tfpl blog

SharePoint offers new opportunities for information specialists

Author: Martin Sanderson
TFPL, Senior Consultant

Remembering Ralph Poole’s reflection in his past blog post that the days when IT developers managed (often with little or no success) all the processes for systems and user requirements analysis may be coming to an end with the arrival of SharePoint platforms.  With SharePoint much of the functionality is preconfigured and the most important prerequisite (and challenge) is deciding how to organize and present information to support users in their day to day operations and tasks. Poole concluded that “Unfortunately, for developers, this means MOSS 2007 needs configuration rather than development”.  Perhaps this is even more so with the introduction of SharePoint 2010.  So move over developers and move in information specialists who are well equipped to deal with information architecture, content types, metadata, search configuration and site navigation.

SharePoint 2010: what it means for information professionals and their organisations

I recently made a trip to Microsoft for a workshop on SharePoint 2010 at their campus in Reading.  The picture I took away is of a shift in focus away from development to configuration (and there's a hell of a lot more to configure), illustrated by the following:   

• Complex (or simple) records and document management policies (compliant with DoD 5015.02, amongst other things) can now be configured into the system at and across every level and site location, or simply determined ad hoc.  It looks like a complete EDRMS is on the cards with hierarchical (file-plan like) structuring, automatic document ID numbers and-all with a highly intuitive and attractive browser (any browser) based user interface. 
• Developers will no longer be needed to come in and hack into your SharePoint in order for it to communicate with other databases and systems.  All of this can be configured out of the box without any knowledge of or ostensible use of code.
• As a result of the above and because the development engine, Visual Studio 2010 (sold separately of course), is integrated into the Central Admin area I think that significant investment on bespoke coding is a thing of the past. For example, .NET coding can as easily be published to SharePoint 2010 as a document might be through a standard CMS. In addition to this, the .NET coding language is relatively easy to pick up for quick learners, which systems admins usually are.
• My opinion is that outlay in development will revolve around (app by app) bespoke applications development which has been readily facilitated through the provision of APIs meaning that apps can be built and rolled out through the Central Admin (or the ‘back office’) development tool-kit.

On cost, for organisations that have made a sizable resource commitment to MOSS 2007 already, the prospect of further investment in SharePoint 2010 might initially be a turn off[*].  If however they are persuaded by the additional functionality (particularly in what was formerly business intelligence, the records centre and mySite) then they still face the requirement to upgrade their hardware to x64 (currently it is x32). This x64 backroom hardware is needed to effectively accommodate technologies such as ajax which make for seamless and smooth user operability on the client side but demand significant resources from the servers to that end. This demand scales up with increases in user numbers and user activity, which will be a significant consideration if organisations start adopting SharePoint as a “full featured business platform”, as Microsoft is touting it.

Additionally, upgrade/migration from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint was not something that was readily covered and I suspect 2007 users may be in for a rougher ride, price-wise and technically, than they might otherwise have expected.  This may be a particular issue to those organisations that invested heavily in 3rd party bespoke development of the product.

So, how significant is the advent of SharePoint 2010 to the information professional? Well, we have always known that information architecture, information governance (inclusive of its pillars such as policies, rules etc) and sound information management in general are critical to the success of any electronic information system deployment.  And, with the removal of significant functionality barriers in SharePoint 2010, the continued importance of this cannot be stressed enough in giving systems administrators something to consider before bending to every whim of their users. 

It is therefore critical that the advice of the information professional is heeded at the highest levels of management and engendered into the IT psyche.  The blueprints of a successful implementation should be drawn up, highlighted, championed and followed from the very beginning, lest the onset of “SharePoint Sprawl”, a symptom of poor information architecture and a lack of information management forethought, generally; and one with which many, if not most, MOSS 2007 implementations contend.

If you have information management concerns around your deployment of SharePoint, or any other system, contact us for expert advice and solutions.

Authored by Shooresh Golzari, tfpl consultant.

[*] Recent conversations with clients and SharePoint integrators indicate that this is true.

A proposed standard for Enterprise Content Management

Last week I went to a seminar on the proposed BSI Publicly Available Specification (PAS) on Enterprise Content Management (ECM).  The seminar, at the Online Information Exhibition, was given by Ben Richmond, author of  the proposed standard and CEO of The Content Group

Some writers have expressed concern that this is a vendor driven standard.  There are two user representatives on the steering group for the standard (Paul Finnis of Credit Suisse and Roger Wyer of Richmond upon Thames Council) but the rest of the steering group are system vendors, system integrators and consultants.  

