The Twitter experiment…

(Originally published on IBM.com by George Parapadakis on 20 August 2009)

I have been using Twitter for a couple of months now, trying to assess its value as a business tool (I’m not too good with broadcasting what I had for breakfast or where I go for a walk in the evening, I’m afraid…). So I’m trying several things out and in a pseudo-scientific fashion trying to analyze the outcome. So here is my first batch of observations, from my experiments so far:

1. Twitter is time consuming. Whether you are a regular contributor or a lurker, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with everything that interests you in Twitter. Even with dashboards like TwitterDeck and Seesmic, it takes a great effort to keep up once you go beyond 30-50 people that you follow. Add to that regular searches on specific topics and you are swamped! So from that perspective it’s interesting, but unreliable as a definitive source of information.2. While there is no definitive protocol that distinguishes personal from business use on Twitter, the signal-to-noise ratio is very high on the noise side. I can see that over time either there will be a Twitter for business and Twitter for personal, or some sort of classification system where you can tag a tweet as personal, business, local interest, hobby, etc. People will get eventually get tired of trying to spot the useful needle in the drivel haystack. In the meantime, I set myself up as three different accounts and have three different communities of following/followers: Work, Hobbies, Other

3. Pay attention to what people are tweeting and re-tweeting. You will soon spot the ones that add value! People who retweet everything – OUT; people who only write marketing /advertising/self promoting tweets – OUT; people who selectively re-tweet and tag things relevant to you, great filters – IN; people who provide insight and genuine thoughtful tweets – IN. I just wish there was a way of grouping the people I follow by stars out of 5, based on how interested I am in what they have to say!

4. Twitter is a pyramid networking system! Unless you are a celebrity comedian, you will only ever have a limited number of followers. But your followers’ followers are your real network. They people that follow you and pay attention, will retweet your posts to their followers. And they to theirs, because they trust the source. Here’s an example: I recently posted a humorous blog on: “10 questions to spot an ECM expert”. I have less than 100 followers on Twitter, and only a handful of them actually pay attention to anything I post. Six (6) people retweeted my tweet. From their followers, I got another 9 retweets. From these 16 tweets in all (and thanks to using relevant hashtags of course) , my blog ranked up to 550 hits within 24 hours. Similar blogs before twitter would have had 5 to 6 hits over a couple of weeks. Very powerful!

5. Don’t believe everything you read. There is a lot of scope in Twitter for distorting (deliberately or accidentally) information, because people implicitly trust the sources they signed up to. A re-tweet does not necessarily come from whoever it says it comes from, nor did it have the same text necessarily, when it started its journey!

So here is my conclusion so far, and I would love to hear your views on it: In the next 6 months Twitter will either collapse under its own weight (people getting tired of trying to find the relevant amongst the irrelevant) or it will transform radically into a set of different and more refined tools. Marketers who already abuse the system will be marginalized, while marketers that understand (and respect!) how powerful this tool can be, will use it to disseminate valuable information, faster than ever was possible before. Personal tweeting will either be segmented out, or it will move back to other networks like facebook, linkedin, etc.

10 questions to spot a real ECM expert

(Originally posted in InformationZen by George Parapadakis on July 24, 2009)

Imagine the scenario… You are at a conference, it’s lunchtime and you are waiting your turn at the finger buffet. The person next to you says “hello” and introduce themselves as an “ECM expert”. Are they? Can you call their bluff? Here are some questions you can try…

1. What does ECM stand for?

• “Electronic Content Management” – Oh, that kind of expert… Let me explain…
• “European Congress of Mathematics” – Definitely an expert, wrong field!
• “Enterprise Content Management” – Good start, continue talking…

2. What was ECM called before it became ECM?

• “Web Content Management” or “Knowledge management” – They are a vendor. Take a step back…
• “Document Management” or “EDMS” or “DMS” or “EDRMS” or “Records Management” – Hm… ok, these are acceptable, we’re on the right track
• “It didn’t really exist before, it evolved from a number of technologies” – Correct!! This could be an interesting conversation!

