Introduction to Structured Content Management with XML -- Featured Topic -- CMS Watch

Introduction to Structured Content Management with XML -- Featured Topic -- CMS Watch: "Introduction to Structured Content Management with XML
by Kay Ethier and Scott Abel, Bright Path Solutions
2004-09-15

Organizations of all sizes are beginning to realize how content and its reuse across the enterprise can improve productivity--and the bottom line. The need for change is driven by the desire to better manage information assets (documents, creative ideas, illustrations, charts, graphics, multimedia, etc.) and eliminate costly processes that fail to facilitate the effective and consistent re-use of content. "

Book review: Leading Change

Column Two: "Book review: "Leading Change"
Leading Change
John P. Kotter
It is widely recognised that organisations are under greater pressure than ever before to adapt to meet new conditions and challenges within their marketplaces. This has spawned many change management projects, reorganisations and strategic realignments. Most of these have failed.
This book takes a much-needed look at how the process of organisational change must operate if it is to have both short-term impact and long-term sustainability. At the core of the book, is a eight-step process:
* Establishing a sense of urgency
* Creating the guiding coalition
* Developing a vision and strategy
* Communicating the change vision
* Empowering broad-based action
* Generating short-term wins
* Consolidating gains and producing more change
* Anchoring new approaches in the culture "

Migrating Content into a CMS

"Migrating Content into a CMS" in CMS-Watch.

Considering Fluency in XML Design

CMSWatch -- OpinionWatch: XML Authoring -- Considering Fluency in XML Design: by Mark Baker, Principal, Analecta Communications
2004-03-29

Fluency is perhaps the most neglected aspect of XML markup language design. Fluency is the ability of an author to write with ease and confidence. A fluent author has all the tools of language at their fingertips.

The property that provides for the easy development of fluency is lucidity. How do we ensure the lucidity of markup languages? First, we must recognize a markup language for what it is: a user interface.

The greatest virtue of XML is that it is easy to transform one XML tagging language into another. You may need an elaborate document structure language to drive your publishing process, but that doesn’t mean that you have to force authors to create content directly in that language.

Getting the cooperation of authors is one of the biggest challenges that content management leaders face, both at the local level and at the enterprise level. Authors are already enormously reluctant to abandon their familiar authoring tools and methods. You can greatly improve your chances of getting authors to cooperate with your content management initiatives if you demonstrate that you understand to the importance of protecting their fluency, and if you show that you are willing and able to create lucid interfaces that let authors create content without loss of fluency.

Macromedia flexes Flash muscle

Macromedia flexes Flash muscle: "By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com, March 29, 2004.

Macromedia released on Monday a new server product intended to expand the use of its Flash format for presenting Web applications.

Flex, formerly code-named Royale, allows developers to create scripts in common languages such as Java and .Net and to run them on top of Web applications. Flex breaks them down into a Macromedia dialect of extensible markup language (XML) that can be read by the Flash Player, the widespread Flash client commonly used to spice up Web pages.

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! - Making sense of it all

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!: "Making sense of it all" By:Lars Marius Garshol, Development Manager of Ontopia.

The title says it all.

An excellent, highly readabls paper.

Serving it up fast: Efficient CGI page generation

Serving it up fast: Efficient CGI page generation: "By Nigel McFarlane, CNETAsia Builder.com Monday, September 30 2002 12:01 PM

Efficient delivery of dynamic Web pages remains a challenge for Internet developers, especially when moving static HTML pages to CGI. I will review some performance numbers I obtained from testing three CGI strategies during the generation phase of page delivery.

Candidate CGI technologies
My testing assessed three common Perl techniques for page generation performance:

• HERE documents


• Templatization


• CGI.pm module

(The WINNER is......... in-line HTML embedded in your Perl script - "HERE" documents)

Six Sigma and Software/Systems Process Improvement

Presentation to ICSQ, 11th Oct. 2001, by Jeannine Siviy of Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute Measurement and Analysis Initiative:- Six Sigma and Software/Systems Process Improvement
In a PPT style presentation, provides an overview introduction to Six-Sigma, with a Software Engineering slant. Includes illustrations of the 5 stages of the Six-Sigma Improvement Framework - "Define", "Measure", "Analyse", Improve" and "Control".

