Never A Dull Moment In The World Of ECM

by Kyle McNabb.

A few recent technology vendor announcements point out how the ECM market continues to mature — ECM acquiring Berkeley Data Systems, Interwoven acquiring Optimost, and Autonomy acquiring Meridio.

EMC takes ECM to consumers

EMC announced in early October it was acquiring Utah-based Berkeley Data Systems Inc., the operator of the Mozy online-backup service. Right now you're probably thinking, "Kyle, what the heck does this have to do with content management?" Well, read me out...

What EMC has done is bought an online service provider (more than just software-as-a-service) that allows us (all of us with an Internet connection) to securely back up and archive OUR content (files) we have on our home workstations and laptops. All of us have digital pictures of family and friends, and one electromagnetic pulse can wipe out years of personal history. Heck, simple hard drive crashes have caused countless tears as parents realize they no longer have pictures or videos of their sons and daughters. And how many teens have lost their music collections after spilling coffee on their laptops?

The need is pervasive. And frankly, it really isn't that hard to offer up a backup and archive service. What makes EMC's move more interesting is that they have content management technology (Documentum) that when added to this newly acquired service moves it beyond backup and archive to 'content management for the masses.' Imagine the following: EMC builds this service up, adds greater metadata management, content analytics, and additional features from their Documentum product line. Doing so lets EMC not just simply offer a place to backup and archive content, it gives them the ability to do something with that content, to put it to use.

Don't expect EMC to build out a consumer brand and market this service directly to us, I don't believe they will. Instead, expect them to offer this service to your local cable company or telecom provider. Each will have the chance to private label EMC's service and give us one more item we can add to our bill - content archiving and backup.

Interwoven acquires Optimost, shows how SaaS will impact the ECM market

On October 17, 2007, Interwoven announced its intention to acquire Website optimization vendor Optimost. This move continues Interwoven's push away from marketing itself as an ECM vendor to a vendor that helps enterprises put content to use and, in this case, improve the customer experience. Acquiring Optimost also gives Interwoven a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering — interactive marketers, online channel managers, and site administrators can utilize Optimost's technology without having to install it on premise, they can simply subscribe and tap into a service to help improve site effectiveness.

The SaaS part of this acquisition geeks me up. Why? I think it shows how SaaS will really impact the ECM technology market. Many organizations I speak to believe their core investments into ECM help them build a better information management foundation. They have to have this technology in place to help them manage and retain important intellectual property and other valuable assets. And I think most of you wouldn't feel comfortable relying on SaaS for your company's foundation for managing content. But what about value added capabilities that help you put content to use? Wouldn't tapping into a readily available server be easier than trying to build out or implement, on-premise, all the tech needed to satisfy the varying ways in which content needs to get put to use to help employees, improve business processes, and drive better customer experiences? I think so.

Autonomy acquires Meridio, and may perhaps expedite the move to contextual access to content

On October 23rd, Autonomy announced its intention to acquire enterprise document and records management vendor Meridio for about $40 million. Autonomy's slowly added ECM technologies to its portfolio, most recently with its purchase of email archiving vendor Zantaz to help tackle growing eDiscovery needs.

Search is important technology. Yet many organizations I speak with often note that search is an add-on, it is replaceable — especially when they consider they can get search on the cheap from platform vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. And there's Google, offering another inexpensive enterprise search alternative. But more alarming to search advocates is the recognition by many that search sometimes isn't the answer. Sometimes content needs to be delivered to a user, within the context of what that user's doing. If the user has to search, they're taking an additional, sometimes unnecessary step, in order to get a job or task done.

Autonomy's moves on Zantaz and Meridio, I think, helps set the stage for the next evolution in ECM and search. For Autonomy, it gives them something not as easy to replace as say, enterprise search. Instead, they now have technology helping organizations take ownership of their content — not simply find it. For you though, search technology, now, gets really interesting. With technology to help you manage documents, emails, and other intellectual property, imagine the new ways Autonomy can help you enrich that managed content with metadata, classify it, and index it in ways to help you more easily put it to use in a business process. Better yet, imagine not having to search for content, its just there, in your context. You can't easily pull this off with independent search and content technologies, the integration burden put on you is just too much. Heck, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft all have visions to help us put content into context, but let's face it, they all move slower than maple syrup on a cold day in January. But with non-platform vendors like Autonomy (and others will follow) focusing on this, we're getting closer...just don't hold your breath — we've a long way to go.

