I dropped the reference to “Management” here to break the inherent inference to corresponding technologies.

Back in April, Bill Ives addressed the question, “What is the Role of ECM in Enterprise 2.0?” A number of relevant comments were added, including one where I suggested a great piece on Content Management 2.0, which includes a great list of 2.0 principles useful for any 2.0 discussion.

To immerse readers in related conversations going on among content management practitioners, I share my responses to what started out as a usability discussion (limited to membership, the discussion started with an announcement of a related piece, authored by one of the members).

05-07-07 I have no issues with James list other than it’s a list. All of the client situations I’ve run into, even if they’d had the list, they still likely would have not made a purchasing decision based on any of these items. Why? They don’t necessarily really understand what it ‘means’. That is, they’d turn around and ask the vendor if they can address all of these issues and the vendor will invariably say ‘yes’.

A more effective list would effectively be one that begins to break down all of the specific issues with various interfaces and the level of effort required to implement an effective experience.

05-08-07 James said: “While a richer interface does address a number of the issues”

Hold the phone. There seems to be an implied alignment in this statement of 2.0 to ‘richer interface’. Not so. Clearly the piece from the link in my earlier post (which was originally posted via this list but I guessed that many have not read it) suggests otherwise. Let me copy some of it here for your viewing pleasure. Note that ‘rich’ is .5 of the 6 (it’s only half of point 4). [Included a portion of earlier reference here to the list, toward bottom of page. The authors are on the list and had posted the link...but I don't think many understood its significance as no conversation ensued.]

05-24-07 Walking along the same line of thought that Tim introduced [addressing the correlation between web sites and hierarchical navigation he stated: It's my observation that the human mind likes to make geographic analogies...when speaking of a web page...the word "space" creeps into the lingo], I drop the big question: who cares? Step away from the car…

Start with an analogy…say you drove to work this morning. You may not have been able to take the shortest route. All the variables notwithstanding there was one very critical issue: the infrastructure only supported certain routes — you can’t build your own roads. That’s not the case in the digital world and we need to NEVER forget it.

Here’s the short version of my advice: 1) Focus on taxonomies and other ’structure’ for optimizing search. 2) Make sure that whatever is needed to support the primary scenarios are in place (and are featured in weighted relevancy — more important scenario support is more evident and less important scenarios are less evident), 3) Work to improve the relevancy and ‘velocity to understanding/action’ of the content itself, 4) drive directly to content through any and every means possible (ala. direct channel access which circumvents navigation altogether).

Start paying attention to these items which are more important and you’ll forget all about the slow road to yesterday.

05-26-07 As to Yair’s comments I suggest the answer is ‘both’ (hierarchy vs vector) and neither. I just started reading David Weinberger’s new book “Everything is Miscellaneous” last night. It reinforces my earlier comments…remember that we’re talking digital.

We need to structure things in a way that they can be ALL they can be (anything to anyone depending on their perspective).

If I can add a real world situation, this morning I was working on my genealogy. Due to the fabulous nature of all that is going on right now, I was able to tie several of my ‘known’ ancestors altogether into the same family…aligning yet another critical figure in the early 1600 settlement of colonial Canada as my 9th great grandfather. The problem was that I stumbled onto this fact just by my own intuition and deduction because the spelling of the last name has over 15 variations.

The challenge with our ’structures’ today is that we focus on the structures (do not suppose I’m suggesting they’re not important — I’m fighting a battle to get such focus into a current effort). The truly untapped value from a digital perspective is not in the individual units (ala. the content), but in the relationships which can establish ‘different’ structures. This is clearly not a hierarchical problem set — hierarchical is but one dimension for one perspective. Reality is far more dynamic.

Choosing to focus on the hierarchical, leaves a limited view of the possiblities. The current hierarchical structure of the software by which I store information of my relatives plays against my needs. Even though there is a field which captures alternate name spellings, it still took my ‘inference’ to make the necessary connections. What my brain did can be easily replicated. It’s a simple problem, but it continues to be twarted by hierarchical thinking applied to problem sets.

Inference…3.0 thinking.

05-26-07 Tim mentioned saving searches. I’ve thought through this recently. I remember how valuable the tool Copernic was to me in the mid-90’s. I could not only do a search, I could filter out what was not relevant and only save what was relevant. I used these saved collections (which could be generated html pages), to send ‘filtered’ relevant content for managers to review (I was serving as a research librarian in this way…although it was not an intended role).

Today, I do the same thing via my del.icio.us collections. There is key difference here from my former scenario. Often times I had to conduct multiple searches to find all the relevant materials. I would then manually reconstruct a ‘total’ html file that combined the results of the various searches before sending the file. But the results were ‘fixed’ and was a reflection of the results that came forth at that point in time. Data warehousing taught us that sometimes those ’snapshots’ in time, however, are relevant — suggesting the ‘both’ principle again, both ‘fixed’ and ‘dynamic’ (I’ll defer from launching into my perspectives on the fundamental principles of endless groupings of continuums along which the points converge based on the ‘collective’ of the relevant set of continuums, all being influenced by one another and the situations/environments/time, all to arrive at a point in time decision — ala. the new science of economics, including behavioral economics).

Therefore, there is value not only in the searches themselves, but in the references to the content (ala. the relationships). With del.icio.us, tagging inherently creates a variety of relationships — in the earlier scenarios, the content was hardwired to a fixed results set (although, this would not have to have been the case if Copernic had simply stored a ‘template’ of the xml or some other layer which represented the relevancy of my results set — capturing the attributes of the things I excluded and the attributes of the things I included to approximate the search again).

Moral: Rethink the problem from a different perspective.