Also includes a very interesting overview of how various Six-Sigma concepts, processes and metrics relate to the 5 CMM levels.

Data warehousing: Seven don'ts

By Scott Robinson, TechRepublic
Tuesday, March 16 2004, on CNETAsia-IT Manager:- Data warehousing: Seven don'ts:

"Data warehouse implementation is a formidable undertaking. Most of the experience you bring to the task won?t fit a data warehouse?s unique requirements and challenges. There are several things you might ordinarily do that you should steer clear of when working on a data warehouse. "

1. DON'T write code you can't modify quickly.


2. DON'T use a database access API that won't allow modifications.


3. DON'T design anything that isn't extendable.


4. DON'T insinuate anything between the data and the user unnecessarily.


5. DON'T take shortcuts on data cleanup or source analysis.


6. DON'T avoid granularity and partitioning issues.


7. DON'T try to work OLAP without asking business questions.

Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap

Michael Angeles' presentation "Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap" at the Computers in Libraries conference - follow the link to the PDF slide-show file.

Consuming Web services in PHP

By Sanders Kaufman, Jr., at CNET-Asia Builder.com | Thursday, March 11 2004: Consuming Web services in PHP:

"There are currently three major ways to build a Web service with PHP. I say, 'major' because there's really almost an infinite number of ways to do it--but most are based on one of three methods: SOAP, XML-RPC and REST.

"Which one fits your project?" With SOAP calls, you get ubiquity. With XML-RPC calls, you get performance. With REST calls, you get control."

Open Text adds IM to content management

By David Becker Staff Writer, CNET News.com, March 10, 2004: Open Text adds IM to content management

Content management software specialist Open Text announced Wednesday that it plans to add instant messaging functions to its main product.

Open Text CEO Tom Jenkins told CNET News.com recently that growing regulatory and legal pressure for routine preservation and cataloging of documents--from instant messages to legal briefs--is the main force behind dramatic growth in the enterprise content management market. You have to make a leap of faith to put everything on the server...and regulatory compliances force you to make that leap of faith," he said.

The Generation Lap

James Hall writes in Australia's CIO magazine on 10/03/2004, The Generation Lap:

"To some, the tech wreck proved the idea of the Internet as a catalyst for social revolution was hyperbolic. However, a generation born into a digital world is starting to enter the workforce, bringing with it expectations informed by a world of technological connectivity and information democracy."

A fascinating article, with too much to summarize here, looking at changes we might expect in the work-a-day world over the next 20 years as the "N (Net) Generation" takes over the reigns from the "Baby Boomers" and Gen-X'ers.

A "Must Read".

How to Create a KNOW-IT-ALL Company

Sue Bushell wrote in Australia's CIO magazine on 10/03/2004, How to Create a KNOW-IT-ALL Company

Put simply, the effort of sharing knowledge has to be less than the value of participating.

An initial low-cost pilot for 30 staff taught the company a few valuable lessons: Do not use systems as your starting point. Do make sure your CI (Competitive Intelligence - KM by another name) efforts are integrated into the core processes of your business. And above all, do make sure CI becomes a part of the organizational culture.

CI is really important to our roles, but at the end of the day, if it imposes an additional burden on us, it is not going to get done.” The answer was to build CI into business processes.

CI is still mainly about people, and about planning, says Professor Daniel McMichael, group leader for business intelligence CMIS at CSIRO’s division of Mathematical and Information Sciences.

McMichael recommends organizations take a look at the CSIRO’s P@noptic, a new search engine for corporate and government intranets that he says makes information more accessible, improves information flow to clients and significantly increases efficiency.

Consider these tips for making knowledge sharing work for your organization

• Start with the enthusiasts.
  
• Convince the influencers.
  
• Make it a no-brainer.
  
• Hire a knowledge coordinator.
  
• Tell stories.
  
• Recognize contributors.
  
• Create in-person knowledge forums.
  

What Not to Do

• Don’t call it knowledge management.
  
• Don’t sweat the definitions.
  
• Don’t offer carrots.
  
• Don’t wave sticks.
  
• Don’t bother unless there’s trust.
  

Adobe adds bar codes to PDF forms

David Becker wrote on CNET News.com on Tues.9th March 2004, Adobe adds bar codes to PDF:

"Adobe Systems is set to expand its electronic forms with new capabilities for adding bar codes to forms based on the company's portable document format.

