Last week Paul blogged his opinion on the design of devices and applications.

Buchheit’s post was written in response to criticisms of Apple’s forthcoming iPad. Critics have listed all the things that the iPad won’t do that they would expect a tablet computer or netbook to be able to do. For Buchheit these critics are missing the point:

What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.

We took a similar approach when launching Gmail. It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no “rich text” composer. The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing (the engineer doing the work originally wanted to spend five days on it, but I talked him down to two since I never use that feature anyway). Of course those other features can be added or improved later on (and Gmail has certainly improved a lot since launch), but if the basic product isn’t compelling, adding more features won’t save it.

By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product. If your product needs “everything” in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative (though it might be a nice upgrade to an existing product). Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good.

At the end of the post Buchheit made a comment that helps explain why so many enterprise applications suffer useability problems:

Disclaimer: This advice probably only applies to consumer products (ones where the purchaser is also the user ..). For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.

Enterprises still purchase their applications and devices through a long list of feature requirements. Microsoft are kings of enterprise computing because they provide so many features in their products- SharePoint can be made to do almost anything. It isn’t just Microsoft that operates like this. Every Enterprise Content Management system vendor plays the same game, favouring features over useablity and design values, because it is features that they are judged on.

This contrast between the design of devices and applications intended to appeal directly to consumers and those intended to win through enterprise procurement processes is coming to a head.   More and more aspects of enterprise computing are becoming markets which consumer-targeted devices/applications are competing for.

Three years ago the battle for the smartphone market was a straight head to head between Research in Motion’s Blackberry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Both assumed the smartphone market would go to the supplier that won the enterprise market,  and both crammed their smartphone full of features. Then Apple bought out the iPhone, with less functionality,  appealing direct to consumers, and a design that so intuitive that they did not have to ship a manual with the phone.  Now the future of the smartphone is a battle between two consumer companies: Google and Apple.

These two companies will also be the ones fighting it out for the tablet/netbook market. This year will see the launch of Apple’s iPad, and of Google’s Chrome OS – a new operating system for netbooks. Both will be bought as consumer devices but used for work. Read this post from Pete Gilbert for a discussion of how the iPad will support work in ‘the third place’ – outside of both the home and the office, on the move, in cafes, on trains, airport lounges etc.

The trend of enterprise computing is to require less and less to be installed on the PC, with the logical end result being that your device will only need a browser. For over a decade Microsoft have had a very safe income stream from Microsoft Office, which always had to be installed on the client device. Now it has to compete with Google Docs, which not only doesn’t require anything installed on the device, but is also free. Their solution is Office Web Apps, which will allow people to view and edit documents held in SharePoint 2010′s without having MS Office installed on the device.

As soon as you reach the point where only a browser is required on the device then (in theory!) it doesn’t matter what device an employee uses (so long as it doesn’t compromise security). That will work to the advantage of both the enterprise and the individual: the enterprise because they will no longer need to worry about providing every individual with a PC (and configuring and maintaining them) – the individual because they can choose their device of preference.

Consumerisation is a trend that affects applications as much as devices.

The one thing that every web 2.0 application has in common is that all of them were written to be used without training and without helpdesk support. It is conceivable that enterprises may start to regard training and helpdesk support as unwanted costs of applications (much like cloud computing vendors are encouraging enterprises to see system and server administration as unwanted costs).

Last week I heard Roger James, Director of IT at the University of Westminster, describe to the UNICOM Records Management update conference how the University provided Google Apps to all its students and staff without having to provide any training. It has been in use for over a year and they have so far only received 150 help desk calls. Google Apps is an amalgam of applications such as GMail, Google calendar and Google Docs that were first launched as free consumer products on the web.

My Sites provide an individual with three key benefits:

• the ability to display information about themselves to colleagues, through a profile and, if they wish, a blog
• the ability to store documents in document libraries, and either keep them private or collaborate on them with colleagues
• the ability to function as a personalised start page

These are functions that the individual could in theory use a combination of a Linked In account, a Blogger account, a Google docs account and an iGoogle page for.  However Brett Young, in a very useful and reflective blogpost describing his organisations experience with My Sites, argues against comparing My Sites and web 2.0 applications:

It is very tempting to compare My Sites to Facebook. It’s not a good idea to do that. First, it builds an unrealistic expectation. Facebook is a Web 2.0 application designed from the ground up as a social networking platform. My Sites are built on MOSS and WSS. Facebook is relatively intuitive. Probably very few people feel the need for Facebook training. On the other hand, My Sites are about as easy (or hard) to use as any other Microsoft application. Frequently functions are hidden deep within complex menus. Seemingly simple functions, such as deleting a list or library throw people off. They invariably come away thinking a My Site is nothing like Facebook.

The second reason that comparisons to Facebook are problematic is that the feature sets don’t align. Sure there are some slight similarities. However, there is nothing in My Sites equivalent to status updates, the comment wall, or friend activity tracking. (No, the colleague tracker web part doesn’t even come close.) That’s fine. My Sites do a lot of cool business-related stuff that Facebook cannot do, like document management, approval workflows, and lists. So, the point isn’t that one is better than the other; it is that while there may be some loose similarities, they are two completely different tools, designed for different uses. It is better to market My Sites for what it is, a document-based, personal workspace with some basic social networking capabilities.

