BizTechTalk with Dan Keldsen

There is a phenomenon in the content management world called SharePoint, which, like it or not, has really changed the level of awareness of electronic content concerns in businesses today. While SharePoint has nearly made content management a commonplace term in organizations, it’s not as though SharePoint or any other solution is perfect. To a certain degree, the Basic Content Services of SharePoint will be “good enough” that many businesses will not run into severe problems any time soon. However, there are a variety of deficiencies of SharePoint that I hear from time to time - one of which is the Red Herring of almost any discussion, which is “will it scale?” Another, relating to businesses who take uptime, availability, and governance seriously is, can you REALLY manage the content in SharePoint as well as we’d like? Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Ted Orme, Director European Operations for RepliWeb and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of SharePoint from a scalability and governance perspective, and how these concerns are not at all NEW to the content world. If you are currently using SharePoint - have you experienced problems in rolling-out large-scale sites, or changes to those sites? If you are using alternatives to SharePoint and are considering SharePoint as a supplement or replacement to existing solutions, such as from OpenText, IBM, EMC/Documentum - do you already have practices and processes in place that can easily be transfered to the SharePoint realm? Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, we can make the most of ANY content management system, regardless of the provider. After all, your business is more likely to be about something else OTHER than running a content management system. Is your Information Architected to get out of the way of your business, or better yet to fully support your business? Comments and questions welcomed at: http://www.informationarchitected.com/blog/iam-talking-scaling-sharepoint-deployments-and-surviving/

Is the legal industry ready to change their standard practices in billing, particularly given the economic climate of 2008-2009 and at least the short-term future? If they do change that model, will it least, or go back to “business as usual” when the economic smoke has cleared? Knowledge = precedent = expertise. Why not efficiency and effectiveness as well? Is the industry that should have been the poster child for Knowledge Management finally going to see more reasons to be time and cost efficient, just as most other industries have had to do so to remain competitive and retain clients? Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Christopher Marston, Esquire, CEO and Founder at Exemplar Companies, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of the traditional law firm model, and how that model is evolving and even being flipped upside-down in a disruptive innovation sense. If you are currently a client of a traditional law firm - have they adjusted their model in recent months? Do you feel they should? If are a knowledge management practitioner within a law firm, how do you handle cost justification and Return on Investment (ROI) for knowledge management practices within the firm? Only in certain pockets? Firm-wide? What are the pros and cons that you have seen? War stories you’d like to share from any side of the fence? Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and awareness of Knowledge Management itself matures. It’s not dead yet - and we haven’t even gotten started yet, particularly in the legal industry. Listen to full episode and ask questions or comment at: http://www.informationarchitected.com/blog/iam-talking-death-to-the-billable-hour-long-live-knowledge/

SharePoint seems to rank nearly as high as Twitter in any given conversation these days - although I’ve yet to hear Oprah talk about SharePoint (not that I’m watching). While there are many reasons not to adopt SharePoint or to use it as THE 100% solution for your content management, portal, search or workflow needs, it most certainly IS having a huge impact on our industry Why is this? What are some of the strengths of the “core” of what many call SharePoint’s “Basic Content Services” capabilities, and for the purposes of true enterprise-wide or cross-enterprise deployments, what are some of the hazards to be aware of regarding how information is organized and shared within a SharePoint environment? Are the capabilities of SharePoint enough, if you care about managing and maximizing the value of your information? Are the tagging and taxonomy capabilities of SharePoint sufficient, or seriously deficient? While we will not answer the questions to their entirety in this slightly over 22 minute podcast - I hope it prompts you to question whether your current or planned strategy for the use of SharePoint, or really, ANY content management system, is up to the full task or tasks you’re trying to accomplish, particulary with regards to organizing schemes such as tagging, metadata or taxonomy models. Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Lowell Anderson, Vice President of Marketing at SchemaLogic, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the pros and cons of tagging versus taxonomies, where some of the weakness and strengths of SharePoint sit, and where we might be heading with SharePoint and the types of concerns that customers of SharePoint have in trying to wring out the most and best effective use of SharePoint in their organizations. Is your organization struggling with SharePoint schemas? Succeeding? What are the pros and cons that you have seen? War stories you’d like to share? Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can all be that much wiser as the market overall, and SharePoint itself matures. Listen to full episode and provide your comments and questions at: http://www.informationarchitected.com/blog/iam-talking-smarter-tagging-in-a-sharepoint-enterprise/

