Sunday, May 09, 2004
TagGen® Office is a complete software solution for developing and maintaining metadata schemas, creating meta tags, verifying compliance and creating a metadata index for your Enterprise.
Wanted: Information Architects!By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group
Imagine that it five years in the future. The people in your company are gone. There nothing left but a pile of information--electronic and printed artifacts of what your business once was and what it did. A visitor arrives from outer space and wants to sort through these artifacts to understand what kind of business this was: What services and products did this organization provide? To whom, where, and to what benefit? The researcher also wants to get a picture of all of the issues the people in your organization dealt with, what they cared about, and what actions they took and were planning to take. This mythical task is no joke. It actually describes the task confronting most organizations today as they prepare to become more transparent to customers, regulators, and internal and external stakeholders. Much of the activity that we see in "content management" projects today centers around "information findability." How do we make it easier for the people within our organization and outside our organization to find the most relevant, current, accurate information they need to carry out the functions theye trying to accomplish? The term that wee heard frustrated end-users, employees, and customers use over and over again is "google." Why can I just oogle?our Intranet and get the answers I need? It works on the World-Wide Web, why doesn it work within our organization? And when I do search and find stuff, there too much of it, I can tell which is the right piece of information for my needs. It takes me too long to sort through it. I have to pick up the phone and call people until I get the answers I need. This information findability problem isn going to magically go away by slapping Google or any other search engine across our company Intranets. Nor will a search engine really solve your information classification, organization, and refinement problem.
Every organization in the world is now in need of information architects who can survey our littered electronic landscapes and make sense of what we do, how we do it, and help us organize, classify, archive, and refine the vast amounts of information--both structured and unstructured--that is now much more visible than ever before. Certainly, search and discovery and pattern-sensing technologies will certainly help alleviate the problem of having too much disorganized information at our fingertips. Presumably, our mythical visitors from outer space would be able to use electronic probes to turn all the information artifacts into patterns of conversations grouped into topics. From that discovery process, they be able to begin to analyze and to classify the services and products we offered, the benefits and costs associated with those products, and the issues we faced and dealt with. They be able to spot who our customers were, who our suppliers were, and what relationships existed among all the various stakeholders. They would also discover and/or create a classification structure that would describe our organization and its offerings. They find lots of redundancies, duplicates and near duplicates, but they be able to cluster these together and eliminate the noise so that only the salient and more important facts would remain. They would uncover the most authoritative sources of information within the organization and surface the core classification schemes that turned this chaos into order. They be able to index and abstract all of the most critical documents so that they could quickly digest the salient points that were made in any spreadsheet, document, email, memo, or report. In short, they make the workings of our firm visible, comprehensible, and orderly.
Ie just described the job of information architects, librarians, information professionals: to analyze a body of information; to detect patterns; to classify those patterns into groupings that make sense; to establish authority files for core information (official product names, accurate customer records, current prices, etc.); to develop thesauri to map variants against the elements in the authoritative sources so that variants can be easily grouped together and understood as the same, or very similar entities); to index and abstract the salient points from every important communication.
Every company is in desperate need of these information architects and other information professionals. We all need professionals who can make sense of the mess of information wee created and is now exposed. We need professionals who can establish classification schemes, taxonomies, authority files, thesauri, and other tools that will enable our organizations to create and distribute information that is easier to quickly understand and to assimilate. Luckily, these professionals are available. You can find them in your research libraries, in your publishing groups, in your database design and data management groups, and in your content management teams. It time to elevate the importance of this role within your organization. Begin now, before your company drowns in a sea of disorganized and dysfunctional information.
Imagine that it five years in the future. The people in your company are gone. There nothing left but a pile of information--electronic and printed artifacts of what your business once was and what it did. A visitor arrives from outer space and wants to sort through these artifacts to understand what kind of business this was: What services and products did this organization provide? To whom, where, and to what benefit? The researcher also wants to get a picture of all of the issues the people in your organization dealt with, what they cared about, and what actions they took and were planning to take. This mythical task is no joke. It actually describes the task confronting most organizations today as they prepare to become more transparent to customers, regulators, and internal and external stakeholders. Much of the activity that we see in "content management" projects today centers around "information findability." How do we make it easier for the people within our organization and outside our organization to find the most relevant, current, accurate information they need to carry out the functions theye trying to accomplish? The term that wee heard frustrated end-users, employees, and customers use over and over again is "google." Why can I just oogle?our Intranet and get the answers I need? It works on the World-Wide Web, why doesn it work within our organization? And when I do search and find stuff, there too much of it, I can tell which is the right piece of information for my needs. It takes me too long to sort through it. I have to pick up the phone and call people until I get the answers I need. This information findability problem isn going to magically go away by slapping Google or any other search engine across our company Intranets. Nor will a search engine really solve your information classification, organization, and refinement problem.