If colleagues do make use of their SharePoint 2007 My Site then it helps the whole ecosystem of a SharePoint implementation.

• it adds a human element – when an individual contributes a document to a library anywhere in SharePoint a link will be provided to his or her My Profile page in their My Site. This means that if I see a document that interests me I can immediately click on the link to the contributor’s My Site to find out more about them. How good the information is on the profile depends upon whether the individual is motivated to contribute to it (though organisations can usually pre-populate basic role and contact data for staff from other databases).
• It helps internal communications: My Sites are places to which the organisation can push messages relevant to that individual. The individual can use their My Site to manage their subscriptions to other information sources in SharePoint, and to keep tabs on the various team sites that they belong to or are interested in.

A My Site is a SharePoint ‘site collection’ in its own right, which means that the individual has adminstration rights over it. They can add new pages, or new sub-sites. They can add whatever SharePoint web parts they wish to pages within their My Site. They can give trusted colleagues permissions to view and/or contribute to documents, document libraries, web parts, pages or sub-sites within their My Site.

The high degree of control that an individual has over their My Site has pros and cons.

• On the plus side it means that it gives the individual scope to experiment and customise and is a great place for them to learn about the functionality available in SharePoint, the way it works and what you can do with it.
• On the down side some organisations have found that underneath their My Site  individuals have created what are in effect team collaboration sites, visible only to the select group that the individual has invited in to that site, and evading any controls the organisations has put in place to govern and limit the creation of new team sites.  Organisations can mitigate this risk of this by imposing quota sizes on My Sites

Steve Gaitten has written an excellent critique of My Sites in SharePoint 2007, which is much fairer than its title ‘SharePoint My Sites Suck’ would suggest.

Gaitten’s comes up with three killer criticism of My Sites:

• Useability – Gaitten says My Sites are ‘too hard to personalise – if we’re asking users to choose, add and configure Web Parts to create a basic user profile, it’s just not going to work. Many employees can’t do it and most just don’t care enough to make the effort.’
• Lack of lifestreaming features – ‘Status is absent. The single most important feature driving the adoption of Twitter and Facebook is the status message. What are you doing right now?’
• ‘Lack of integration with existing social networks. Social networking is one of those things where you need a lot of people to play for it to work. On that basis alone, I’m skeptical that viable social networks can be formed outside of the largest organizations. You need thousands of users updating profiles, status messages and contributing to the network to keep it interesting. A company with even a few thousand employees may find that there just isn’t enough critical mass for an active social network to form’.

Gaitten gives the reason for the weakness of social computing within SharePoint as being the fact that the My Site feature must have been thought of and planned as early as 2005, when social computing was in its infancy. (SharePoint 2007 was released late 2006). This is a fundamental weakness of packaged software as opposed to applications hosted by the providor.  Think how many times Facebook has radically changed the look, feel and operation of its application since SharePoint 2007 was released. Even if SharePoint 2010 was to come up with a social computing facility that matched Linked in, Facebook, Twitter and iGoogle now, how will it keep up as those applications, and whatever succeeds them, continue developing?

The first stage of the project has been a literature review.   A Google search for occurences of the word ‘SharePoint’ on sites within the domain ‘.ac.uk’  threw up many descriptions of how particular HEIs are using SharePoint.  University IT departments often provide information for staff and students regarding their information systems on the University’s publicly accessible website.

The search indicates that two common uses of SharePoint by UK HEIs are to:

• provide their teams or departments with SharePoint collaboration sites (team sites) so that they can use them for document managament and collaboration in place of, or as a supplement to, their network shared drive OR
• use SharePoint as a portal powering their website/intranet and connecting up to internal systems

These are similar to the uses that organisations in other sectors of the economy make of SharePoint.

Some of the most interesting debates in the literature concern the use of SharePoint in a role specific to the world of education, namely its use as a virtual learning environment (VLE).

Microsoft’s attempt to break into the VLE market

Virtual Learning Environments are the primary way in which HEIs manage teaching and learning.

Virtual Learning Environments typically provide learners with

• access to key resources such as lecture schedules, reading lists, lecture slidepacks, assignment details, news and announcements
• facilities to collaborate and connect with fellow learners, and with lecturers
• a personalised space to keep a record of their own work and learning

The market for VLE software is bigger than simply HEIs, it also comprises schools and further education colleges.

In the UK the VLE market is dominated by two specialist VLE systems:

• Blackboard (a proprietary system)
• Moodle (an open source system)

With SharePoint 2007 Microsoft are making an explicit move into the VLE market. They are likely to find this a hard market to crack into it.   No enterprise system vendor has yet managed to break into this market.   Most HEIs already have a VLE in place.

In October 2008 Dominic Watts, Microsoft UK’s Higher Education Business manager, posted a blogpost Using SharePoint as a VLE.  In it Watts states that Universities could use SharePoint as their VLE either by using out of the box functionality or by customisation.