I can't see how an ECM standard could be anything other than vendor dominated: after all ECM is a vendor created concept.  ECM is essentially a cobbling together a disperate set of document related technologies (document management, workflow, collaboration, web publishing, records management).  It does not stem from a desire of organisations to obtain all of this from one vendor, rather it comes from a desire of system vendors to sell as much as they can to each of their clients.  

The standard aims to provide a best practice methodology for organisations implementing ECM.  It defines ECM as 'a framework of technologies and practices working in an integrated fashion to manage information'. 

Ben characterised ECMs as focusing on unstructured information, rather than the data you find in databases.  I am not sure how long we should hold onto that distinction. In my experience those implementations of SharePoint that have been most succesful have been the ones that leveraged the value of data from their databases by bringing it into the collaborative environment where people can see it and do things with it.  I am thinking of two simple examples:

• Esher College integrating their college timetabling system with SharePoint so that any change to the time or location of a lecture was automatically fed through to the SharePoint mysite of the students and lecturer due to participate in it.     

• TLMI integrating their project management database into SharePoint so that metadata about a project is automatically added to documents saved to that project; and so that an aggregated view can be provided of all documents arising from a project regardless of the particular teamsite they were saved into. 

Ben Richmond says that the purpose of ECM is to cut across silos. He placed great emphasis on the word integration:

• if a system just covers one aspect of content management (for example it just manages your web content ) then it is not an ECM system.
• If an implementation is confined to one department or area then it is not an ECM implementation.

Ben described the best practice methodology outlined in PAS 89 . PAS 89 has come up with nine categories to encompass all document related taks.  These categories are:

• Creation
• Capture
• Management
• Processing
• Collaboration
• Distribution
• Publishing
• Reporting
• Storage

Ben said that the methodology in the PAS will advise organisations to take the following steps before implementing ECM:

• think through how your users would carry out each of the nine tasks in the ECM environment.
• develop policies and strategies around ECM.
• develop a metadata model, identifying what metadata they need, and how they will capture it in the ECM 

The methodology sounded very corporate centric, based on a high degree of corporate planning.   This is at odds with the general move towards environments that are customisable to team and individual taste. This move is evidenced by the phenomenal take up of web 2.0 applications, the low take up of corporate fileplans in the EDRM/ECM space, and the rapid rise of SharePoint - an ECM that lacks strong corporate classification and governance functionality.

Here is a quote from a speech by Gartner Vice-President Yvonne Genovese.  Genovese identified four overarching trends reshaping how IT is used in the workplace, and said:

“Most current software is focused on general enterprise needs rather than user-specific needs, The opportunity for business and IT leaders is to understand how the individualization of work will affect businesses, critical processes, innovation and interenterprise collaboration. End-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions made by IT.”

The BSI PAS on ECM is currently out for public review.

(Thank you to @metataxis for the reference to the Yvonne Genovese talk)

 

Information Management in 2008

As 2008 begins, TFPL consultants reflect on the projects we have worked on over the past 12 months and outline the key information challenges that our clients have asked us to address as a pointer to the trends for the coming year.

Content management
Our consultants were involved in several intranet redesign projects as well as taxonomy strategy and development projects. The common theme was intelligent information architecture,  making content better organised and described to bring it and users together in a more natural and efficient way – to the benefit of the business AND the user.

Intranets are key resources for organisations, and TFPL helped a number of national organisations review and redesign theirs to work both as a communications channel for the business and as an efficient business application, serving up everyday information.  This process needs skills to look at both the user-focused (i.e. the layout of pages) and the content-focused,( i.e. the metadata profiles and attendant controlled vocabularies) elements.

Taxonomies continue to be important:  there effective design allowing users to manage and navigate content systems and aids retrieval using search engines.  Extending these classification aspects with resource discovery and dynamic publishing of content we are beginning to allow Information Discovery with content related to other similar content through well created and managed metadata.

Aligned to information architecture work has been a growing need from organisations to manage the complex task of migrating unstructured web content from disparate sites into centrally managed content management systems.   We have managed content migrations for a large government deparment and a global law firm.  TFPL have developed a methodology to assist our clients through a content migration, covering:

1. content audit
2. migration planning
3. user review
4. automatic, rule-based migration
5. quality assurance

Knowledge management
There has been much interest this year in the development of information and knowledge strategies to support the business objectives resulting from changing trends in external economic, social and technical advances. These drivers have led to:

• Downsizing the workforce and workspace
• Flexible work patterns, with more and more staff working from home
• New technology (web 2.0) and more robust communication networks to improve knowledge sharing and learning across organisations

We have conducted information and knowledge audits and strategy development projects for government agencies, local councils, and the not-for-profit sector.  Organisations are reviewing how they manage and deliver information to ensure that K&IM strategies and services are aligned with business objectives.  They are looking to rationalise the procurement of published material and working to deliver internal information effectively as well as seeking to avoid silo working

Our consultants spend time talking to staff across the organisation, using a variety of methods to better understand:

• What information they require to carry out their jobs
• How they want to work
• How best they would prefer to access and use information 
• What where the key issues and barriers preventing them from doing so.

