The new 2009 AIIM survey found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted.

“In AIIM’s view, most organizations are only just waking up to the fact that among the deluge of day-to-day emails, are some that constitute important business records. These emails need to be recorded and retained as such.”

The reason I bring this up here is that there is no difference between email communications and social-network communications, covering blogs, wikis and other postings. It’s all electronic communications posted on behalf of organizations to conduct organizational business. Social network interactions are business records, too.

The question is, how soon before legal departments start getting the jitters over electronic communications beyond email?

There are also the accompanying management issues that also go with the storage and retrievability of electronic communications. Someone has to be in charge of discovering, storing and archiving these communications. Hardware needs to be made available, and managed.

The AIIM study observes that more than half of the respondents lack confidence “that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete and recoverable… Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system.”

This, of course, is a nod to the study’s underwriters, but the findings also give pause to companies with intense and pervasive social networking activities. Can they retrieve discussions and communications from six, 12 , 24 months ago? What if important communications took place on an outside service such as Twitter?

Who’s in charge of all this information? And do they have the resources to manage, store, and archive it?

According to a new report in the Financial Times, “revised guidelines on endorsements and testimonials by the Federal Trade Commission, now under review and expected to be adopted, would hold companies liable for untruthful statements made by bloggers and users of social networking sites who receive samples of their products. The guidelines would also hold bloggers liable for the statements they make about products.”

A counter-argument by Richard O’Brien, vice-president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said it was premature to regulate blogs or other forms of new media. According to FT, O’Brien rote to the FTC that “regulating these developing media too soon may have a chilling effect on blogs and other forms of viral marketing, as bloggers and other viral marketers will be discouraged from publishing content for fear of being held liable for any potentially misleading claim.”

Over the past decade or so, the legal system caught up to email, which must now be managed and is treated as any other corporate record or statement. That is, companies are liable for the statements made by company representatives within email communications. Even more recently, instant messaging has fallen under the same scrutiny. Both email and IM, in fact, are construed as electronic communication. In fact, the United Nations Commission on International Trade (UNICTRAL) Model Law on Electronic Commerce — which serves as the basis for many national laws — defines a “data message” as “information generated, sent, received, or stored by electronic, optical, or similar means including, but not limited to, electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic mail, telegram, telex, or telecopy.”

The UNICTRAL definition was drafted earlier in the decade, but certainly can be extended to social media.  How liable will organizations be for any and all statements made by employees or representatives in blogs or social media sites? That is a question that inevitably will be hashed out — and hopefully, we can keep the lawyers from quashing the potential of the social media sphere.

In fact, a survey out of the University of Southern California last year found almost of half of organizations may be holding back on social media inittaives due to liability and legal concerns.

A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.

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Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizen’s Briefing Book

I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.

You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.

I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.

Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.

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I’m not surprised.  if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.

A culture continues to grow, informed by a "two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results"

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A new study from Saugatuck Technology states that users want SaaS throughout the enterprise, whether their enterprises are ready for it or not. And, by extension, SaaS is spreading throughout the enterprise, whether the vendors – or their offerings – are ready to support and deliver what users want.

The study, based on interviews with 400 executives and 30 SaaS solution provider and independent software vendors, finds that while users are increasingly demanding and expecting SaaS versions of everything from email to ERP, they often don’t understand the technological and organizational resource constraints to enterprise-wide SaaS.

Blame the vendors, who are scrambling to catch up with demand coming from within enterprises, according to Mike West, Saugatuck research vide president and leader of the SaaS study. “Unfortunately, not enough SaaS providers see or understand the increasing enterprise scope of user demands and desires. Over time they will face some real challenges when it comes to maintaining high user satisfaction and, ultimately, high rates of renewal or expansion of their services.”

Saugatuck identified four waves of SaaS evolution. While earlier-generation “Wave I” offerings continue to flourish, the broader market has moved on to “Wave II” solutions that integrate with on-premise data and processes.

Some providers are beginning to address key “Wave III” requirements, which support inter- and intra-company collaboration and personalized workflows.