3. Tell me a couple of big ECM vendors

• “IBM, FileNet, EMC, Documentum, OpenText, …” – Yes, that’s good
• “LavaSoft, Hummingbird, Tower, Total Recall, … “ – Maybe they had a clue, about 10 years ago…
• “Doculabs, DocScience, DocumentBoss” – Wrong planet! Must have seen these names twittered somewhere…

4. Is BPM part of ECM?

• “That depends on which vendor or analyst you are talking to” – Hm… true enough, but not really an expert answer: They are thinking about the software tools
• “What is BPM?” – Never mind, is that sausage roll nice?
• “Process and documents always go hand in hand in an organisation” – Great answer! Get them to tell you more, you may learn something!

5. What is AIIM?

• “The main association for the ECM industry, I’m a member.” – You are in good company!
• “All about imaging and microfilm” – How close are they to retirement???
• “Isn’t that a toothpaste?” – Yes it is (ahem) More orange juice?

6. Where do you keep your most important documents?

• “We make sure they are stored in a secure repository, as soon as possible” – You are already into a deep and meaningful relationship with this expert.
• “I hand them over to our Archiving department – It’s their problem” – Houston, we have a problem!
• “Under my mattress” – Houston… never mind…

7. Why is an electronic document better than paper?

• “I don’t know, our legal department keeps telling us we have to keep papers for compliance” – Smile contentedly, you just opened up a sales conversation!
• “Because it’s quicker to move around the organisation, you can share it and you can back it up” – By George, they get it! You are preaching to the choir…
• “It isn’t! – If I don’t see a piece of paper with a signature, I don’t trust anything!” – Oh dear, not your expert. Ask if they are divorced…

8. So, is email a record?

• “eMail is just a medium. It’s the content inside the email that will determine if it’s a record” – Pitch Perfect! You found a visionary!
• “Not sure, we archive all our emails, just in case” – Ouch! Explain why they should pray, never to be sued for anything
• “No, we make sure that all email is deleted after 20 days” – Oh dear… Better not tell them anything. Ignorance is bliss!

9. What is the most critical component of an ECM implementation?

• “The software and the vendor, you need a strong relationship” – True, but by no means the most critical. You are talking to an IT generalist.
• “Executive Sponsorship” – yadda, yadda, yadda so they’ve read the book.
• “The user” – Bingo! They’ve done this before and they have the scars to prove it!

10. How long does an ECM project last?

• “We had ours up and running in 2 weeks” – Ah, yes, and what does it do exactly?
• “ECM projects go on for years before they deliver anything” – Sorry, you have a project management issue, don’t blame ECM!
• “ECM is a journey, not an event – it evolves as the business changes” – Perfect. You have found your ECM guru! Suggest going out to dinner….

Have a great weekend!

(for @skjekkeland and @sanoojk who asked for it, and @zoernert who challenged me . TGIF!
Inspired by: 10 Questions for Social Media Experts)

What if Orson Welles used Twitter?

(Originally posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on July 10, 2009 )

A scary Friday thought, but with a hint or reality thrown in…

A lot of people will be familiar with the famous War of the Worlds radio hoax story: In 1938, Orson Welles presented a Halloween spoof alien invasion story on CBS radio. The story was so believable that widespread panic ensued.

“The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress [...] The program’s news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast” (Wikipedia)

In 1938, pre-TV era, radio was the most immediate medium for communicating information to people. People trusted the radio and in particular they trusted the News bulletins. In a way, Welles hijacked (abused, if you like) that trust. People reacted to snippets of unconfirmed information, because they implicitly trusted its source. The resulting panic was not the only effect. The trustworthiness of real news sources was questioned. A host of conspiracy theories followed. The same play was adapted and reused in other geographies, causing similar panic and even resulting in deaths.

Roll forward 70 years or so… The most immediate broadcast medium today, is Twitter. Based on 140-character snippets of unconfirmed information. Delivered straight to your mobile/cell phone, wherever you are. What if the BBC or Time or CNN (or anyone spoofing as them) were to broadcast an Orson Welles equivalent hoax. And the world re-tweets, seconds later…. What would today’s reaction be?

