Monthly Archives: February 2009

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Deeper than Twitter and TweetDeck

The Portable Consultant just watched an episode of Cali Lewis’ GeekBrief TV:  How to TweetDeck Like a Pro.

Unless you are a follower of Net Culture you likely won’t understand what it’s about. Not surprising, but does that matter?

Yes.

If you don’t understand this you may not know about, understand, or care about Twitter. You may not even understand or care about social media. You may not know something’s happening let alone know what it is.

On one level: Twitter and what it does and who does it will have an impact on enterprise communications from collaboration to employee relations to sales and marketing. Just as corporate web sites, online sales & support, blogging, podcasts, and online video á la YouTube.

On a deeper level: How a concept like Twitter is born, finds early adopters, and grows up in the real world is a fascinating progression worthy of a hard-cover business book (and a free online creative commons licensed edition with a forward by Cory Doctorow plus accompanying Ogg format audio file).

The required baseline awareness is rising. If I did not follow podcasts I would not know about GeekBrief TV or Twitter to start with. I wouldn’t appreciate that, increasingly, this is how information on such developments is disseminated. When, eventually, this hits the mainstream press I wouldn’t get it (any more than most of the mainstream media writers and presenters do).

Two other things that struck me while I was watching this show:

1) Great video quality! …much better than RocketBoom. Why is that? Surely, not the cost alone. I put it down to Adam Curry & company’s deep experience with the mainstream media they aim to replace as well as their appreciation of the need for high production values in new media.

2) What is that software on the monitor behind Cali Lewis? Could I find a use for that? The video is almost high-def enough for me to read the name. And isn’t it cool that it’s displayed on a real world, physical equipment rack. That’s (almost) an artistic statement.

And that’s the way it is: Saturday, February 21st., 2008

Cheers,
-pmh
ps: No apologies for the two oblique Boomer references.

Emerging, New Paradigms, Open Source

Open Source moves towards the masses

The Portable Consultant would like to build his home media network: a media pc network with heavy lifting back-end and slim, quiet front-ends next to TVs and stereos.

There are countless ways to do this, and countless web sites to show you how, but what’s striking is the vast array of open source options. Not only Linux OS spin-offs like MythTV and Mythbuntu, but what appear to be very smooth products like Elisa and Neuros LINK from Fluendo and Neuros respectively.

These companies are not only using Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), but many of them are actively inciting FLOSS developers to join their open source development communities to contribute to and hack their products. Neuros, for example, sends interested developers to its developer wiki directly from the same web page that directs customers to online support forums.

After years of denial from commercial software vendors, the FLOSS paradigm of development and support is proving increasingly useful for commercial consumer products.

These media related software & hardware products, and not the home Linux PC, appear to be the arena where the consumer is meeting open source systems for the first time… whether they know it or not.

Cheers,
-pmh

ECM, Grumbles, Ramblings

Some ECM “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for February

In the northern latitudes of North America February is considered quite a dismal month. With cold, grey skies overhead and worthless, shadow seeking groundhogs below there is not much to be encouraged about except the slowly lengthening hours of daylight.

The Portable Consultant is feeling understandably low, therefore, when against this bleak backdrop he is exposed to an ECM project that seems to model much that can go wrong with an ECM initiative.

While the following is not intended as a comprehensive list, these are some of the Do’s and Don’ts that the principal consultants on the project failed to be aware of. In no particular order they were:

  • Do have a Project Charter… an SOW is nowhere near good enough for the implementation of a critical enterprise infrastructure such as an ECM.
  • Don’t undertake ECM as an IT Department driven technology project… ECM is more dependent on business requirements and business processes than, say, a new firewall. These days the IT guys should be tightly integrated with the business; e.g., the head of IT should be a CIO who ensures C-level priorities, not technology, drives IT.
  • Do establish an ECM Steering Committee that is representative of the whole enterprise and leverage them to provide guidance, impetus, and a high-level sign-off for company-wide issues such as the corporate taxonomy, key metadata, and security models as well as critical SLA and Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements. Specifically…
    • Don’t confuse backup/restore requirements with DR. DR is about business continuance after the entire office and/or data centre has ceased to function while backup/restore is about a broken server, corrupted database, or some such.
    • Don’t just sit down some afternoon and enter new metadata fields into the production system on the fly without first gathering, documenting, and having affected parties sign-off on the relevent requirements.
  • Do not rely on business units to gather and present their own requirements without extensive guidance from knowledgeable ECM consultants who can speak to the business in their language, the language of business processes not software configuration.
  • Do not expect one of the Big 4 consultancies to necessarily know all this and manage the project according to ECM Best Practices… sometimes just one experienced independent consultant can be enough to help even a large global enterprise to navigate the treacherous waters of ECM deployment… without all that excess overhead. <grin>

Sigh. Time to crawl back into my burrow, I suppose. Wake me up in another six weeks.

Cheers,
-pmh