Every organization in the world is now in need of information architects who can survey our littered electronic landscapes and make sense of what we do, how we do it, and help us organize, classify, archive, and refine the vast amounts of information--both structured and unstructured--that is now much more visible than ever before. Certainly, search and discovery and pattern-sensing technologies will certainly help alleviate the problem of having too much disorganized information at our fingertips. Presumably, our mythical visitors from outer space would be able to use electronic probes to turn all the information artifacts into patterns of conversations grouped into topics. From that discovery process, they be able to begin to analyze and to classify the services and products we offered, the benefits and costs associated with those products, and the issues we faced and dealt with. They be able to spot who our customers were, who our suppliers were, and what relationships existed among all the various stakeholders. They would also discover and/or create a classification structure that would describe our organization and its offerings. They find lots of redundancies, duplicates and near duplicates, but they be able to cluster these together and eliminate the noise so that only the salient and more important facts would remain. They would uncover the most authoritative sources of information within the organization and surface the core classification schemes that turned this chaos into order. They be able to index and abstract all of the most critical documents so that they could quickly digest the salient points that were made in any spreadsheet, document, email, memo, or report. In short, they make the workings of our firm visible, comprehensible, and orderly.
Ie just described the job of information architects, librarians, information professionals: to analyze a body of information; to detect patterns; to classify those patterns into groupings that make sense; to establish authority files for core information (official product names, accurate customer records, current prices, etc.); to develop thesauri to map variants against the elements in the authoritative sources so that variants can be easily grouped together and understood as the same, or very similar entities); to index and abstract the salient points from every important communication.
Every company is in desperate need of these information architects and other information professionals. We all need professionals who can make sense of the mess of information wee created and is now exposed. We need professionals who can establish classification schemes, taxonomies, authority files, thesauri, and other tools that will enable our organizations to create and distribute information that is easier to quickly understand and to assimilate. Luckily, these professionals are available. You can find them in your research libraries, in your publishing groups, in your database design and data management groups, and in your content management teams. It time to elevate the importance of this role within your organization. Begin now, before your company drowns in a sea of disorganized and dysfunctional information.
The Business of Knowledge Management in the Knowledge-aware Organisation
Formal surveys and anecdotal evidence both indicate that knowledge management has gained general acceptance as a business concept. However, despite this acceptance, many businesses have yet to fully implement an effective knowledge management program. This paper examines the challenges facing organisations that are preventing successful implementation. In particular it focuses on the need for the knowledge-aware organisation to recognise the business of knowledge management, that is the effect of knowledge management on the profitability and competitiveness of an organisation.
Formal surveys and anecdotal evidence both indicate that knowledge management has gained general acceptance as a business concept. However, despite this acceptance, many businesses have yet to fully implement an effective knowledge management program. This paper examines the challenges facing organisations that are preventing successful implementation. In particular it focuses on the need for the knowledge-aware organisation to recognise the business of knowledge management, that is the effect of knowledge management on the profitability and competitiveness of an organisation.
Opening the Knowledge Portal
Internet portals that deliver electronic services to citizens are appearing faster than you can say "Yahoo!" But in the rush to go online, many governments may be overlooking the portal's potential for knowledge management.
North Carolina is the latest state to launch a high-profile state portal. Working with Andersen Consulting, Bell South and the king of portals, Yahoo, the state has ambitious plans to construct a portal where citizens will be able to apply for a fishing license, check a stock quote, read e-mail and schedule appointments on a calendar, along with a host of other services.
The project, known as "North Carolina @ Your Service," is the latest in a series of state and local government portal initiatives that are sweeping the country. The Center for Digital Government, a research firm based in Folsom, Calif. (and a division of e.Republic Inc., which publishes Government Technology), lists more than 30 portal projects underway in states and localities, and that list is constantly being updated.
