Bullying Analysts isn’t the Best Way to Deal

By  | 

I’ve enjoyed reading Robin Bloor’s series of posts on How to Deal with Analysts. The title of one called attention to analyst abuse, which set some thoughts meandering. Robin made a point under the heading of scruples, and related to briefings.

“The fundamental balancing act lies in the interaction between analyst and vendor. The vendors are keen for the analysts to know and understand their products. The analysts treat briefings as occasions for relationship building and selling.”

Although the point of the post I’ve quoted differs from what I’m about to mention, I really liked that bit in relation to the title on analyst abuse. One form of analyst abuse that could be included in a taxonomy on the subject: bullying.

A few months ago, my job function changed with some corporate restructuring. I found myself taking on the management of several additional teams, including directing TEC‘s research analyst group. It’s been an interesting and busy few months where (cue an excuse for my woeful lack of posting here) I’ve identified and set the groundwork for the year and focused attention on areas that needed it.

Yes, it’s an exciting time full of creative possibilities but when you take on a new job, role, or responsibility you quickly learn it comes ready to share its treasure trove of frustrations too. For example, analyst/vendor communications sometimes feel like an uplifting meeting of intelligent people, ready to help each other learn and spread useful information. Other times, communications go awry and it seems that one person after another dumps their grey matter onto a buzzing heap of rotting political motivation.

I think that Robin says a key thing in calling attention to the analyst and vendor interaction. Something important transpires (or ought to) between analyst and vendor, which involves building a relationship. That relationship (fundamentally if it’s good) requires understanding of the vendor’s product, direction, motivations, etc. Personally, if I don’t have a good relationship with someone, I find it more challenging to understand the person. Why? Pragmatically speaking, a poor relationship likely signifies that the people involved are not communicating well. Not communicating well certainly doesn’t improve understanding.

So, back to my frustations… there I was, sitting with one of my analysts on a briefing. The briefing resulted from a third party that provides some sort marketing/publicity/AR type of function for the software vendor. Ok, that’s fine, a nice briefing facilitated through this person’s efforts. However, the underside of this is that the third party only facilitated the briefing after falsely accusing the TEC analyst of having erred by excluding the vendor from an article we published. We agreed to the briefing under the assumption that it was a good opportunity to find out more and get to know this vendor better–after all, what harm could learning more do? Sadly, it seems the third party presented it to the vendor in a rather different light, one in which the vendor was inaccurately lead to believe we’d slighted them and owed them a fix.

The briefing was fine. Later however, the third party began a strangely vehement and tentacled campaign to charge us with further, (false) wrongdoings. The third party bestowed its unfounded opinions to a host of people including the vendor’s president–curiously shaping attitudes around a neglectful mythology. Coinciding with this, were the third party’s demands that we publish new research about this particular vendor or include mention of it in unmerited ways.

To me, this is a case of bullying. Here, the third party muddied rather than fostered good interactions between a vendor and an analyst. I suspect this particular third party has an odd sort of motivation to appear as an important source for garnering publicity (thereby securing its position with the vendor). Of course this is just an example, not necessarily the norm.

I don’t know whether bullying works on many analysts but it doesn’t impress me. At best, it cannot influence an analysis of the vendor, at worst, provided I have to continue dealing with the marketing/publicity/AR third party, it doesn’t compell me to reach out more than required to do my job properly and certainly raises some questions about that vendor’s interactions with its customers, partners, etc. I mean, is that part of its corporate culture?

It’s striking that a person hired to facilitate understanding with analysts, instead permeated vendor/analyst communications with misunderstanding. Bullying is analyst abuse, it fouls the relationship.

Some Notes on the Canadian Digital Information Strategy Draft

By  | 

I’ve been reading the draft consultation version of the Canadian Digital Information Strategy. The strategy proposes strengthening content, ensuring its preservation, and maximizing its access and use. These are important for many reasons the report addresses regarding culture; the report also has some anchors in industry, stating that “nations that nurture their digital information assets and infrastructure will prosper.”

