Enterprise Metadata

Trademark 2.0: New Book

Globalization has taken on a whole new definition and meaning since 1999 when only a few organizations sent work overseas during the Y2k crises. Today, just about every organization is trying to stay competitive by sending operations, development, and design to countries such as India, China, or Russia. For the information worker the facts can be unnerving to say the least. While the percent of jobs lost due to outsourcing remains in the single digits, no one can deny the trend of expotential growth will continue. With research firms continuously publishing reports on how organizations can leverage technology from these countries, there will be no shortage of fear in the coming years.

Hardly an information technology book or magazine can be picked up that does not mention the focus to achieve enterprise effectiveness or share information in a manner that allows the organization to react in an effective manner across the entire supply chain. The result of these efforts to lower the costs and gain a competitive advantage within the supply chain has lead to a much more diverse community of individual suppliers. This transformation from hierarchal controlling structures to distributed flat organizations has created what Dan Pink calls the Free Agent Nation. The reality is that free agents may not come from next door but rather the next country. Employees need to adapt by creating unique value propositions that are captured with their Trademark.

This book will discuss several dimensions of building a personal Trademark. Unlike other books on this subject, this book will focus on the “How” an individual can move from local labor to global talent in the new world defined as Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 commonly refers to organizations that operate under an open communication model where interaction and communication is encouraged from the top down. Enterprises are accomplishing this feat by not only addressing the technology requirements of Web 2.0 but the social and organizational changes required to sustain a competitive advantage.
Subject

The domain of the book is the creation, development, and ongoing utilization of a personal Trademark. Wikipedia defines a Trademark as follows:

A trademark is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. A trademark is a type of industrial property which is distinct from other forms of intellectual property. Conventionally, a trademark comprises a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.

The choice of the Trademark over the conventional term branding is by design. Information workers think of themselves as members of a trade. A trade is a long term progression where skills, competencies, and experiences come together to create subject matter expertise. The new world of business is built around ambiguity, collaboration, networks, distributed leadership, loosely coupled processes, and a dispersed workforce. For many in the industry, the transformation has been overnight and the majority of us are not prepared to handle a world without hierarchal structures. The Trademark is a physical representation of who you are as opposed to the concepts of branding which are more metaphysical. Much of this book will focus on the physical creation of informational elements that define a brand or brand position. Generally speaking, information workers are more receptive to the hard elements of a Trademark versus the emotional elements of a brand. Historically, trademarks have been associated with professions like the pharmacist’s mortar and pestle, the anvil for the blacksmith, the red and white pole for a barber or the wooden Indian statue for tobacco stores. These symbols represented something about the profession and those that practiced it.

In the 2.0 environment, these physical trademarks have been replaced by more meta-physical ones such as logo, slogans, and reputation. Still, like every organization, we must learn to build both the physical and meta-physical trademarks in order to compete in the next 25 years. This book is designed to give the information worker an overview of personal branding and provide a process for the creation of their physical Trademark in a 2.0 world.

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DMreview: Three Little Cores

When Herb Kelleher was asked how long it would take to train his successor, he replied, "About five minutes," which is about the length of time it would take to explain the importance of making decisions at Southwest based on the core concept of being the lowest-cost provider. Is it really that simple? Why not fire the flight attendants and maintenance personnel? This would certainly lower the costs of doing business. However, in the long term this would increase the costs of the business and force Southwest to increase prices. This is an oversimplification of an obviously successful business model, but think about the message this sends to the employees.

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New Collaborative Weblog

Collaborage is a railing against the forces that stand in the way of complete re-invention of how business gets done in a large organization. This re-invention will be defined by the new collaborative and social applications including Weblogs, Wikis, Profiles, Collaborative Environments, RSS, and many others. Hopefully, you will find these implementation observations of value in your implementation of Web 2.0 technology.
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It's Your Metadata

An enterprise asset is a technical resource that can be used across business units and/or across applications. This definition includes assets such as Web services, shared components, systems, interfaces, data definition and schemas. The idea is that an enterprise repository should contain any asset regardless of type. That being said, most organizations have a collection of repositories to fulfill the service of metadata delivery. One common theme is that if you don't share the asset, then why would you catalog it? What would you do if a business unit approached your metadata organization with a truckload of data assets but wanted to lock access down so that no one could access the information? Worse yet, these data assets are not enterprise level and can't be shared with other business units.
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Welcome to the Herring Club

Animal Planet is a great resource of business metaphors and last night had a great show on Dolphins. One of their favorite foods is herring which forms a giant ball when attacked. The thinking is that if they come together, they will appear to be bigger and a more formidable foe. Unfortunately, thousands of years of evolution and basic instincts plays right into the Dolphins hands, I mean fins. The tightly packed school of herring creates an undersea McDonalds; fast food for Flipper. I won’t describe the actual details of the feast, but you get the idea that mother nature isn’t always the kindest thing to watch.