Creativity At Work: Not Just For Advertising Execs

by Erica Driver.

I picked up a book at the airport last week because 1) It had a pretty cover, and 2) The title was Juicing The Orange: How To Turn Creativity Into A Powerful Business Advantage. I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the stuff that information and knowledge management (I&KM) pros are doing at work and the business movement toward organizations that are creative and have a heavy emphasis on innovation and design. Juicing The Orange turned out to be about lessons learned specifically in the advertising industry — not exactly my area of expertise. But I couldn't put it down! Many of the points authors Pat Fallon and Fred Senn raise are directly applicable to the efforts I&KM pros are undertaking — especially those who are or who work directly with HR, chief design officers, or other "culture players," as they are described in Juicing The Orange. In particular:

• Start from scratch when you're trying to create something new. If you don't, you could get stuck in the mindsets of those who went before you. The authors made this point about advertising campaigns. But we are all marketers, to some extent. We are marketing collaboration or Information Workplace strategies to prospective executive sponsors, or selling to information workers the benefits of swapping out beloved point collaboration products with an enterprise collaboration platform. Fresh thinking may be critical here. How about a brainstorming session to come up with a list of non-obvious ways to apply collaboration technology to specific business problems and to convince the powers that be to make the human capital investments needed to move the company toward a culture of innovation? It's probably a good idea to separate the brainstorming conversation from the "yeah, but. . ." conversation.
• Work on an internal culture where people are allowed to act on their passion for an idea. This will become an increasingly important truth in business as companies continue to focus on top-line revenue growth through innovation. (In one example, in August of 2007 Pricewaterhouse Coopers published the results of its quarterly Consumer Products Barometer survey, in which the company found that senior executives of large consumer products companies raised their companies' revenue growth targets for the coming 12 months to an average of 6.3%, up from a reported 4.8% in 1Q 2007, and on par with projections a year prior (6.2%).) I&KM pros should approach collaboration and Social Computing tools as tools for enabling innovation, for connecting people who might not ordinarily interact with each other. This is the digital equivalent of one of the Juicing The Orange authors' traditions (he is a co-founder of advertising agency Fallon Worldwide): he invites 19 staff members to his home for dinner each month — people he thinks ought to know each other better. In case you're wondering, the number of guests is based on the number of chairs he has.
• Prioritize getting buy-in at the top — perhaps from a sponsor you hadn't thought of. The way they put it in Juicing The Orange: A creative idea never has a chance to thrive if the executive suite doesn't approve it, and leaps of faith must be supported. Sometimes, collaboration strategy teams are required to come up with a solid business case for investment in a collaboration platform, or specific tools. Other times, this is not required; the powers that be simply believe. They believe in the necessity of tools and technology to connect people and transform the organization. One golden nugget I gleaned from this book: perhaps the executive sponsor for an enterprise collaboration strategy or an Information Workplace shouldn't necessarily be the CIO or even a line of business or functional head — perhaps it should be the chief innovation officer or chief design officer.
• Identify culture players and distribute them throughout the organization. According to Juicing The Orange, culture players know everyone and know a lot about everyone. They are outgoing, optimistic problem solvers who treat everyone with the same "loving irreverence." We have talked in some of our Forrester research about the knowledge trainer role. (See IBM’s Collaboration Platform For 2007 and see How To Create A Knockout Collaboration Strategy Document.) The most recent job title I've heard for this role is "personal knowledge trainer." The person in this role sits in the business units and is closely connected with IT. It is someone who is responsible for building up the culture of collaboration or knowledge sharing or social networking. It may or may not be a full-time job. Identify culture players who understand the value of collaboration technology and recruit them to fill the knowledge trainer role.

Interwoven Advances Its Interactive Marketing Push

by Stephen Powers.

Interwoven has announced its acquisition of Optimost, a company offering Web site testing and optimization through a software-as-a-service model. Optimost enables organizations to use multivariable testing to identify combinations of Web content — such as ads, pricing, and layouts — that get the best response from site visitors (all the better to drive up those conversion rates).

