Big Data? Big Whoop!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been seeing a number of posts and tweets about Biiiiig Dataaaaaaa (ring announcer voice in my head)! What is “Big Data”? Check out the definition in this executive summary; or as I and others like to say, “It’s as big as a piece of string is long”. I certainly understand the idea behind “Big Data”, but do we really need a new term for something that, let’s face it, isn’t new at all?

In a comment to this post I used the phrase “E2.0 meets BI”. To be more accurate I should have said “E2.0 fuels BI”. This whole “Big Data” thing is nothing more than reporting and analytics, but with more data than we had before. Those of us who have a stake in the BI domain have often wished for more raw data on which to base our decisions. Now that we have it, and are getting more of it every second, we’re freaking out and giving one or more major vendors in the space an opportunity to define something new. Two things, and only two things, have really changed:

1. The available amount of raw data is way beyond what it was only a short time ago;
2. The Cloud and SaaS jeopardize access to some of the raw data.

If you’ve got the resources (i.e.: $’s) dealing with #1 one is a matter of scaling. Dealing with #2 is tougher, especially if any of your data sources are not entirely under your control (Cloud, SaaS). The challenge, however, is not insurmountable:

• Rationalize your requirements and identify what is absolutely critical to your business (i.e.: leave the “it’s just cool” stuff out or defer for later);
• If you rely on hosted data sources negotiate appropriate access and up-time agreements;
• Find out if your hosted providers can provide some of the ETL for you;
• Trim your datasets where possible;
• Identify your true timing requirements (real-time, near-real-time, periodic);
• If you have retention / disposition policies on your data sources, enforce them; if not, define and enforce them.

The funny thing is, when I made my living in BI projects, 5 of the 6 points noted above where standard things we did. Maybe nothing really has changed all that much, other than my segue into RIM. Oh well.

With that done, I want to turn to look at some of the particular ECM needs of for-profit ed providers and how fostering better content management practices can help transform these organizations.

Growing pains

The biggest challenge facing for-profit ed providers is growth, whether organic growth or growth by acquisition. Over the last six or seven years, for-profit ed has experienced huge growth, and while this is obviously a good thing, it brings significant challenges.

• Operations - scaling to keep pace with growth is difficult, from back office functions like HR and accounting to front-office functions like enrollment, financial aid, or curriculum development
• IT - not only is scaling existing systems a challenge, but integrating new systems from acquisitions can quickly overwhelm even a mature technology function
• Personnel - the difference between for-profit and traditional educational cultures is vast—when a traditional educational organization is acquired and becomes part of a larger for-profit organization, sparks fly and change management is a daunting task
• Student experience – large for-profit ed providers are typically a patchwork of content sources, delivery platforms, and service organizations—and if this makes things difficult for employees, you can imagine what it does for a consistent, quality student experience
• Curriculum development – on the one hand, large-scale acquisitions give for-profit ed providers more content than they know what to do with, but on the other, they also have to build agile, effective curriculum development functions to allow them to move into new markets before their competition

ECM solution areas

Although the challenges for-profit ed providers face as a result of their rapid growth don’t have a single solution, there are some significant ways that ECM can contribute signally to how organizations face these challenges.

• Structured Authoring and Publishing – to enable a workflow driven authoring process that leverages modular content creation and reuse, author once – publish many, and multiple-channel output
• Enterprise Collaboration – to enable virtual teams, distributed expertise management, and knowledge sharing
• Workflow/Advanced Case Management – to digitize, automate, and streamline core processes, both transactional (e.g., application, enrollment) and knowledge worker (e.g., financial aid decision-making, grading, customer service)
• Document Management – to improve how documents are created, managed, and accessed across the organization
• Portal - to provide user communities, discussion forums, and alternative feedback channels for employees
• Socal Media Integration and Community Development – to provide user communities, discussion forums, and alternative feedback channels for students
• Customer Communication Management – automate, standardize, and optimize how providers communicate with students across all channels

Real-world examples

For-profit ed providers are addressing these ECM solution areas in a variety of ways. He’s some of the real-world solutions I’ve seen in my travels.

