My computer is having a spaz attack – discuss!

I was working from home yesterday. My daughter stormed into my office:

• “Dad, I need to use your computer”
• “Why?”
• “I need to print some pictures”
• “Why don’t you use your laptop?”
• “It’s not working…”
• “What do you mean ‘it’s not working’? What is not working?”
• “I don’t know, it’s having a spaz attack”

I have long given up any pretence of understanding the etymology of the teenage language. In a language where “fit” means handsome and “sick” means nice, I have no hope in tracing the origins of “spaz”. I can only guess that it stems from “spastic” or “spasmodic”. I have learned that “spaz” is an abbreviation of “spasticated” (as in “it’s gone all spasticated…”), which leaves me none the wiser. I digress… Whatever the origin of the term, in my thirty years of troubleshooting computers I’m pretty sure that epileptic seizures where never on the symptom list…

• “Why didn’t you bring it down so that I can sort it out?”
• “I don’t have time for that. All I need is to print three pictures for my artwork.”

I yielded, even though every fibre in my body was screaming for answers and detail. There is no such thing as “Not working”.

I saw a huge IT generation gap issue here: When I started working with computers, somewhere in the prehistoric early ‘80s, you needed to understand computers to use them. I won’t bore you with stories of bootstrapping from paper tapes and disk drives that needed to be shutdown in a certain way because the heads would physically crash on the disk, but to a whole generation of us, “not working” immediately triggers a root cause analysis mechanism in our brain: Power, motherboard, fans, memory, disks, peripherals, operating system, drivers, software, network connection, telephone line, etc. By process of elimination, ONE of them is not working, but not usually the whole. And part of “using” the computer was to understand which part is not working and how to get it to work. Because, frankly, if we didn’t figure it out there wasn’t anyone else around that could.

My daughter is a typical business user: To her, the computer is a means to an end. Her laptop is a tool. She has no interest to find out which part isn’t working or to make any attempt to fix it. If she can’t go to Google and print the three pictures she needs, when she needs them, it renders the tool useless. “The computer is not working”, does not mean the physical machine is broken, it means “my tool doesn’t do what I need it to do”. Why and how is irrelevant.

A couple of weeks ago, when her laptop refused to start altogether (hard disk index corruption problem, a simple CHKDSK fix), her only concern was if she would lose the book she has been writing for the last six months – cue the usual backup lecture from dad… She doesn’t want to learn how to do backups, she wants her book to be there.

Interestingly, the same gap exists between most business user communities and IT. IT will worry about which part of the infrastructure is failing, which vendor to contact, which component needs tweaking, which performance bottleneck requires more resources at peak time. For the users it’s black & white: “The system” is working, or it’s not.

Coincidentally, I saw another example of the same gap earlier in the day, yesterday, when I went to my dentist. After paying for my check-up, and after several failed attempts, the receptionist informed me that they could not give me a receipt because the printer is broken and they were waiting for the engineer to arrive. I could see the aforementioned printer from where I was standing: It was flashing a red light with a message that it had a paper-jam. There were four people at reception, and various dentist assistants that paraded through. Not one of them had either the skills or the inclination to clear the jam.

I felt envy towards the engineer – Money for nothing!

I also resisted the temptation to say “Can I try and sort it for you?”, but it was hard! I agreed to have my receipts posted in the mail, instead.

Data Governance is not about Data

Those that have been reading my blogs for a while, know that I have great objections to the term “unstructured” and the way it has been used to describe all information that is text-based, image-based or any other format that does not tend to fit directly into the rows and columns of a relational database. None of that “unstructured” content exists without structure inside and around it, and databases have long moved on from storing just “rows and columns”.

A conversation last night with IDC Analyst @AlysWoodward, (at the excellent IDC EMEA Software Summit in London), prompted me to think about another problem that distinction has created:

Calling that content “unstructured” is a convention invented by analysts and vendors, to distinguish between the set of tools required to manage that content and the tools that service the world of databases and BI tools.  The technologies used to manage text-based content and digital media need to be different, as they have a lot of different issues to address.

It has also been a great way of alerting the business users that while they are painstakingly taking care of their precious transactional data, that only represents a about 20% of their IT estate, while all this other “stuff” keeps accumulating uncontrolled and unmanaged on servers, C: drives, email servers, etc.