The post itself does not elaborate on using SharePoint’s out of the box functionality, but this is likely to mean:

• using SharePoint team sites as collaborative areas for staff and students around course modules. This would provide facilities such as SharePoint calendars, discussion boards, announcement lists, wikis and blogs, and would enable the use of document libraries to store resources such as reading lists and slidepacks
• giving each student an individual SharePoint ‘my site’ through which to organise and record their own work, and to communicate with fellow students and lecturers.

In terms of customisation Microsoft are making a SharePoint Learning Kit freely available via Codeplex that extends SharePoint to provide VLE functionality.

The possibility of using SharePoint as a VLE gives HEIs an interesting choice to make. Do they go for a specialist VLE provider, or do they go for SharePoint and look for synergies with SharePoint’s use elsewhere in the institution?

Examples of usage and non-usage of SharePoint as a VLE

In the US Washington State University is using explored the use of SharePoint as their VLE.  Their Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology wrote a blogpost giving the following four reasons for adopting SharePoint as a learning environment for students, in preference to Blackboard (the market leading specialist VLE):

students are learning skills in SharePoint that they can later use in work contexts, where Blackboard skills are not useful outside the school context

As [the] university adopts SharePoint for a variety of administrative purposes, there becomes a larger group of SharePoint experts who can provide support to both faculty and students using SharePoint as a learning platform.

SharePoint has a concept for exporting sites and elements of sites (libraries, web parts, surveys, etc) as .STP files and then re-importing these into other sites or adding them to templates for users to choose.

SharePoint’s architecture enables other linkages and mashups. It is a source and consumer of RSS, will support embedding of other Web 2.0 resources in its pages, and can capture email and originate email alerts.

The blogpost also mentioned the flexibility of SharePoint document libraries, and SharePoint’s fine grained access control.

[Update: Nils Petersen of WSU has left a comment to this post informing me that WSU explored the use of SharePoint , but it was never centrally implemented, and that WSU are now implementing Angel as its centrally supported learning environment]

In contrast Utrecht University chose Blackboard as their VLE, rather than SharePoint, even thought they are using SharePoint for their website, intranet and had plans to use it for team sites.   Keith Russell wrote a blogpost in which he gave the following rationale for Utrecht’s rejection of SharePoint as a VLE:

Blackboard offers all the required functionalities out-of-the-box, whereas using Sharepoint would require a lot of programming and customising. This would not only make it a very expensive option in the short term, but also requires upkeep and adaptations in the longer term. Sharepoint was also considered less suitable due to the steep learning curve for staff. This is related to the fact that it is not purpose-built for teaching and learning and does not fit in the ‘classroom metaphor’

SharePoint’s current position within the UK VLE market

In their  2008 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK UCISA notes a consolidation in the market:

Blackboard continues as the most used enterprise or institutional VLE. However, when also including VLEs that are used more locally, e.g. within departments, then Moodle is most used with a rapid rise since 2005. Overall, there is a vastly reduced range of VLEs in use since 2005.

The same UCISA survey commented

SharePoint was identified as the leading institutionally developed [VLE] platform.

However SharePoint still trailed well behind Blackboard and Moodle with only 5 HEIs using it as their main VLE (7% of UCISA’s sample).

Microsoft is keeping its options open with regards to the usage of SharePoint in relation to teaching and learning. As well as promoting SharePoint as a VLE in its own right, they also sell SharePoint as an enterprise portal that can provide access to the VLE and any other HEI information system. As early as May 2007 Microsoft’s Higher Education blog announced that web parts had been developed that enabled information from the Moodle VLE to be displayed within SharePoint.

More HEIs are using SharePoint as a corporate portal, or as a general enterprise document management and collaboration system, than are using SharePoint as a VLE. HEIs such as the University of the West of England, Coventry University, and the University of Oxford have large SharePoint implementations in place or planned. However each of them are sticking with their specialist VLEs.

Debates among information professionals

JISC provides a network of Regional Support Committees to provide UK further and higher education institutions with help in relation to information technology. Many of the Regional Support Committees facilitate a Moodle User Group, a Blackboard User Group and a SharePoint forum. The minutes of the Scottish SharePoint Forum, Held on 16 June 2008, includes the following list of the questions discussed in a round table session at the end of the meeting. The list is dominated by questions concerning the relationship between SharePoint and specialist VLEs:

Is there an overlap between the functionality of VLEs and SharePoint or do they serve different purposes?

Does content need to be in a single place (i.e. the VLE, SharePoint or elsewhere)? Does this matter if the end user can be directed to services via a single interface (and single sign-on)?

Single sign-on is essential for providing seamless access to services for students

What content should be provided for students? Are we giving them what they need or are we simply being led by the tools that are available?

VLEs are effective tools for distance learning, but are they being used widely by other students?

Asking “how should CILIP use Web 2.0 to engage with its members?” ignores the more fundamental question, “what is the role of an organisation like CILIP in a Web 2.0 world?”. It’s a bit like asking an independent high-street bookshop to think about how it uses Web 2.0 to engage with its customers, ignoring that fact that Amazon might well have just trashed its business model entirely!

