WebSphere Portal Coolness Factor Just Shot Through The Roof

by Erica Driver.

Today, IBM announced that it will bring Google's consumer-style Web utilities, called Google Gadgets, into WebSphere Portal 6.0 and WebSphere Portal Express. Nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets will be available to WebSphere Portal 6.0 customers at no additional cost. Google Gadgets include things like package tracking, Wikipedia searches, language translators, weather, and--my personal favorite--the Virtual Flower Pot. (Just today I realized that the reason my red tulips weren't growing is because I wasn't watering them by mousing over them frequently enough.) What this all means:

• This move increases WebSphere's value. Google Gadgets, alongside the oodles of portlets that IBM and its business partners already provide for WebSphere Portal (see this list), will encourage adoption of WebSphere Portal as an important element of composite app infrastructure. It's about more than virtual tulips; Google Gadgets also include busines-suitable tools like stock ticker trackers, currency converters, and Web site traffic monitors. For more Forrester viewpoints see the January 17, 2007, Forrester report "Business Software Platform Vendor Profile: IBM" and see the October 4, 2006, Forrester report "Trends 2006-07: Application Server Platforms."
• Digital work environments are becoming more contextual. With Google Gadget support in WebSphere Portal, people will be able to get valuable services delivered to their digital work environments that they previously have only been able to get when they have their consumer hats on. Workers will receive these services contextually--in the context of the portal environment they use every day to find and interact with information and people and get work done. For more information on the importance of contextual services see the March 8, 2006, Forrester report "Context Is King In The New World Of Work."
• Web 2.0 technology complicates the life of information and knowledge management pros. As more rich content, mashups, and social computing become part of the work environment, part of an information and knowledge management professional's job will be to figure out how to optimize all the options available to workers based on their roles so that information overload goes down and productivity and innovation go up. For related research see the Jan. 10, 2007, Forrester report "Wikis Change The Meaning Of 'Groupthink'" and see the Sept. 10, 2006, Forrester report "Social Computing For The Enterprise Architect."

Retention Management Best Practices – Hard To Find

by Barry Murphy.

Last spring, Forrester introduced the concept of retention management, which extends records management to all content from creation through long-term retention and destruction (check out the Retention Management document).  Seems simple enough, but with so many repositories of information (hard drives, network file shares, SharePoint sites, email servers and archives, and any number of managed repositories) extending retention policies to all of it is all but impossible.

To get a sense of how organizations address retention management, I reached out to approximately 300 companies for a research interview, figuring maybe 10 would be willing to speak about what they are doing.  In an indication of how hot the topic is, over 30 companies wanted to speak further.  Having conducted about half the interviews so far, it’s clear we are at the very beginning of the learning curve for retention management. 

Some emerging hypotheses to date:

IT owns retention management.  While IT staff cannot necessarily create the retention policies (that’s up to records management, compliance, and legal), budget authority and ultimate responsibility lies with IT.

Retention management is a 5 year vision.  Executing retention management does not happen overnight.  For most organizations, putting management around all content regardless of where it lives will take at least five years.  Yes, there is work to be done and tools to deploy in the early years, but achieving the vision of managing all content from birth to death will take time.

The upfront work is hard – and messy.  As with many projects, the early work in retention management involves political battles and change management.  Organizations must first put granular retention policies in place – and address all content with those policies.  Next comes figuring out how to organize that information, creating a file plan (taxonomy) and standard metadata vocabulary.  And finally, tools must be in place to enforce and audit policies.

The solutions landscape is fragmented.  When it comes to retention management, there is not one product that can be deployed today as a black box to provide the solution.  Rather, there are a number of products – records management, message archiving, file system archiving, desktop imaging and collection, search and analytics, and eDiscovery – that can help to get closer to achieving the goals of retention management.  But, there is much consolidation to be played out, leaving customers wary of putting all their eggs in one basket.

Litigation and information risk are becoming the dominant drivers.  As organizations digest the impact of the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (for more, see my eDiscovery Market Overview), there is a growing sentiment that the ability to response to electronic discovery requests is a cost of doing business.  No organizations wants to be the next Morgan Stanley and run into millions of dollars in fines.

Agree?  Disagree?  Want to talk further about what your organization is doing?  Send me an email at bmurphy@forrester.com.

How To Restore Email To Its Productivity-Enhancing Glory

by Erica Driver.

I just got off the phone with a small software startup called Get Back Software. For $3/team member/month, a department head can use Get Back’s product, called Postware, to put a cap on the number of emails that people in their group can send. The thinking behind this new software as a service is that email has turned from a productivity-enhancing tool into a productivity sinkhole, and that by giving workers a limited “email allowance” you can change their behavior—you can get them to think twice before cc:ing their boss or replying to all, or inviting a colleague to lunch via email rather than by walking down the hall or picking up the phone. I agree with the core premise here—that the productivity benefits of tools like email (and instant messaging and mobile devices) go down when the volume of communications hits a critical mass and when workers have no control over the volume and frequency of interruptions to their work.