• Centralizing the management of student records using paperless, straight through processing and an enterprise image repository
• Streamlining student on boarding and management with self-service web tools
• Standardizing the curriculum development process with an authoring platform
• Creating virtual “student unions” with online community tools
• Creating communities of expertise to connect SMEs across the organization, whether in home office (such as curriculum developers or tech leads) or campus functions (guidance counselors or instructors)

The final word

The for-profit ed market, as breakneck as its growth has been, shows little signs of stopping. As this market continues to expand, and providers continue to grow organically and through acquisition to gain and maintain competitive advantage, they’ll be under increasing pressure to streamline their operations. The ECM solution areas I’ve outlined above, along with other enterprise domains like CRM and ERP, will be central to their continued success.

While I muse on what the next transformational market in this series will be, I’d love to hear from folks out there—thoughts on for-profit ed? Other perspectives on how they’re using ECM to transform their business? Is there something I’ve missed?

Jump in and share your thoughts with all of us and let’s get the conversation started!

I suspect the future of writing in the office place will shift from Word and Open Office to open platforms where the words that you write are what is most important, and computers and editors will apply style, images and links to related content to enrich the content as a workflow process following its initial creation.

This makes the transportation and transformation of the words from one product into another so much easier, and style can be changed quickly and easily for past and future content. It is also easier to use and re-use it again in other products.

Think about it, how many times does the Word file you spend half an hour tweaking just so it looks right end up in several places and different platforms looking completely different? My own experience in this has lead me to writing in blogs, because it is just so easy to do. The files are small, transportable, accessible, open with a simple browser (no special or expensive software) and have some of them have built in spell checking as I write – not as a separate function. I can write from my desktop, laptop, phone, or TV and the content can be styled in any way I or someone else pleases. Not to mention that people can index it and discover it, as well as comment on it and share it with others quickly and easily. It also fits with my hope of where things will go in the future with regard to IT and work. Simple really, all I should need is an internet connection and a browser. Which is also why my recent work has been focused on browser wars and how they are doing against one another.

So to wrap things up, spend that extra half hour working on the content, collaborating with colleagues, checking your sources, and making your inner author voice shine through, and give a blog a chance – you might just come to like it for the same reasons I do.

-Lance.

I like Social Networking: Even if I haven’t quite eschewed email and my C: drive, I rely heavily on my social network for information, for feedback and for personal communications. My 350 carefully vetted Twitter followers, my 150 Facebook family and friends, my 100 LinkedIn business contacts and University alumni, my 50 RedBubble artist friends and the dozen subscribers to my WordPress blog, make up most of my social network.

It’s not a huge network, but it’s mine, it is personal, it is relevant and it is important to me. Whether I like it or not, it also defines my public identity, to a certain extent.

So what happens when disaster strikes? What if all that was wiped away?

Louis Richardson very eloquently describes a new Information/Knowledge Management environment that centres around the individual and his social network rather than information collected in documents. (“People-centric vs. Content-centric” http://bit.ly/gU5Skf). AIIM (by voice of Geoffrey Moore) similarly describe the transition from “Systems of Record” to “Systems of Engagement”. (http://www.aiim.org/Research/AIIM-White-Papers/Systems-of-Engagement)

Both of these highlight the fact that my social identity is now a more important asset than the collection of knowledge artefacts that live on my hard disk and get backed up regularly.

I have no backup of my social identity!

Within my work environment, people will look to my social community profile, to understand who I am, where I come from and what my interest and expertise is, based on my profile, my tags, my network contacts, my blogs, the communities I belong to, the bookmarks I shared, etc

One day my public profiles (through a weird upgrade bug) got wiped clean. My profile was blank, my identity was gone! I was no longer an opinionated thought leader and social media zealot, or helpful ECM advocate with answers to questions. I was another blank profile with just a name.

Rebuilding that identity is not easy. Not only it takes time and effort, but trying to remember what was there to start with, is a nightmare. Who was I connected to? Which communities did I belong to? What tags did people assign to me? More importantly, how long will it take for my profile to “mature” to the same level of trust and credibility that it carried before?

Thinking about this, I realised how much I’ve come to rely on social media. Facebook and LinkedIn are my address & phone lists and birthday calendars for friends, family and work colleagues.  My on-line calendar is also my diary and meetings history log.  My blog site contains most of my innovative thoughts & nuggets from the last 3 years. The people I follow on twitter are my market intelligence engine. The people that follow me, are my influence sphere.