Recipients of a PDF form fill it out on their PC using the free Adobe Reader, which will also get a bar code plug-in, with the space allotted for the bar code automatically filled in as data is entered. A single bar code can represent up to 2,000 characters of data.

When finished, the form is printed out. The recipient uses a scanning device or fax machine to read the bar code, sending the results to a server running decoding software being developed by Adobe, Baum said. The server then feeds data into a corporate database or other backend systems.

The Acrobat and Adobe Reader plug-ins, as well as the decoding server, all are planned for delivery in the second half of 2004."

A Transforming Experience for Content Management?

On CMSWatch, Steve Heckler, President of Accelebrate, wrote on 2004-03-04 , A Transforming Experience for Content Management? -- Featured Product:

During the past five years, XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation) has emerged as the “Babelfish” of the XML world, translating XML documents into other XML and text formats. XSLT combines a versatile, tag-based scripting language with XPath, a powerful language for selecting specific sections or data within XML documents. The advent of XSLT 2.0 could mean even more power and capability for XML-based content management systems.

Another not-so-permanent archive

(Australian-IT: crossroads | Stuart Fist, MARCH 02, 2004:- Another not-so-permanent archive:

So what is the likely life of your CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-RW disks today ?

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a Data Preservation Laboratory looking at these problems, and it has come to the conclusion that the scientific answer to all these questions is: 'not very long'."

These are only preliminary results at present. It says:-

• true gold coating is better than any of the silver-coated (aluminium, etc) disks


• CD-R is clearly the most reliable disk recording system.


• the NIST hasn't damned DVD-R as much as I expected, which suggests that DVD's advanced error-correction systems really work.


• disks should be stored upright.


• Disks need to be kept away from circulating air to reduce corrosion and evaporation of the plasticisers.


• Plastic sleeves are probably better than jewel cases.


• Storage should be cool, but not freezing, and dark.


• Humidity of about 40 per cent and a clean atmosphere.


• The NIST condemns the practice of using adhesive labels on the disk surface.

Test Web pages in multiple browser versions

Test Web pages in multiple browser versions - Builder - CNETAsia: "By Michael Meadhra, Builder.com | Thursday, February 26 2004 "

One of the challenges that Web builders face is testing their Web pages in various browsers. It's not enough to know how your page will appear in the current version of your favorite browser—you also need to test all of the other browsers that your site visitors might use. If you're working on a Web site that's open to the public, you also need to test multiple versions of each browser.

Finding older browser software - If you don't have what you need archived on a CD somewhere, you can turn to several online resources......

The problem with IE - Now the Solution - running concurrent copies of IE of differing versions....

Six "must-haves" for productive software teams

Six "must-haves" for productive software teams - Builder - CNETAsia: "By Bruce Hadley, Builder.com | Friday, February 27 2004 "

CEO Tim Bigelow of Performance Software says, "When your entire bet is riding on custom development, you have to be good at development—that's obvious. But the part that many custom developers leave out is delivery."

Bigelow focused on the six items that he says are required "must-haves" for any software company looking to create highly-productive software teams.

1. Hire high-performance people


2. Define and develop a high performance culture


3. Insure proper training and adequate mentoring


4. Build innovative tools that make your job easier


5. Optimize project methods and processes


6. Focus on accurate weekly metrics and standardize project planning

Careless Web site content can place your company at risk

Debra Young wrote in CNET-Asia/IT.Manager on 26th February 2004, Careless Web site content can place your company at :

"Sandy Sherizen, President of Natick, MA-based Data Security Systems, advised that anyone responsible for corporate Web content should ?learn to think like a thief, like someone who might want to steal information or get involved with competitive business intelligence gathering.? "

He cited case law where an individual went fishing on Corporation A’s Web site and, because of insufficient firewalls, found a way to use that Web site to break into Corporation B’s information system and wreak havoc. Corporate B was able to successfully sue Corporation A for damages, even though a third-party hacker (a teenager with minimal assets) actually executed the intrusion.