In explaining why we need a strategy the report says

“Digital content will be more and more in the form of conversations between people, using many different media types.”

This requires a more solid understanding of what constitutes conversation. The different media are one issue but within the use of those media the constructs of a conversation vary hugely. From blog posts to instant messages, even the selection of hyperlinks you choose to place in your web page.

The report offers a grid (p. 10) categorizing content by its source, motivation, audience, and characteristics. I believe there is a miscategorization here in that one source is the public domain and civil society whereas other sources are the business world or academic community. The report notes there may be some overlap but I think this categorization could be reconsidered and improved. The overlap seems too great to make the existing categories meaningful. In particular, I don’t see why the public domain is held separate from the rest, since it is not the same sort of a category at all. Every other category can include the public domain.

A key assumption in the proposed strategy is that

“Information access and use supports Canada’s societal goals-In society, equitable information access fosters equal opportunity for learning, creative and commercial enterprise.”

I think this is a wonderful base assumption, not simply for recognizing the need to have equitable access but also because I think it requires recognition of the integral role that this access plays for learning, creative, and commercial enterprise. And because information access leads to what enables people to access it-so if you read the report you’ll see various (welcome) mentions of open standards and sources.

An outcome the strategy seeks is that Canada’s information assets and knowledge are preserved in digital form. There is the point that we and future generations ought to have ongoing access to our digital knowledge and information assets, especially with regard to the intellectual, scientific, and creative accomplishments. I’m glad this point is in the forefront because it is a big problem. I touched on this in a post previously, commenting on our political motivation in terms of our heritage.

Unfortunately, I feel that the strategy doesn’t outline a sufficient method for ensuring the storage techniques to make this digital preservation clearly the right choice. Not that I’m saying it isn’t, but we have many flaws to deal with in terms of digital preservation and I think those must be worked out much more completely. The plan does cover some ground in this regard.

For example, in the objectives for ensuring preservation, it states

“We are confronted with the need to choose what will be preserved and what will not.”

It calls for a reasoned framework to do so. The strategy notes that we’re incapable (presently) of storing all the information we create. But haven’t we always had this problem? We’ve never been able to store everything (digital or not) and what we do keep in museums and archives, is not necessarily placed there because of a reasoned framework. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have such a framework however, but I’m questioning what it should be used to accomplish.

For all the digital information we create, how do we determine what will be significant to the future? Nobody’s ever thought it was an important idea to record every phone conversation for eternity. However, now that we’re looking at conversations in digital mediums, weblogs for example, and we feel like they’ve got to be preserved. Is the impetus for this the digital medium? I think the more difficult part of the preservation task is determining the “what” rather than the “how”and I suppose that’s the purpose of the framework. Any framework though is going to be developed within our present context so I wonder how it will be able to account for the rapid changes that take place in digital mediums? When hyperlinks constitute conversations do they cease to be preservation worthy in the same way as day-to-day phone conversations? Interesting problem.

To continue on the “how” side of the digital preservation thread, the strategy addresses trusted digital networks (TDRs), which cover the “policy, process, standards, and technology framework for digital preservation.”So TDRs address the “how” for making digital information accessible to future generations. I think two things are lacking here. One is the specifications for what constitutes a TDR but maybe that is better off in another document. The second is a thorough discussion of what we need to do to train future generations so that they’re able to understand and access these TDRs. We cannot just assume that the work we put into creating them will easily carry on to the next generation. I would expect that a digital TDR is a complex system, relying on current technologies that may be so obsolete that they’re not even comprehensible to future generations. That’s an ongoing concern that I posted a bit about in mass replicability.

Furthermore-the TDR idea, while not completely articulated yet (and as the strategy mentions, a proper TDR does not exist in Canada yet) does promote

“…common attributes and open standards; provision of guidance and training; and development and sharing of open source tools.”