What struck me was how our corporate hierarchal structures do the same thing; create giant balls of fish. They hire the same people, with similar backgrounds, similar skills, and knowledge. Then if that wasn’t enough, they immerse them into similar technologies, cultures, processes, and structures. We don’t want people that color outside the lines and we have been taught that since second grade. We, as employees, gladly accept this as the norm. Our assumption is that if we pool together and appear the same then we are safe from outsourcing, downsizing, and job stagnation. Don’t believe me that we are all treated the same? Ask your HR professional what percentage of employees got a below average rating last year? Mathematically speaking, that number should be 49% but you and I know it’s more like .05%. Are you the one getting packed (herring) or doing the packing (Dolphin)? Either way, the end result is the same.

Do you blog every day? Do you own www.johndoe.com and develop your personal brand? Do you collect, track, manage, and evaluate yourself by your trademarks at the end of the year? Do you update your resume or CV quarterly? If your organization deploys Social Software, will you be one of the 1% that actually participates? If not, welcome to the Herring Club, glad you’re here.

Governance and the Open Source Repository

The Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives is one of the few texts to combine OSS in public and private sector activities into a single reference source. This authoritative publication examines how the use of open source software (OSS) affects practices in society, business, government, education, and law. It provides a balance of theoretical perspectives, experiences, and cases in relation to these key areas. This thorough collection includes an overview of the culture from which OSS emerged and the development practices though which OSS is created and modified. The Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives is an international collaboration including authors from six continents and more than 12 countries. This multinational and multicultural perspective becomes crucial when making effective decisions about software in todays global policy and business environments. This text is an essential reference to business persons, policy makers, educators, and private citizens who are curious about how factors related to OSS may affect different aspects of their lives.

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Who are you in Web 2.0

Well, let’s see who you are in the 0.0 and 1.0 world. The easiest way is to take a look at the corporate directory. “S”, “Ste”, “Stephens”. Ah, here I am “Robert Stephens”, not Todd but Robert. I am employee number 458279 with email address rs9999. My phone numbers and address are here. And so is my job title, “Architect”. There you go; I am a number, an address, a title, and a component of some hierarchal structure that seems to be wrong. Not sure about you, but after 24 years in this business, you would think that I would have accomplished a little more than that.

Now, let’s imagine someone in a 2.0 world. Not a number, but someone that is an innovator because I can see they have several patents to their name. They are an author, due to their recent book publication at iUniverse mentioned in their blog. They have skills, knowledge, and experience that are clearly communicated and oddly enough, up to date in the profile. They are a thought leader based on their contributions to the Wiki space. Reading their blog comments, I can see this person is an educator and willing to communicate the complexities of their subject matter. They are a leader, not in title or organization structure, but a leader of thought and strategic direction. They have an enormous network of corporate relations based on the contextual tagging. This person is honest, open and trustworthy based on the communication and projects they have lead. They represent the values we want based on the family and volunteer efforts described in their profile. Employee number 14528 does say much but the vast experiences, jobs, and qualifications do. This person is an asset, an individual, and valuable to where this organization is going.

Who would you hire or fire? Personally, that Robert guy doesn't sound like he is doing anything of value so get ride of him. That second person sounds like the kind of leadership we need. Hire her and pay her what ever she wants

Patent Granted 7,206,785

Impact Analysis of MetadataMethods and systems for estimating impact between metadata descriptors are provided. A software program compares a first metadata descriptor with a second metadata descriptor and determines an impact rating between the metadata descriptors. The impact rating may be used to map metadata descriptors or as an indication of how a change in one database will effect other interrelated databases.
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DMReview: Data Quality: The Price of Entry

What exactly is data quality? The most obvious answer is that data quality represents the validity of the information. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story of data quality, take a look at the following dimensions as describes by the United States Accountability Office: Accuracy, Validity, Completeness, Consistency, Timeliness, and Ease of Use.
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Mass Adoption of Social Software

While Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, SlideShare, MySpace, and Second Life provide great examples of large scale deployments, we seem to have a shortage of Enterprise mass adoptions. Mass adoption would be where a large percentage of employees, contractors and business partners access the social application in their day to day work. To put this in perspective, Wikipedia is updated by only 1% of the user base actually updates information. In January 2007, the site registered 42.8 million unique visitors while only 75,000 registered contributors. Another way of looking at it is that the Wikipedia server infrastructure handles 200 million queries while handling around a million updates. Do not misunderstand, this is very impressive but with those numbers within a corporation, what happens? To keep the math simple, let us assume that we have 100,000 employees. Based on the Wikipedia numbers, we might expect to have 1,000 people updating content. Of course, that would only be in a perfect world. The actual number may only be around 100. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says that instead of the hundreds of thousands of people we might imagine contributing information to the site, it’s actually written by just a few hundred people, known as "super-contributors. Jacob Nielson remarked User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute); 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So what constitutes mass adoption? Can we say that 100 contributing users defines an environment of mass adoption? Perhaps we can separate the content from the usage and only attach the mass adoption class to the usage side. That seems to be limiting to me but I have been wrong before.

Patent Granted 7,200,820

A system and method for viewing search results is disclosed. A method of communicating a search result according to various views is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with content of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with relationships of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with images of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with seals of websites is disclosed. A method of displaying metadata associated with one or more websites in a view, receiving a request to change the view, and displaying metadata associated with the one or more websites in a second view is disclosed.

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What is Social Tagging

Social tagging describes the collaborative activity of marking shared online content with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering, or search (Gibson, Teasley, & Yew, 2006). Traditional information architecture utilized a central taxonomy or classification scheme in order to place information into specific pre-defined buckets or categories. The assumption was that trained librarians understood more about information content and context than the average user. While this might have been true for the local library with the utilization of the Dewey Decimal system, the enormous amount of content on the Internet makes this type of system un-manageable. Tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community. Perhaps the most important feature to the individual is the ability to bookmark the information in a way that is easier for them to recall at a later date. The benefit of this ability on a personal basis is obvious but what about the impact to the community at large. The idea of social tagging is allowing multiple users to tag content in a way that makes sense to them, by combining these tags, users create an environment where the opinions of the majority define the appropriateness of the tags themselves. The act of creating a collection of popular tags is referred to as a folksonomy which is defined as a folk taxonomy of important and emerging content within the user community (Ahn, Davis, Fake, Fox, Furnas, Golder, Marlow, Naaman, & Schachter, 2006). The vocabulary problem is defined by the fact that different users define content in different ways. The disagreement can lead to missed information or inefficient user interactions (Boyd, Davis, Marlow, & Naaman, 2006). One of the best examples of social tagging is Flickr which allows users to upload images and “tag” them with appropriate metadata keywords. Other users, who view your images, can also tag them with their concept of appropriate keywords. After a critical mass has been reached, the resulting tag collection will identify images correctly and without bias.