Nick Brigman, VP of Product Strategy for Pittsburgh, PA-based RedSiren, suggested applying the "rule of least-privilege" to what you put on your Web site. “Only put out there what’s absolutely needed for a given function,” cautioned the IT security management executive. He said it starts by first determining the goals and uses for your corporate site. “If your goal is to attract prospects and transition them to a sales team, then you don’t need to put a lot of detailed information about the company up there on the Web site,” he explained. Too much information can give away the company store.

"

How keywords impact search engine

In CNETAsia/Builder, Michael Meadhra wrote How keywords impact search engine :

Most search engines give a keyword more or less weight based on its location. The weighting algorithms vary at different search engines, and the details of those algorithms are closely guarded secrets. The following list puts the possible keyword locations in approximate order from highest to lowest priority.

• Domain


• Page title


• Headings (enclosed within h1, h2, h3 tags)


• Body text - The first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more than the rest of the text (if the search engine scans more than that).


• Meta tags - Keywords appearing in the description meta tag still seem to count, as do keywords in some of the Dublin Core meta tags. Some search engines don't ignore the keyword meta tag completely but, rather, discount it heavily?especially if the keyword doesn't appear elsewhere on the page.


• Links - Even keywords buried in the URL, name, or id attributes of a link count in page ranking


• Alt text - Keywords in alt text attributes count toward page ranking. This is yet another reason to take the time to create meaningful alt text for all images

Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages

Michael Angeles has written Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages:

I need some way of exploring alternatives, but I don?t want to change the site too drastically without having some justification for doing so, so about a month ago I asked our systems administrator to come up with ways to track where links are being clicked on the page. The first month of data has arrived and I have some stats to show where people are clicking to get around the site.

1. Child list links (in body) - 65%


2. No navigation used - 18%


3. Side-bar navigation - 13%


4. See Also links (in body) - 4%


5. Bread-crumbs - <1%

The findings aren’t very dissimilar to what you may have read in Michael Bernard’s articles, Where Should You Put the Links” (Usability News 3.2) and Examining User Expectations of the Location of Web Objects” (Internetworking 3.3).

Living with Topic Maps and RDF

Lars Marius Garshol of Ontopia has written a paper, Living with Topic Taps and RDF
(Topic maps, RDF, DAML, OIL, OWL, TMCL):

This paper is about the relationship between the topic map and RDF standards families. It compares the two technologies and looks at ways to make it easier for users to live in a world were both technologies are used. This is done by looking at how to convert information back and forth between the two technologies, how to convert schema information, and how to do queries across both information representations. Ways to achieve all of these goals are presented.

An excellent comparative paper of some 30 pages.

The Ideal CMS -- Circa 2004

Tony Byrne, Founder, Principal, CMSWatch, 12th Dec. 2003, wrote
The Ideal CMS -- Circa 2004 -- Featured Product:

This remains something of a quixotic venture, because choosing a web content management product forces buyers to face real trade-offs. This is almost inevitable in an environment where enterprises have extremely divergent -- and sometimes conflicting -- business reasons for implementing a content management system. Achieving greater automation will almost always reduce content re-use opportunities, and vice-versa. The more flexible technical platforms usually take the longest to implement and have fewer editorial features 'out of the box.'

Naturally, then, vendors make choices about where to focus their products, often driven by the requirements of their major clients (or industry focus). A vendor may market its product (or 'suite') as a universal tool, but most CMS packages are beginning to fall into identifiable niches.

So herewith is the 2nd Annual ?Ideal CMS,? based on package versions in production as of November, 2003.

Value-Driven Intranet Design

Shiv Singh wrote in "Boxes and Arrows" on 9th Feb.2004, "Value-Driven Intranet Design:

Fundamentally, your intranet must be tied to value creation like other business services within your organization. If it does not result in value creation for your business, the intranet is a failed service.

...breaking up your intranet into discrete, tightly defined services is the first step in measuring its value. These discrete services should provide tangible benefits to narrowly defined target audiences.

ask yourself and the specific target audience questions such as:

• Is this service being delivered in the offline space?


• If so, how effectively is it being delivered and is it reaching all of its target audience?


• Can the service be delivered more effectively and efficiently via the intranet?


• Will it reach a larger percentage of the target audience?


• Will the offline service need to continue once the intranet service is launched?


• How does the target audience benefit from access to the service?


• Under what circumstances will they use this service?