Would people panic? That means that people are trusting their social media sources as much as they trusted the radio in 1938. And twitter is a dangerous place to be!

Would they wait and double check their sources? If so, it means we are inherently NOT trusting the information we get from twitter. Which then questions the value of the medium.

Are we any more savvy today than people were in 1938? We would like to think so. But the thousands of people that daily fall victim to email and phone and get-rich-fast scams (and the proliferation of these scams) does not substantiate that belief… Fortunately or unfortunately, people are generally more naive than paranoid.

Have a good weekend! – George

Put that down! You don’t know where it’s been…

(Originally posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on June 29, 2009)

Sometimes, we take too much for granted. Twitter is a wonderful and dangerous thing! Recently I had three twitter experiences which made me sit back and think again:

1) I saw Michael Jackson’s death twittered, before there was an article about it on the BBC News page. The immediacy of twitter as a medium is phenomenal. But “caveat emptor”. This time the news checked out when verified – it was true. It could have just as well been completely false, which would have equally driven crowds into mild panic and depression. So while I appreciate hearing about it first, I prefer the slightly more reserved “verify your sources first” approach of the news. Especially now that the conspiracy theorists are having a field day.

2) Re-twitting is what drives twitter and spreads information around faster than wildfire. Brilliantly simple concept and it really gives me a buzz to see people that I’ve never heard of, re-twitting my comments or my links. Just prefix with RT and the name of the original twitter and off you go. The other day however, someone RT’d one of my comments (thanks) but decided to slightly change half of it. The quip was funny, I appreciated his point and there was no malice intended. But it made me realise how easy it is for someone to put words into my mouth, by allegedly re-twitting something I’ve never said. People inherently trust information if they trust the source. There is no control in twitter-land for verifying that what someone says I said, is actually true! Combine that with the speed that information spreads on Twitter and you have a potential recipe for disaster!

3) Spare me the drivel! I think a lot of you will recognise this symptom: I am being very selective on twitter. I have a personal account and a work account. With my work account I follow people that relate to my work or have information that may be relevant to me. Including people from my own company. Recently I also joined a couple of twitter “communities” (twibes or Comtweets) from work, which changed my Twitter experience dramatically – I want to know what’s going on in my company. I don’t want to know the football results or what someone in Venezuela had for breakfast! The signal-to-noise ratio on some of these communities is very low. There is so much irrelevant noise that I am forced to un-follow them. I’m sure I will miss some important information from there. But it’s a small price to pay for not losing all the value of the other people I carefully decided to follow, who have something relevant to say and are now lost in the alphabet soup I receive.

I’m sure that over time, some form of informal “etiquette” will develop on twitter that will allow me to filter out the noise, verify re-tweets and validate news gossip. But until then I have to protect myself by treating everything with a little bit more caution than I have done so far.

Have you had any similar experiences that made you think twice about the value of social networking tools? I’d love to hear them and compile some sort of “Beware” list…

Classification in my kitchen

(Originally posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on June 24, 2009)

I don’t buy newspapers. One of my Firefox tabs is permanently on the BBC News page, and a couple of glimpses per day, tell me if the world is likely to come to an end, or not. That’s all the news I need – I live online so the rest will find its way to me one way or another…

But I live in a town with 300,000 people and we therefore get two local rags delivered for free. One every Thursday and one every Tuesday, and they land on our kitchen table. What happens next is interesting: The Thursday one, is organized into sections, that fall out as soon as you open the paper:

• Property – When we were looking for a house, this was the first thing we turned to and it was scrutinised. Now we bought a house, it goes straight into the recycling bin.
• Motoring – Not looking to buy a car, I may look at the front page for any new models. Then in the recycling bin.
• Sports – I don’t follow local sports – In the recycling bin
• Entertainment – A handy 2-page pull out. This stays around for most of the week, as it has a handy TV guide, the cinema timetable and any local events that happen in the weekend. It will get recycled when next week’s paper comes in.
• News – having reduced the original 100+ page tome down to about 15, I may spend 10-20 minutes browsing the local news: The fireman hero, the rapist on the loose, the school kid who won the obscure poetry award and the bunch of juvenile delinquents that tried to set fire to their school. The usual stuff.