The business model of the large UK membership societies is that in return for a membership fee they will provide exclusive access to news, information resources and networking opportunities. This was tenable in the days before web 2.0 when news, information resources and networking opportunities were scare resources. But in the web 2.0 world all three are becoming abundant and free. 

It is a triple whammy.  The web 2.0 world is exposing weaknesses in the business model of membership societies. Their business model is making it hard for membership societies to grasp the opportunities that are open to them in the web 2.0 world.  The web 2.0 world makes it possible for professionals to organise themselves in new ways – and is throwing up alternatives to the traditional membership society model.

The time was when the only way that you could keep up with news and opinions from a profession was through the relevent membership society’s newsletter/bulletin/journal. Now the fastest and best way of obtaining news is to follow the contributions of fellow professions to blogs, on-line forums, mailing lists, twitter, Linkedin groups, facebook groups etc.  Time was when to get your writing published you had to go through your membership society’s newsletter/bulletin/journal.  Now you can publish yourself. 

The web 2.0 world provides opportunities as well as threats to membership societies. The main asset of membership societies is their members. The web 2.0 world offers membership societies the opportunity to become a showcase for the expertise of their members and of the profession as a whole.  By facilitating, hosting or aggregating the online contributions of their members, societies will be doing a service for their profession, for their members (whose work is made more visible to the wider world) and for the brand of their society. Membership societies are well placed to do this.  CILIP, the Society of Archivists, and the Records Management Society are great brands. They are trusted and liked by their members and the world outside, and each of them has the bulk of UK practitioners in their field within their ranks. None of them has yet grasped the nettle. Their desire to provide exclusive benefits for members has got in the way of their acting as the showcase for their profession on the web.

The publications of membership societies

Most membership Society regard the publications that they produce as member only benefits, to be distributed to members in hard copy and made available (to members only)  online.    CILP follows this model with its monthly magazine CILP update , as does the Records Management Society with their Records Management bulletin. These are good publications, well edited, well produced, and well worth reading. But there are three big problems with the members-only model for publications:

• by channeling their news and features into  membership-only publications, these societies are leaving their own websites starved of fresh content.
• writing for member-only publications will become less attractive for potential contributors because their writing can not be linked to, blogged about or tweeted about, and hence will not show up in google searchers and will not help them build up their online visibility
• the continued increase in the numbers of librarians, archivists and records managers contributing to  blogs, twitter, mailing lists and discussion forums provides alternative sources of news.  These publications, while still very useful to professionals, are no longer essential

The Society of Archivists makes its monthly publication Arc  available to all, members and non-members alike via its website.  But they do so in a pdf format, a few weeks after publication.  This means that their website gets very little benefit from the good content that the magazine contains, the content is in effect buried.  Chris Campbell wrote a thought provoking  article on ‘big bucket retention theory’ in the May 2009 edition of Arc, but I can’t link direct to the article, and the links that Chris provides in the article can’t be clicked on.  Links are the life blood of the world wide web. Links into a web page give the page its ranking on Google and bring new visitors to the site.   It would benefit the reader, the writer and the Society if each article from ARC was put up seperatly on the website as and when they became ready.

AIIM (the Enterprise Content Management Association) has gone someway down this line by producing a digital version of its publication ‘infonomics‘ and allowing everyone access to it, member and non-member alike. Individual articles have their own url and identity on the web.  

The impact of web 2.0 on events and conferences

The web 2.0 world is changing expectations as to what access people can enjoy to events that they are not attending in person.

Steve Bailey couldn’t attend the 2009 Records Management Society Conference, and wanted to follow the event via the tweets and blogposts of people attending. He started a debate on Twitter by expressing his disappointment that there were only a couple of people tweeting it, and no blogposts were produced during the event. He felt that the Society needed to do more to encourage people attending RMS events to tweet and blog about them.

A recent Eduserv Symposium on Identity in the Web 2.0 world ( chaired by Andy Powell whose quote starts off this blogpost) set a new bar for providing people not at the event with the ability to follow it and contribute to it as it happens, and to access the outputs of the event afterwards.

Eduserv streamed high quality live video of the event on the web for anyone to watch.   They publicised a twitter hashtag for the conference (#esy09) before the event, and encouraged those tweeting about the event to add the hashtag to their tweets.  This  enabled them to aggregate the tweets being posted about the event.   They set up a chat facility so that people not on twitter could contribute to the debate.   When you go to the video archive for the event you will be able to see on one screen:

• videos of all the speakers at the event
• all the twitter posts tagged with the hashtag for the event
• contributions to the chat facility for the event

If you had visited that page on the day of the event you would have seen the event itself, the twitter debate, and the chat facility debate unfold before your eyes. Questions posed to twitter and to the chat facility were posed to speakers at the end of each talk.

What will the impact of this be?  It will not affect people’s desire to attend events. Football matches are best watched at the stadium.  Films are best watched on the cinema.  Live television coverage and DVDs have not killed football and cinema attendence.  I was glad I could follow the Eduserv event online but I would have benefited far more from attending in person, where I could have given it my full attention, and where I would have had the opportunity to converse face to face with fellow delegates and with speakers.