If these accounts were to suddenly disappear, I will have lost not only years of investment, but my social identity and my social memory. And that would cost me time, it would cost me operational efficiency, it would cost me credibility, it would cost me competitiveness, and it would cost me personal angst. It will ultimately have an impact to both my work and to my private life.

How do I protect this identity? Some tools, like Facebook, have their own mechanisms for taking a backup copy of your profile data. Did you know that? When was the last time you took a backup of your Facebook account? Other third-party tools (e.g. http://www.backupify.com) will backup and restore multiple public profiles from different tools. They are commendable, but not complete. And how many of us actually use them?

Take a step back: Imagine for a moment that your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts are wiped clean. Imagine that your blog has no entries. In the people-centric world of social networking, what impact will this Social Amnesia have to your business and your personal life?

A little background
I recall hearing that the average commute time in DC was over a half an hour. I commute about an hour and fifteen minutes a day, each way. So I usually check NPR news headlines, and about a half hour of 103.5 to catch the main stories, weather, traffic etc…

So how do I use/engage my brain for the rest of the commute? I turned to podcasts. And in doing so, I found many good sources of relevant information and news I could use to maintain situational awareness with regard to issues I am involved with at work. I am aware of the latest developments in the areas I am most concerned with, and I hear varying viewpoints on those issues from several sources over the course of a few days. I have subscribed to individual podcasts, and I use a podcast streaming service called Stitcher for some of the broader interest areas and what others in my field are sharing and talking about.

Thoughts
As I started to think more about it, I realized that if I were to compare the costs of my minutes – the minutes in the commute were pretty cheap. Cost here being the cost of what do I give up to listen to a podcast on my way to work vs what is the cost of the time I would spend reading all of that information while at work. Or put another way, what can I not do while I am locating and reading these articles or bits of information?

It dawned on me that most people are interested in the information that our communications committees are putting out across several formats and publications that include a newsletter, emails, banners, signs, internal web page, etc… But, when I thought about it, what I wanted was one source, and I wanted to move that source to less expensive minutes, otherwise – I was not likely to digest all of those different resources, and I am missing out on useful information.

Motivation
So there is was. I wanted to know those things, but they were spread out, and using expensive work minutes instead of cheap commuting minutes. (Commuter minutes, gym minutes, elevator minutes, lunch minutes etc…)

That is the motivation for consolidating those bits of information into a podcast and allowing the workforce to access the information from home, download the mp3 files to a smartphone, or mp3 player, and listen to the issues that might otherwise go unknown.

If you are interested in the mechanics of how I am creating the podcast, the previous blog entry to this covers that pretty well, and I may add another when I get to the point where I am interviewing instead of just reading the news.

Question for you – where are your cheapest minutes? I don’t think my list is big enough, and I would like to know when you listen or might listen to a podcast.

If you have any comments, or questions – please leave them below in the comments, I will respond to them and thanks for reading.

But still gossip persists and continues to be passed along via email and social media. In a 2008 article, Psychology Today outlined 8 ½ reasons why gossip is hard to kill. It is this very “sticky” nature of online gossip that merits us asking the question: What can gossip teach us about social business and collaboration?

1. Users give priority to information that is pushed. Information that is in front of you is easier to access than information that you have to find. Even if the search time to find that information is only .23 seconds, if information is pushed, it has priority over information that must be searched for. Add to this the complications of enterprise search (a far cry from a Google-like experience), and pushed information wins every time. In most organizations this pushed information means e-mail today, but it will quickly come to include your social collaboration platforms as well. As online collaboration increases in the business environment, it will be important to understand the priority that users place on information that is given to them as opposed to what they need to go find in a repository or group space.
2. The personal trumps Corporate. People have social “pull” with each other that faceless departments or organizations cannot imitate. An email from a friend or co-worker whom you trust will outweigh the company-wide memo or a newsletter blast. Social business communities will respond substantially better to company-wide information if it is disseminated by an actual person rather than by a department.
3. Identify expertise. In an online collaboration event, a lot of comments and content can be generated quickly. But we lack editorial knowledge of this content. Depending on how many voices are parts of the conversation, we do not always know who we can trust. This problem is exacerbated by micro blogs, where users are not always easy to identify. Community managers would do well to assign “expert” status to certain users so that their commentary can be elevated.
4. Rewards can help clean up the content. Systems that provide a voting mechanism for users to select the best answer can award expertise points and help clean up the slop that is generated during collaboration by elevating knowledgeable or expert answers above the rest. Yahoo! Answers is a good example of this type of environment in a consumer environment. Not only are experts incented to participate, but users can also have faith that the content they are depending upon is valid.
5. Sometimes gossip is right. The same Psychology Today article states that 95 percent of the gossip in hierarchical social structures (e.g. a business) is often correct. As social business systems become filled with popular sentiment, community managers could be tracking employee sentiment to harvest the wisdom of the crowd.