These artificial distinctions however, are only relevant when you consider HOW you manage that information, the tools and the technologies. These distinctions are not relevant when you are trying to understand WHAT business information you hold and need as an organisation, WHY you are holding it and what policies need to be applied to it, or WHO is responsible for it: The scanned image of an invoice is subject to the same retention requirements as the row-level data extracted from it; the Data Protection act does not give a different privacy rules for emails and for client records kept in your CRM system; a regulatory audit scrutinising executive decisions will not care if the decisions are backed by a policy document or a BI query; you can’t have a different group of people deciding on security policies for confidential information on your ERP system and another group for the product manufacturing instructions held in a document library.

“Data Governance” (or “Information Governance”, or “Content Governance”, I’ve seen all of these terms used) is not an IT discipline, it’s a business requirement. It does not only apply to the data held in databases and data warehouses, it applies to all information you manage as an organisation, regardless of location, format, origin or medium. As a business, you need to understand what information you hold about your customers, your suppliers, your products, your employees. You need to understand where that information lives and where you would go to find it. You need to understand who is responsible for managing it, making sure it’s secure and who has the right to decide that you can get rid of it. Regardless if that information lives in a “structured” or “unstructured” medium, and regardless of the tools or technologies that are needed to implement these governance policies.

The Data Governance Council, has developed an excellent maturity model for understanding how far your organisation has moved in understanding and implementing Data Governance. It covers areas such as “Stewardship”, “Policy”, “Data Risk management”, “Value Creation”, “Information Lifecycle Management”, “Security”, “Metadata”, etc. etc.  All of these disciplines are just as relevant in taking control of the data in your databases, as they are for managing the files on your shared drives, your content repositories and the emails on your servers.

I seriously believe that by propagating this artificial divide between “data” and “content”, we are creating policy silos that not only minimise the opportunity for getting value out of our information, but we are introducing even further risks through gaps and inconsistencies. We may have to use different tools for implementing these governance controls on different mediums, but the business should be having ONE consistent governance scheme for all its information.

Open to your thoughts and suggestions, as always!

The Great Big File Box in the sky – help me out here…

The internet is buzzing with the success stories of Dropbox.com and Box.net. How much they’ve grown, how much they are worth, who’s likely to buy whom, where does iCloud/iPages come into it, etc., etc.

Am I the only one who doesn’t quite get the point here? Yes, I can see how it makes file sharing easier and how it potentially reduces internal IT costs by outsourcing the management of large volumes of information.

How is this ever a good strategy?

We have spent the last 20 years, trying to educate companies on the need to organise their information rather than just dumping in on shared file drives. Classification, version control, metadata, granular security, records management, etc. Anything to convince users to think a little bit further than just “File, Save As” in order to minimise the junk stored on servers, to maximise the chance of finding information when you need it and maintain some sense of auditability in your operations.

So instead of moving forwards, we’re moving backwards! First Sharepoint and now these wonderful cloud services, allow us to shift our junk from our own fileservers to The Great Big File Box in the sky.  With no plan, no structure, no governance, no strategy, no security model, no version control or audit trail.

How is this ever a good idea? I plead ignorance – please help me understand this…

Did anyone go to an “all you can eat” buffet restaurant and not come out feeling bloated??

Systems of Engagement – A bridge too near?

It’s now about a year since AIIM first introduced their study “Systems of Engagement and the future if Enterprise IT” (led by Geoffrey Moore). In this last year I’ve heard this study presented several times and it always resonates with the audience.

However, I believe that the study does not go far enough.

I agree totally that in the last few years we have seen a dramatic shift in the way people interact and communicate and it’s primarily driven through the adoption of social networking and collaboration tools. So the principle of moving to “Systems of Engagement” is sound.

Where I disagree with the study though, is the concept that “Systems of engagement begin with a focus on communications”. That we have moved from managing content to managing interactions. Yes, the new mediums are a lot more interactive and as a result we have more transient content and a higher volume to manage. But fundamentally, this is still describing a system of records, with records encompassing this new type of content.

In my view, what has fundamentally and irrevocably changed is the perception of value. Systems of Engagement no longer derive value from managing information. The focus is on managing Relationships.

• Relationships between individuals
• Relationships between people and knowledge domains or communities
• Relationships between people and information
• Relationships between information sources – i.e. context
• Relationships between groups, businesses, communities

What was the primary driver for adoption of tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? connecting people into networks. What will determine the success or failure of Google+? The transition of communities of users from other networks.

In Systems of Engagement, we no longer bookmark the information. We connect with individuals: Friends, Circles, Connections, Followers. We trust the information, because we trust the source. We seek expertise first, and information second. My value, as an individual, is not defined by the documents I’ve written but by my network, my presence and my contribution to the communities I belong.

This applies just as much inside the firewall, as it does outside. Collaborative tools, crowdsourcing, open Q&A, etc. are not driven by sets of captured information, they are driven by connecting the right people to the right tasks and the right communities. By developing relationships.