The economic downturn means that people and businesses are being more careful with their travel, training and sponsorship budgets. More and more people will base their decision on what events to attend/speak at/sponsor by researching the online coverage of the previous years event.  

• Speakers are going to be attracted to events that generate healthy online discussion and coverage because that gives them wider visibility, and leaves a trace of their talk that is available via Google search.
• Delegates will look to the online discussion to check that the kinds of people attending that event are the kinds of people they want to network with.
•  Sponsors are going to look at the reach that the event has on the web

If we look at recent annual or biennial conferences of the membership societies in the UK information management space there is very little information available for potential delegates, speakers or sponsors to judge the event on:

• presentations from the 2008 Society of Archivists conference are available on line for members only
• presentations from the 2007 Umbrella CILIP conference (it is a biennial conference)  are not available
• presentations from the 2009 Records Management Society conference are not publicly available on the RMS web site, neither are presentations from the 2008 RMS conference. Video recordings of the 2008 conference were sent to members on a members-only DVD (disclosure: I organised the 2008 RMS conference)

More and more conferences are providing open web access to the slidepacks and video recordings of speakers at their conferences. More and more speakers are making their own slidepacks available on services like Slideshare or on their blogs. If the event organiser puts a video of a speaker on You Tube they are significantly increasing the chances that someone will blog, tweet or comment about the event. Bloggers can embed the video in their blogpost, people tweeting can link to it, people can leave a comment on the You Tube page itself.

By denying the population of the world wide web access to the outputs of their events, membership societies risk denying themselves the fruits of widespread coverage, publicity and links on the web.

Providing a place to network on-line

A key strength and mission of membership societies is that they make it possible for professionals to meet and network with each other.  Professional societies are well placed to facilitate professionals networking online because of their brand and because of their access to most of the professionals in the field.  

Lets look at what the societies have done in this area:

• CILIP has a Communities facility, powered by Telligent software. Members can maintain a profile, contribute to discussions, and keep a blog. Non-members are able to view some of the forum posts and some of the blogs but can’t contribute to discussions and can’t maintain a profile. CILIP has to bear the overhead  of maintaining a mechanism for authenticating that people seeking to contribute to the forums are current CILIP members.   Members complained earlier this year about what CILIP member Tom Roper called ‘Byzantine Authentication’ procedures for members to sign onto the forum.   Restricting CILIP communites to members has the advantage that the forums are untroubled by spam. But it also means that the forums can not benefit from the contributions of people who are not members of CILIP.  
• AIIM has been the boldest of the membership societies in the information management space.  They have set up an online forum called Information Zen that has over 3,000 people signed up for it.   Information Zen is a Ning site. AIIM have branded their Ning site and and loosely integrated it with the AIIM website (it appears as a navigation tab on the website, but has a seperate url (www. informtionzen.org). You can view Information Zen, sign up to it, post comments and questions to it, without being a member of AIIM.  The site brings AIIM benefits by significantly increasing the exposure that AIIM events,  AIIM training courses and AIIM spokespeople enjoy.  Using Ning is a relatively, low maintenance option for AIIM,  people can sign in with a Ning ID, and AIIM doesn’t have to worry about authenticating them.
• The Society of Archivists have a set of forums, powered by vbulletin .  It does not appear to be members only, but you have to register for the forums and your registration request goes to a moderator, and you have to wait for the moderator to approve your registration request (I have unsuccessfully attempted to register for the forums) .
• The Records Management Society has not yet set up any online networking facilities.

Using web 2.0 to dialogue with members, and to speak for the profession

The role of membership societies in acting as the voice of their profession has hindered them in participating in debates on web 2.0 platforms.  The knowledge that any false statement by the society would bring the whole profession into disrepute acts as a millstone around their neck.   Membership societies are used to taking their time and arriving at a considered position that does not offend any section of their membership.   They are used to communicating by making anouncements at annual conferences, writing editorials in newsletters, and issuing press releases.  The use of these forms of communication has served to create an artificial distance between the governing bodies of these societies and their membership.

In the web 2.0 world the debate moves faster and may take place on whatever forum members are gathered. Governing bodies can no longer automatically choose where the debate take place.

The nature of the web 2.0 world, with real-time updates in Twitter and Facebook, and the near-immediate updates to blogs, creates expectations on behalf of members that they can:

• have an ongoing ‘drip feed’ of news and information about the society
• hear about initiatives while they are still being planned and talked about, rather than having to wait until they are finalised
• hear about initiatives in a format where they can respond to, comment on, praise, criticise, or publicise the news.

This switch is proving a real challenge to the membership societies:

• the Society of Archivists does not have a national blog, although its  Scottish region has a good blog
• the Records Management Society started a blog in 2007 but discontinued it in 2008. It doesn’t have a prescence on Twitter. A Facebook page has been set up but not used. 
• Aiim has several blogs including one on its standards work, one written by its president, and a team blog on ECM. Many of its staff are on Twitter including their president and vice-president
• CILIP has several blogs, including one from its president, and maintains a directory of blogs from its officers, groups and members. CILIP has no prescence on Twitter. 