Great that it is being couched in open standards and open source.

One potential risk of TDRs is that they might concievably be used as official checkplaces for “intellectual property” rights. I think this stands a great chance of being detrimental to the assumptions of the document for equitable access and the nurturing of digital assets. I may have a pessimistic view, but current IP trends, as controlled by short-term commercial enterprise, suggest that my pessimistic view for such a rights repository would be a likely consideration for misuse or abuse.

On developing an effective TDR, the strategy promotes the idea that “Effective R&D will enable the technical foresight and constant vigilance required to manage and preserve digital information” which is nice thinking but I still think this calls for a more deliberate outline.

Switching gears, an idea the strategy introduces, which really fascinated me was

“creating new competencies and positions such as ‘digital curators‘ who would have stewardship responsibility for digital information.”

The strategy recommends raising

“the profile of digital preservation needs and challenges within creator communities…”

This is important because the changes digital media have provoked are barely audible in public discourse. As a whole, we should make these issues commonly understood by the greater population so that they can be acted on with political will. Information is within our environment and ought to be considered intimitely.

The Library and Archives Canada draft strategy covers a lot of ground and raises important points for further discussion. I loved seeing that it was introduced to the public for commentary too (I suppose I wouldn’t be writing this post otherwise).

Personal Wikiesque Note Taking Mind Mappish Killer KDE App: BasKet

By  | 

I’ve found one of my favourite applications ever. It’s called BasKet Note Pads. Here’s my problem, I’m always typing up little notes to myself and saving them as text files, all over my desktop, all over my hard drive. Sometimes I try to organize them, sometimes I send myself reminder e-mails, or I create calendar entries, or use a wiki. The wiki is good for certain things, especially in a collaborative environment, but for personal work it’s not quite right. And if my scattering of electronic notes is doing anything, it’s certainly not helping how I treat physical notes. The free KDE application, BasKet, is perfect for those jobs and more.

BasKet opens up as a blank page, you click anywhere on the page and start typing. There, you’ve got a little text note embedded in the page. You can drag it around associate it with others, tag it, schedule it, whatever. You can also drag links, images, etc. onto your page. Plus, there is no need to save, things are just there. Simple and intuitive it took no time to learn how to use and it’s been enormously helpful.

November is Nanowrimo month, so as I’m furiously pounding out that novel, I’ve had BasKet open beside my word processor, where I’m putting notes and outlines to keep the story growing. I refer back to them when I need to remember what I was doing with the plot or what I named a certain place, etc.

It’s also useful for work, where I try to keep track of my thoughts on a bunch of different projects. I often have a thought that I need to jot down to come back to, but it gets buried with the mass of text files littering my desktop. Great to have a BasKet to dump them into.

Although BasKet lets you drag your notes around and group them conceptually, it would be wrong to call it a mind-mapping tool. It’s extreme editability gives it somewhat of a wiki feel, but it’s not so concerned with making links between pages because it isn’t really organized as pages. This is where the name comes in, it’s just a big basket of your stuff. But a potentially organized one.

I was thinking this morning how nice it would be if I had an option to just make BasKet integrated to my desktop. After all, most of the things on my desktop are just temporary files that I drop there for frequent use or because I need them immediately and don’t want to remember where to find them. Perhaps that’s a bad habit, but a BasKet desktop could be so much better than any other desktop. It would make the desktop useful (right now, most desktops are little more than a few program shortcuts and an overglorified file folder). I Checked the BasKet project page this morning to see if there was anything like that planned, it does look like there are some notes suggesting some possibility in that direction.

