I’ve chosen to use Archimate as a modelling language, and as I develop the model offline I will be posting views of it to pages liked from this wiki page.

Harold’s model looks like this:

As I began to unpick Harold’s seven processes I realised that although they are primarily focused on “self”, one key aspect to understand them is to identify the different roles that “self” (and “others”) play. This aspect of the model so far is shown in the Introductory View :

Alongside the work of developing models for each of the processes, I began to develop a view of the key information artefacts manipulated by the PKM processes.

I’ve also created pages on the wiki for the first iteration at modelling the  individual processes, linking them down to a core set of application services, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll write blog posts for those.

Comments welcome to help refine this modelling effort.

In the paper Louise sets out 20 brief case studies from various companies, and surveys typical commercial uses for a wide range of social tools. She goes on to pick out several key questions that organisations should consider: is the organisation suited to this approach; is there a real community to tap into; when and where to implement; is the information “good”; and is the company prepared for the changes that might come? She then spends several pages on more general guidance on how to construct the business case and investment analysis.

Louise emphasises the need to understand the likely benefits, even if uncertain, and the importance of changes in behaviour to support those benefits. This, for me, could usefully have been extended with some reference to benefits mapping as a tool to firstly gain consensus on the benefits and what would need to happen to get them, secondly to communicate those benefits and changes to senior management in support of the business case, and thirdly to provide a framework for measurement.

The changes in behaviour needed to gain benefit in the enterprise from social tools are significant, and as many have commented (e.g. Euan Semple, Jon Husband), they are often changes that sit uncomfortably with senior business, finance, technology and HR managers. This is precisely the sort of scenario where a clear visual emphasis, such as a benefits map, that you need to change what you do, not just the technology you use, is of use in shaping the approach taken by management.

As a member of the Internet-using public I’m always a little sceptical of companies who see Web 2.0 as yet another “channel” for push marketing and sales approaches. In the conclusion to the longer paper, Louise notes that people often resent such overt tactics, and writes “[…] Instead, I think the greatest potential for web 2.0 tools come from their role in encouraging collaboration; and accessing talent outside the organisation’s boundaries […]“, so it seems to me that she “gets it”, and indeed invites debate via comments on her blog.

Sadly CIMA don’t seem to get it – to comment on the blog you have to be registered with their system, and although I tried I was baulked by a combination of server errors, account verification emails which never arrived, and some pages which seemed to suggest you could only register if you are a CIMA member. So if anyone from CIMA reads this, please take note of your own experts!

(cross-posted from my professional blog)

At FASTForward, he reports on Why and How to SaaS, a view by Jeff Kaplan of THINKStrategies, and links back to an earlier conference presentation by Pete Fields at Wachovia bank

At The AppGap Bill writes about the provision of of Web 2.0 for talent management by SuccessFactors.

And at his own Portals and KM blog Bill has a series of (sponsored) posts from the Serena Tag 2008 conference, including the views of Forrester and Gartner on mashups in the enterprise.

In this case [an enterprise social networking tool provided by the company] is your social graph actually intellectual property of the company? would a company who gave you a tool want you to use the benefits of this when moving to another organisation (who could be a competitor)?

I can certainly see Neil’s point, indeed in pre-Web 2.0 days a whole body of law has grown up around the use of contact lists etc. that one has accumulated through the course of carrying out a job. I don’t know if there is any relevant case law that brings this up to date…

On the other side of the coin, as an individual I clearly feel that the information about my connections to other people (i.e. my relationships to other people) is absolutely my information. Even if the means of expressing and sharing that information belongs to an employer or a third party like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Perhaps there is a lesson for employers from the situation with “public” social networking sites. Clearly sites have a business proposition around “monetising” the network (aside – we so have to find a better verb!) that users create. In return we accept (or put up with) that because of the benefits we perceive from sharing our connections. The sites have to make their proposition attractive or else there will be no network and no money. The analogy within an organisation would be the organisation investing in the tools in order to benefit from a more effective workforce, giving the users the benefits they perceive.

In all cases the underlying tension is between a closed network and an open one. For users open networks or the ability to transfer their information from one system to another is a key benefit. For employers the typical initial reaction will be similar to Neil’s – if this gives us an advantage we want to keep it in house. My feeling is that this analysis springs in part from assuming the social graph is like a list of contact details – information that can be of value to anyone.

Looking deeper though, I think a better analogy would be to think of a person’s social graph as if it was part of their training and development record. Just because two people have been on the same course they do not necessarily have the same skills. Just because two people both express a relationship to me via a networking site that does not make our working relationships equivalent. Human relationships are not fungible.

So if a free market in “labour” is of benefit to the firm, and if the effectiveness of a workforce is enhanced by the use of tools that can express relationships, then surely an advantage for such network sharing systems must be the ease with which the information is imported, exported and shared?

There’s a lot to develop here, and some people have already been paying attention to it. This article by Alex Iskold would seem to be a good starting summary, pointing as it does to Brad Fitzpatrick’s post Thoughts on The Social Graph.

The two things that put me off Qumana before were its inability to post via a web proxy (not tested this time), and the lack of control over the HTML it was creating. The second thing has been fixed now, with a "Source View" tab.

Things I like

The drop-pad – this makes it really easy to grab links and bits of content as you work and park them in a scratchpad for blogging later. This was the key part of the workflow that Earl Mardle described.

The writing interface is really clean, with the minimum of interferences to get in the way of the words you want to write, and really clear, so you can review your words easily. Being a beta there are a couple of funnies – for example "Insert Link" and "Align Left" seem to share the same keyboard shortcut as described in the menu (actually it applies "Insert Link") – but those are trivial things that I’m sure will be fixed in the release version.