This isn't Interwoven's first effort to appeal to marketers; earlier this year, the company announced a targeting management module that allows non-technical users to manage contextual experiences for Web site visitors. This latest acquisition plays nicely into the story of traditional WCM vendors offering features such as targeting, testing, and analytics that will differentiate them from the platform vendors, which tend to offer more limited functionality in those areas.

My colleague Suresh Vittal commented that this acquisition is just another step in the broader issue of increasing relevance and targeting. The question now is whether Interwoven will continue to add additional components of an online marketing suite, such as enhanced campaign management and Web analytics, in order to further differentiate themselves from their competition.

An interesting sidenote to all of this is that while large enterprises have yet to embrace SAAS as an option for main WCM functionality, it appears that traditional vendors are awakening to the fact that SAAS add-ons can nicely complement installed solutions.

Reinvention Requires A Near-Death Experience

by Erica Driver.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology, was speaking from experience this morning during his interview by Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg at the BIF-3 collaborative innovation summit. By a near-death experience, Wladawsky-Berger was referring to what IBM went through when Bill Gates founded Microsoft and the PC took off. Another example interviewer Mossberg raised during the conversation was Apple, which was in terrible financial straits in the mid 90s and has risen from the ashes to become today’s darling in the consumer electronics and digital music markets. Wladawsky-Berger said that near-death experiences open up the mind to new experiences – they “clean the brain.” These experiences force people to think in new ways and look for new opportunities. For IBM, the Internet became the lifeboat and the company clutched onto it. Later came Linux and other technologies.

I would contend that IBM went through this again more recently, in the Lotus group. Lotus may have had a near-death experience somewhere around 2004, when Microsoft’s market share in messaging and collaboration began to increase, some Lotus Notes/Domino customers began to jump ship, and Lotus revenue growth was at a low. The lifeboat for IBM’s Lotus group is enterprise Web 2.0. This new wave of technology is IBM’s opportunity to change the game, to innovate and deliver solutions to customers that allow organizations to transform the way people innovate, collaborate, and -- in general -- work.

One of the most important technologies in this mix is the 3D Internet. While many are skeptical (as Mossberg put it this morning, referring to Second Life, “What does fake people using fake money, flying on magic carpets and building little islands have to do with business?”), my view is that the 3D Internet will have as big an impact on business and work as the 2D Internet (the World Wide Web) did. Maybe even bigger. Irving Wladawsky-Berger seems to be of like mind -- here is some of what he had to share today:

• The 3D Internet is the evolution of social networking and collaboration technologies. In Wladawsky-Berger’s view, the killer apps for 3D Internet are meetings and learning and training. At IBM, they have started building sites – both in Second Life and on other virtual world platforms -- for virtual classrooms and conferences. Dozens or even hundreds of people can come together in a virtual classroom or meeting room through their avatars.
• Virtual worlds are a big improvement over conference calls. IBMers who were participating in meetings in Second Life found the experience of dealing with each other there more "human" than dealing with them in conference calls. Conference calls are "cold" – a group of people dials in at 9AM and talks for 30 minutes for a specific reason. Much of the chit chat that occurs before and after in-person meetings is lost, and with it camaraderie and the potential for serendipitous interactions. In Second Life, people do chit chat at the beginning and end of meetings. They get to know each other. Bonds of relationship form.
• The virtual and physical worlds will merge into hybrid worlds. The MIT Media Lab is one institution doing work in this area. The lab is doing research into physical-world sensors that control items in a virtual world. For example, a person wearing sensors on their hands may be able to move their avatar’s hands by moving their physical hands. MIT Media Lab is working on the Huggable, a robot that’s being designed to have a full-body sensitive skin with over 1,500 sensors, quiet back-drivable actuators (whatever those are), video cameras in the eyes, microphones in the ears, an inertial measurement unit (whatever that is), a speaker, and an embedded PC with standard wireless networking. The physical-world Huggable is tied into the virtual world. When the child moves the Huggable, the robot’s avatar in a virtual world moves.
• Watch what’s happening around you. “If you are smart in a company like IBM, which is full of sharp people, you watch what they do,” Wladawsky-Berger says. “When you see them doing certain things you realize you have to change directions. In 2006 we had more and more people at IBM who started to have more and more meetings  in Second Life. These weren't kids, they were people with jobs, dealing with each other.” Guaranteed, you’ve got people working in your organization who use virtual world technology to play games. Some may be using it as part of their social lives. Increasingly, they will look for ways to use it for work.

Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor

by Erica Driver.

As part of the run-up to the Business Innovation Factory summit (BIF-3) currently going on in Providence, Rhode Island, attendees participated in an online social network. On the social networking site, the most common one-word answers to the question “What are 5 keys to innovation?” were rolled up into a tag cloud (see figure). Words that rose to the top of the list included creativity, collaboration, and passion. These are all good.

But as I sit in the back of the theater listening to the storytellers (they each get 15 minutes of stage time to share experiences they’ve had with innovation or to participate in a short interview) I realize we missed something big: serendipity — fed by sheer dumb luck. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, serendipity is the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought after. And luck is a force that brings good fortune or adversity, or the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual. Luck, when good, can lead to serendipitous events and encounters. A couple of BIF storytellers shared some insights into and examples of the role of serendipity in innovation:

• “ . . . But we’re watching Seabiscuit!” said author Steven Johnson’s wife when he returned from the movie theater lobby to tell her he had just come up with the idea for his next book. Johnson, now author of five books, knew he wanted to next write a book about an idea that had a good story behind it, he just didn’t know what idea to write about. He was at the movies with wife watching Seabiscuit when the book idea came to him.  Perhaps it was the movie’s imagery of injury and resurrection, or who knows what other brain synapses were going off. But suddenly the story of the worst cholera outbreak in 19th century London came to mind and the book The Ghost Map was born. The Ghost Map was published has was recently selected as one of two runners-up for the National Academies of Science 2007 Communications Award.
• "Luck is the number one success factor in business and life."  These words from the mouth of Eric Bonabeau, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Icosystem and author of the book Swarm Intelligence.  I couldn’t agree with him more. So many potentially game-changing ideas have gone by the wayside despite passion, perseverance, and plenty of communication and collaboration. It’s for reasons like the market wasn’t ready, something else was going on at the same time that took peoples’ attention away, or someone else with a competitive idea had a better network of contacts at the time.

Without those serendipitous moments, a person's ability to innovate is limited. One random encounter, as Eric Bonabeau said today during his time on stage, changes you and leads you to the next encounter. The question I see many information and knowledge management professionals wrestling with -- and trying to address with collaboration and knowledge management strategies and collaboration tools like social networking, expertise location, and virtual worlds: How can you increase the odds of chance encounters being the next encounter being a good one and leading to fantastic innovation? Or, on a bigger scale, how can you create a company culture where the workforce experiences more occurrences of happy accidents? This very question should be at the heart of many organizations' enterprise collaboration strategies.

Lessons In Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption From The BBC

by Erica Driver.

I am at the first day of the Business Innovation Factory conference ("BIF-3") in Providence, Rhode Island. Sitting around me are 350 people who came together to share stories about collaborative innovation in business. One of storytellers this morning was Euan Semple, who up until about 18 months ago was the head of knowledge management for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Now he's an independent consultant. Today, the BBC has 23,000 bulletin board users, about 4,000 wiki users, and 400 to 500 people who are blogging. The company is getting enormous value out of this, but it didn't happen overnight. The BBC has been experimenting with Social Computing for a long time; they built internal networks using forum software before blog tools came to be. Lessons learned at the BBC:

• Enterprise Web 2.0 can be the catalyst for a more collaborative business environment. The BBC had done a lot of work to try to create a more collaborative work environment. The BBC World Service, for example, has 47 language services. People need to work together who come from wildly different backgrounds (cultures, languages, etc.). How to make this happen? As it turned out, the BBC's internal forums, which only cost the company about 200 pounds, got the company to be more collaborative than the more formal initiatives did.
• Experiment, start small, and make sure ownership is clear. Using Social Computing tools at work is very different from the way most of us are used to working. Managers, for example, may need time to get used to a flatter kind of environment, where people are off doing their own thing. One thing that helped at the BBC was that the forum environment was collectively owned; this helped people take responsibility for how it was used.
• Trust breeds trust. The BBC found that when people are given responsibility, the right tools, and a little coaching, most of them will do the right thing. And as people gain experience with Social Computing tools, the value of their efforts increases. While Semple didn't get into this in his story, I'll add here that creating a solid policy about appropriate use of tools like blogs, wikis, virtual worlds (a policy that has teeth) — and educating the workforce about that policy — can go a long way toward helping employees and management feel comfortable with what is going on.
• Go where you're not quite comfortable going. This is the source of innovation. At the BBC, employees were allowed to post on internal forums about anything they wanted to. Someone started a conversation about the pros and cons of being single. This evolved into something awfully close to a dating service. Managers, as you might imagine, were cringing. But before long one of the producers came to Euan Semple saying he was about to do a program on being single, and the employees who had participated in the forum about dating had done half the work for him. Great example of something that didn't seem business like ending up delivering true business value.

Playing Monopoly With Enterprise Software: Will SAP And BOBJ Build Hotels On Broadway Or Go To Jail?

by Boris Evelson.

SAP and Business Objects today announced that the companies have reached an agreement for SAP to acquire Business Objects for approximate sum of slightly above 4.8 billion euro. Forrester has been predicting this continued market consolidation for some time — see our Microsoft Buys Proclarity and Oracle Buys Hyperion research documents, as well as a couple of my earlier blogs on the subject. SAP must be feeling a lot of pain and pressure to make such a significant move — SAP executives have been telling the world for years that they prefer small, tuck-in acquisitions. The deal though does make a lot of sense. In one transaction SAP gets the best of breed set of BI tools with full BI stack capabilities, everything from data integration tools like ETL and data quality to reporting, OLAP, dashboards, text analytics and many others. This deal has multiple implications to enterprise software users, especially for those 30-40% from the common SAP/BOBJ customer base:

Positive implications:

• Business Objects users will gain from SAP’s domain expertise. In the era of increasingly commoditized products and services, domain expertise and industry specific solutions are key differentiating factors for any enterprise software vendor.
• NetWeaver BI (formerly SAP BW) has traditionally compared unfavorably to competition. No ETL tool to speak of, poor performance (partially solved with the new SAP BI Accelerator appliance) and scalability, instability, and inflexible reporting often make SAP users turn to 3rd party BI solutions such as the ones from Business Objects. Now these SAP ERP customers will have fewer incentives to look elsewhere for BI solutions and can get best of breed ERP and BI apps from one vendor.
• SAP/BI combined entity has the opportunity to lead the pack in the convergence of the worlds of data and process. BI vendors have traditionally thought of the world as being data centric. It is not – our world is process centric and data exists only as a byproduct of processes and rules. SAP understands this concept very well and has been practicing  and implementing workflow based industry specific processes with embedded BI for a long time.
• SAP and Business Objects have always been known for their ability to ingest and analyze structured data from relational databases, in order to discover patterns and trends that help guide business decisions. Conversely, text mining vendors like Inxight, recently acquired by Business Objects, specialize in extracting information from unstructured text — such as emails, documents, blog sites, and Web pages — and then automatically tag and quantify it for analytical purposes. SAP/BOBJ/Inxight now have a powerful combination for applications like fraud detection, enterprise risk management, quality improvement, and a host of other information-intensive initiatives within organizations.

Issues and challenges:

• The roadmap for SAP/BOBJ Performance Management or Business Performance Solutions is murky. There’s nearly 100% overlap in the PM capabilities of SRC and Cartesis (BOBJ) vs. Outlooksoft (SAP) and profitability applications from Armstrong Laing (BOBJ) vs. Acorn Systems (resold by SAP). Until both companies go through a formal product road map exercise, which may take at least a few months, it is unclear which products will remain front and center of SAP’s Performance Management strategy and which ones will be relegated to the “second class citizen” status. See more on the subject from my colleague, Paul Hamerman.
• Even though Business Objects continues to work on product integration and made good progress in XI release, it still suffers from incompletely integrated set of products: Crystal, full client BI, WebIntelligence, Voyager, etc. While these products share metadata, security and other integrated features, one cannot easily move a report developed in one tool to another. Moving some of the BOBJ R&D resources to SAP product integration will not make internal BOBJ product integration effort any easier. To make matters worse, BOBJ XI release requires complete retest and sometimes even redesign of every single report. Some customer have been struggling with this upgrade and even used the requirement to upgrade (BOBJ will stop supporting all prior versions sometimes in 2008) as an opportunity to consider other BI tools. SAP has to be very careful not to make this situation worse and potentially loose some BOBJ BI customers.
• SAP has a bit of a mess on their hands after Informatica (which has a multi year OEM agreement with SAP) was awarded a permanent injunction preventing Business Objects  from shipping Informatica's patented data transformation technology in the Business Objects Data Integrator product (acquired as part of BOBJ acquisition of Actaworks, company originally formed by ex Informatica employees). SAP now needs to figure out how Informatica and BOBJ will play nicely in one sandbox.
• And last, but not least, Oracle, SAP’s archenemy, has numerous partnerships and joint development efforts with Business Objects. BOBJ is Oracle’s largest BI partner and provides tight data base integration as well as data integration and data quality solutions for Oracle eBusiness applications. This relationship is going to be strained at the very least, and quite possibly severely reduced in scope.

What does it mean to the rest of the market? Remaining pureplay BI vendors (Cognos, IBI, Microstrategy, SAS, Actuate) will most probably treat this as a non-event, and will possibly even try to spin a positive story - the less independent BI vendors left on the market, the more opportunities they have to go after customers who want stack independence. As far as recommendations to enterprise BI users - I say take quick advantage of uncertainties in the product roadmap, lock down maintenance contracts and sweetheart deals while you can to get a good deal from BOBJ before SAP really takes over.

3D Internet: From A One-Speed Banana Seat To A 24-Speed Mountain Bike — Someday

by Erica Driver.

I am chomping at the bit about the 3D Internet (of which virtual worlds and massive multi-player online games are early iterations). What I see is its potential to improve my work experience dramatically — and the work experience of information workers world-over. Not that I've got it rough — I am privileged to be able to work from my home office in rural Rhode Island when I'm not on the road. But working remotely has two major downsides:

• A dearth of social interaction. I miss out on valuable social interactions with my colleagues, including people who work in other departments at Forrester. I miss hanging out in the lunch room and going out for coffee in the afternoon or a drink after work.
• Less-than-optimal meeting effectiveness. Meetings (e.g., client inquiry calls, vendor briefings, etc.) and collaborations with my colleagues on reports and consulting projects are often clunky, even with the array of tools I have at my disposal: my own conference bridge, calendaring and email, team workspaces, Web conferencing, and instant messaging. These tools don't even come close to replicating the level of communication and idea and information exchange that takes place when I'm meeting face-to-face with people. And sometimes the technology actually slows us down.

Here's where virtual worlds come in. Picture this:

• Your organization and its people have 3D replicas. Your organization has a virtual representation of itself, maybe in Second Life or perhaps in a more controlled, private 3D Internet environment. The company has a virtual campus — buildings, plants, meeting rooms, etc. You and all your colleagues have avatars that look like you – perhaps even photographically so. Your real name and job title is associated with your avatar. Your access to virtual buildings and rooms, as well as people, is controlled by information in the enterprise directory and other security systems.
• Your experience in the 3D Internet imitates the physical world — in a good way. You speak with your colleagues via text chat or built-in voice over IP. When an avatar standing to your avatar's left says something, you hear the voice to your left. The voices of people whose avatars are close to yours are louder than the voices of those standing farther away. You can easily have your avatar express gestures and emotions (e.g., smile, shrug, sigh, raise your hand, clear your throat, nod, shake your head, giggle, frown).
• You and your colleagues all have virtual offices. You can see who's in the office at any time by "walking by" (or "flying by") their office. You can personalize your virtual office any way you want (within good taste, of course). Not only can you find people in their offices, you can stop into the virtual café to see who's there, and join in on ad hoc conversations.
• Participants are fully engaged in virtual meetings. To have a brainstorming session or collaborate on a document, you and your colleagues' avatars can meet in a virtual conference room where you can do anything you can do today via the 2D Web: talk, upload and view documents, draw on a whiteboard, watch videos, etc. You can even drink a virtual latte. You can see a 3D representation of the people you are meeting with and glean insights from their expressions and gestures. You always know who's talking, and can tell who's anxious to jump into the conversation. Meetings on the 3D Internet will be to today's phone and Web conferences what a 24-speed mountain bike with a cushy gel seat is to the one-speed, banana seat Schwinn you probably had when you were a kid.