Aside from simply praising this app, what’s the point of this post? Perhaps I’ve been sheltered but I’ve never seen a program that works as nicely or accomplishes what BasKet does in another operating system or desktop environment. BasKet ought to be a killer app for KDE (Linux or otherwise). I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

Copyright Reform and the Stats Can Report

By  | 

Michael Geist posted about the politics in the debate on copyright reform. The point stems from dissonance between the recent Statistics Canada report and a reform-oriented bill expected to introduce more restrictive copyright policy. The report showed some nice Canadian recording industry profits where similar industries in other parts of the world seemed to be declining. It also showed that Canadian artists were selling more. Geist says

“With opposition likely to come from broadcasters, education groups, consumers, privacy commissioners, and the technology community, copyright could emerge as an issue where the Liberals and Conservatives sing a different tune.”

Which I think would be great. I recently wrote about how “intellectual property” issues should be brought into mainstream political discourse.

Anti-IP Motivation from Me

By  | 

Frustrated with the state of things on the “intellectual property” news front, last week I sent a few letters accompanying copies of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture book to some Canadian politicians. Is that self-righteous? I really enjoyed the book. Lessig did some sound thinking around all kinds of issues and he wrote about them in a compelling way.

Besides, I think it’s good to write letters. It’s one way to communicate between votes and I can’t assume anyone in the political sphere necessarily reads anything I put on any of the blogs/sites I write.

It’s a funny thing, protesting “intellectual property” issues. I suppose people could organize large-scale public protests. Or you could regularly do acts of peaceful protest–perhaps sharing some creative commons-licensed music would qualify. But at the very heart of it, you’re essentially dealing with something that is invisible, it’s a concept embodied in progaganda, policies, and laws, and expressed in people’s activities. It’s a bit more tricky than showing polluted lakes requiring environmental reform, or people waiting in hospitals that require more doctors.

Letter-writing and article publishing are some of the ways to address it. That’s why I published the letter on the web. It adds to the monuments of discussion and perspectives building the force behind sentiment against restrictive IP regulation.

TEC’s Blog is Born!

By  | 

The TEC Blog went live today. It’s been quite a while in the works but finally TEC is publishing its own analysis and corporate blog. My TEC colleagues and I will use it to regularly discuss enterprise software and selection issues, and augment the other research/articles we publish.

Although I’ll continue to blog here at pundit.ca, I’ll be addressing FOSS, software selection issues, and TEC’s services, research, and products on the TEC blog.

The TEC blog is actually a multi-blogging site. We’ve begun by publishing in English and Spanish, with additional blogs to come in other languages, including French and perhaps Chinese. We’re starting small at the moment and will then look at expanding it into more blogs. I expect we’ll have fun working out a number of kinks over the coming weeks. I hope the blog will make it much easier to have an open line of communication with our regular users and other visitors.

Fronting Prim and Proper Research

By  | 

A long running debate at TEC, is it a good idea or bad idea to enable public visitor comments on our research? I’m not referring to blogs, which by their very nature are intended to enable commentary. I’m thinking in the context of analyst firm research. I think there is a lot of room here to create an interesting and valuable research methodology (I’m sure I’m not the first to say so). Here’s some background on my query.

TEC has published articles and other research on the IT/enterprise software front since the early 90s. For the majority of that time we haven’t asked our visitors to pay for much of this research. I often compare what we offer (rightly and wrongly) to things available from other analyst companies like Gartner. Gartner, for example, has just about everything locked behind its e-walls. It’s almost all for sale over there. If you go to Gartner for a report or some other research, you won’t see commentary posted under the report by regular visitors debating/debasing that report. Should you? Haven’t we all seen that some of the most significant cultural, business, political, and other developments are based on the new communication and collaboration means enabled by Internet technologies?

Back to TEC, I pushed for a while to have a simple comment system on our site. Something that our visitors could use to post thoughts about our articles, podcasts, reports, etc. It was implemented and people began using it. There were a mixture of comments. As you’d expect some were nice, some were not, some were well-thought out, others not so well. C’est la vie.