Yes, as Geoffrey Moore describes in the study, new information is generated through the interaction between individuals. But the new currency in the world of Systems of Engagement is not the snippet of interaction between individuals and the knowledge contained within it. That knowledge is transient and most often obsolete as soon as it is captured.

The new currency today in Systems of Engagement is the Relationship, the connection, the network: Who knows whom? Who knows what? Who do I know? Who knows and follows me?

My first DMS kiss…

A recent tweet exchange with @pmonks and @pelujan (legends amongst the ECM Twitterati…) prompted me to dig deep into my past to find my first flirting with Document Management, a relationship that has lasted over 35 years.

The year: 1984

The venue: London, offices of a Greek shipping company

The actor: An impoverished first year BSc student

The platform: Perkin-Elmer (later Concurrent) super-minis, 32-bit architecture

The language: CoBoL with proprietary RDBMS and transaction processing

The screen: Green on Black

The medium: X.25 network, over a private leased London-to-Athens line

The gig: Long-distance telephone calls between London and Athens offices were costing the company a fortune. Also, the timezone difference reduced the effective daily communication window by 4 hours. The company was looking for a way to leverage their existing technology platform, to exchange messages between offices synchronously or asynchronously, without incurring additional telephone costs.

The solution: A database system written in Cobol, which allowed terminal users at either end to pick a recipient from a list or registered users, leave a message from the user to the opposite party and receive a message back. Since it showed a history of the messages exchanged between the parties, if both parties were on-line, then you could have a dialogue in real-time (line-by-line). If not, the other party would pick the message when they logged in and respond back. This was using a temporary database table. If either party wanted to keep a permanent record of the conversation, they would “archive it” in a separate table, holding metadata like start time, end time, from, to, a subject description, location, etc. Also, since I wanted to be able to exchange messages about code with other programmers in the head office, it had a primitive system of referencing external files on shared disks.

In today’s terminology, this was email, Instant Messaging, micro-blogging and Document Management system rolled into one. An early form of social collaboration. I designed it and built it in about two weeks and it was used daily. It was simple, crude but effective.

[A side note for the pedants: I know email systems were already around by then in the Unix community, but they were not commonplace and they certainly were not available on a business platform like the Perkin-Elmer. Remember, 1984: no TCI/IP, no Internet, no Windows, no PCs, no files]

Since then, I’ve worked on many more weird DMS implementations, before the Document Management market was even identified as such: A hand-crafted invoice processing system written in VB with Kofax cards and massive Cornerstone monitors on OS/2 machines; A bespoke DMS for commercial property agents, with distributed desktop scanning (property images) attached to workflow (rental review) cases; A bespoke DMS based on Uniplex and Informix 4GL for lawyers, a fully fledged DMS with version control and content searching on NeXT machines, using C, Informix and BRS-Search (free-text database), later ported to a disasterous Ingres implementation on Windows 3.11

By then Documentum came on the scene and I remember writing VB for a very early implementation of version 1 (effectively just a set of APIs) for a Pharmaceutical company. FileNet was already on the scene with the first notion of Imaging+Workflow as a single intergrated platform, but our paths were not to cross until a decade later.

Now, there is a point to this inane drivel, beyond self-indulgence…

In today’s confused ECM market, none of these early bespoke implementations would classify as proper “Document Management”. Yet at the time, they were all innovative, trailblazing, and large companies would pay good money to implement them. It created the legitimate (if schizophrenic) ECM market space that we live in and love today.

When I launched “Document Management Avenue” in 1995 – the first independent online community forum for DMS, for those old enough to remember – we were tracking over 300 products in this space. I still have the list somewhere. Today, most of us can only point at a dozen or so major ECM / EDRMS vendors.

There you have it. My own short history of watching the birth of ECM – The bespoke became product, which became open-source, which became commodity. The rest, as they say, is history… And some of us are still arguing what to call the baby

Lawyers are from Mars, Technology is from Venus

I spent two excellent days last week at the Legal Week’s Corporate Counsel Forum, where I’ve met several new and interesting people and learned an awful lot of things I didn’t know.

But I left the conference very frustrated.

The forum audience comprises primarily senior lawyers: General Counsel and Heads of Legal departments. The topics covered were as wide as crisis management, ‘moral’ compass, employment, Bribery Act, ‘Tesco’ law, cross-border teams, intellectual property, competition, etc., etc. Fascinating subjects, some of which admittedly I knew nothing about and learned a lot. It gave me a small insight into “a day in the life of a General Counsel” and the sheer volume of diversity that they have to be knowledgeable about, deal with and protect themselves (and their company) from.

