Info Sys Management

IT and IG - Friends or frenemies

Annotated slides from my recent presentation at the Ark Group Information Governance forum:

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The flaws of DIKW

One of my constant bugbears in KM theory is the use of DIKW, or the pyramid of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

The idea is that a "refining" process takes place at each layer of the hierarchy. So: refined data becomes information, refined information becomes knowledge; and refined knowledge becomes wisdom. I personally feel the model is, at best, only really applicable in a few limited domains and even then it is problematic.

I have two main two objections to the theory:

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Decision-making structures of organisations

Recently I read Steve Denning's article about moving away from hierarchical organisational structures. However, I found myself confused about the difference between heterarchy, and responsible autonomy, two alternate forms of polyarchy in opposition to the tradition of hierarchy.

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The modern customer and the modern company

There was an important and insightful post from JP Rangaswami last week. JP is far ahead of me in incorporating the work of the recently-deceased Ronald Coase into his worldview (but I'm trying to catch up), and he absolutely nails why resilience and preparedness for change is increasingly essential to organisational survival:

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ICT is not always a source of productivity

One of the commonly-held beliefs of managers is that productivity improvements can be best done through the development and implementation of new or upgraded ICT systems. The McKell Productivity Report (2012) writes:

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Launch of Dropforge

"Launch" is perhaps too strong of a word for something that is more of a personal hobby. Dropforge is a site containing the web-based tools I have developed for my own personal use over the past several years. Specifically, they are:

  • munchcrunch – a RSS reader in the style of Google Reader
  • Clamshell – an OpenID 1.1-compliant authentication provider
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Bounding your system risk by retaining alternative completion methods

From ACM Queue, via RISKS Digest, an essential quote from Dan Geer on the risk of relying on the Internet for critical infrastructure:

Risk is a consequence of dependence. Because of shared dependence,
aggregate societal dependence on the Internet is not estimable. If
dependencies are not estimable, then they will be underestimated. If they
are underestimated, then they will not be made secure over the long run,
only over the short. As the risks become increasingly unlikely to appear,

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Using RecordPoint to make SharePoint records-compliant

Undoubtedly, one of Microsoft's biggest successes of the past 10 years has been Microsoft SharePoint.

After a couple of stuttering early releases, SharePoint 2003 became a useful and viable choice for organisations that were heavily reliant on Microsoft Office documents (ie just about everyone), due to its ability to provide flexible, end-user customisation of sites and seamless opening and saving of documents in Office (no more download -> edit -> upload cycles!).

Strategically it's been brilliant, because it has become a natural extension of using Office for people who don't like receiving documents in their inbox like Strategic-Plan-v12.1+JC comments.docx. Microsoft's also incorporated SharePoint integration into many of their products including Dynamics CRM, and even made SharePoint the underlying platform of a few (Project Server, Forefront Identity Manager).

But that typical Microsoft ease of installation was always countered by recordkeepers who would say (with perhaps a tinge of relief) that "it wasn't records compliant". And this was true, unless you locked down most of the features that made SharePoint a platform people wanted to use in the first place! So in many organisations, SharePoint lives side by side with an "official" recordkeeping platform like TRIM or Objective.

[Why RecordPoint fills the gap...]

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Running a complex project successfully

A great piece of investigative reporting from Bob Lewis. He discovered the Loch Ness Monster a SAP implementation project that finished ahead of schedule by the Japanese company Daiwa House Industry.

The lessons are entirely relevant to any complex project implementation.

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Maximising utility of content stores

On actKM, Richard Vines recently posed a question on how we can maximise the value of ICT investments in content/metadata management systems. All too often systems are implemented without a view to their eventual decommissioning or integration with other systems. This inevitably leads to expensive, error-prone and disruptive data synchronisation and/or migration projects down the track (and often not as far away as people imagine).

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