We didn’t implement an community moderation system like, say, Slashdot does. This then is where potential problems enter. I happen to be opposed to any electronic forum censorship (note: I don’t view a community moderation system as censorship, rather it’s a peer reviewed ranking device). Wading through online censorship experiences first-hand (dating all the way back to the days of BBSs) I’ve seen how censoring comments tends to destroy online communities or at least ultimately drives their quality down (I’d make an exception for things like spam, which aren’t comments in the first place). But that’s another debate.

A portion of TEC vehemently opposed displaying negative or poorly written comments, and with well-intentioned reasons. “Imagine if all analyst firms allowed such comments, they figured” (I’m paraphrasing the ideas). “Would they still be able to sell their research?” I think it’s a good question. Will people see commentary by other visitors and lose trust in what you have to publish? Does it detract from the professional image of the site? After all, sites like my Slashdot example, never portray themselves as analyst firms–they aim for a different impression entirely. Can an analyst firm, often sought out as subject matter experts, survive while fostering its own public criticism?

I think it could. A well-considered approach could enable that firm to take the reins and harness that criticism to improve. I think if you really are a subject matter expert, or even if you’re not an expert (I’m more of a generalist) but practice well-refined analysis and synthesis skills, you have nothing to hide and would welcome the opportunity to discuss your research publicly.

I would like to see greater online visitor participation. I think there is a lot of potential in getting all the different people related to aspects of the IT industry involved in voicing their activities, concerns, ideas, etc. around a specific body of research. It would probably make that research more valuable rather than detract from it. It could even give the firm totally new ideas for improving their products/services, just the way participation in FOSS development can.

Of course right now, we can all do this to some degree using blogs, but then aren’t we all just circling around the research, rather than assaulting it directly, in its home, where everyone else gets a chance to form some perspective. Maybe it’d be in an analyst firm’s interest to maintain that home? I’ve seen several peer reviewed journals on the Web, like First Monday. A few sites, such as ITerating, seem to be making some sort of effort to approach certain forms of IT research from this angle. RedMonk is interesting in that they espouse a similar idea through blogging. As I mentioned at the start however, the potential for reader participation is inherent to blogging; it’s not the same as offering a particular piece of research or report (or the methodology of developing it) to be ripped to shreads, lauded, or critically enhanced by its community of software users, consultants, vendors, developers, etc.

Whether or not it can be purchased is relevant to the business model, but not so much to the greater issue of what’s more useful–what can be done better? If you could derive a certain edge from opening up all your analyst research to public commentary, I think you might discover some very interesting competitive advantages. I’ve got ideas–but that’s for another time. I don’t know that I made a strong enough argument for the value of uncensored commentary and had to ask the dev team to remove the comment capability altogether. Maybe the implementation was too basic. Perhaps down the road we’ll find a way to make it more productive by implementing it differently. In any case, in the meantime, I’m happy to say that although our comment system died today, we simultaneously launched an official TEC blog. And that will be the subject of my next post.

Microsoft Flunked Comparing 101

By  | 

It’s the thing to do since everyone is linking to the page–I just read Microsoft’s new page comparing Windows to Red Hat (www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/compare_linux.mspx). The marketing group at Microsoft does impressive work. They successfully got a large number of article writers and bloggers to keep their name floating on everyone’s mind (myself obviously included).

Nevertheless, if there was a school teaching how to compare products, Microsoft would’ve flunked. The first issue is a basic logical fallacy. You cannot necessarily apply a characteristic of one specific instance to the larger group and claim it to be true of the group as well. I happen to love spicy food, does that mean everyone named Josh loves spicy food? No. Microsoft’s link labeled “Compare Windows to Linux” goes to a page called “Compare Windows to Red Hat” so they’re comparing a specific linux distribution, Red Hat, with Windows but a visitor to the web site has clicked something leading him or her to think that s/he is reading information about Linux in general. Slimy as spam, that is.