And in 8 out of 10 conference sessions I wanted to shout: “There is a solution that can help here!”.

It amazes me (and frustrates me!) how much of the technology that other parts of the organisation take for granted seems to be absent from the legal department. As if they are the poor relatives in the organisation. I am not talking about highly specialised legal technologies such as eDiscovery, Content Analytics or even Information Risk & Compliance Governance (although these too are available and seem to be missing from many legal officers’ armoury, but that’s another conversation…). I am talking about basic capabilities that make the daily office operation significantly more efficient:

• Digitising paper – avoiding the costs, avoiding delays of shifting piles of paper around and the risk of losing them by accident or in a crisis
• Electronic document repositories – managing security and access controls, reducing duplication, managing versions, allowing online access from anywhere and simple searching
• Case management – allowing lawyers to organise their work, negotiate with third parties, monitor progress, apply rules and generate reports automatically instead of using spreadsheets
• Email management – capturing, filtering, organising and routing emails, ensuring compliance
• Collaboration software – communicating amongst large teams, dispersed in different geographies and timezones

The list goes on… This isn’t trailblazing, these are automation tools and capabilities that have proven their value and have been helping organisations remove basic inefficiencies, for the last 10-20 years.

I am not advocating that technology is the answer to everything. Some business problems can be improved with some common sense and a bit of reorganising. Others are far too complex to be tackled by technology alone. But there is certainly enough basic technology to make a General Counsel’s life much simpler.

One of the key messages coming out of the conference was the resource constraints that legal departments are facing. Too much to do, too little time, too few people, too much information to process, too much knowledge to upkeep, too many risks to avoid, too many departments to coordinate, too many regulations to adhere to and too many stakeholders to appease.

So why are you wasting time on menial tasks that can be simplified, automated, or eliminated by use of simple tools, instead of using that time effectively to add value to the elements of the process where technology can’t  help.

Whenever I asked that question, the answer is typically “We don’t control the budget” or “We have other priorities” or “We don’t have the time to look at new tools”, etc.

Excuses! The question here is not “have I got time to worry about technology?”. The question is “Can I afford the luxury of NOT using it?”.  If these technologies can improve the productivity and reduce costs in the operations department, the marketing department, the sales department, the procurement department, why not use them to improve the efficiency of the legal department too?

(I would love to hear your views on this, especially if you are and in-house lawyer or work in a legal department)

Tweet Jam Tarts – Revisited…

(c) dadcando.com

Last Thursday I participated in another exciting ECM Tweetjam (if you don’t know what a Tweetjam is read it here) organised by @bduhon (long suffering editor of AIIM’s publications and curator of @AIIMCommunity). I had missed the announcements, but stumbled upon a tweet message from a friend, just in time, so I jumped in.

The usual suspects participated in the discussion. Virtually all vocal participants were from the vendor community, but that is not surprising given AIIM’s make up as an organisation. Also not surprising, since the people who have opinions to share on ECM tend to be the ones that have been around this industry for a while and have seen the good, the bad and the extremely ugly (I’m talking about ECM projects here, before anyone gets offended!)

Even though you can use any twitter client to participate in a tweetjam, TweetChat was the preferred tool of the day. It just keeps everything focused and flowing but even with the best tool for the job, it’s difficult to keep up. At the peak of the discussion there were between 5-10 tweets in every 5-second refresh cycle. No chance of reading all of them, never mind responding. Bryant did his best to streamline the flow by numbering the questions but, inevitably, the limitation of 140 characters and the multiple threads of conversations/retweets/comments on each question meant that it was fairly chaotic at times. That’s not a bad thing in a tweetjam! It shows that the participants are passionate about the topic and that it’s not scripted. I’ve been in other tweetjams before, where it was obvious that the only participants were marketers with a very specific message to convey. Those tweetjams are boring!

For those interested in stats: In an hour – 977 tweets, 82 twitterers, potentially reaching 42,500 people…

It’s worth remembering though, that for every person active in a tweetjam conversation, there are several others that just listen in, monitoring the hashtag and looking for pearls of wisdom. And there were several in the session.

So, what ECM pearls did we pick up in the Jam? Here are some…

• The never-ending saga of “is ECM the right name for what we do?” continues
• BPM is a fundamental part of ECM, as confirmed again by OpenText acquisition
• ECM is relevant to small organisations as much as it is to large ones
• SharePoint is here and offers basic ECM, if implemented correctly, but there are some ‘evil’ implementations out there.
• Operational efficiency is “sexy”… According to some at least.
• Some of us are too old and have been in ECM for far too long…

You can read Bryant’s more detailed blog about the #ecmjam here, but I must say it was fun!