• Does it make a meaningful difference to their jobs?


• Does it enable them to create measurable value for the company?


• Do they have the right tools, usage patterns, and motivations to use the service?

The questions above are designed to help you truly understand the need for the service, the context in which the service will be used, the tie to the business value through the service, and the personal event triggers that will motivate use of the service.

Managing the Complexity of Content Management

Victor Lombardi wrote in "Boxes and Arrows" on Feb.9th, 2004, "Managing the Complexity of Content Management":

...the issues are many, spanning strategy, design, content, technology, training and several others. One conclusion we can make is that content management has become a very large category?attempting to include content authoring, metadata authoring, database-backed websites, workflow management, and even thesaurus management?and instead of making CMS a goal you might start by focusing on which of these functions you need. Otherwise, the general complexity becomes the central problem facing any content management project.

Here are ten lessons in managing complexity:-

1. Keep the team small
   
2. Don't try to fix everything at once
   
3. Only build what you need
   
4. Create an efficient information architecture
   
5. Show your content some love (creation, editing, and migration of content are often underestimated)
   
6. Hire bouncers as project managers
   
7. Tightly integrate design and technology
   
8. Buy the right size
   
9. Design faster than business can change
   
10. Get a second opinion
    

Information Architecture: Creating Order out of Chaos

Tracy Reith has written a "Quick and Dirty" presentation on Information Architecture: Creating Order out of Chaos.

Includes a "Process", checklist, survey, design principles, etc.

Ideas in Technology and Publishing: Who Should Manage your CMS?

On 9th Feb 2004, Bill Trippe wrote Who Should Manage your CMS?:

The question came up recently--where in your organization should a CMS be managed?

1. The CMS software, repository, interfaces, and customized tools should be managed by a centralized technical organization...

2. The content of the CMS content and how it displays to its various audiences should then be controlled by those people who own the different communication products and different audiences..... Some organizations are very focused on branding (e.g., use of the corporate logo and name, colors, etc)....they can be easily controlled and administered by a central group.

IBM sets out to make sense of the Web

In 'CNet Asia - News & Technology', Stefanie Olsen wrote on
February 6 2004 9:25 AM IBM sets out to make sense of the Web:

The Internet can be a treasure trove of business intelligence--but only if you can make sense of the data.

Enter IBM, which would like to see its WebFountain supercomputing project become the next big thing in Web search. Along with competitors such as ClearForest, Fast Search and Transfer, and Mindfabric, Big Blue hopes to foster demand for new data-mining services that ferret out meaning and context, not just lists of more-or-less relevant links.

WebFountain traces its roots back to Stanford University and another groundbreaking research tool, Google. Its origins lie in a scholarly paper about text mining--authored jointly by researchers at IBM's Almaden site and at Stanford--that discusses an idea known as hubs and authorities.

That theory suggests that the best way to find information on the Web is to look at the biggest and most popular sites and Web pages. Hubs, for example, are usually defined as Web portals and expert communities. Similarly, the concept of authorities rests on identifying the most important Web pages, including looking at the number and influence of other pages that link to them. The latter concept is mirrored in Google's main algorithm, called PageRank.

IBM applied the same concepts in an early Web data-mining project called Clever, but shortcomings eventually led researchers to turn the theory of hubs and authorities on its head. In short, IBM found that it could excavate more interesting data from pages that the theory of hubs and authorities normally pushed to the bottom of the heap--unstructured pages like discussion boards, Web logs, newsgroups and other pages. With that insight, WebFountain was born.

Cogitative Topic maps Websites (CTW) Framework. Information and tutorial

At Cogito Ergo XML:

As a website grows and turns into a Web portal with deeply interconnected website architecture that provides access to rich content, content with lots of links, images, and other types of objects, its developers are faced with the growing challenges of enforcing link integrity and maintaining the enterprise look-and-feel standards and navigational order. Tasks that once were simple can turn into laborious and convoluted processes as the information resource base of the site expands.

However, information maintenance can be robust and straightforward. This tutorial shows that using topic maps as the source code or site map of a website offers convenience, power, reliability, and rapid reconfigurability to the maintainers of large, complex websites.

Includes fulling working example with source XTM, XSLT transformation the generates the set of XHTML web pages, and the working web-site.

