if your email is growing faster than the allowance) you will run out of space at some point.

The three main webmail providers will soon be offering unlimited email storage which will then cease to be a competitive factor. The focus will change to attachment limits fair use policies and other features such as being able to use your email client of choice.

Despite the rise of collaborative spaces and secure extranets for document interchange, email is still the way business is done today. One company reports that some of their employees receive around a gigabyte of email per month, not counting spam. At many companies, imposed mailbox limits are in direct conflict with people doing their jobs and it is one of the reasons the relationship between IT departments and fee earners sometimes turns adversarial.

An industry has sprung up to offer solutions for sharing of large files with services such as DropSend operating with a 1 Gb attachment limit. But sometimes the fastest way to move data is by sailboat.

Tags: email Google Yahoo Yahoo Mail Gmail email storage mailbox limit DropSend attachment storage

Nothing is ever finished. Define and reach milestones

Houses are an oft used metaphor when describing achievement. Using the traditional metaphoric qualities of house construction, doing the last work on a building so that it is ready to occupy is hailed as completion. But this doesn't describe our world accurately. If we regard the act of moving into a new house as a milestone we can breathe new life into the metaphor and use it to describe the world around us more accurately. What happens when we move into a new house is countless modifications that makes living in it a better experience, until circumstances or ambitions change and a more fundamental remodeling is undertaken.

That software is never finished is an accepted truth; software version numbering schemes have become a meme in and of itself and made category jumps to other areas where major and minor version numbers proliferate.

Products are never finished. Milestone versions of products are launched on the market but product development continues, both in the lab and amongst end users.

Documents are never finished. Milestone versions become books, product specs or legal contracts. Sooner or later new editions replace old, specs are updated and improved, contracts are renegotiated.

This is a world that wikis model well. The platform allows both for gradual evolution or complete rewrites. It is easy to see what has changed and it allows multiple participants to contribute.

Will the wiki concept itself become a future metaphor for human achievement? The world is but a draft with multiple authors.

Tags: wiki draft evolution version numbers

The memory of you

Google are announcing that they are going to improve privacy measures by limiting the amount of data that can be used to identify you. With personalised services there is a trade-off between the usefulness of the service and privacy: The more data for algorithms to be unleashed on, the better the resulting recommendations, search results etc. Google are planning to introduce retention policies mandating the anonymisation of data after 18 to 24 months.

On Amazon, I can see orders that I placed in 1997 when I started shopping with them. My HSBC internet banking account only allows me to see transactions up to seven weeks in the past; if I am looking for earlier information I have to resort to printed statements which is annoying (of course, HSBC will retain that data for a lot longer but I don't have access to it). How can a service you subscribe to determine what a useful retention period is?

It can't. What I hope to see in future versions of many services is a way to set the retention period for your data as part of your preferences. As the B2B software-as-a-service market matures this will be a critical feature for many businesses with retention policies already in place.

What is likely to happen in the longer term is increased user ownership of your personal data and a choice of where you want to host it. A natural service area for identity providers to expand into.

Tags: Google privacy retention identity Amazon HSBC clickstream personal data internet banking

BusinessWeek tells CEOs about wikis

In 2004 when I introduced a hosted wiki as an experiment to the knowledge department of a law firm, adoption was almost instant. I primed it with a top level structure reflecting the things that mattered to our team: People, Projects and Ideas. Within a week, two projects had decided that this was the best tool to use for project management and communication, somebody started compiling a list of useful technologies and vendors, others started sharing ideas and links to articles. Most took the opportunity to provide a richer profile of themselves than the intranet allowed. The wiki clearly filled a vacuum, somewhere between email and the document management system. Yet, a few were not interested and didn't participate.

In short, a typical wiki adoption story. But the typical story may be about to change.

Many wikis started as an experiment by a small team, then spread virally. Now, CXOs and the business press have started to notice the power of simple tools like wikis. The success of Wikipedia explains part of the fascination (imagine having your own corporate equivalent) and a number of case studies are becoming well known.

BusinessWeek just published a series of articles on wikis as part of their CEO guide to technology (main article). Last month, InformationWeek reported on Enterprise 2.0, explaining that it is about "a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts--whether co-workers, partners, or customers." Their survey found that while a third were using the new tools, most technology professionals remained wary.