Usability, User Experience, Experience Design, Lab Testing, Qualitative Testing, Quantitative Testing - there has been a long evolutionary path of skills, tools and concerns relating to delivering an experience for customers, employees, partners, or in short, ANYONE using software interfaces. The vast majority of organizations have not even begun to seriously address these concerns however - particularly for employee-facing sites such as Intranets. Why is this? What are organizations missing as a result? Lost revenue? Unproductive employees? Customers that hate you? Getting started is likely to be far more affordable, understandable and directly applicable to the top-line and bottom-line of your business than you (or your management team) might think. Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Kim Oslob, Senior Research at UserZoom, and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the rise of usability to user experience, and the benefits of keeping USERS and not features in mind. Is your organization involved in usability or user experience work? What are the pros and cons that you have seen? Any companies that you love because they clearly understand this? Or companies you refuse to do business with (or would if there were alternatives) that are clearly “user hostile?” Please feel free to contribute your comments, concerns and questions, and together, perhaps we can crack this area open just a bit further than it already is. Listen and comment on the full episode at: http://www.informationarchitected.com/blog/iam-talking-the-evolution-of-user-experience/

It’s the Year 2009, and the idea of Agile Software Development or variations such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, or pre-cursors such as Rapid Application Development have been around for two decades or more. Why is it that many businesses are still developing or buying software systems such as enterprise content management, portals, search engines, intranet, collaboration spaces, etc., that take months to years to develop and deploy? Isn’t there a better way? Of course there is - and it is time for the inwardly-focused enterprise developers and integrators to take a lesson from the commercial software developers who have seen radically improved time-to-market, Return on Investment (cash does not flow until product ships) and greater customer satisfaction. Listen to the podcast interview (below) between Robert Dempsey, CEO of Atlantic Dominion Solutions and Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal of Information Architected discussing the rise of Agile and Scrum from an active practitioner, developer and trainer perspective. If you have experience (good or bad) with Agile methods of any kind - what have you seen? Cultural problems in implementing the change? Customers who can’t keep up with the rate of change? Can’t find the time to deposit all of the revenue coming in because you’re too busy improving the code? See/hear the full episode at: http://www.informationarchitected.com/blog/iam-talking-its-2009-are-you-agile/

An interview with David Silverstein, CEO of the Breakthrough Management Group (www.bmgi.com), and one of the authors of 'INsourcing Innovation' - a book largely focused on TRIZ (the Russian Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). This interview combines discussions of TRIZ, with ways in which Six Sigma, Lean Thinking, and Portfolio Management might be applied to both small and large innovation problems - not just in the finished goods or manufacturing worlds, but in all walks of business life. Enjoy, feel free to discuss on the blog at www.BizTechTalk.com, or via trackback from your own blog. Both David and I would be very interested in hearing of your own experiences and thoughts on the topics in this interview! David's blog can be found at "Leadership and Business with David Silverstein." (http://www.leadershipandbusiness.com/)

An interview with Dr. Ellen Domb of the PQR Group (www.trizpqrgroup.com) and also Editor of the TRIZ Journal (www.triz-journal.com) - in this session, we discuss some more of the background theory of TRIZ and it's classical origins, but also it's more modern ties into business and management concerns, self-correcting code and the world of Extreme Programming (XP), and a fair romp across a number of topics - all wrapped around TRIZ (The Russian Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). This is the third podcast I have produced on TRIZ at this point, so keep an eye out for past episodes if this is of interest!

24/7 Innovation - Creating an Infectious Culture of Innovation - an interview with Stephen Shapiro, author of the book 24/7 Innovation, covering a wide range of topics within Innovation, from tools and methods for individuals, to processes and a larger setting, and brewing it all up into innovation as a culture and embedded capacity. Have you been infected?

Inventium – Instant TRIZ with cards: A dive with Andre de Zanger of the Creativity Institute in New York, into the 3 most used principles of TRIZ (the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, out of Russia in the 1940s), through Andre’s card game, Inventium. And as usual, many other topics, and philosophical discussions along the way. Think! Invent! Play! Put the science into creativity, and the creativity into science!