Introducing Enterprise 2.0

By now you have probably heard of Web 2.0 and all of the hype surrounding the next evolution of web technology. The impact on our culture is unmistakable with the advent of Weblogs, Wikis, and many other social applications. While Web 2.0 has been debated by researchers as to who and when the concepts emerged, little argument exists that the technology has arrived. Unlike Web 1.0, this new technology encourages user participation and derives its greatest value when large communities contribute the content. User generated metadata, community based information, and innovative designs enable a much richer environment for value creation.
Imagine a world where delivering the most advanced product with the greatest number of features actually losses the war for customer’s attention. This is exactly what happened to the feature rich Diamond Rio MP3 player. The Rio hit the world with a simple design, advanced features and a collection of technology advancements that forced the recording industry to file suit to protect their interest. Yet, today 75% of the market is owned by Apple’s IPod which has far fewer features, cost more, and operates on top of a proprietary music format which cannot be accessed by other devices. On the surface, this seems to fly into the face of Web 2.0 openness. What happened to the traditional framework where value dictated the winners and losers? Describing the competitive market where the Apple IPod competed head to head with the RIO is leaving out a few details. Specifically, the emergence of ITunes and the ITunes Music store altered the entire music ecosystem. The advanced functionally was transformed to the computer application which eliminated the need for that kind of feature set to be housed within the device. Add the ability to buy any song for $0.99 and you have a complete transformation worth billions. What Apple delivered is the “music experience” for the end user. This transformation from the traditional buying CD’s and loading the songs on the computer then trying to manage the music was Apple’s greatest accomplishment.
The IPod story is an Enterprise 2.0 success story based on collaborative designs, viral marketing, and the implementation of the experience over technology and features. Businesses, organizations, and individuals are all changing the way in which value is delivered. Enterprise 2.0 is about you, your collaborative ability to contribute to the vast amount of knowledge in the world today. We are starting to see power shift from the few that controlled the flow of information to you; Times Person of the Year for 2006. The business implications of this new media are unclear. No one is really sure where the rich user interfaces, self-service, the long tail, agility, transparency, and the emergent components of trust are going to take us. The one thing we can count on is that change is inevitable. Organizations have a plethora of knowledge stores ranging from repositories to registries; from corporate Wiki’s to Enterprise Collaborative applications like SharePoint. While we have plenty of tools to choose from, technology is only part of the solution. Social or behavioral changes must also occur in order to make inroads into the business culture of the organization. For example, when sending out an attachment do you email the document or send a link to a shared workspace? With collaborative type solutions, we have a much richer set of tools to deliver value to the business. Additionally, the organization must also change and adopt the technologies as a viable method of doing business. The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the facilitation of value creation not the management of it. We are moving away from the traditional command and control model of value creation to one that is self-organizing, innovative, distributed, and collaborative. By utilizing these tools, altering the social behavior, and implementing change in the organization, we can evolve to a single entity all driving toward the same goals.

Life without Metadata

Have you ever thought about what life without metadata would be like? Not the traditional database metadata, but retail metadata - the kind of metadata that appears on every product inside Wal-Mart, Kroger and Publix. For example, consider a simple bottle of aspirin, where the metadata on the box includes the manufacturer, ingredients, volume, quantity, directions and safety warnings. Open the box, and there is an insert with even more metadata on how and when to use the product. Not to mention the bottle itself, which repeats much of the metadata that was on the box, only in smaller print.
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Chris Saad has followed this article up with some delightful insight into the needs of metadata in the 2.0 world.

When we come across a blog, I think that most people look for the subscriber count and consider (at least at the back of their mind and as part of a larger value judgement) whether or not they should add the author to their subscription list based on how authoritative that number makes them. Adding someone to your feed list is a relatively big decision. So the 'subscriber count' metadata is important

Read His Comments Here

Design and Usability are Irrelevant in Web 2.0

Wait! I can hear ever reader out there saying that in the Web 2.0 world design and usability are not big issues. The contribution will be based on the value of the content not the look and feel. Of course, that’s why we buy a Lexus versus a dune buggy because we only want to get to point A to point B. Please, give me a break; you can’t honestly believe that.

Imagine for a moment that web communications is like owning a home and the original web was like living with your parents. If you didn’t know how to landscape a yard then you just cut it as your Dad told you to do. If you didn’t have an inkling of interior design then that hand-me down furniture with neon posters worked fine. If you didn’t understand the architecture of remodeling then you shared a bathroom with your three sisters. Same thing with Web 1.0 design and usability, if you didn’t understand Human Computer Interaction, HTML or Metadata then you stayed at home and used whatever your management told you.

Early or Pre 2.0 applications like discussions threads or community sites was like leaving home and renting an apartment. Of course, you felt the freedom and exhilaration of being on your own and being able to say and do whatever you wanted to do. However, you couldn’t change the infrastructure even if you had skills in design, the landlord would have kept that 2 month security fee. Rules were everywhere; no parking, no parties, no noise, no boats, etc. It was better than living at home but your freedoms were limited.

The emergence of Web 2.0 is like moving into your own home. You are now responsible for the look, the design, the content, and the perception decreed by the environment. If you want to plant Kudzo in the front yard because you have childhood memories of failure then that’s ok. If you want to paint your house with a giant “Wonder Bread” design then knock yourself out. Do you like that seventies look? They still have those Forrest Green and Harvest Gold appliances available and shag carpet may be making a comeback. The point is that you control things now and you don’t need to know HTML or .Net programming but you still have an image or brand to protect. Design and usability don’t become irrelevant, they become distinguishing. There are 55 million voices out there and your just one of them, you are going to need all of the help you can get.