Longer-term, “Wave IV” threatens to sweep IT and business together and forward beyond user and vendor experience. Continuous growth and innovation are core competitive requirements in most SaaS markets -addressing an ever-expanding array of customer and partner desires and requirements for interfaces and function.

The on-demand, cloud model of computing is poised to sweep enterprises — even those using traditional ons-ite software, Saugatuck predicts. With traditional on-premise license revenues stalling, ISVs will adopt SaaS strategies en masse, led by either internal development initiatives, acquisition of synergistic SaaS assets or via virtualization.

But there is no guarantee that many ISVs can and will make successful transitions to SaaS, Saugatuck adds. When asked to identify who the “SaaS Master Brands” of the future are likely to be, 51 percent of users chose either pure-play SaaS solution providers or said that “it was just too early to tell.”

As an enabler of Cloud-based software development, deployment, integration, and management, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will significantly improve the enterprise-ready capabilities of most SaaS offerings. PaaS therefore becomes a key enabler of enterprise-ready SaaS, and of SaaS-ready enterprises.

Saugatuck predicts that “Cloud Computing” will evolve into “Cloud Business” — a natural progression of SaaS, the IT utility concept, and business process outsourcing and transformation.

CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.

News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.

How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?

I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.

Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience – how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.

This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.

The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.

What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?

Both Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe have publicly stated that they are seeking examples of serious productivity issues resulting from Web 2.0 deployments. So far, Dion reports, “no one has come forward with a significant story around productivity loss, or misuse of these tools in the enterprise. “We have been unable to hear even one. So far, the evidence is looking favorable.”

Dion had recently joined Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague from ebizQ, who hosted a fascinating online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth and Dion were joined by ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM.

For those managers who fear the ramifications of productivity loss as a result of unleashing Web 2.0 into their enterprises, think back to the first Macs and Windows-based PCs 20 years ago, said Doug Wilson. “When we introduced GUIs 20 years ago, there was the same question. Weren’t we going to waste a lot of time, people moving the mouse around?”

Of course, PCs and Macs had a very different kind of an impact on productivity.

An even more delicious example is employee orientation at a candy factory, Doug added:

“Candy makers indoctrinate people by telling them to eat as much candy as they want off the line for the first day, or anytime else for that matter. After 20 minutes, people will have had their fill.”

Likewise, when a new technology or technique is introduced, it’s only natural for people to try and learn and teach themselves. That’s how human beings learn — they experiment and play.”

Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:

“AOL rolled out…a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web… it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms.”

This is a fairly common story, Dion added — analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago.

Immediately following Hart, David Weinberger gave us his vision of where the chaotic, miscellaneous, Web in all its ganglionic glory appears to be tending. Weinberger offered a radical recasting of the now hallowed nostrum, “Information wants to be free.” It’s quite otherwise — if I may paraphrase his thought: It’s we who are trying to be free from information.

Hart and Weinberger were coming to the crux of FASTforward08 from seemingly antipodal perspectives, and it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both:

In this corner, Hart, the corporate maven, looking at advanced search and context as a new platform for news and data providers like Dow Jones to actualize in ways that add tremendous and new kinds of informational value to large numbers of end users – so much so that they’ll happily pay ample subscriber fees for the privilege.

In that corner, Weinberger, looking at the “here comes everybody” energy, complexity, and messiness of the web as it is today, with its social spontaneity, its twittering micro-nets, its folksonomies that defy rational taxonomies because they’re spun from the arbitrariness of all those other minds. Each of whose lives, passions, traumas and idiosyncrasies is planting its own imprint on what matters to them. The result: a burgeoning infinity of highly idiosyncratic tags, links and ephemera, each of which makes sense within the universe of one that constitutes any single end user, but which present varying degrees of opacity to any data-mining operative whose success depends upon predicting how various sets of users organize their most vitally important data.

The differences between Hart and Weinberger come through in the differences between Hart’s dashboard and Weinberger’s “new front page.” For Hart, the idea is to know what the user needs and wants, and to build a unique set of data that changes with the contextual moment. Her example of the finance worker whose top news stories and analyses will be shaped by his or her clients’ portfolios made perfect sense, because the professional setting from day to day offers a predicable set of tasks, hotspots, and priorities.

