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Follow the Yellow Brick Road – Which way to SharePoint 2013?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on May 14, 2013 in Blog, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Ahha, seems the only way to get to SharePoint 2013 from an older version is to migrate. Ok from 2010 to 2013, but nothing before – think 2003 and 2007. We have several clients on SharePoint 2013 – and got there without glitches. We don’t have many that are left on 2003 or 2007 as a matter of fact.

So what’s the difference from the standpoint of unstructured and semi-structured content? Either clean up the mess now or later, or like many folks not at all. From this perspective, migration is a better choice to follow. Many migration tools have solid products that do what they say they do. Our products work alongside of them. The ability to mass move content is relatively straight forward. However, from an information governance approach, mass moving content results in the same problem of mismanaged content.

To migrate document collections effectively, the text content of each document needs to be searched to determine its value. This can’t be done manually, as the volume is too high, and the consistency of human review and decision making is unreliable as well as costly. If manually processed, the security rights of the documents as they are moved to their new location must be applied. General migration tools cannot safeguard document confidentiality because they do not make intelligent taxonomy workflow decisions based on the text content of the individual document.

The way we do it, as content is migrated it is analyzed for organizationally defined descriptors and vocabularies, which will automatically classify the content to taxonomies, or optionally the SharePoint Term Store, and automatically apply organizationally defined workflows to process the content to the appropriate repository for review and disposition.
The end result is a highly effective approach to cleanse irrelevant or unnecessary documents, as well as to identify records that may not been declared or have potential privacy exposures.

Alas, as a vendor I wish everyone used our technologies for migration, but they don’t. How do you approach this? If you are moving from 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2013 what would be the best method for you to strategically cleanse content before it available in your shiny new SharePoint 2013 environment?

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We have been victimized by a hacktivist 416 days ago!

By marting@conceptsearching.com on April 16, 2013 in Blog, Data Security, Information Governance, SharePoint 2013

The US Congress is dangling its toes in the water towards requiring companies to admit they have been hacked. The proposal regarding data breaches is a component of a larger draft bill being circulated in the House Judiciary Committee. In addition to raising the maximum penalty on cyber crime, it is suggesting that a business must disclose a security breach within 14 days from when it was discovered. In the case of a “major” breach, that window shrinks to a mere 72 hours, and involves the FBI or the Secret Service.

HP just released a report, HP 2012 Cyber Risk Report which stated that it takes 416 Days to detect a breach. Hmmm…somewhere the math doesn’t quite make sense. If 416 days is typical to identify a data breach, I guess reporting it within 14 days after the realization is not so bad.

Cyber crime, data breaches, and just plain old hacktivists are on the rise. The basic problem is there is no single law addressing data breach notification. For many industries they are regulated differently depending on the state they do business in. A similar situation exists in Europe, where E.U. officials have introduced their own draft regulation on data breaches, saying the mostly voluntary system it has now is “too fragmented” and leaves the region more vulnerable. Opponents have argued the proposal is burdensome because of its requirement that notifications take place within 24 hours of a data breach. If the European plan gets approved, it could boost the chances that the US Congress will pass something like it, although this isn’t the first time Washington has tried dealing with data-breach notifications and has done nothing.

I do get concerned that my data has been breached. It has happened to me several times now and I wasn’t notified for several months which I think is totally unacceptable. But on the other side of the coin, the state of Massachusetts has just ruled that zip codes are Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The whole topic doesn’t appear to be as straightforward as one might think.

I do have a problem that a company doesn’t know that a data breach occurred in 416 days? Really?

Where do you stand?

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Content Enrichment – Is it a component of Knowledge Acquisition?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on April 14, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, SharePoint 2013

It sometimes seems that knowledge management professionals can disagree with the basic meaning of ‘knowledge management’. Even though the term has been bounced around since the early 1990’s it doesn’t seem that there is one size that fits all. And, that’s ok with me.

What I have been thinking about is with the continual rise of baby boomers retiring what happens to corporate memory as it applies to knowledge acquisition? Even without the boomer impact, the escalation of unstructured content poses the problem of how can content be enriched and transformed to knowledge which can then be shared?

We would like to assume that our chiefs are making the right business decisions which consist of tacit as well as explicit knowledge. But unfortunately as we all know, decision makers do not always make good decisions. This takes us down to the practical aspect that although they are using their knowledge, the decisions must be substantiated by facts and information stored in corporate memory. There lies the rub. I would argue that many, if not most decisions are not necessarily made on the most accurate and trusted information. (I think we’ve all been there at some point). Simply because it can’t be found, either at the time it is needed or perhaps buried so deeply down in the abyss of unstructured content it can never be found. We also sometimes have cement heads as decision makers who will make a decision based on their own opinion. At that point the organization must rely on the consensus of the decision makers, cross their fingers, and hope for the best.