Integrated speeling chocker – definitely a requirement for those fast posts!

Things I don’t like

Unless I missed it in my exploration of the configuration, there is no way to post to your blog as draft. For me this is the killer feature-lack that makes it difficult for me to integrate Qumana into my preferred workflow. I can see an argument that says this tool is for creating fast posts, but I’m sure that many people would like the ability to post in draft. If nothing else, this makes it easy to capture thoughts when they happen, for later access and editing from another computer.

There’s another reason that I would want a "post to draft" facility, which is more to do with my specific blog setup – I make use of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to create tags on my blog, and this requires access to the online WordPress editing screen. If when you read this post it doesn’t have any tags, that’s because I’ve only just posted it and haven’t time to go into WordPress and add them. In fairness to Qumana, this is not something they could realistically accomodate as a specific requirement because it lies outside the XML-RPC interface to WordPress, however a "Post to Draft" feature would enable it. And of course, they do include an easy shortcut for inserting Technorati tags "the normal way".

Things I don’t really care about

A key part of the functionality of Qumana is the ability to easily include adverts in your posts through the close integration with Adgenta. As this isn’t something I particularly want to do on my blog (unless the ISP fees go up!) then it isn’t a selling point for me – nor did I test this aspect to see how well it works.

Summary

A nice tool, and if it had the ability to post in draft I would probably use it. If that isn’t a requirement for your own preferred style of blogging, then give it a go!

[...] The concept is really simple – there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get – essentially – free metadata on a whole range of other concepts [...]

and goes on to play with ideas for aggregating tags on radio songs into folksonomic descriptions of aggregates of those songs (radio shows, albums) and aggregations of aggregations (a radio station, an artist’s body of work).

Reading it I was struck by a link to something I wrote about a year ago on semantic aggregation and filtering (I’m using aggregation to refer to a slightly different thing in that post) – so from that I would add to Tom’s idea the possiblity for allowing new tags to be added to describe different entities in the aggregation – e.g. directly tagging the shows as well as using tags derived from the tags applied to the songs.

Tom goes on to suggest that by using the links between these emergent tags you could lead people to new-to-them material that reflected the best example of things they may like – “best” being determined in a Wisdom-of-Crowds-like way by the station’s listeners.

The concept makes immense sense from the perspective of a broadcaster that is seeking to create new metadata about material, and to provide listeners with the most engaging experience.

From the perspective of a listener though, I’d like another layer. Alongside the “transmitter-side” aggregation of metadata from the broadcaster based on the tags submitted by their listeners, I’d like a “receiver-side” metadata aggregator that aggregates my tags across all the media I’ve ever listened to over time – and on top of that a way of comparing “my” folksonomy with “their” folksonomies so that I can find new artists or stations that I am likely to enjoy.

I’ve been coming back to the use of a wiki in the work environment, again with project teams, for rapid development of specifications and management of action lists.

Two things that struck me, after spending a large chunk of the working day creating and editing stuff in a group of browser tabs. Firstly, that this is a really good way of developing a set of inter-related ideas; secondly, how it made periodic checking of my Bloglines feeds list and various email accounts less disruptive: it’s far easier and faster to Ctrl-PageDown to the next Firefox tab than it is to switch context between browser, email client and word processor. (And as you will note, implicit in that statement there is also my view that tabbed browsing is vastly more efficient than the non-tabbed variety.)

I think there may be a clue here about what needs to be done to increase the use of blogs and wikis in a corporate setting – if you look at the user patterns within browser-based tools and the more traditional thick-client set of email-wordprocesssor-spreadsheet it is much easier to switch and share within each sub-system than between them.

It’s an idea I’ve touched on before; the question remains will we see an end-to-end solution from Microsoft? Or will the independent tool vendors and the Open Source community be able to come up with something first?

The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.

Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future…

He adds a fourth mechanism for extracting and sharing a taxonomy

The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.

Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing – Now that would really assist content sharing!

to which I would add another nuance – as well as deploying these tools to categorise your own text how about deploying them inside a feed aggregator with mapping rules based on the reader’s frame of reference – this way in addition to using the author’s taxonomy you could decide how to categorise a piece of content in the reader’s context.

Update: From this article via Denham’s wiki it looks like there has been a lot of work in this area already…

He extends the thought to consider how context modifies the use we can make of specific pieces of information – as an example notes that are contributed to a topically-focused space such as a bulletin board or mailing list contrasted with the same note expressed in an individually-focused space such as a weblog. He sees syndication formats such as RSS as the connecting bridge that allows people to assemble published information into unique contextualised views that serve their specific needs.

This idea seems to be teasingly close to what I have described as projections of knowledge – each context is a map of the knowledge space projected in a particular way. Beyond the raw mechanics of content feeds the key to assembling projections/views is being able to find and select the information you want in an automatable way. The problem is to determine which concepts are “close” to each other on the map in question.

Most approaches that I have heard of use categorisation and filtering as a proxy for measuring conceptual proximity. Whether you use shared taxonomies or the more emergent “folksonomy” approach a mechanism is needed to determine which labels are close to each other within the map of choice.

I can imagine this happening in a number of ways.

• At the most basic level tools could use some shared thesaurus to identify synonomous labels.
• An enhancement would be to allow the user to view a set of available labels and identify their own associations – this could in turn be published to allow “association aggregators” to form emergent thesauri.
• Even more subtle would be to allow the user to modify the view parameters by assigning votes to the returned concepts.

I have a hunch that all of this is buildable with currently-available standards. There may be tools out there already but I suspect they are proprietary – what we need are the simple building blocks to allow a “small pieces loosely joined” solution.

Wiki page: [wiki]SemanticAggregator[/wiki]