Weinberger’s “front page,” on the other hand, is described as a rich and amorphous mess of referrals, nets, connections, keyed to the individual but marshaled by no one, controlled by no one. No two front pages of this kind will ever be alike, raising serious questions about to what extent there could ever be some commodification sufficiently compelling as to command a subscription fee.

Of course a key difference is that Hart’s dashboard is driven by professionally identified objectives and informational needs, where Weinberger’s “new front page” has as many shapes as it has users. Where Hart begins with the assumption that much of what her user needs and wants can be intuited and provided, Weinberger’s user is pretty much the vortex of a dynamic series of singularities – indeed, his user’s “front page” is more like the sign of what is unknowable until it exists, and mutates as soon as it is known. Never the same, as once was said of a river.

In a way, isn’t this one paradox at the heart of FASTforward08? Its ambitious spectrum brought the promise and excitement of advanced search techniques that will surely provide large new affordances within the Enterprise and new opportunities for monetization in the space between the Enterprise and its end users. At the same time, it touched on some thorny questions arising from the fact that human beings are usually not transparent, often do not understand themselves, and resist efforts by others to horn in where they themselves may fear to tread.

Which gives us reason to ponder one of the many suggestive things FAST ceo John Markus Lervik had to say in his opening address:

Today’s online environment is shaped by the person in it.

If true – and there’s reason to think it is becoming more true each day – then the professional knowledge worker is about to enter an environment steeped in a precocious awareness of her needs and wishes.

But those who, like irritants in oysters, generate something in the web that goes deeper than the consumption of information, could be less than delighted when approached by someone offering to do it all for them.

Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread.  We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.

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The world’s 50 most powerful blogs

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.

Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.

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The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment.  Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so.  And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.

I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I  think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.

Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives.  That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites  they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.

It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of Web 2.0".  I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting.  I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.

In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group.  His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.

Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics.  In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said  "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.

It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.

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What about owning the means of production in today’s information age?

Bob Lewis has a 21st Century take on this: why not leave it up up to the end users to supply their own computers on the job?

Here’s the lay of the land, as Bob puts it:

“When using their home computers, end-users experience a vast array of possibilities, but at the office they operate in a very constrained space; and increasingly, ‘work/life balance’ is giving way to “‘live your life wherever you are.’”

As we’ve seen from the many insights coming out of FastForward ‘08, users need to be unleashed to get their jobs done with the tools they see fit. So why not let employees do their thing with their own PCs? As Bob Lewis put it:

“No corporate-owned PCs at all. Let employees buy their own — whatever they think they need to do their jobs. It’s Nicholas Carr’s vision in reverse: Only central IT remains. Employees take over ownership of the periphery, including responsibility for their own PC support.”

We already see plenty of instances of employees using their own mobile devices for work-related connectivity. And, countless users log in from their homes to check into the intranet or for updated communications.

Of course, the legal departments would pull their hair out at the notion of everyone bringing in their own machines to work, especially in light of fears of data being taken out the door. But if there were a way to effectively lock down data either online or offline, wouldn’t this idea make a lot of sense?

So, Bob put another idea out there — virtualize. “Give end-users two virtual machines.” One virtual machine — the corporate virtual machine — could be “buttoned-down, corporate, protected, fully supported, and strongly connected.” The personal virtual machine could be the “sandbox,” on which users can do anything their hearts desire.

The description from the program: “Reality has sold us a bill of goods: Because we’ve had to keep our physical stuff neat and orderly, we’ve assumed that the ideal information system also is neat and orderly. But that type of organization actually excludes more information than it makes available. As information – and, importantly, metadata – get digitized, we have to unlearn millennia of lessons reality has taught us. The changes affect not only the basic principles of organization, but also who gets believed and why. In this session, David Weinberger explores what happens to experts, authorities, and the business and institutions that depend on them as we move to social knowledge, rich in connections but often uncontrolled and uncontrollable.”