In a recent survey, the analyst firm IDC estimated that 281 billion gigabytes of digital information was created in 2007, an amount that is growing by 60 percent annually.1
While billions of gigabytes is not a number I can relate to every time I open my email or glance at my hard drive’s “my documents” folder, I’m reminded that information is increasingly easier to capture, create and distribute, yet harder and harder to find, organize and manage.
Approximately 80 percent of the information we use in our business is unstructured, which means that it lives in documents, emails, presentations, videos and other formats. By comparison, structured information lives in the neatly managed world of a relational database, where the information domain has been thoughtfully designed, modeled and controlled.
Surprisingly in most organizations, only 10 percent of this unstructured information is managed through an information lifecycle in a formal way from creation to approval to archival or disposal.
During the 1990s, I spent several years consulting for pharmaceutical companies to implement large-scale systems that managed the creation of regulatory submissions for new drug approvals. The focus on a rigorous discipline for information lifecycle management was mission critical. Yet, stepping outside of the project room, you’d experience the “haves and have-nots” effect. 90 percent of the business had little or no support to help share and control information other than an intranet, a network drive and/or email. The perception was this lack of information management only impacted office productivity, not regulatory compliance. Because business information wasn't considered mission-critical and the costs of deploying an information management system were so high, the issue went unaddressed. This gap between the haves and have-nots continues today.
The challenge across an enterprise is how to allow information workers to be as productive as possible while supporting the business need to control, retain, share, and re-use valuable information. Most importantly, how can a cost-effective system be deployed to support users who don’t have the high level of motivation required to organize, categorize and publish information? The simplicity of email can make it hard for users to change their habits.
Focus on Cooperation, not Control
The consumer Internet provides some useful insights into how these challenges can be addressed. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a surge in the growth of Web sites that share, manage, and distribute user-generated content. For example, YouTube and Wikipedia are now the third and eighth most visited Web sites on the Internet. This move toward the "read-write" Web, where anyone can publish information, has empowered consumers to express their expertise and passions, discuss and collaborate with others and, in the process, create some of the most valuable information available on the Internet. To help describe this type of application, the term "Web 2.0" was coined by the industry analyst and publisher, Tim O’Reilly. Web 2.0 is essentially a movement from the Internet as a destination to the Internet as an information platform. After spending time researching these areas I started to understand what Sun Microsystems meant when they changed their tagline to “The Network is the Computer.”
Enterprise 2.0 Models for Information Management
Organizations are now starting to evaluate whether the tools and techniques that individuals use in their consumer lives can help solve enterprise problems for information management and collaboration. This process is even more pronounced as Generation Y, which was born into the digital age, starts to enter the workplace with consumer-grade expectations for how people collaborate, communicate and share content.
A design pattern has emerged over the last two years which can be used to describe the behavior and characteristics of consumer Web 2.0 applications and how they can be applied to the enterprise. At the heart of these applications is a model which focuses on user cooperation and information sharing. Wikis, blogs and content distribution platforms all share a common set of characteristics:
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