I looked at a few government agencies that are using the Twitter service looking for use cases that I might recommend using in our organization, and with a specific purpose.

Here is the list of activities I observed on their Twitter pages:

- Post links to photos related to employees and their activities at work and in the community
- Links to articles that involve their employees or business activities
- Announcements
- Links to charity events
- Links to Podcasts and Videos
- Weather/Emergency alerts (Open/closed/late arrival/early departure/Telework etc…)
- Visitors
- Safety notices
- Travel Advisories
- Uniform Changes
- Contests
- Updates on projects or activities of the business
- Links to reference or other resources
- Job announcements
- Seeking skills or equipment announcements
- Events that influence Employees or Business Partners or Customers
- Links to business mentions in the news or other media

Of the items on the list above, I am recommending the following for my organization:

- Job announcements
- Weather/Emergency announcements
- Travel Alerts
- Events that influence Employees or Business Partners or Customers
- Links to our activities in the local community

Getting Started

- No associated costs
- Can start immediately
- Link to the Twitter feed from the Organizational Homepage on the Internet
- Start with an initial post that links to an article that describes the intended use of the feed and how employees, customers, and partners might want to follow it.

As for who should have the ability to update the posts to the business feed, I would recommend 3 people fill that role, and that requests for posts be sent to those individuals through existing chains of command pertaining to the individual submitting the request with specific words in the email subject line that identify it as a post so that it can be viewed and acted upon immediately by one of the posters (ex… Twitter Feed update request). Candidates for those three people would likely be people that already handle business announcements.

If you have other ideas, please add them to the comments below, and I’ll try to add them to the content in this article in the near future.

Tweet

API (application programming interface): A source code interface (a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications) that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services from a computer program

Blog: Originally a single, unedited voice; still individuals’ online journals, but many contain links to other blogs (blogroll) and feedback from readers

Enterprise 2.0 :An entire new suite of emergent technologies—wikis, blogs, tagging, etc.— within the business environment

Mash Up: A Web site or Web application that combines different APIs and content from more than one source

Prediction Market: A speculative market created to improve forecasting

Remixing:Users add their own data and services to collaborative Web services, making them more useful

Ruby on Rails (RoR): An open-source project written in Ruby programming language that aims to increase the speed and ease with which database-driven Web sites are created; offers skeleton code frameworks (scaffolding) from the outset

RSS (really simple syndication): A means for users to subscribe to Web content that is updated frequently

Social Networking: The use of the Internet to build and maintain relationships

Tagging: The use of keywords to track Web content

Wiki: A Web site that allows users to create and edit content; a form of collaborative working

Part 1 What is Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

Described as “an interactive dialogue”, instead of just buying the morning paper you can go online read an article and there is technology in place that facilitates sharing, commenting, bookmarking, rating and blogging.

The platform that supports this technology is “Web 2.0” a term used to collectively describe the current web generation. While Social Media tools like Facebook and Twitter are great for the public domain, what about the private sector? Enterprise 2.0 is the technology and business practice that enables Social Media in the enterprise.

The characteristics of E2.0 are:

Flat Organization
Ease of Organization Flow
Agility
Flexibility
User-driven technology
Bottom up
Distributed
Teams are global
Fuzzy boundaries, open borders
Transparency
Information systems are emergent
Folksonomies
Simple
Open
On Demand
Short time-to-market cycles

Common E2.0 Tools:

Wiki’s
RSS
Blogs
Mashups
Social Networks for Professionals
Instant Messaging
Shared Calendars
Microblogging
Discussion Boards
Ratings
Collaborative Document Management

Almost all large to medium sized organizations have some form of Social Media that workers use as part of their day-to-day activities. All characteristics are not required for an organization to have a rich and vibrant online community of employees that increase sales, improve business processes and share knowledge.

Next Part 2 – The Vendor Landscape