Views of knowledge are human views

G. Dueck writes in the IBM Systems Journal "Views of knowledge are human views"
Different people see knowledge management from different perspectives. Some people emphasize intellectual capital, some people always think about technology, whereas others put community building first. In this essay, I associate the different views of knowledge with personality types. In other words, a person's temperament determines that person's view of knowledge?a remarkable coincidence. Therefore, a person's answer to the question ?What is knowledge?? is strongly related to the answer to ?Who am I?? Hence, an enterprise should be careful when defining knowledge management for its use, lest its definition imply ?who the employee should be.? "

"The ancient Greeks differentiated between four kinds of knowledge:

pisteme

abstract generalizations, basis and essence of sciences; scientific laws and principles

Techne

technical know-how, being able to get things done, manuals, communities of practice

Phronesis

practical wisdom, drawn from social practice

Metis

“It is what the flair, the knack and the bent of the successful politician is made of: a form of knowledge which is at the opposite end of metaphysics, with no quest of ideal, but a search for a practical end; an embodied, incarnate, substantial form of knowledge.”

We observe in today's KM communities that we are still struggling to integrate such different dimensions of knowledge into a unified approach to KM."

Information architecture: carrying out a classification situation analysis

Gerry McGovern writes in "New Thinking" Sep.9th 2002, Information architecture: carrying out a classification situation analysis

Before you create a classification for your content, it's essential to carry out a comprehensive classification situation analysis. Classification design should follow the 'geniuses steal, beggars borrow' rule. Your job is not to come up with some innovative way to classify your content. It is to find a classification that works.

He presents a simple method and 8 areas that should be examined in the situational analysis.

Finding the Web services 'sweet spot'

Daniel Foody writes in CNET-News, 29th Jan.2004, Finding the Web services 'sweet spot':

Does Web services management belong in the domain of the application platforms? Does it belong in the domain of the systems management platforms? Is it truly a new market? Those in the industry state with absolute certainty that they know the answer. Unfortunately, their answers vary. As you would expect, it's not as clear-cut as any of the industry folks might have you believe.

Heterogeneous central visibility is foreign to application platforms but typical of systems management products. On the other hand, active in-network control is something foreign to systems management products but typical of application platforms. Coordinating in-network control across heterogeneous projects requires a careful blend of functionality drawn from both systems management and application platforms. This is the "sweet spot" of Web services management.

XML:DB native XML database API and its implementation in Apache Xindice

Peter V. Mikhalenko reports in CNET-Asia-Builder, XML:DB native XML database API and its implementation in Apache Xindice

The XML:DB API is designed to enable a common access mechanism to native XML databases. The API enables the construction of applications to store, retrieve, modify and query data that is stored in an XML database.

XML:DB API can be considered generally equivalent to technologies such as ODBC, JDBC or Perl DBI.

Apache Xindice is a native database designed from the ground up to be especially valuable when you have very complex XML structures that would be difficult or impossible to map to a more structured database.

Knowledge augmentation

Denham Grey writes Knowledge-at-work: Knowledge augmentation: "key practices that lead to effective knowledge creation, increase awareness and assist teams to leverage their tacit understandings"

• Discover and share distinctions & heuristics
  
• Engage in collaborative reification (writing)
  
• Speed learning cycles - OODA loops
  
• Conduct community inquiry
  
• Write patterns
  
• Use Patterns
  

CIPS Connections - Bill French Interview

Stephen Ibaraki of CIPS Connections, interviews Bill French of MyST Technologies.

Template Files for Web Projects

e-consultancy.com has published a set of Template Files for Web Projects : including the following:

• Contract for Web Services
  
• Web Project Plan
  
• Usability (various)
  
• Site Map
  
• Functional Specification
  
• Technical Specification
  
• Content Plan
  
• Privacy Policy
  
• User Agreement
  
• Wireframes
  
• Style Guide
  
• Maintenance and Service Level Agreement
  
• Site Evaluation Framework
  

(A more comprehensive version is available for purchase.)

Creation does not guarantee renumeration

Leon Gettler of The Age, on 16th Jan. 2004, writes Creation does not guarantee renumeration:-

Paul Geroski, the British Competition Commission's deputy chairman and a professor of the London Business School, has found that businesses are erratic innovators because they don't want to risk cannibalising their systems.