Learnings from recent debates in CILIP’s on their use of Web 2.0

The radical change in expectations that the membership of professional societies have over how their societies communicate with them is illustrated by debates in CILIP over the past six months:

• In February there was a debate on twitter in which  various CILIP members asked why the society had no presence on Twitter
• On 18 February 2009 Bob McKee, the Chief Executive of CILIP  wrote a blog post explaining that CILIP was not planning to establish a prescence on Twitter.   He said that CILIP could not speak with an official voice in an informal environment such as Twitter.  
• On 27 February Phil Bradley responded with  a scathing blogpost memorably entitled CILIP epic fail.
• Phil Bradley’s blogpost sparked a huge debate on Twitter, that dominated the Twitter feeds of UK information professionals that day. The debate involved members and non-members. It broadened out from the question of whether or not CILIP should participate in Twitter to cover other percieved failings including Cilip’s ‘monolithic website’ (as summarised by Tom Roper here. )
• For a period CILIP were caught like a rabbit in headlights, they couldn’t take any part in this debate because they didn’t have and didn’t want a presence on Twitter. The key to fighting a war is to fight on a battleground of your chosing and this battleground was very much the province of the critics, well connected on Twitter and well used to using it as a medium.
• In the end CILP made a very positive and constructive response to the storm, by inviting their most articulate critics, Brian Kelly and Phil Bradley, to an open session of the CILIP Council on April 29 this year, to discuss how CILIP can best use web 2.0.   The session was live blogged and attracted a huge conversation on twitter.

What can professional societies do in the Web 2.0 world?

Brian Kelly embedded a copy of the presentation he gave to to the CILIP Council session on Web 2.0 onto his blog

His advice to CILIP was to:

• take an experimental approach
• think through the risks holisticaly – doing nothing may be even more risky than doing something
• suppport and advise local groups and special interest groups to empower and enable them use to make use of web 2.0 in ways that work for them

Recommendations for the Records Management Society (RMS)

Building on Brian Kelly’s advice to CILIP, here are some recommendations as to to how the RMS can adapt to, and make use of, the web 2.0 world.

Experiment

Peter Godwin, who teaches information literacy at the University of Bedfordshire, says that web 2.0 suits people who are prepared to experiment, but frustrates those who want things to be perfect first time.  When you set up any type of social networking or discussion site online there is never any guarantee that it will be sustained through time with lively and useful contributions. But experimentation is the only way you build up your own capability and confidence, as an individual or as an organisation, and it is also the only way the RMS can start to build up the on-line relationships and following it needs for its web 2.0 ventures to be succesful.

There has been some experimentation in setting up social networking facilities for records management professionals in the UK, albeit not under the official banner of the RMS. Two closed (invitation only) Ning sites have been set up:

• Steve Bailey set up a Ning site for people interested in developing the ideas of records management 2.0 ideas outlined in his book ‘Managing the Crowd’
• I set up a Ning site for people who attended an RMS London Group meeting in the autumn of 2008 on recent academic research in records management (I am chair of the RMS London Group).

Neither experiment cost any money: if you are prepared to put up with adverts from Ning then having a Ning site is free.

Both Ning sites started well: neither site found any difficulty in attracting people to join. Participants in Steve Bailey’s Records Management 2.0 had an online discussion and worked up a manifesto for records management 2.0. In the RMS London Group Ning site there was input from members on what they wanted to see at Group meetings going forward, and there was a fair degree of interaction between people on the site who left messages for each other on their profile pages. But on both sites there has been very little activity in the past few months. Both sites have run out of energy because they are invitation only, which means they get no inbound links, no referrals from Google, no new visitors and few new members.

My conclusions from these experiments is that Ning is a very useful and flexible platform, well suited to regional groups or special interest groups of the RMS or any other membership society. My advice to any regional or special interest group setting up a Ning site would be to configure it so that the Ning site is open to anyone to join it, anyone to view it, and anyone to link to it.

Update: Steve Bailey has now made the Records Management 2.0 Ning site open to all to view and join

The Mashed Library Ning site is a good example of what uses a local group can put Ning to. As far as I can see no money has been spent on this site. It serves a group of information professionals interested in the potential uses of ‘mashing up’ data from library catalogues with other data sources. The Ning site of the Mashed Library group functions as their blog, their website, their discussion facility and their social networking site.

Be realistic about the risks

Membership societies have been very cautious indeed about going down the web 2.0 route.  But the risks are not necessarily great. If you are investing a lot of money in purchasing, installing and supporting an online forum that authenticates people against your membership list then there is financial risk.  If you are doing some gentle customisation to a Ning site and publishing it to your domain name, or setting up a discussion group on Linked in or Facebook then the financial risk is negligable.  The big risks for the RMS of not doing anything are that:

• they don’t learn or build up their own capabilities in this area
• they are seen to be behind the times
• a third party moves into the space and grabs the online attention of their members

Speak with many voices

It is very hard to speak with a corporate voice on the web 2.0 forums.  Whether it is Twitter or the blogsphere an individual voice comes out strongest and clearest.  You don’t need everyone on the RMS Executive to be on twitter or blogging.  But if two or three of the Exec are blogging or tweeting about what the Records Management Society is working on and thinking about then they can:

• act as conduits between the governing body and the membership
• drip feed news to members
• engage in open conversations (respondong to  twitter replies or blog comments) with members

Empower and support local and specialist groups to establish a lively web 2.0 presence

The regional and special interest groups of membership societies have the real potential in a web 2.0 space.  They are already communities who want to interact with each other.   The events that they hold act as hooks to have online conversations about, and act as ready sources of content.  