The page is arranged like a large grid where the Y axis has a list of criteria on which the products are “compared” in two columns. The first criterion is total cost of ownership. In this criterion, Microsoft mentions Red Hat’s subscription fees for support (again Red Hat, not Linux distributions in general) but doesn’t discuss other costs that one would figure go into calculating total cost of ownership. The explanation glosses over how additional software components can be adopted in the first place, which may not require certain fees that would be present with Microsoft products. Though to its credit, Microsoft provides a report discussing support fees over time. I have not fully read that so I will not comment on it.

The more problematic issue is that when you read Microsoft’s own response to TCO it slants far from an apples-to-apples comparison of what it says about Red Hat. Even though it cites certain prices and issues with Red Hat it doesn’t offer parallel information for Microsoft. In other words, it is not a direct comparison and the reader is left in the dark about how the two actually compete here.

A well-constructed comparison would consistently and systematically compare the alternatives on the same criteria, using the same types of data so that the reader can understand what is similar or dissimilar. Forget that this is a marketing vehicle and forget that this is on Microsoft’s web site, which obviously has a strong interest to publish information biased toward its own products (I don’t mean to imply anything necessarily wrong with that). A critical reader of this comparison however, ought to be suspicious because it is constructed in such a way that it does not permit the reader to actually make a comparison on the terms it purports to. I think Microsoft would have a much more compelling page if it did a proper comparison rather than trying to trick readers with lousy logic and inconsistently responded criteria.

One last thing that interested me (I won’t go over these point-by-point), is at the bottom of the page. Microsoft states that open standards do not equal open source. Actually the page says

“Open Source is a software development and distribution model, which does not equate to how easily the software interoperates with other software or how open or standardized the interfaces are.”

I tend to agree with that characterization. I love that a typically proprietary vendor is saying this when so often I see proprietary software vendors flout their work on open standards as a method of deflecting the fact that their software is not open source. It’s as though they hope the similar sounding terms will stun questioners seeking open source.

Having said that, Microsoft talks about its own products in a way that attempts to make the reader feel the products are designed to be interoperable with everything. Reading carefully, Microsoft is not claiming so much to adhere to open standards as they are claiming that their products work with their own products and their partners’ products. They also mention competitors’ products and “engaging” in standards setting activities. Search news articles about open standards processes and they’ll be rife with commentary about Microsoft tactics at thwarting standards that don’t originate from a place sustaining Microsoft product dominance. Is that how it engages in standards setting activities?

I would argue that while open source doesn’t imply open standards, it could make developing open standards easier, since none of the software is locked behind proprietary secrecy. Rather, free and open source software enables anyone to study it and tinker so that common grounds can be engineered for standards–but then, from the outset, Microsoft also mischaracterizes free.

—

Addendum: nice comment from Barbara French, refreshing a good linux.com link to an article about the previous campaign. 

Corporate Wiki, a TWiki Announcement

By  | 

After a lengthy post yesterday about TEC’s internal use of a corporate wiki, I read an announcement today from TWiki about the launch of its enterprise wiki service TWIKI.NET. TWiki is a venerable open source wiki system, with a huge quantity of interesting and useful plugin functionality. The company’s press release says

“TWIKI.NET will provide premium support to a tested, reliable and secure version of TWiki. “We’re adding a professional company to a proven software platform so Fortune 500 companies and organizations of all sizes can feel safe, supported and secure while also accessing the innovation and flexibility of the TWiki solution,” added Beckström.”

Looks like they’re taking one of the common open source business models in hand, providing services to ensure dependability, upgrades, security, features, etc. A few years ago wikis seemed to be the little booth in the corner at trade shows, without a huge amount of people paying attention to why these would be useful in an enterprise context. Persistance seems to be paying off as these wikis continue to mature and gain acceptance, and most seem to be growing from their open source seeds. The list includes SocialText, Atlassian’s Confluence, XWiki, DekiWiki, and a lot of others.

One other thing of note, TWIKI.NET has a page with brief reasons why companies use an enterprise wiki–lots of interesting reasons.