He found that growth patterns followed a "random walk". This was because big businesses have fixed costs: they refuse to tackle a problem until they reach some threshold of poor performance, and only swing into action when things get so bad that they either have to change or go bust. Even then, they only tackle it in one big hit......

....According to learning organisation theories, one of the best sources for innovation and doing things better is the workforce. Surveys, however, show that many employees say no one listens to their ideas or asks for their opinions.

The reality is that creativity is a social process, which means it requires organisation. Organisations, however, stifle creativity because good management is about efficient repetition. Creativity, on the other hand, usually involves unrepeatable moments of inspiration.

This leaves innovation and organisation in a state of constant tension.

Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts

Russ Weakley of MaxDesign has written a tutorial Colored boxes - one method of building full CSS layouts (13-Jan-2004):

This article explains one method of building a full CSS layout from start to finish. The method, based on positioning colored boxes and testing across a range of browsers, can be used to build a wide range of full-CSS layouts.

Cosmology Overview

Noted in Astronomy 123, Cosmology and the Origin of Life Quote:- "Early Cultures were curious and motivated to explore the world no one was ignorant because everything was new but the process of learning can beget ignorance through the death of imagination."

Knowledge, Learnig Organizations and "Infinite" Games

Chris Macrae (wcbn007@easynet.co.uk) wrote Knowledge and LO & Infinite Game LO3 in "Learning Org - LO30872":-

Although you might look at the organisation as a number of parts there
is an entity, which operates as a whole. The cohesion can be used to
great benefit, but requires expanding views to move away from simple
cause & effect management to looking at the way in which the
organisation exhibits a system in its own right.

Now today its estimated that 95% of the people employed can do their jobs better than their bosses can. When you're managing subordinates who know how to do what they're doing better than you, you don't manage what they do, but manage the way they interact...

If you look at organisations that fail or have trouble, it is frequently what they didn't do, not what they did. Yet, if you are in an organisation where the culture dictates that "making a mistake is a bad thing", then to maximize personal security the best strategy is to minimize the changes you bring about. If we want to change, we have to start to record mistakes and systemically learn from them.

WHAT IS THE INFINITE GAME - to improve play rather than to win the game.

In the Finite game who wins and who loses is the whole point of playing in the first place.

The main contrast, according to Carse, between Finite and Infinite games are:

• Purpose is to win versus purpose is to improve the game
  
• Improves through fittest surviving versus Improves through game evolving
  
• Winners exclude losers versus winners teach losers better plays
  
• Winner-takes-all versus winning widely shared
  
• Aims are identical versus aims are diverse
  
• Rules fixed in advanced versus rules are changed by agreement
  
• Rules resemble debating contests versus rules resemble grammar of original utterances
  
• Compete for mature markets versus grow new markets
  
• Short-term decisive contests versus Long term
  

Should a "Big 5" Firm Implement Your CMS?

Choosing a CMS Implementation Consultant

Featured Opinion -- CMSWatch by Matthew Clapp, Independent Consultant

The Big 5 excel at technology strategy and process....typically make the greatest impact at the early stages of a project, when assessing organizational readiness, helping with change management, and re-engineering business processes.

One of the biggest hurdles implementing a new CMS is understanding your company’s business process -- in CMS terms, your workflow. It always amazes me how many companies do not have this well documented.

...major software vendors offer commissions or what the Big 5 calls “fees,” for recommending that vendor’s products. These fees frequently range from 25-35% of the software list prices.

I would encourage you to explore the following approaches:

1. Consider investing in objective research before you pick up the phone to call in outside consultants.
   
2. Bring in a Big-5 firm when you really need help understanding your company’s business processes and you require an overall content management strategy.
   
3. Take principal responsibility for product selection and avoid outside consultants with conflicts of interest.
   
4. Send your staff to CMS training (general and product-specific), and if you plan to run the project in-house, think about bringing in a couple of your vendor’s PSO staff.
   
5. Call in a smaller technology company to complete the implementation when you need to outsource the work and want CMS-specific expertise.

Content Management and Information Architecture -- Lou Rosenfeld Interview

CMSWatch 23rd May 2003:
(Lou co-authored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly), often known as the "Polar Bear" book).