In nearly all of our client organisations we found that people were spending too much time trying to find the information ‘they knew was there somewhere’. . Clients were also interested in how other organisations have addressed these issues so that good practice methodology can be adopted straight away.

The range of our IM/KM work across all the sectors has enabled TFPL to share experience and know-how with our clients and to work with them to build a vision for information and knowledge management.. In many cases TFPL has gone on to support clients through the implementation and evaluation of the projects.

Information service reviews
We have worked with in-house information services to ensure that the services and products offered are fresh and relevant.  Challenges facing information services include:

• Detachment from target audiences
• Remoteness from senior management
• Hesitation over service development
• Subjective spending decisions

Records management

The demand for records management consultancy during 2007 remained very strong across the government sector and clearly re-emerged in the private sector as organisations realign their information and records management programmes to meet changing external demands and set out to realise the benefits of technologies. Building good RM practices into the electronic records management arena still poses a challenge for many and TFPL is supporting a number of EDRM designs and implementations.

Small to medium sized organisations are attracted by the Microsoft Sharepoint offering which is considered an attractive alternative to traditional RM applications and are showing increased interest in using collaborative and social media tools.

Bringing sense to the e-records environment still requires the understanding of the connectivity between the governance frameworks, information architecture, user friendly corporate fileplans with appropriate metadata frameworks and controlled vocabularies. TFPL is meeting the growing demand for making sense of and integrating legacy records into the new e-environment through migration and rationalisation of applications that hold records.  Developing and applying retention schedules for legal and regulatory compliance across all organisations has also featured in this year's consultancy projects.

2008 is widely expected to see a tightening of belts across all sectors.  In this climate, efficiency in business is essential and good decisions can only be taken with the right information at hand.  TFPL consultants can help your business put it's Information Management strategies and practices in order.

Psycho information architecture!

TFPL regularly runs training events for its temporary recruitment candidates. 

Last night, over 30 of then heard Alan Flett describe how psychological theories and methodologies, coupled with computer-based analysis, can help us understand users' mental models and build better information architectures.  This is done by using psychological interview approaches with users and analysing the outputs via computer aided clustering techniques.

The outputs can be used to inform information architecture design.  The results are evidence based, user focused taxonomies and wireframes etc that are capable of evolution and refinement.

For more information on 'psycho' information architecture contact alan.flett@tfpl.com.   For more information about temps training events, contact katy.crosse@tfpl.com.

Thinking about a spring clean?

A client, embarking on the roll out of a new Content Management System in 2007, asked me for an opinion on the potentially thorny problem of classifying a large set of existing content.

The answer is, “well, there are a many ways to attack it.”  So I thought I’d share my points of view on it:

Manual classification

• requesting the author classifies their content gives you a high degree of accuracy, but often it is a subjective set of tags (the author knows what they were thinking when they wrote the document, but might not consider wider tags which are equally applicable to the content).
• employing Information Scientists (directly or outsourcing to a group like TFPL’s Information Service) to read appraise and tag the document – This could be a useful approach if you want other metadata to be created, for example a summary, abstract or headline where there is some skill in creating those new meta items.
• employing a team of classifiers to train on a specific taxonomy and to apply this to content. If the volumes are not huge and this is a one off task, providing some temporary contactors to plough through a document might be low tech, but could be the best option.

For all of the above elements the size of the taxonomy can be a limiting factor.  Any structure over 200 nodes and the lower level nodes are unlikely to be used.

Automatic classification

For large content sets or for multiple and or large taxonomy structures, an automatic classification system might be the best approach. However, the trade off is typically the effort required “up front” to develop the tagging rules.

There are a number of software applications which in one form or another build up rule sets to apply to the language of a document and return one or more tags (dependant on the setting of a threshold value).  This process can include:

• Training sets: compare a positive set (documents you know are about the subject), to negative set (a random control set) and generate the linguistic rules.  The effort involved in creating the initial documents sets is non-trivial. 
• Manual rule’s bases – requires expertise in the rule language and application
• Machine learning systems – needs monitoring and tailoring over time to improve accuracy.
• Thesaurus driven systems – using keyword relationships to preferred terms with an algorithm to create a rule base. Can be set up reasonably easy, but will need tailoring for complex and ambiguous language  (which English  seems to be littered with wen you get into this topic!)