But, sadly, Second Life has a long way to go. At least for newbies like me. Last night I decided to spend some time trying to make my Second Life avatar (Erica Burns) look more like what I think I look like in real life, and go out and explore Second Life. A couple of hours in and I still didn't get very far with my avatar (see photo and Second Life snapshot). And that was the least of my concerns. While I located a few islands that look like terrific places to experiment with new ways of working (e.g., IBM's executive briefing center and EOLUS One), I didn't see any avatars in them while I was there.

And I got caught up in a bunch of junk along the way. Even when de-selecting "mature content" I came across way too many avatars with not-enough clothing on, even on the public help island. My avatar was even attacked, yes, attacked, on the public help island by some weird red monster thing brandishing some sort of fiery-looking stick and carrying a placard about the Burmese people. All this while I stood with a small crowd of other avatars trying to figure out the meaning of a bloodied, dead avatar surrounded by yellow "crime scene do not cross" police tape.

Call to action for Second Life developers: Help business people like me find ways to benefit from all the great things virtual worlds have to offer, while at the same time shielding me from the anarchic nasties. Help me easily get to freely-accessible, though private-while-I'm-there, conference and meeting rooms so I can begin to experiment with the 3D Internet. In return you'll have a shot at the eye and ear —  and keyboard — of multitudes of information workers jonesing for a better way to work.

Recap From Tech Leadership Forum

by Erica Driver.

Last week at Forrester's Technology Leadership Forum conference in Carlsbad, CA, I did 3 presentations and workshops on collaboration — and Information Workplace (IW)-related topics, all of which turned into highly interactive discussions. I'll find out when I see the participants' feedback whether this was good or bad, but in one of these sessions we never got past the agenda slide. During the 2-day event I also had 16 one-on-one meetings with attendees and spoke with many other people informally during meals and breaks. A few things jumped out at me. Today, information and knowledge management professionals:

• Are hard at work developing strategies. This is an exciting time for IT decision makers working in areas like collaboration, content, portal, office productivity, business intelligence, and learning. Because these technologies are converging and Web 2.0 is evolving so quickly, the time is ripe for organizations in all sectors to rethink the way technology can transform business processes and help people get work done more effectively. Architects, strategists, CIOs, and others I talked to are focused on IW and collaboration strategies with an eye toward Transformation with a capital T. Like how to transform an energy company's business based on changes in the world supply of fossil fuel.
• Are trying to find the right balance between chaos and control. There wasn't one single conversation I had that didn't include some aspect of Web 2.0. Okay, I admit, often it was me who raised the topic. But not always. Wikis, blogs, widgets, mashups, social networking, tagging, even 3D Internet — these things are on peoples' minds and in their technology plans and road maps. Web 2.0 is forcing attempts to find the balance between two extremes: utter chaos and ultra-tight lock-down. I had lots of conversations about policy, and I know my colleagues did too.
• Have their eyes on more than IBM and Microsoft. One of the sessions I ran with Rob Koplowitz was titled "IBM Or Microsoft For Collaboration -- Or Both? How To Use Forrester's CollaborationPath Methodology." In this session we got to slide 10 or so, and then the hands started to fly up. We spent the rest of the session answering questions sometimes about IBM and Microsoft but very often about other vendors like Adobe, Google, Newsgator and many others. As new technologies enter the mix at a rapid clip, it's looking less and less likely that the big platform vendors can meet all, or even most, of an innovative organization's IW platform requirements. I&KM pros should explore their collaboration platform vendors' partner ecosystems. Third-party software vendors are recognizing an opportunity to fill gaps in these vendors' platforms and are integrating their products with the platform vendors' core collaboration services.