The Tuesday newspaper has very similar information, but it’s bound as a single tome and you have to browse through it to find any of these sections. So guess what happens? It hovers on the table for about 24 hours and then goes straight in the recycling bin. Not opened, not read.

Ok – what’s my point? Not all information is created equal. Not all information is relevant to all people all of the time. Taxonomies and classification may be boring (for some), but they are essential if you want your information to have any value and to hit your audience. Organise it, Group it, tag it, label it, classify it – whatever you want to call it – but make it so, that I can quickly throw in the recycling bin what I don’t need. Only then will I have time to read the part that’s relevant to ME.

Why is it so difficult for people to understand this? I receive more information than I have time to digest. I get 100+ emails a day, I see hundreds of tweets, I follow blogs, I get post, I chat with colleagues. I have the attention span of a gnat! 99% of what passes before my eyes will never register or be looked at. It is your responsibility – the information provider – to highlight the one relevant or interesting keyword that catches my attention and puts you in the 1%.

Classification of information is not an archivist’s problem. It’s YOUR problem, if you want ME to pay attention to you.

Is it a Record? – Take 2!

(Originally posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on June 10, 2009)

In response to my previous blog “Is it a Record, Who cares?” @DoD501502STD twitted: “Let’s just ignore the laws we don’t like??”. It’s a very valid question, but I think it slightly misses the point I was trying to make in my post: “Who Cares?” wasn’t a flippant remark, it was a literal question…

I want to be very clear: I am not at all disputing the need to manage records. My discussion point was on the issue of what constitutes a record that needs to be managed as the law prescribes. And I guess there are two points I’m trying to make here: (1) The distinction between a record and a non-record is becoming a moot point, and (2) that the paradigms we use today to manage records are no longer relevant. Let me explain…

Today, all electronic information is potentially discoverable, in the legal sense, regardless whether that information has been declared as a record or not. Today, the information relating to a business transaction (the “record”) will be spread across multiple media and formats – paper, electronic document, database entries, email, website interaction, instant messaging, telephone transaction, SMS text and potentially even Twitter. The current paradigms for records management, which would effectively require you to electronically “staple” all these bits of information together in order to archive them in a folder, in a volume, in a category of a fileplan, is using an outdated model that has been designed for the constraints of the paper archiving world and is no longer relevant.

Arguably, existing RM practices, are effectively constraining organisations in defining the most appropriate RM strategy by prescribing management paradigms which no longer align with today’s information management practices.

The WHY, which is the law requirement, is the secure preservation of information for a defined retention period, and the audited exercise of disposition schedules. HOW we go about implementing this today, is what I’m questioning here. Not the requirement to manage records, but what is a record and how we manage it.

So, to follow through from my previous blog, I would suggest that it is the desired behaviour and context of these information entities, that defines whether they are a record or not, and not their physical medium or simply their content.

So my suggestion would be: Focus on the WHY – The spirit of the law: The need to reliably, transparently and accountably protect all relevant information, for a given period of time. In today’s IT and social networking environment, designing an environment that delivers that capability may need alternative paradigms that are effective and efficient, but may be far removed from our current rigid definitions of records, fileplans or what an RM implementation is “supposed” to look like.

Your Thoughts?

Is it a record? Who cares?

Originally posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on June 8, 2009

Is anyone else getting tired of artificial boundaries in IT terminology, or is it just me? In the quest to simplify and categorise software products, the market, requirements and (to a certain extent) ourselves, we keep trying to fit everything in neatly labelled boxes. And it doesn’t work! Just like a flu-virus that keeps re-inventing itself, as soon as we’ve fully understood what a box label means, the contents of the box have changed shape. What has this got do with Records?

Well, to identify if a document is a “record” you need to look at what information it contains, right? In the old paper world, the paradigm was simple. One or more pieces of paper bound together were a document, and if the information in that document had to be kept for any length of time it, then it was a record. Simple! But in the electronic world, the boundaries have shifted… A document file is no longer the only “container” of information. A blog, a website, an instant message, an email – all could carry information that make them a business record. And an instant message or an email or even a blog, can contain an attachment that is a record.