Wiki While You Work

By  | 

The Globe and Mail published an article about using wiki applications in the workplace. While not a new notion, this is the first time I’ve seen it in a regular newspaper and not an IT business rag. A point the article touches on is the wiki’s security. I think wiki security may be one of the more misunderstood issues about using a wiki for work and an important differentiating factor in determining when to use an enterprise content or document management system (CMS/DMS) and when to use a wiki. In fact, I think it’s hard to beat a wiki if you need an application to capture and disseminate employee knowledge.

“One drawback is security. Much of the hype around wikis concerns their ability to place everyone from the receptionists to clients to chief executive officers on the same virtual playing field.”

The key phrase above is that it puts people “on the same virtual playing field.” Useful things take place when people are uniformly able to document their activities, collaborative or otherwise. Simplicity is a defining aspect of wiki applications–they make it incredibly simple to collaborate on developing, publishing, or otherwise contributing to company information, documents, in some cases products, etc. I’ll talk about an internal wiki only, as I realize that one open to clients as well may present a slightly different set of issues. Still, I’d argue that in most cases the somewhat loose security issue is more of a benefit than a drawback. Let me illustrate this with how the company I work for, uses one.

Some time ago, frustrated with the problems of repeatedly sending mass e-mails to everyone in our company, I set up an internal corporate wiki. A wiki is excellent for work that is in constant flux or must be accessible by everyone in the company.

  • communicate important news or announcements
  • inform about policies that must be adhered to
  • distribute documents
  • collaborate on work issues
  • capture and disseminate the day-to-day knowledge that employees develop

I think these things fail through e-mail but work with a wiki. I think most of these things are usually (though not always) too encumbered with hierarchy structures, metadata entry, and access controls to be the most effective for the types of things I mentioned above. Even when people save e-mail messages, they must make repeated archaeological expeditions through their e-mail histories. If announcements need to be referred to in the future, there’s no guarantee people will be able to find them in an inbox. Policies and problems that have been solved are likely to be forgotten if they’re not easily present and visible, as they are in a wiki. Ensuring that people always use the most up-to-date versions of documents means making them easily accessible and that is so nicely accomplished with a wiki. Using e-mail to collaborate on projects can become a nightmare of criss-crossing information, which often leaves people out of the loop. If people are in the habit of working with a wiki on all sorts of general day-to-day tasks, it becomes an automatic, company-wide storehouse of employee knowledge.

Using a wiki facilitates these activities. For example, at TEC, internally we use the fantastic, open source Wikka Wiki application. It’s simple enough that people can be productive with it after about five/ten minutes of instruction. It doesn’t confuse with over-sparkly and burdensome features. It’s fast–takes fractions of a second to access and edit in a web browser. It doesn’t require manipulating difficult access permissions. These are all important features because they make it at least on par, if not sometimes easier than sending an e-mail or accessing a DMS. If you want to change peoples’ work habits from constant e-mail use, then I think the alternative ought to be at least as easy and efficient or else offer something so incredibly good as to compel its use.

Before the wiki, people would forget what an important policy might be after six months. Now, even if forgotten, it can be easily found for reference. Before the wiki, frequently used documents were sometimes difficult to disseminate in their most up-to-date form. Now they’re updated, in short order, on their corresponding wiki page.

Before the wiki, information about projects that different groups in the company had to collaborate on, was spread across different people’s e-mails. There was the risk that someone wouldn’t get all the information s/he needed. Now it gets collaboratively updated on pages that anyone within the company can see, which has the added benefit that sometimes people without an obvious, direct connection to the project can discover it and contribute or use it in positive ways that nobody would have imagined previously.

I don’t think a wiki replaces a DMS or vice versa. A DMS might sound like it is designed to capture and better enable such collaboration but I don’t believe that is necessarily its strongest point. I think a DMS is probably better-suited to developing documents that require tight version control, traditional hierarchy structures, and cannot necessarily be developed as content within web pages. A DMS might be more useful for archival purposes or for documents that are sensitive and absolutely must have special access controls. But a DMS tends to be more cumbersome in the security and access area, and thus loses utility in the area of capturing and disseminating employee knowledge.

