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Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management
Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.
We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.
This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.
If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.
I asked a customer the other day why they were running an Information Management project. Her answer was refreshingly honest:
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, “It just seems like the responsible thing to do.”
It was a great answer, and it got me thinking about The Promise of Information Management. Why are people doing this stuff? What is it that IM tools and technologies are really designed for? In my experience, the hierarchy of needs for Information Management looks something like this, with each need requiring fulfillment from the bottom up:
At the bottom, there’s the mitigation of risk. Effectively managed information lowers the likelihood of bad things happening to your information, and as a consequence, to your organization. Compliance is still the most common driver for people to invest in Information Management. That’s hardly a surprise since it’s the responsible thing to do. Any organization that faces public scrutiny needs to classify and control its information and implement consistent retention policies.
Higher up the pyramid, we encounter the reduction of cost. If we store our information effectively, we can spend less money storing things we don’t need. We can also recoup time spent on re-creating things we didn’t know existed. There are many ways that effective information management can reduce costs. (These are inevitably the things that end up in all the business cases, under the ROI section.)
Finally, at the pinnacle, there’s the incentive to innovate and to improve the way the organization functions — the ability to meet and exceed performance metrics and offer better solutions to customers, internal and external. Improved awareness, and greater access to knowledge. The benefits of efficient management of information result in people doing better business.
While these three tiers constitute the promise of information management, the reality is that the needs of knowledge workers are not being met by current IM solutions. Nearly all of the tools designed to manage information will be sold based on the benefits of improved productivity or designing better business process — but in fact are designed primarily to fulfill risk mitigation and/or cost savings. As an ECM consultant, I had to reconcile this bait-and-switch on a daily basis.
With Infovark Personal Edition now perilously close to its first public release, I find myself trying to determine how our new product fits into this information management promise. We’ve turned the pyramid upside down. We put innovation and knowledge awareness right at the bottom, as the platform that everything else is built on. Infovark contributes to cost saving only incidentally (our peer architecture doesn’t require any new servers or centralized storage) and we’ve actively removed a lot of the control, security and access barriers that compliance-oriented solutions offer.
We feel this aligns better with what the vast majority of business people actually need. Most knowledge workers don’t seem to care much about compliance or retention. That’s a management concern. They also seem largely uninterested in cost control. What we hear from people working with information daily is that they want an authoritative source of reliable information, the answers when they need them, and a way to learn what they don’t yet know. They focus on the revenue side of the equation, on pursuing opportunities, on delivering value.
What IM has traditionally seen as base level needs — retention, security and control — we at Infovark see as advanced needs that can be addressed only once we have first fulfilled the more pressing needs of the individuals within the organization. You have to increase transparency and information awareness first, then optimize the way information flows, and only afterward can we look at what risk mitigation policies makes sense.
Yeah, the management team might not buy this approach. But we think everyone else will.
Personal information is everywhere in modern systems. Most people have multiple user profiles, duplicate friend information, redundant login details, and several address books. All of this personal data is scattered across many systems.
Sometimes this is done deliberately, to provide better security or privacy, but it’s most often done incidentally, because not all of our systems synchronize with each other. Different facets of our identity reside in different places.
We’ve gotten used to this situation in public spaces on the Internet. Most of us take for granted the hassle of having to re-enter our profile data and re-establish links with our friends and peers. It’s the price we pay for an Internet that preserves anonymity.
Inside the walls of an organization, it’s a different story. It’s crucial to know who’s who. It’s important to have accurate, up-to-date contact information. But most of today’s enterprise systems contribute to the identity management problem. And the new breed of Enterprise 2.0 systems are only likely to make things worse in the near future.
Dealing with this explosion of fractured contact information is a hard problem. Dean and I have spent loads of time discussing grandiose, world-changing ideas to fix it all.
Then we gave up and decided that two guys in a basement weren’t going to be able to resolve these corporate identity management problems any time soon.
But we figured that something we could do was collect existing data and help people share that with their peers. So we added a template to support contact information.
Infovark captures contact information from Microsoft Outlook Contacts and shares them with your colleagues. We use the hCard standard to mark up contact information, so as to make everything as interoperable as possible. hCard is itself based on the older vCard standard, implemented by virtually all modern email systems.
If you add your Outlook contacts folder to the list of mail folders Infovark monitors, you’ll see the contacts appear in your shared website:
Much like the way we handle files, if you update your contacts in Outlook, you’ll find they automatically update in Infovark, too. So while we haven’t figured out a way to solve the identity problem yet, we’re doing what we can to keep the problem from getting any worse.
Infovark will also automatically relate these contacts to the email and attachments you receive, helping to build a picture about what subjects your contacts know about. And because contact information is also tied to our user data, Infovark will notice which of your contacts interacts with your web site, and will learn about the things they care about too.
Infovark uses both sets of information to help you identify the right person to talk to about any particular subject. It’s an easy way to keep track of all your “go-to” people.
