This presentation to the ARMA Cincinnati Chapter introduced Web 2.0 tools, provided some use cases for each tool, and then described strategies for managing the content created by these tools.
AIIM International is a not-for-profit industry association representing professionals that work in Enterprise Content Management. AIIM defines ECM as the technologies and solutions used to CAPTURE, MANAGE, STORE, PRESERVE and DELIVER documents and content related to organizational processes . That is quite a mouthful, but we are hoping that through today’s class we can help you better understand both the strategy behind and technologies within ECM. AIIM is an international association with members in 146 countries. Our North American headquarters is located in Maryland and we have an office in the UK that services Europe. We also have a network of local chapters that spans North America. AIIM is an “independent” organization and this course is a good example of how AIIM provides a neutral ground for you to get advice and learn about the latest solutions. AIIM’s programs and initiatives focus not only on technology, but how to implement technology successfully. And, AIIM has been an intermediary for the many constituents that work in ECM, including users, suppliers, consultants and analysts for more than 60 years.
Blogs are a great tool for project management. Instead of sharing updates to schedules, drafts, etc. through email, the project manager can post them to a blog that is available to team members, managers, and stakeholders. When a new member joins the project team, they can review the entire project to date simply by reviewing the blog.
An internal blog can also cut down on email blasts from management, HR, or IT about upcoming holiday events, deadlines for payroll, or scheduled server maintenance respectively. In short, anything that is typically sent as a broadcast to many people and which doesn’t require everyone to respond can be published to a blog instead.
And Twitter is great for sending reminders of deadlines or events – and for describing them to folks who aren’t there. This year has seen an explosion of “liveTweeting” sessions and I expect quite a bit of it at AIIM 2010 next year.
Wikis are very effective tools for collaborative authoring, including but certainly not limited to documenting processes, answering frequently asked questions, drafting and reviewing contracts or other deliverables, or updating, say, a records retention schedule.
Wikis are also great for setting up and managing meetings. A wiki could be set up for a meeting to get input for scheduling; draft the meeting agenda; provide supporting documentation (including links); and drafting and publishing the minutes of the meeting.
Quoted in the New York Times, Aug 4, 2008
Social networking is Facebook…
And Myspace….
Classmates.com to keep up with your high school or college classmates…
So here’s a quick look at AIIM’s Information Zen. Note the groups.
And it’s meta-social networking. This is Ning, which is a white label social network that allows you to create your own social network. As of this morning, I am a member of 16 separate Ning-based social networks, including GovLoop, AIIM’s Information Zen, Friends of Alchemy Document Management, and Steve Bailey’s Records Management 2.0. Ning boasts of more than 1 million social networks created as of April 2009, and more than 4,000 new ones being created every day. And they are by no means the only social networking meta-tool out there.
The first business use most people think of is networking and recruiting. LinkedIn is certainly the best-known example of this. And according to a June 2009 study from Careerbuilder.com, forty-five percent of employers reported that they use social networking sites to research job candidates – both to find new employees and to screen them out.
Social networking tools can also be used to collaborate across locations, timezones, and organizations.
And many organizations use them to identify and aggregate experts and information sources relating to a particular topic, again often across organizational boundaries.
Here is a screenshot of YouTube. You can see some of the social aspects of Youtube here, including ratings; the ability to mark it as a favorite; the ability to subscribe to updates either of the video or by the author; and the ability to share a video in a number of ways including sending a link or embedding it directly in another web application such as a blog or Facebook. Users can also comment on individual videos via text or by posting video responses. Most of the other social sharing tools offer similar capabilities.
Slideshare, Scribd, and Google Docs are all great ways to share documents and presentations. Slideshare in particular will let you record audio for a presentation and make that available as a “slidecast”.
Another significant use case is photo sharing. Sites like Flickr and Twitpick allow organizations and users to share photos of conferences or user group meetings; new or updated product lines; or even set up sharing for customers or attendees of a particular event
This is delicious, which is used to share all kinds of bookmarks. It’s great for accessing your bookmarks from another computer such as an internet kiosk, but it’s even more valuable as a filter. As you see here, you can see bookmarks related to a particular topic and how many times it’s been bookmarked, which is one way to gauge its value to others. You can also post a link to your delicious page and others can access your bookmarks directly.
The first step is to determine whether or not something is in fact a record. Just as we know that most email messages are not records, for most organizations their Facebook fan page updates will not be records either. In other words, we have to ask the same questions about these tools that we’d ask about any other type of information: Does it document a transaction or a decision? If it does, it’s probably a record. Is it captured in another form? This is the biggest reason why most social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter wouldn’t need to be captured as records – in most cases they are being used as another transmission mechanism for information stored elsewhere. Now, just because it isn’t a record doesn’t mean it couldn’t be discoverable or a public record and subject to FOIA-type laws. Again, same considerations here as for other types of information. [twitter]Determine whether something is a record or not according to its content and context.[/twitter]
Most of these tools can be secured with passwords and/or have the default permissions set to be private. They are not hacker-proof, necessarily, but for most non-confidential information this is sufficient security.
Fundamentally, most of the most commonly used 2.0 tools are databases + templates. That raises two points. The first is that most of these tools are already manageable in the same way that databases are. The second is that they tend to track changes and versions automatically. Here you see a screenshot of the change tracking in Wikipedia. On the right you see in yellow those areas that were changed, and on the left you see what they were changed to. Wikipedia tracks changes to the individual character level (and so do other wiki packages); other tools may not be quite as granular but can still provide an audit trail, though the granularity will vary widely.
I’m not a big fan of pre-publication review – anything that’s been vetted by 12 layers of bureaucracy will sound like it has. It also defeats the purpose of some of these tools – Twitter in particular is based on rapid response. That said, it’s absolutely appropriate for the organization to monitor how its employees use social networking. This screenshot shows a query I did for “ARMA2009”, but it could just as easily be for my name, for my employer, etc. Any query can be saved and its results made available as an RSS feed, which you’ll see on the next screenshot.
This means having the same type of data map you have in place inside the organization, but with listings of all the services you use, the accounts used there, etc. At a minimum you should list any official use of services and official accounts. It also means understanding the process for getting at that information in the event of litigation, FOIA request, etc. The time to put that process in place is before the subpoena is received. For hosted tools, such as FB or Twitter, it may mean taking periodic snapshots of what is posted to them. Right now there aren’t a lot of tools that do this; one way that can be effective is to capture the RSS feeds generated by these tools. As updates are made, they are published through the RSS feed, which can be saved locally. It might also require working with the third-party vendor in the event that some information or some updates are not available through RSS – for example, web-based email.
Finally, there are enterprise versions of every Web 2.0 application. These enterprise versions are often available to be hosted inside the firewall, meaning that security is much more robust. Access can be secured to them much more effectively. They can be integrated into the organization’s identity infrastructure – whether Active Directory or something else – such that any change, post, comment, edit, update, etc. can all be tracked and, more importantly, tracked to a specific named user. No anonymous postings here. Of course, you have to pay for an enterprise version, but what you’re really paying for is a level of peace of mind. And you still get many of the same benefits – ease of use, familiarity with the type of tool, rapid and agile collaboration across geographical and time boundaries, etc. You’re just getting a more secure and robust version of it.
At this point I’d be pleased to entertain your questions.