Infovark

Enterprise 2.0 case studies are hard to find, so I pay attention whenever someone posts interesting findings on the Internet. Jack Vinson published his notes on social bookmarking in the enterprise talk given by Laurie Damianos of MITRE at the Boston KM conference. It’s worth a read. From the study:

“Many of the terms used by users are not in the official taxonomy, and work is underway to expand the formal taxonomy to represent things according to how people expect to find them.”

A corporate taxonomy based on what actually happens, instead of what is supposed to happen? 

That could be useful…

Astronomers and physicists have a big problem on their hands: the universe. Cosmology has developed and discarded many models for how the universe works over the years, but our current model has a hole in it. A very dark hole.

Scientists have discovered that there is more matter in the universe than they can see. There just aren’t enough stars, planets, gas and dust to hold galaxies together. Physicists call this missing matter “Dark Matter”, because gravity indicates that something should be there, but it isn’t directly observable.

This is kind of like writing “Here be Dragons” on an old map. The term “Dark Matter” is really nothing more than a pointer to our current levels of ignorance.

I was drawn to look up all this fascinating physics stuff on Wikipedia, because for a while now I’ve been discussing “Dark Matter” as it pertains to enterprise information.

It’s hard to guess exactly how much data is dark in a typical business. You can’t know how much you don’t know, after all. But a recent AIIM study showed that 69% of people believe that less than 50% of their organization’s information is searchable online.

With all the effort being put into implementing collaboration, ECM and social media tools, you’d think someone would worry about the fact that we’re missing more than half the information we need.

And that’s merely the searchable stuff. The picture gets worse if we want to analyze or secure that information. A 2005 AIIM presentation prepared by Doculabs suggests that 80% of organizational information is unstructured and 90% of this remains unmanaged.

So every organization has a huge amount of unstructured, tacit information lying around, beyond the reach of their IT systems. This is the Dark Matter of the enterprise. And while content management vendors spout statistics about how effective information management can improve productivity and effectiveness, the vast majority of the information is still out there somewhere — unsearchable, unfindable and unknown.

We don’t have a searching problem. What we have is a data collection problem.

There’s a vast amount of Dark Matter holding our organizations together. But we know very little about it today.

Dragons indeed.

(Dean and Gordon have been busy doing administrivia so they let me guest blog today.)

Microsoft’s new ad campaign is all about how Microsoft connects with real people. Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfield act out a mini-reality series about how they need to get in touch with real people. TechCrunch is not buying it, and I can see why.

Microsoft wants to show they understand real people. But like most big companies, they only understand the CIO, the CTO, and the head of IT because that is who they sell to.  They have long forgotten what helps me and my fellow workers.

Microsoft is not alone in this. Most companies forget what it’s like to be a worker bee. This is because the executives that make the decisions are removed from what their employees do.

I, for one, am drowning in email and PowerPoint and Word documents and meetings. I have no time to do my real job. I waste countless hours of my day looking for that document that Steve sent me… last week I think… is this the right version? No, this isn’t it. Maybe he didn’t email it. Maybe he stuck it on the share drive. I’m sure it’s on his machine somewhere, but Steve is in a meeting. I can’t find him… maybe Don has a copy?

Where’s the Microsoft product to help me, a real person, solve these mundane real-world problems? I need to re-find the things I have, share with my co-workers and managers without interupring my work,  find the expert I need, work offline for a little bit, and focus on getting things done.

Once upon a time Microsoft did actually sell to the indivdual knowledge workers, and their software was leading edge. I bought a copy of Excel because it was better than Lotus 123. Many of us switched to Word because pasting images and slides into documents was cool. Multiple undo was a killer feature for real-world folks like me who ocasianally sometimes misspell stuff.

Microsoft are confessing they are a bit out of touch with these new ads. The reason for this is because long ago they stopped focusing on the end user, and started focusing on their (much more lucrative) OEM and Enterprise licensing customers. But the needs of enterprise customers rarely intersect with the needs of average consumers.

What sort of Xbox games would Microsoft make if it sold them to the local PTA?

While browsing the feed from Content Management Connection, I noticed that Oscar Berg re-blogged David Wineberger’s notes on the nature of openness taken at a seminar given by James Boyle.

The gist of the talk (and the notes) is that people routinely overestimate the risks of transparency and undervalue the benefits of openness. It’s a hard habit to break. We assume that increased control will lead to increased security. But there are situations where the reverse is true.

Which is more secure from a group of second-graders: A cookie in plain view on the breakfast table or one in a ceramic jar on the kitchen counter?

Psychologists have done this experiment. The cookie lying out in the open is the most secure. Everyone can see if it’s missing or if someone took a bite out of it. If one of the kids takes it all the others will know — and at least one will probably tattle. Only if all the children work together can they get the cookie and get away with it. That requires the children to work together closely and divide the spoils fairly.

The cookie in the jar is actually less secure because any one of the children might be able to sneak it without the others knowing. (And now you know why most jars of candy are clear glass or plastic!)

Information is Brain Candy

The same logic that drives the cookie experiment is the logic that makes sunshine laws, open source software, and Wikipedia work.

Security is often the first concern raised by organizations implementing collaboration tools. But openness can actually lead to better security.