Law – The fire within…

(Photo by kind permission of Jan Timmons)

I must confess: I am not a legal expert and my closest encounter with a courtroom is through the safety of a television screen.

I realised recently however, that inside my brain I have multiple and conflicting views of “The law”.

I grew up in Athens and, even though my grandfather was a lawyer (or maybe echoing his cynicism), I have grown up with an inherent mistrust of all thing ‘legal’: Legalese language that seeks to confuse and befuddle the average mortal; vulcher lawyers that procrastinate in order to maximise their hourly fees; legal cases that run for years and years because scheduled court hearings get postponed on technicalities; the list goes on…

In another compartment of my brain lives the virtuous, almost glamourous, world of TV courtroom drama with a very diverse portrayal of reality, ranging from Rumpole Of the Bailey and Kavanagh QC to Ally McBeal and Law and Order. Where young and old conscientious lawyers are burning the midnight oil, over endless stacks of case law books, looking for the one nugget that will exonerate their Ill-accused client and where honour, ethics and the omnipotent sage of the presiding Judge, prevail to save the day.

Many many years ago, I was involved in the delivery of early, bespoke Document Management systems to large law firms, such as Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Cameron Markby Hewitt (as it was then…), and others, which gave me yet a different perspective: One where Law firm partners are considered akin to deity, hordes of hopeful legal students and young lawyers work through endless hours of menial tasks in order to establish themselves on a career ladder, where information is king but information systems are a foe and where laborious, manual processes represent the status quo. Admittedly that experience was over ten years ago, but it was a cut-throat business then and I doubt that much has changed since.

More recently, I have been marginally involved with the world of electronic discovery and reading about legal proceedings on both sides of the Atlantic, often through the excellent commentary of Chris Dale’s insightful blog.  Through this, I have seen a more earthy view of litigation, where monetary considerations, negotiations, common sense (if such a thing exists….), judgments written in plain English, project management, geopolitical variances and the general admission that nobody, not even judges, are immune to the complexities of technological innovation, paint a picture of a legal environment that looks, well… almost business like! Commercial reality (and the associated astronomical costs of litigation) often dictate that cases are assessed, negotiated and settled on the merits of cost and objectives, not just “fairness” and “justice”.

Which of the views in my brain is more realistic? I don’t know. I find all of them fascinating: I am intrigued, watching an industry which is thousands of years old, constantly evolving and seeking to learn new tricks, acknowledging its own shortcomings and fighting to keep up with technological innovation – just like the rest of us!

“Hey, Watson! Is Santa real?” – Why IBM Watson is an innocent 6-year old…

I love the technology behind “IBM Watson“. I think it’s been a long time coming and I don’t doubt that in a matter of only a few years, we will see phenomenal applications for it.

Craig Rhinehart explored some of the possibilities of using Watson to analyse social media in his blog “Watson and the future of ECM”. He also set out a great comparison of “Humans vs. Watson”, in the context of a trivia quiz. However, I believe that there is a lot more to it…

Watson is a knowledgeable fool. A 6-year old kid, that can’t tell fact from fiction.

When Watson played Jeopardy!, it ranked its possible answers against each other and the confidence that it understood the questions correctly. Watson did not for a moment question the trustworthiness of its knowledge domain.

Watson is excellent at analysing a finite, trusted knowledge base. But the internet and social media are neither finite, nor trusted.

What if Watson’s knowledge base is not factual?

Primary school children are taught to use Wikipedia for research, but not to trust it, as it’s not always right. They have to cross-reference multiple research sources before they accept the most likely answer. Can Watson detect facts from opinions, hearsay and rumours? Can it detect irony and sarcasm? Can it distinguish factual news from political propaganda and tabloid hype?

If we want to make Watson’s intelligence as “human-like” and reliable as possible, and to use it to drive decisions based on internet or social media content, its “engine” requires at least another dimension: Source reliability ranking. It has to learn when to trust a source and when to discredit it. It has to have a “learning” mechanism that re-evaluates the reliability of its sources as well as its own decision making process, based on the accuracy of its outcome. And since its knowledge base will be constantly growing, it also needs to re-assess previous decisions on new evidence. (i.e. a “belief revision” system).

Today, Watson is a knowledge regurgitating engine (albeit a very fast and sophisticated one). The full potential of Watson, will only be explored when it becomes a learning engine. Only then can we start talking about real decision intelligence.

Social Amnesia – What’s your social identity worth to you?

I had the unfortunate experience of losing one of my Social Media accounts recently. And as per the popular song… You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone!

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?