As the scales tip, collaboration centric initiatives are graduating from skunkworks to management sponsored projects engaging those communities eager to participate. This increases the likelihood of broad internal adoption of powerful, enabling technologies like wikis.

Tags: wiki law firm collaboration

Dimensional tagging approaching collective intelligence

At last week's Future of Web Apps conference, Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo presented an example of the power of tagging in flickr, a photo sharing website. I have replicated the example which was a search for photos tagged with geographic coordinates and the phrase route66. When plotted on a map, the results cluster nicely along the legendary highway Route 66. The map represents an example of collective intelligence: No single person had to travel the entire length of the highway to produce it.

The example shows how large collections of data can reveal patterns not evident at the item level. Could flickr's innocuous hobbyist photographers help us reveal, say, crime hot spots in London? Maybe with time; so far there are less than 100 data points:

The approach to reveal collective intelligence is illustrated with photos in this example, but there are many potential other applications: Customer records, documents, call centre entries, laboratory measurements and most kinds of transaction records. The central requirement is that people are free to apply tags to the data. Any tags. If the only option is relating items to a taxonomy, the data set will only answer yesterday's questions (for which the taxonomy was designed).

  A false positive for the crime tag 
  Photograph by Elliot Moore.

Working with information in this manner means dealing with a new type of complexity which springs from the fact that the tags originate in individual human minds. The Route 66 example does not result in a perfect tracing of the US Highway - somebody seems to have gotten lost in Arkansas and Utah. And there is a semantic angle as well, aptly illustrated by the fact that one flickr photographer has added a crime tag to the photo of ducks and added the coordinates for Kentish Town, a part of London. This is where statistics come in with algorithms for identifying and dealing with outliers.

What data collections do you have or are being built where tagging can be exploited to reveal patterns?

Related:

• Tag clouds with a silver dollar lining - about tags, again with flickr as an example
• New geography 101 - about geotagging and GPS

Tags: tagging aggregation collective intelligence FOWA fowalondon07 fowa07 flickr Yahoo Bradley Horowitz crime ducks

Google Apps becomes a commercial product

Some five months after launching Google Apps for Your Domain, Google is out with a commercial version called Google Apps Premier Edition.

Google Apps Premier is a beefed up version of Google Apps for Your Domain (Gafyd), itself a repackaging of some well known Google products. With Premier, you get email, shared calendar, instant messaging, internet voice calls, web page publishing and real-time collaborative documents and spreadsheets. Mailbox limit has been raised to 10 Gb, email is covered by a service level guarantee and there is support for users and the administrator. Annual subscription is $50 per user. The existing Gafyd product remains available for free.

The service is not a fully fledged office suite. There is no application to churn out presentations; this could be a deal breaker for many organisations where Microsoft PowerPoint has taken over from Microsoft Word as the environment of choice for writing documents. The spreadsheet is not as advanced as Microsoft Excel, it lacks pivot tables for example. The power of Google Docs and Spreadsheets is in the real-time sharing capabilities.

I have helped set up the Google Apps for Your Domain service for three startup companies and Gafyd remains a good, free option for small firms and organisations. In fact, the free version of the service is more attractive now that Premier offers a way to grow (extra mailbox limits, meeting room schedules, support and SLAs). There is little reason for startup firms to opt for the Premier Edition right away, but Premier could be attractive to organisations that want to simplify their IT or save costs - and need migration of users, email, data or integration with an existing infrastructure.

All the concerns raised about SaaS in general are applicable to Google Apps Premier Edition. Don't use if you are concerned with what jurisdiction your data resides in. Don't use if you are based in a country that is likely to block access to the service. Think twice about it if your teams are offline for long periods of time or served by low bandwidth (see Zero bandwidth scenarios, March 2006).

Most of my previous predictions about Google Apps have been proved right with the launch of Premier. I suspect future versions will address behind-the-firewall access and include more applications. Behind the firewall access will be provided by rolling out Google Apps to the users of Google appliances. Behind-the-firewall access is likely to be addressed before offline access. A wiki is a likely application to be added to the mix, perhaps a one with presentation features to address the lack of a slide composer. Google has more applications that would be useful in an enterprise setting and some of them, such as Analytics, Blogger, Translation, may find their way into the Apps bundle.