Ah, Email. Where would we be without the flood of email that greets us every morning? Email is one of the oldest protocols for communicating via the Internet — in fact, the first RFC for standardizing email headers was proposed in 1973. That’s older than me!
Email is the default method of collaboration for all knowledge workers. It’s a very flexible system, and that’s why it tends to fill the gaps where other collaboration systems fall down — you can always go back to sending email.
This flexibility has led to the emergence of all kinds of proprietary and non-proprietary extensions to email. For example, although they look different, Microsoft Outlook implements Messages, Calendar Items, Meetings, and Tasks on an underlying email template. The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, originally created for email, has grown to become the predominant way that all content is described on the internet.
There’s a lot of conversation in the Enterprise 2.0 community about where email fits in this new puzzle. Luis Suarez talks about how he managed to kill his inbox and kick the email habit altogether, whereas Sam Driessen suggests the complete opposite — that any effective 2.0 tool has to start with the inbox.
Well, here at Infovark, we decided that we would have to make a decision on this one way or the other. Both Dean and I are really not fans of email. There should definitely be a better default. And yet, if we wanted to help people share their information, we would have to go where the information lives. So we added a template to support email.
In keeping with Infovark’s philosophy of sharing your work without any work, Infovark scans your Outlook inbox in much the same way as it does with files – you tell your Infovark which folders in Outlook you want to share:
Infovark takes care of the rest. As emails arrive, (or as you move them into folders), the Infovark Outlook Crawler will pick them up, read them, tag them, and share them with your colleagues on your Infovark website on your local machine:
Unlike our file template, the Infovark web site displays the complete text of an email. It also indexes them, so you can search for them outside of Outlook, and if you happen to have one of those evil quotas on your inbox, Infovark can take snapshots of your mail, so you can keep stuff that your sysadmin won’t let you keep. Attachments are automatically stored as local files and related to the original email.
Just like our file template, you can add tags and rate the email, but in keeping with the email paradigm, you can’t edit the text of a sent email itself.
We also offer the option to access this information within Outlook itself, through our outlook utility, that we call “Outvark”. (You can read more about that here.)
So, that’s how your Infovark can help turn your idle forgotten emails into an interactive website that you can share with your colleagues. Next stop on our whirlwind tour: the contact template.
The file is the basic unit of computer information. From a collaboration perspective, there are plenty of file-centric tools designed for sharing files — network drives, SharePoint, box.net — even the Internet itself isn’t much more than a collection of files, shared through various protocols.
For a knowledge worker, the files they work with daily usually map directly to a particular work task — for example, minutes of a meeting, or a document detailing a deliverable. They can also contain knowledge sourced from other people or places, like news reports or policy documents.
Regardless of what’s in them, Files are also the primary unit of plagiarism. I don’t mean plagiarism in a bad way; if these files can be said to “belong” to anyone, they belong to the Enterprise as a whole. It’s common for a valuable file within the organization to be re-purposed multiple times. Making key documents available to other people in your organization can be a huge productivity enabler.
By default, these files nearly always end up on your local machine. People mail them to you, they leave them lying around on network drives for you to copy. You download them from the web and read them locally. Despite all our efforts to try to centralize file storage, my computer is full of all kinds of files collected through my work. And as much as I can appreciate the benefits of cloud-based storage, I don’t think that this is going to change anytime soon.
And although files are traditionally thought of as unstructured data, it turns out there’s a lot of indexable and valuable information that can be collected from them. It’s just takes a bit more work for us software developers than accessing data that’s already been put into a database or some other structured format.
Infovark and Files
Infovark will process any file you give it, but it has best results with files that contain meaningful text. By default, Infovark scans all Microsoft Office files, PDFs, and plain text files, but you can include other file formats if you like. Infovark will do the best job it can.
To have your Infovark process a file, you need to tell it where to look. You can do this from the Infovark Manager, on the Files tab:
You just need to specify the folder that the document is in – that’s it. From here, your Infovark will keep an eye on the directory, and when you save or update a document, your Infovark it will capture it, and make it available on your local Infovark website. When it’s done, the web page it produces looks like this:
More than Tags
If you click on the picture above (opens in a new window),You can see that your Infovark has provided a text summary of the document, and also tagged the document with what it thinks are relevant keywords.
Infovark’s tags are a bit special, though. You can search for documents by tag, just like a Delicious or Technorati search. But Infovark also uses these tags to develop concepts it associates with your information and contacts. These concepts are used to suggest people you know or other useful email and documents.
You can see this in action with the related content panel, down the right hand side of the screen. So tagging is not just useful for you, but also improves the recommendations that Infovark makes.
You can edit the document summary, and provide more information about the document on this screen. You can add headers, pictures, links to other web pages within your Infovark site as well as on external sites using a friendly WYSIWYG editor. There’s no need to learn confusing wiki markup.
Visitors to this page can leave comments, download the file for themselves, or follow links to other relevant content. They can also rate the file or add tags to the page.
As you can see, Files are a hugely important part of how Infovark determines what you know. In our next post, we’ll look at email, and how it’s captured and shared.