Within a CMS, the information challenge is first and foremost one of management as opposed to making the information findable, which is what we’re concerned with in information architecture (IA).

• Where does IA end and CM begin?
  

  The content management world, however, is different in that it has a suite of technologies that drives the development of the CMS field.
  In our world, there’s really nothing out there really that would be considered IA software. So, we are kind of technology agnostics...
  

  
  
• What are the top three things I should look for in an IA consultant to a CMS team?
  
• What are the key deliverables that I should expect?
  

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html: Denton, William, Nov.2003
Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson 2003). This is not surprising--facets are a natural way of organizing things.

This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web.

Refs. include:-
Van Dijck, Peter. 2003. XFML Core ­ eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. http://www.xfml.org/spec/1.0.html

Communities of (Knowledge) Contribution

Information Economics Journal (Butler Group) - by Roger James, Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Southampton University, UK.

"To capitalise on the value of knowledge companies should design their information structures to encourage collaboration and attract new partnerships. An 'asset' based, proprietary company taxonomy will be seen as irrelevant, like trading in Esperanto - perfectly formed but of little practical use. For knowledge management the new focus is on the communities of contribution and away from the palaces of production.

Much of knowledge management (KM) thinking has, like poor IT implementations, delivered new implementations of the old ways of working. In these early years knowledge has been treated as other physical goods characterised by audit and the disciplines of husbandry and protection. Knowledge, in stark contrast to physical goods, can increase in value if shared or if given away (as the distinguished history of advertising proves). Knowledge assets have to be exploited to attract new trading partnerships, new collaborators and new means of production.

... a previous article focused on doing the right things with the wrong information, much of KM is today concerned with doing the wrong things with the right information. Like all other architectures of communication, knowledge can encourage participation and needs to be open to others."

So, what is a CMS?

StepTwo KM Column:June '03: CMS: A working definition

"A content management system (CMS) supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information.
It covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your site, from providing simple tools to create the content, through to publishing, and finally to archiving.
It also provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users. "

Weblog Application Server | MySmartChannels

Bill French writes: "Enterprise blogging technology requires a Weblog Application Server that must (for a start):

• Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
  
• Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
  
• Provide cross-author searching
  
• Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
  
• Support behind-the-firewall deployment
  
• Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
  
• Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases"
  

Software Testability: On the Train or on the Tracks

Opinion by Linda Hayes, DECEMBER 19, 2003 - Computerworld:

Companies have spent millions of dollars buying costly, specialized test scripting tools, then millions more trying to work around automation-hostile software development practices. Most of them (90%, according to one analyst report) have reached frustration limits, shelved it all and retreated back to manually testing their software. Ironically, refusing to invest development effort into testability ultimately sacrifices all three goals: it takes longer to get the software out, it costs more money to test it, and crucial features are more likely to have defects.


It's insane but true. Companies have refused to invest an extra 5% of time in development to potentially shrink schedules and budgets by 30% or even more. Who wouldn't make a no-brainer investment like that?

...the application was impenetrable to every test tool we tried, and so I went to the lead developer and suggested that the team compile in an agent that would give us access to the objects for testing...

In the past year, I have seen a sea change taking place in attitudes toward testability. Whereas five years ago developers would barely tolerate QA, recently I have seen more and more agree to design in testability -- all the way from compiling in an agent to adopting naming standards and conventions to developing a complete testing application programming interface (API).

Squeezing value from KM

Computerworld Singapore - Vol. 10 Issue No. 10, 15 December 2003 - 6 January 6th: A knowledge management solution is all about establishing what information matters, what information exists internally and externally, where it is stored, who needs access to it and how they will access it. By Melanie Liew

Knowledge Management (KM) is an all encompassing approach to harnessing the knowledge within an organisation, from capturing it to ?sharing it. It is predicated on existing organisational intelligence, the organisational culture and the platform that is in place.

That, according to Clare Hart (left), president and chief executive officer, Factiva, is KM in a nutshell."

Learning-Org Nov 2003: My Theory of Organizational Learning LO3

Learning-Org Nov 2003: My Theory of Organizational Learning LO3: A draft "Theory Underlying Organizational Learning"
by: Richard Karash, submitted to the Learning-Org discussion list for comment.