But the typical answer, mostly from decision makers, is that’s what their enterprise search and/or content management systems are supposed to do. Many, if not most, do not do it well. To transform content so it can be used by the organization as a knowledge asset, the unambiguous meaning and the unidentified relationships between similar and also dis-similar content must be exposed. Which leads us back to the age old problem of the tagging of content. Bottom line – I say potato, you say patattah. When the enriching of content and knowledge management are coupled together, it is only then that trusted decisions can be made and productivity increased so the entire organization can benefit in knowledge acquisition.

What are your thoughts?

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Migration – You Mean You Are Migrating 69% of Useless Information?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on April 12, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, SharePoint 2013

According to a survey by the 2012 Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Summit, 69% of corporate information that is saved can and should be deleted. That’s a pretty hefty percentage. According to IDC, 80% of enterprise information is unstructured. Let’s assume that these figures are correct. For the sake of discussion what do you do when faced with a migration? Move it all? Why? Because it’s easier and you can ‘worry about it later’? Or tell your end users to clean up their messes and trust them to do it (and correctly).

What are the problems? Migration of unstructured content can be a laborious and time consuming project. The challenge is that documents can exist in multiple places at the same time, different revisions of the same document exist, some documents should be deleted, and others should be archived. There may be records that were never declared, as well as confidential or privacy information that will not be identified when migrated. The ability to mass move content is relatively straight forward. However, from an information governance approach, mass moving content results in the same problem of mismanaged content.

To migrate document collections effectively the text content of each document needs to be searched to determine its value. This cannot be done manually, as the volume is too high, and the consistency of human review and decision making is unreliable as well as costly. If manually processed the security rights of the documents as they are moved to their new location must be applied. General migration tools cannot safeguard document confidentiality because they do not make intelligent taxonomy workflow decisions based on the text content of the document, or do it in mass.

We recommend the auto-generation of semantic metadata and a taxonomy before migration to cleanse and identify content to determine if it should be moved, if it should be archived, if it contains sensitive/privacy data, and to identify any records that need to be kept but were never declared records, or just plain delete because of redundancy and versioning.

But what about you? Since at times I have tunnel vision, how do you address these types of migration issues with unstructured content? How do you resolve and what is your approach?

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Concept Searching Survey Finds Intelligent Migration a Key Priority for 2013

By admin on March 22, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Concept Searching conducted a survey in the fourth quarter of 2012 to identify key executive priorities for 2013, specifically around the use of applications that require metadata. The survey included Concept Searching clients as well as the broader marketplace. Although improving search was the number one priority across the board, surprisingly, migration was also high on the respondents’ replies.

Responses from the Concept Searching client base revealed that 33 percent have used the technologies for migration, with 53 percent of the broader marketplace looking for a solution that can intelligently address the migration process. The migration process now requires more sophisticated techniques to ensure compliance objectives are met. Simply moving documents from one repository is not enough, as content that was typically unmanaged will remain unmanaged, continuing to expose an organization to risk. Information cannot be managed from inception to deletion without comprehensive metadata associated with the content, and incorporating the multiple channels and origination points from which content was received.

To read the press release, click here.

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Successful SharePoint Stories or Tales of Woe?

By marting@conceptsearching.com on March 8, 2013 in Blog, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Recently I read an article, ‘SharePoint Faces a Challenging Future’, posted on InfoWorld that references a new report from Forrester where SharePoint has come under fire as not all it’s cracked up to be. Interesting food for thought. This made me start thinking about ‘real live’ organizations many of which have their own SharePoint success stories to tell (or tales of woe). Just thought the points mentioned were worth thinking about. The article above references a new research report issued in February from Forrester. This report uses data from Forrester’s August 2012 Global SharePoint Usage Online Survey to analyze the current and likely future state of SharePoint adoption in enterprises.

Some of the observations concluded that SharePoint has a long way to go and is at a cross road. I must also emphatically state that it wasn’t all gloom and doom for SharePoint. But we are going to concentrate on the gloom and doom just for the sake of conversation. See if you agree with some of the points made by the authors.

“The gap in satisfaction between IT pros and business managers — SharePoint met the expectations of 73 percent of the former, and of 62 percent of the latter — is of concern, according to the authors.” (I actually don’t think these are necessarily negative stats. One point not made was the maturity level of the SharePoint installations – have they been up and running for years or still in some stage of deployment?)

“Dissatisfaction is centered on several areas, including adoption challenges, a dislike for the SharePoint user experience, a preference for other tools like email and skepticism over its business value.”