And, just to add to the confusion, a record is not only defined by what information it contains but also where that information has been used. An email that wasn’t a record, becomes one, as soon as you send it to an auditor. An opinion document or a blog entry, becomes a record when it is used in a process to support a decision. So the context becomes just as relevant as the content.

OK, so the box is square but the content we’re trying to squeeze in it is an amorphous blob. Should we make a bigger“A record is…” box so all types fit in? Do we design a box that can change shape according to the record you are storing in it? Should we get better at making the amorphous “record” blobs neatly square, so that they fit in the same box? Perhaps we should just dispense with the box and the label altogether? Is a formal fileplan really necessary, when you can have metadata and tags and search engines? Is every scrap of information potentially a record, with a disposition that ranges from zero days to forever? And what happens when the customer walks in and asks “I want to buy a box to put my records in, please”?

I will leave this question open-ended… I believe that in the next couple of years we will see some radical changes in this space so anything you would like to contribute to the research, let me know your thoughts!

A document file is no longer the only “container” of information. A blog, a website, an instant message, an email – all could carry information that make them a business record. And an instant message or an email or even a blog, can contain an attachment that is a record.

Unstructured? You must be joking!

(Originally Posted on InformationZen by George Parapadakis on August 11, 2008)

While I was listening to a friend analyst talk about the future of ECM, I got one of these “eureka” moments that is also an “oh ****!” moment at the same time. One of these moments that makes you realise that something has been staring you in the face for a long time, and you just happily ignored it…

Our whole industry are guilty of propagating that “universal truth” which, I’m starting to think, may have stifled a lot of creativity in the ECM space: The notion of “unstructured” content vs. “structured” data. We often use this concept to distinguish between electronic information that lives in an ECM repository vs. a relational database.

I could argue (and I will!) that there is no such thing as unstructured content!

Take a Word document: It has a hierarchy of chapters, with headings that describe them, it has a table of contents with hyperlinks to the sections, it has tables and footnotes and properties and embedded objects, internal cross-references and external links. It can even contain meta-content that describes what was changed in the document by whom and when. Is it unstructured?

Take an Excel spreadsheet: Not only it contains data like a database, but it also contains text that provides context to that data. It has formulas that provide calculations and validations, embodying business rules and multiple views of the same data. Even code. Is it unstructured?

I can carry on… Powerpoints have sequencing and timings that define the order and relationships between the slides. Photos, jpeg, contain highly structured information about the camera and the circumstances that the picture were taken. TIFF, XML, software code – highly structured content, by definition!

And that’s without going into philosophical arguments about the fact that any text written in a language, has by definition more complex and universally understood grammatical and syntactical structures than numbers in a database can ever portray.

Now, look outside the documents themselves and there’s even more structure: relationships between documents (the RFP, the proposal document, the presentation and the spreadsheet with the pricing are implicitly connected through their structures – you know that specific slides will typically relate to specific parts of the proposal). Spatial and domain specific structure in terms of the applicability of the content, etc.

And what do we ECM practitioners do? We take all of this highly structured information and obscure it by shoving it in a repository (or collaborative space!) as an “unstructured” blob, hoping that a user might define three or four attributes – title, author, date, description; hoping that a search engine may one day find it back.

And all that richness lies hidden until the next time someone opens the document and goes “oh! I see!”. What a waste!

It is true that ECM has been designed to deal with unstructured content – because we designed it that way! A typical ECM system has no notion of understanding or exploiting the structured within its content objects. Most of the time it can’t even define and exploit relationships between these objects (other than the fact that someone happened to put them both in the same folder).

I would like to stop calling content “unstructured information”. I think the sooner we educate people on how structured content is and the value that structure adds, the more likely it is that we will increase the value we can extract from it!

Time to consolidate!

Starting to get tired of multiple blogs and re-posts, re-blogging. I am going to try and use this as my central point of reference, and then work out from here. Here are some of the blogs I’m consolidating…

Information Zen

IBM.com

blogger.com