Unfortunately, building a portal with knowledge-sharing capabilities isn't as easy as it may appear. Simply providing links to other resources and a few catchy features, such as stock quotes and weather reports, only takes knowledge sharing so far. One of the fundamental problems with knowledge management in government is the inability to update and classify the constant stream of information that pours into its databases. Failure to electronically tag documents means they can't be properly indexed and searched once they are dumped into an agency's Web server.
That's why people like Eileen Quam are so important. Quam is an information architect for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. For the past year, she has been working with 13 different state agencies to organize, classify and index tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the state's environment.
The result is "Bridges," a unique, collaborative effort at knowledge sharing. Using a software tool from Ultraseek Corp., she has been able to put all sorts of electronic documents into a hierarchical directory similar to those found on such popular portals as Yahoo.
Comparing her work to a library cataloger, Quam has the tough task of persuading other agencies to cooperate and place meta tags in each document they file on their servers. But the hard work pays off in spades when it comes to knowledge sharing. "We are showing people how they can gather information in a much more effective way," she said. "By creating an environmental portal, it allows people to find answers to their questions a lot faster than searching without the directory."
Internet portals that deliver electronic services to citizens are appearing faster than you can say "Yahoo!" But in the rush to go online, many governments may be overlooking the portal's potential for knowledge management.
North Carolina is the latest state to launch a high-profile state portal. Working with Andersen Consulting, Bell South and the king of portals, Yahoo, the state has ambitious plans to construct a portal where citizens will be able to apply for a fishing license, check a stock quote, read e-mail and schedule appointments on a calendar, along with a host of other services.
The project, known as "North Carolina @ Your Service," is the latest in a series of state and local government portal initiatives that are sweeping the country. The Center for Digital Government, a research firm based in Folsom, Calif. (and a division of e.Republic Inc., which publishes Government Technology), lists more than 30 portal projects underway in states and localities, and that list is constantly being updated.
Unfortunately, building a portal with knowledge-sharing capabilities isn't as easy as it may appear. Simply providing links to other resources and a few catchy features, such as stock quotes and weather reports, only takes knowledge sharing so far. One of the fundamental problems with knowledge management in government is the inability to update and classify the constant stream of information that pours into its databases. Failure to electronically tag documents means they can't be properly indexed and searched once they are dumped into an agency's Web server.
That's why people like Eileen Quam are so important. Quam is an information architect for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. For the past year, she has been working with 13 different state agencies to organize, classify and index tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the state's environment.
The result is "Bridges," a unique, collaborative effort at knowledge sharing. Using a software tool from Ultraseek Corp., she has been able to put all sorts of electronic documents into a hierarchical directory
Comparing her work to a library cataloger, Quam has the tough task of persuading other agencies to cooperate and place meta tags in each document they file on their servers. But the hard work pays off in spades when it comes to knowledge sharing. "We are showing people how they can gather information in a much more effective way," she said. "By creating an environmental portal, it allows people to find answers to their questions a lot faster than searching without the directory."
Minnesota Metadata Guidelines - Dublin Core (MMG-DC)
The Foundations Project has developed information architecture to improve public access to environmental information within Minnesota State agencies. Called the Minnesota Metadata Guidelines - Dublin Core (MMG-DC), this information architecture also enhances Internet search and retrieval accuracy. The MMG - DC includes the following: 15 qualified metatag elements known as the Dublin Core, the Legislative Indexing Vocabluary thesaurus, the Inktomi/Ultraseek search engine, TagGen metatagging software, and the processes for incorporation of metadata into electronic resources. The latter is called Best Practice Guidelines for Web Metadata.
The Foundations Project has developed information architecture to improve public access to environmental information within Minnesota State agencies. Called the Minnesota Metadata Guidelines - Dublin Core (MMG-DC), this information architecture also enhances Internet search and retrieval accuracy. The MMG - DC includes the following: 15 qualified metatag elements known as the Dublin Core, the Legislative Indexing Vocabluary thesaurus, the Inktomi/Ultraseek search engine, TagGen metatagging software, and the processes for incorporation of metadata into electronic resources. The latter is called Best Practice Guidelines for Web Metadata.