The key success critieria for a local/regional group site are that it should be:

• interactive (at the very least allowing comments on blogposts, but ideally allowing members to start a discussion and message each other)
• public (so that it receives traffic from links from elsewhere on the web and from Google; so that it adds to the web visibility of the RMS, the profession, and individual contributors to the site; and so that it benefits from the contributions of non-RMS members to discussions).  
• easy for the people who facilitate the local groups to contribute information to and to deal with any spamming

In terms of web 2.0 tools available free of charge, then the options for a local group in any society include setting up:

• a blog
• a Ning site
• a Linked in discussion group
• a Facebook group
• a presence on you tube

Of these options Ning sites and blogs both have the advantage for the RMS that they can be published to an RMS domain name (much like the Information Zen Ning site sits within the AIIM domain).

An open Ning site has the most functionality and flexibility for regional and special interest groups. However groups should take into account their own preferences and make a decision on the environment they and their members feel most comfortable contributing to.

The role of the RMS Executive itself should :

• encourage regional and special interest groups to make a considered choice on what type of web 2.0 facility would best support their group
• offer regional and special interest groups advice (if they need it) on the practicalities and pros and cons of each option, and facilitate the sharing of advice and experience between regional and special interest groups
• make funds available (very small sums are involved) to enable regional and special interest groups to pay for hosted blog or Ning sites (if they chose either of those options) to be published to an RMS domain name and to be advert free.

]]> http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2009/06/03/the-impact-of-the-web-2-0-world-on-the-records-management-society/feed/ 11 thinkingrecords http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2009/04/25/question-time-at-the-records-management-society-conference/ http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2009/04/25/question-time-at-the-records-management-society-conference/#comments Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:27:43 +0000 James Lappin http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/?p=163 ]]> Last Monday I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the RMS conference to answer a set of questions on the current state of electronic records management.  

Paul Duller chaired and the panel consisted of Jon Garde, Marc Fresco, Leanne Bridges and myself .

We were lucky enough to have had a very relevant and challenging set of six questions submitted to us in advance via the RMS conference website.

What follows are my recollections of some of the points that we made.   

1. Is Moreq2 a useful standard for supporting electronic information management systems or has it come too late to make a difference?

Jon:   MoReq 2 took a long time to come to fruition, and that was frustrating.  It is not a significant advance upon previous standards (TNA 2002) and is if anything longer and more complex for vendors.   But there is great potential in MoReq 2.   MoReq2 isn’t finished with the publication of the specification.  It is an ongoing project, and once the governance framework and testing regimes are in place we will start to see value

Leanne:  At the Audit Commission we used MoReq1 in our procurement of an EDRMS system,  these standards are useful in giving organisations confidence they are procuring a system that can do the job.  

Me:   No electronic records management standard published in 2008 could hope to have the same influence as the first standard published by the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) in 1999.  Back then vendors were unsure of how to do electronic records management, and the standard was able to create the market for EDRMS.  Now the market has matured.  There is much broader understanding of electronic records management among vendors and practictioners alike.    EDRM has morphed into ECM,  which adds into the mix functions that are out of the scope of records management standards, such as collaboration,  web content management and basic social networking functionality.  And a big gorilla has entered the market in Microsoft with its SharePoint product.  Microsoft has been able to sell SharePoint to organisations looking for an ECM without baseing its records management model on standards like MoReq2.

Marc:   Its a fact that many EDRMS implementations have failed.  But it is also a fact that many other projects has succeeded.  The success or failure is ascribable at least as much to the project management and change management efforts around the technology, not the technology itself.  MoReq 2′s relevance is shown by the number of languages it has been translated into.

2. There is a general belief out with the RM community that MS SharePoint implementation is relatively simple and easy and that EDRMS implementation is hard and burdensome on users and their organisation. What evidence can the panelists provide from their experience that supports or is at odds with this belief?

Me:   I am not sure that ‘easy’ is the right word for SharePoint:  the simple old shared drive is much easier than SharePoint!   For teams the advantage they get from SharePoint is that they it gives them more choice on how they set up their information environment.  But choice brings with it some elements of complexity.     Within their SharePoint team sites teams are having to decide how many document libraries they want,  what they want them for, whether they want version control enabled, whether they want to organise their libraries by folders or content types.  When they start a new piece of work they need to decide whether they want a whole new sub site, or a new document library, or a new folder within a document library. 

For an organisation SharePoint is certainly far from easy to govern:  it takes considerable ongoing thought and effort to control the creation of new sites to prevent SharePoint sprawl, and the SharePoint records centre is far from straightforward to implement if you wish to use that for records management.