Some organisations that start using Google Apps might find it difficult to adjust to "2.0" thinking, particularly if they have been used to traditional office suites. Throughout, these tools rely on tags and search rather than folders, inviting participants instead of emailing copies and a timeline of changes instead of formal version control. All very wiki, bringing with it a change to a more agile relationship between information, people and the organisation.

Tags: Google Google Apps Premier Edition Google Apps Gafyd SaaS office suite Google Enterprise Gmail collaboration tagging

If your organisation has no intranet: An opportunity

I have recently had a series of meetings with a number of small and medium size, high growth, knowledge intensive firms in the professional services sector. None of them has an intranet. My reaction and advice is "Great opportunity. Don't get a traditional intranet."

The concept of an intranet is a great idea. Making all relevant content accessible to everybody in one place. But many companies' intranets suffer:

• Information changes quicker than the intranet team can update it. No content is static.
• When the perception is that the information on the intranet is not up to date it stops being the first source for vital business matters
• The intranet structure typically reflects the shape of the business as of yesteryear
• The process for updating information on the intranet involves finding out who is responsible for a particular page, then describing a proposed change in an email which gets added to a work queue. Most people only involve themselves once in that process if they don't see the page updated within a short time
• Ownership is often skewed: When only a few people can edit stuff on the intranet, an "us" and "them" culture arises. In the worst cases, the intranet becomes the object of blame and ridicule.

The opportunity available to organisations without an intranet is to use some of the new social tools and build an open intranet. An open intranet is one where any user can create a new page and every page has a nice friendly Edit button on it. Anybody within the organisation who wants to update or add information is empowered to do so.

Doesn't that approach lead to chaos? is one of the objections. To a certain degree it does, but there is order in the chaos. This type of intranet will not necessarily evolve into a neat hierarchical structure. But that is not a problem: The information itself is not necessarily hierarchical in nature, and navigation aids exist to work with information organised by different means (search, links, tags etc.).

Can we trust our people to write and edit the information on the intranet? is another one. You already trust your people to advise clients on business strategy so I don't see why not. Besides, most tools offer mechanisms that facilitate review of recently updated content, and everybody is free to correct inaccuracies. Similar information is already being exchanged via email; with no transparency, no mechanisms to discover inaccuracies and limited ways of collecting information for the purposes of wider sharing.

An open intranet helps develop a culture of sharing relevant information and encourages broad participation in maintaining that information.

Tags: intranet wiki open intranet SME information sharing participation

Shared calendars as an example of alignment with individual incentives

One of the aspects that hampered knowledge management (KM) initiatives in the previous century had to do with the separation of work and KM activities. First you did the actual work, then spent some time doing the KM bit. Some systems forced you to do the KM bit first, trying to increase the probability that it got done. KM required individuals to invest time in making information useful in a larger context, on the basis of top-down categorisation schemes that had to be learned. The approach didn't gel well with human nature and plenty of people found ways to circumvent it.

Consider for a moment the near-ubiquitous electronic calendar as a good model of interaction. It allows you to organise your time without requiring extra effort compared to a paper organiser and it even offers some handy features: You can reschedule appointments without using an eraser, you can create repeating entries easily, it will remind you of upcoming meetings, it can synchronise with multiple devices. But the real benefit of using electronic calendars is evident at the aggregated level: Using shared electronic calendars drastically reduces the time required to schedule meetings with colleagues.

Crucially, the benefits are there without the need for additional effort on behalf of individuals to make the information useful to the group or the organisation. The same principle is the driver behind the new breed of collaborative tools.

A good collaborative architecture provides a platform that works for the individual - a place to work with, store, contextualise, search and exchange information - while offering an unobstructive way to make the information useful to a wider group. A spectrum of opportunities for participation is opened up, from discovering relevant information and co-production to refactoring, syndication and mash-ups [link to FT article behind paywall].

We are moving away from old KM (with its separation of work and the places you put work) to better support for knowledge intensive processes (SKIP?). Skipping onerous tasks associated with KM is more in line with human nature. The tools themselves are simpler and the benefits greater.

Tags: collaboration knowledge management support for knowledge intensive processes KM SKIP collaboration architecture human nature calendar shared calendar participation