Spreading the wiki. In the past, people sometimes would tell me about some sort of project they needed to work on or information they wanted to store in an easily usable way. I’d recommend they try the wiki to facilitate it. So they’d ask of course, “what’s that?” and I’d spend five/ten minutes explaining it. The interesting thing is that then they go off and explain it to other people on their teams, then the different teams work on things with the wiki, word-of-mouth makes its use spread. I’m sure this isn’t a 100% effective way to promote its use but I was pleasantly surprised that after implementing the wiki and announcing it, people started pushing its use of their own accord.

A system that requires a lot of security, perhaps needing more of a top-down approach, wouldn’t permit this type of usage to happen. Setting up access controls, accounts, and maybe designing structures for how a company uses its systems of collaboration and knowledge sharing may be time-consuming and ultimately not do the job for which they’re intended. On the other hand, a wiki method allows this to self-organize. The chaos of knowledge that frequently gets developed and lost throughout a work place gains a facility in which to reside and that attracts use.

New BI and CRM Evaluations

By  | 

At TEC, we recently launched several new knowledge bases for comparing and analyzing software vendors and products. I’ve noticed a number of new sites in the recent past that are attempting similar tools to TEC’s evaluation system. I plan to write a little about these shortly. But for now, I thought I’d put the word out that our CRM and business intelligence (BI) segments expanded considerably.

Our BI analyst refined the research so that we now model, on the one hand, business intelligence systems, and on the other hand business performance management systems. It seems like those two areas were not previously well-distinguished, in part because the applications share a lot of common functionality. Hopefully these new BI & BPM evaluation centers will help users better understand how to select and employ these applications. We have evaluation data for a number of well-known vendors such as Oracle | Hyperion and Applix, but I’d like to include some open source apps, like Pentaho, in our knowledge bases.

In addition, our CRM analysts not only improved our model of CRM applications but also branched out a new model of sales force automation (SFA) systems. We already let users analyze their requirements for SugarCRM. Perhaps as demand for open source CRM products increases, other FOSS vendors will want a chance to be introduced in a fair way alongside their proprietary competitors.

Terminology Advocates Protect FOSS

By  | 

Open Source Initiative (OSI) president, Michael Tiemann, discusses adherence to the “open source” definition. I read his article with two interests in mind. First, of someone who feels semantics are important (I’ve always felt the poor argument “it’s only semantics” is little more than an attempt by small-thinkers to belittle what they are unwilling to invest effort into understanding). Second, because I think the labeling of software as open source or free has a profound impact on the communities that have grown from those movements. Advocates are important.

I think it’s positive that Tiemann is moving to be more adamant in ensuring correct usage of the “open source” terminology. I often read commentary on web sites that belittle Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) because he publicly promotes accurate usage of the “free” terminology in reference to the different ideology espoused by the FSF from the OSI. But among whatever else his efforts at promoting accurate terminology do, I think they also benefit the user in the way a consumer advocate’s efforts do (or in this case maybe, a community advocate).

So why does open source need such terminology and definition advocates? FOSS communities have put in considerable amounts of labour not just in developing and distributing software, but also in the methodologies that ensure its viability and business practices. When portions of the community (including what we’d normally identify as the “consumer”) decide to use open source software on the recognized benefits it provides, they’re right to expect those benefits. Those benefits flow from the common recognition and identification of “open source” as specified in its definition.

The open source community includes vendors and customers. If the meaning of “open source” is lost to its participants, what sort of cohesion could it still command? I think that a company calling its non-open source software “open source” in order to capitalize on the market seeking such software betrays the confidence of its customers. As a customer, I would question my willingness to transact business with a company that has misled me. So from those two perspectives, major segments of the community are alienated. In other words mislabeling software as “open source” actively harms the participants demanding and supplying the market for open source in the first place.