However, for some of the known taxonomies, like the UK government sponsored Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV)  there are off-the-shelf classification systems that can be employed directly.

The type and format of the content is also a major factor:

• If your reports follow a standard template then you have a much improved chance getting a successful outcome with rule based classifications (knowing the first section is always an Executive Summary means that more weighting can be applied to the content there than the content in the Appendices, for example).
• Large complex documents can have many subjects and while a classifier could apply many tags it might be better to create distinct sections that have a more focussed set of tags, depending on the desired application of the content.

It's certainly a challenge, but there are options out there and the improvement in search and retrieval with well classified content set is a worthwhile benefit.

Sexy searching

For anyone who has not already seen it, have a look at Ms Dewey, this is a young, attractive and rather sexy search engine – it is fully animated with results pulled in from Live.com. Read Phil Bradleys review for the nuts and bolts of the search function and usability. Ms. Dewey is played by actress Janina Gavankar.

Where do you want to go?

Following the focus group we ran last week we have been using the results to prepare a preliminary draft information architecture for the site. Our client was disappointed with the turnout at the focus group. However, from our perspective it was a success; we were able to gain many insights into how the audience uses the site and what they really want when they visit the site. These nuggets are invaluable in adding meaning to the survey and interview research we have already completed. The interaction between participants gives a perspective that doesn’t come from speaking with individuals.

It takes the emphasis away from the “clever” information architecture and taxonomy ideas and puts it firmly on the content itself.  There are some recent posts exploring this theme.

In his post on goal based retrieval, Joe Lamantia discusses common goals of information retrieval (e.g. reviewing summaries of items, understanding contexts and situations) and the different modes of retrieval or interaction that would meet these goals.

Maish Nichani has written about the idea of focussing on the users’ target content in his excellent post “Taming your target content”.

This approach is helping to define the vague content types mentioned by the audience e.g. “news”, “updates” to something more specific, with the surrounding context to add deeper meaning to a single piece of information.

Tell us how you really feel

Working as a consultant, one of the my favourite activities is running workshops and focus groups. Listening to people discussing thier work, their likes and dislikes and ideas is always fascinating.

Yesterday we ran a focus group for a client which involved a card sorting exercise. The objective was to obtain feedback from the organisation's members about their information expectations and use of the website. Before the exercise we had an in depth discussion about the current home page, talked about the navigation and content. When we came to the card sorting the participants were completely floored by four of the terms.  "environment".... what does that mean? "property" ...huh??!!

Interestingly, these four words were smack bang in the middle of the main navigation that we had just looked at in detail. They had said the navigation made sense to them and they used it regularly, yet the words out of context meant absolutely nothing to them.

User-centered design - 1: Guesstimating - 0

Best of both worlds

A folksonomy is an information retreival tool created by allowing users to 'tag' information resources with whatever words they want to remember them by.

The folksonomy approach is very different from the controlled vocabulary approach (taxonomies, classifications, thesauri, ontologies).  The debate between advocates of the two approaches has, unsuprisingly, been polarised.

For the views of people on both sides of the debate see Clay Shirky's Ontology is overrated  and the robust response of Peter Merholz  Clay Shirky's viewpoints are overrated

The Librarians Guide to Etiquette has put a humorous spin on this polarisation.  It told librarians that they could induce panic into their library committees by making  the following suggestion:

''What if we eliminated the use of costly Library of Congress Subject headings in favour of patron-initiated tagging and social bookmarking in our catalogue?''

The Penn Tags project at the Library of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) gives an interesting way out of this divide.   The library is allowing their users to add their own tags to catalogue entries, and thus generate their own reading lists.

The result is that searchers have two new ways into the catalogue:  as well as the classification and search routes offered by the catalogue itself you now can search on:

• the words that fellow readers have tagged catalogue entries with
• the reading lists of fellow readers, students or lecturers.

This combination of classification and folksonomy could have powerful applications within organisations.   We do need classification structures in our intranets and record systems.  But folksonomies are good at two things that classifications are not good at, namely:

• coping with the diversity of language used by different people in the organisation
• incorporating emerging subjects and new areas of interest

At Penn library the tags that users apply to catalogue entries will have a similar relationship to classification terms in the catalogue as do non-preffered terms to preffered terms in a thesaurus.  They will link the language(s) that people actually use in the University to the necessarily artificial language of the classification.

And when new topics emerge that are of interest to people in the University, these topics will be reflected in the words that students and lecturers use when they tag those resources in the library that are relevant to that topic.