But I’m not sure that putting yet another technical limitation on the ability of people to communicate in their desired way is the answer. After all, information workers already have technical limits imposed upon them in the form of mailbox quotas and attachment size limits. These limitations don’t encourage them to send less email; rather, people spend time cleaning out their mailboxes to make room for new mail, or emailing a sender or picking up the phone to find out why they haven’t received a presentation they were expecting (which was nabbed by the company’s content filtering tools because the file was too big). Workers will find ways to work around technical limits—such as through the use of instant messaging. Or maybe they’ll start using their Gmail or Hotmail accounts instead of work email accounts. In my view, restoring email back to its initial productivity-enhancing glory requires a multi-pronged approach:

• Create a policy that includes legal requirements and etiquette guidelines. For an example of the kinds of things that should go in this document see the June 23, 2004, Forrester report “Why Email Etiquette Guidelines Matter.”
• Offer rich communication and collaboration alternatives. Team collaboration is a good example. Have people send links to documents stored on team workspaces rather than send email attachments around. Not only does it free up storage space but it can help reduce version control issues and can help teams get organized.
• Educate and train the workforce. Help people easily identify when the best time is to use specific communication tools (e.g., email, IM, telephone).
• Deliver contextual collaboration services. Email—and other collaboration services, like instant messaging—make the greatest contribution to workers’ productivity when the service is made available in the context of the business process in which the workers are involved and the applications they are using every day to do their jobs. For more information see the March 8, 2006, Forrester report “Context Is King In The New World Of Work.”
• Move toward unified communications. Unified communications links communication technologies such as voice with collaboration services like email, calendaring, instant messaging, and presence to improve knowledge workers' ability to interact with coworkers more quickly and effortlessly. Unified communications results in streamlined business processes and enables workers to reduce delays in reaching others regardless of location. See the February 22, 2007 Forrester report “Unified Communications.” For information on the vendors that provide unified communications solution, see the November 9, 2006, Forrester report “Unified Communications: What You Need To Know.”

Google Changes the Productivity Landscape

by Rob Koplowitz.

I have a confession to make. I really can’t tell the difference between Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003. I have had all three installed on various computers in my home and they all look the same to me.

Now, I can tell the difference between all of the above and Office 2007. When I joined Forrester I left my Office 2007 beta behind and was presented with a brand spanking new laptop with Office 2003 pre-installed. To quote Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, “DISAPPOINTED”. Luckily, Microsoft came to the rescue and shipped me out a copy of Office 2007.

Against this backdrop I find myself on a call with Google who is briefing me on their upcoming move into the world of business productivity applications. That evening I sat down with my focus group of one, my son Jake who is a sixth grader with writing goals surprising similar to my own. I pulled up Google Docs and Word 2007 and asked Jake to make a comparison. After a few minutes he gave me his expert analysis. “They’re the same.” I was incredulous. I alt-tabbed between the lush, multi-hued garden of Office and the spiny houseplant of Google and asked how they could be the same? Jake patiently pointed out, feature by feature, that Google had everything he needed. All of the advanced features of Word were invisible to him.

Should I listen to a sixth grader when evaluating business productivity software? Yes, absolutely. The fact is that for many users Google will be just fine, although certainly not for me. I need my Office 2007. The bigger question that Google needs to address is how well they are able to live in the broader world of enterprise computing. Microsoft is investing in Office’s ability to integrate with existing applications and processes. Search and Google Earth are already going there, but this time they are taking on the most unassailable franchise in enterprise computing. Can Google succeed where some pretty big, bad competitors have been humbled? I don’t know, but I bet that whatever happens, Jake and I will both have better software as a result.

Call For Collaboration Strategy Documents

by Erica Driver.

My mind is a sieve. It can take a few requests before I remember to do something. And even with a few prods, it takes a while for me to get moving. But I've gotten so many requests along the lines of "What does a collaboration strategy document look like? What should it include?" that it's all I'm thinking about these days.

I will be publishing a sample collaboration strategy document in Q2. If you have developed and documented an enterprise collaboration strategy and would be willing to share it with Forrester for the greater good of industry research--with our promise to guard it and not share it with anyone outside the company--we would love to include you in our research. You can find me at edriver@forrester.com.

eLearning Can—and Should—Have Many Homes

by Claire Schooley.