Marc:  SharePoint is easy and cheap to implement so long as you don’t want to implement it well.  If you want to implement it well  then you will have to give just as much thought to issues of how you want SharePoint to be structured, how you set up metadata and search, and  about governance and access permissions, as you would with an EDRMS implementation.  And if you want to manage records well all commentators are agreed you are going to have to plug in an EDRMS capability at the back of it anyway.

 

3. Is there a future for independent EDRM vendors now that Microsoft is targeting this market?

 

Me:  the next version of SharePoint will be out in the first half of next year and will be called SharePoint 2010.  Although no one has seen it yet, industry analysts are predicting that there won’t be significant improvements in the records management capabilities.  [see Kathleen Reidy and CMS Wire].  I agree with the analysts:  adding MoReq 2 records management functionality to SharePoint would be a major rewrite of the software and I can’t see Microsoft  undertaking it in the near future.    

Microsoft are under no competitive pressure to improve records management,   they have been able to sell perfectly well without it, and none of their real competitors (Google, Apple, Amazon cloud computing) are offering records management capabilities.    The EDRMS vendors recognise that they are not big enough to compete with Microsoft and are falling over  backwards to develop offerings that plug into the back of SharePoint rather than trying to take it on.  

Cloud computing is a threat to Microsoft because Amazon and Google (with their massive data centres) have got into that space first.  Microsoft are moving into the cloud computing market now, and have developed Azure:  an operating system similar to Windows that Microsoft would host from their datacentres rather than organisations having to install it on their servers.  But this means that much of the development effort in upgrading SharePoint in future will go into making sure it can run in the cloud on Azure as well as on Windows.

Jon:  Microsoft have realised that the recent  ISO standards for document formats (Open Document Format and Office XML) threatens the monopoly they had through Microsoft Office.  The move to standards based formats means that documents produced in MS Office are now in an XML format and hence competitors  can offer word processing packages (such as Google docs and Open Office) that can produce documents to the same format.

SharePoint enables Microsoft to keep Office going, because they have tightly integrated SharePoint with Office, and provided functionality to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint users that aren’t available to users of  the equivalent products of their competitors.  In fact I woudn’t be surprised to see in future years Microsoft binding SharePoint in with Windows, so that any organisation that bought Windows got SharePoint embedded in with it.

There will always be a role for the independent providers,  that is where innovation comes from.

 

4. In light of the Government White Paper on Open Source and Open Standards, how can organisations justify not using an Open Source solution for RM challenges?

Marc:  It is going to be very interesting to see the progress of open source systems over the next few years.   In EDRMS sphere the open source offerings are relatively new to the market compared to the proprietary systems,  but  Alfresco are an open source company that has advanced plans to go for MoReq2 compliance.

Jon:  As a programmer I love the idea of open source.  But if I was an organisation going open source I wouldn’t start with EDRMS.  I would start by looking at the whole stack that the organisation was using:  for example an organisation with a standard Microsoft stack (Microsoft Office running on Windows servers, with SQL as the main database) could think about whether it wanted to run  open source alternatives (such as Open Office, Linux servers,  MySQL database).   And then think about whether it wanted to go for an open source EDRMS to manage the information on that stack.  Doing it this way round also gives time for the  open source EDRMS offerings to develop and mature.

One motivation for the Government’s paper on open source could be a gambit to put price pressure on Microsoft:  it is the UK government saying to Microsoft ‘don’t raise your prices to much because we are willing to move to open source alternatives’.

Leanne:  Open source is great but it should be done on a pragmatic basis:  I know someone whose organisation is trying to go open source for all their information systems:  and is finding it difficult in some areas to find good open source solutions, particularly where the solution needed is very specialised.

Me:  It found it interesting listening to Jeremy Tuck speak at a conference about Islington Council’s implementation of the open source ECM system  Alfresco.   In order to consider the Open Source solution the Council to adapt their procurement  procedures.  The proprietary systems had salespeople who prepared costed bids.  Islington had to prepare a statement of what the costs and benefits would be of taking the Open Source code for Alfresco and implementing it as an ECM, and then compare this with the bids from the proprietary vendors.  

 

 5. What do the panelists see as the future role for the Records Manager in the world of electronic information management?

Leanne:  a consultant and advisor to the rest of the organisation

Jon:  a mentor to people in the organisation

Me:  If  services like Facebook and Twitter continue to grow at their current rate  then in a year or two’s time almost everyone of working age will be on one of those services.   Blocking access to these services is easy for organisations when staff are using devices their employer has bought for them, on the organisation’s premises.   But it is not so easy  when people bring their own computing devices to work (netbooks cost less than £200. iPhones and other smartphonest are spreading like wildfire) nor when staff work from home.  And when customers start to want to contact people in the organisation by Twitter or Facebook it is a brave organisation that will cut themselves off from their customers.  Will working conversations start to migrate away from e-mail on to systems like Twitter and Facebook? If so what do organisations do?  Do they rely on staff copying important communications into organisational systems?  Do they deploy systems to interoperate with these Web 2.0 services?


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