“At this juncture, CIOs and other IT executives should rethink the role of SharePoint in their organizations. For example, if SharePoint is used only for document collaboration, it is an expensive proposition for which more affordable options exist, according to the authors. It’s also a good idea to monitor how Yammer is integrated with SharePoint, and assess how comfortable the organization is with providing enterprise social collaboration via a cloud model. In addition, CIOs must keep a close eye on SharePoint’s mobile capabilities.”

“Dangerous competitors include IBM, Google, Jive Software, and Box. Despite its rousing success in enterprises, circumstances have changed, and SharePoint must prove its value all over again.”

So all you SharePoint aficionado’s – WDYT?

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Where’s the missing link in government?

By carlam@conceptsearching.com on February 11, 2013 in Government, Information Governance, Records Management, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Although this blog focuses around government it highlights an interesting paradox. The first article details the US federal Chief Information Officers Council update on the list of core competencies for training and hiring policies so they can hire personnel that are capable of addressing new technology challenges facing government. The council recently released an updated Clinger-Cohen Core Competencies and Learning Objectives and recommended that every federal agency should include staff with experience in social media, open government, and cloud computing.

The document also includes new “competencies” in IT governance, IT program management leadership, vendor management, cybersecurity, and information assurance strategies and plans. According to the article, “Federal chief information officers should ensure that the knowledge, skills and abilities represented in each competency in this document are resident within their organization for overall staff productivity,” the document said. So far all’s well and good and a step in the right direction.

Switch to another scenario. In an editorial by Steve O’Keeffe, from MeriTalk, he discusses the GAO Report released in late January. What struck me as I read both articles back to back is the apparent lack of integrated agency operational plans and the lack of accountability. Some highlights from Mr. O’Keeffe’s article that are recommended in the first article are noted below.

Rampant systems duplication – with 777 supply chain systems, they now need a supply chain system to track their supply chain system inventory
Agencies spend 73 percent of “defined” IT budget on maintaining old systems
IT Dashboard says almost $12.5 billion in IT projects at risk
$3 billion worth of IT projects are without governance
Data center diaspora and dollar discrepancies. Only three of 24 agencies submitted data center inventories and only one has a complete consolidation plan
Failed IT programs total 2.6 billion

I wonder in a ‘real’ organization how often the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray? Although if you add up IT government agency spending it would probably make our eyes pop (luckily for us no one knows what that amount is), but even on a smaller scale how many companies state corporate direction and then it all falls through the cracks? The government is not alone. It is probably more than we think.

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What the heck? Tell me what to call it.

By carlam@conceptsearching.com on February 7, 2013 in Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Since I am in marketing I can’t seem to pin down what to call ‘social networking’ as a good ‘umbrella’ term. It appears that I am not alone – please see below what professionals are calling themselves. But back to the ‘correct’ term. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Social networking
Social networking tools
Social automation
Social computing
Social business
Social media
Social collaboration
Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0
Knowledge Management

The last bullet is an odd ball as it is no longer considered a relevant term and is in disfavor by many, but I have seen the term when referring to “social ?” (I’m quite sure I left some out). Now at a granular level we can probably find differentiators for each term. I have one colleague who still doesn’t know what Enterprise and Web 2.0 are, no matter how many times I explain it to him. He constantly tells me that real people don’t know what that means, oh well.

Oddly enough, coinciding to writing this blog, it seems that ‘social’ professionals are now jumping on this bandwagon. In a blog by Brittany Ballenstedt she wrote, “In January 2013, the number of Twitter users with “social media” as part of their bio has grown significantly, to 181,000, up from a mere 16,000 in 2009. “Maven” and “ninja” were nearly tied for being used the most – nearly 22,000 times. Other popular titles were “evangelist” (20,829), “guru” (18,363) and “consultant” (9,031). “At this rate, everyone on Twitter will soon be a social media guru,” Ad Age’s B.L. Ochman writes.”

From a business perspective, what do you think is the best umbrella term to incorporate the various components? Or should there be unique distinctions in terms and not one ‘umbrella’ term. What does your organization use?

And, if you are an expert in social media, what title do you prefer?

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Protecting Unstructured Content from Exposure

By marting@conceptsearching.com on February 7, 2013 in Data Security, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Corporate risk is increasingly becoming a priority for senior management. The demarcation of who is responsible for the protection of data is becoming blurred. It can no longer be the responsibility of one person, and must encompass all stakeholders and end users to identify and secure privacy assets to protect an organization. Regardless of whether a breach is contained within an organization or, worst case scenario, exposed to the world, 76% of organizations will face investigations, forensics, law enforcement, and actions to protect the victim from harm (Ponemon Institute).

Our approach to the protection of privacy and confidential data includes the proactive identification and protection of unknown privacy exposures before they occur, as well as identifying in real time organizationally defined vocabulary and descriptors in content as it is created or ingested from any source and removing it from unauthorized access. (Read more).

At what point and how do you handle potential data privacy exposures? Or do you?

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