Making the decision of where to place elearning within a company’s organizational structure is often a challenge. Clients have asked me about this a lot in the past few months. Some may say, “Well, that’s easy, it belongs in HR,” Maybe, but not necessarily. I have seen eLearning find homes in five different areas of the business:

1. Human Resources
2. IT
3. Marketing
4. Special department of its own
5. Lines of business

The most common department is HR because learning is tied to performance and career growth. HR takes care of onboarding and a lot of procedural learning at a company is now online. It also shows up in IT especially if there is a lot of in-house production and content involving many kinds of media.

Most people would not think of eLearning managed by Marketing. But it makes perfect sense if your eLearning is closely linked to your success in sales. In this situation, you need to know about the products-- and marketing will make sure you’ve got the right information to make you look smart. Also, this same information can help customers when sales associates look up information on their handhelds and give the customers an answer.

Sometimes learning doesn’t seem to fit well anywhere, and the CEO creates a new department reporting directly to him or other C-level executives. In this scenario, the department usually does a lot of company-wide production as well as production for LOB and even acts as consultants for business units like R&D, sales, operations, and customer service that may already do some of their own short productions.  Organizations going down this path are usually companies with fairly large in-house production unit of proprietary content.

So what’s right for your organization? Take a look at each of these options and see which will give you the efficiency and flexibility needed within the eLearning function. It might be there’s no single answer, and that eLearning is dispersed in several pockets of the organization.

Spilled Latte Leads To OpenOffice.org Experiment

by Erica Driver.

On Friday morning I ventured out in the newly-fallen snow for my morning latte. The tree branches were heavy with wet snow. It was gorgeous. But promptly after settling in at my desk I miscalculated the length of my arm and spilled about 12 oz. of coffee and milk all over my laptop. Little red lights blinked a few times and my screen went dark. That was it. Done. Gone. Dead.

I got on the horn with Forrester's top-notch IT group and I had a new laptop at my doorstep in about 24 hours. Forrester IT rocks. But I'm not here to bemoan my clumsiness or sing kudos to our help desk. I'm here to tell you what happened when I took over my husband's laptop for the remainder of the day. He doesn't have Microsoft Office installed on his machine; he uses OpenOffice.org 2.1.

I had no choice -- I gave it a shot. I was able to get some of my tasks done, but not all. And the learning curve was not insignificant. For example:

• I couldn't open Office 2007-formatted documents (.XLSX, .PPTX, and .DOCX) in OpenOffice.
• The keyboard commands are not all the same (for example, the CTRL+SHIFT+ down arrow key combination didn't let me select entire rows of text -- I had to select across, word by word).
• In OpenOffice I hover over comments others had embedded in Word 2003 docs, but I couldn't figure out how to delete them.

My main takeaway: Don't expect people to switch back and forth between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office -- especially Office 2007 users. And people who are used to Microsoft Office 2003 or higher will have a hard time adjusting to OpenOffice. OpenOffice is best suited to users who don't currently have access to Microsoft Office, or who have very old versions.

The Emerging Content Architect Role

by Kyle McNabb.

We’ve interviewed a number of enterprises over the past few months to understand what makes their Web operations tick. We want to understand how Web teams are organized, what key roles they have, and what lessons learned they can share with others. Our findings will be published later in Q1 2007, but we’ve found one particular important role that we believe every enterprise should pay close attention to – the content architect.

Most enterprises have content locked away in channel specific silos such as the corporate Web site, email campaign management systems, the call center, and in some cases direct mail (print) channels. Each channel’s often supported by its own operation – people, process, and technology. The end result? Customer confusion as they receive inconsistent, often different information from the enterprise depending on what channel they work with. For example, a customer may go see a campaign (content) on a self-service site, but when they call the call-center to find out more information, the call center hasn’t been informed of the campaign and can’t answer.

Many enterprises have attempted to tackle this multi-channel content issue with technology, only to run into numerous people and process roadblocks within each individual channel – people and process changes just doesn’t happen overnight. Some that we’ve spoken to have armed themselves with content architects, usually within their ebusiness groups, that:

-          Work across channels to help the enterprise define content architectures such as the definition of content types; how content should be structured; how content’s related with different channels (email, CRM, call-center, Web sites)

-          Work within each line of business / channel to understand the channels’ content requirements; define and enforce standards such as tone of voice; how to write for a specific channel; and how content should be used in the channel.

-          Work across each line of business / channel to highlight how content’s being reused or used differently, and point out opportunities to improve how they can share content and improve customer experiences.

Content architects don’t have to be technologists. The few we’ve spoken to have a mix of IT and business backgrounds. They all understand the importance of separating content from presentation. They all see the value in defining and managing content as XML – so long as the end users creating content don’t have to learn XML to get their jobs done. And yet they all seem to spend most of their time preaching the benefits of content management and working to convince different channel owners to think differently about their content.

The enterprises with content architects point to incremental improvements in their multi-channel experiences, as well as reduced operational costs associated to duplicated or inconsistent content issues.

Who's your content architect?