Saturday afternoon. Ramona is asleep taking her afternoon nap. Me? I got tons to do but am sitting on the sofa playing with my iPad so I thought I would give Blogger (the platform my blog is hosted on) a try.

I unwrapped my iPad on wednesday taking the day off to enjoy my new toy and spend the day with the kid. I proceeded to do more YouTube watching of Elmo's song then anything else as my 8 month old is already asserting her control of the iPad as a toy that I will have to share with her. So be it, on my list of why I should get one was that she could play baby games on it.

I didn't rush out to buy the iPad - I actually did not buy it, my husband sick of hearing me talk about the pros and cons, if I should wait for the next version (primarily because of the camera) came home with it on Monday - there was no reason to return it once it was in the house. I am a lucky girl. I do like Apple products, our home computer is a Mac, I have an iTouch (which I won but probably would have bought) but work revolves around windows and blackberry and those are big parts of my digital life.

I am going to love my iPad for personal use, consuming content from browsing the web, reading books, playing games, watching videos, etc. But straight away i feel that this is a great tool for work as well. I have only had my iPad for 4 days, but I have already used it at two client meetings and sketched an outline of a solution I am putting together for a client (using sketchbook pro app). One of the meetings i had to be on the 3G network in downtown San Francisco, which was slow as a turtle which was disappointing but expected. The other i displayed a presentation in PDF format that i had emailed myself and it worked fine. Keynote is one of my next Apps that i need to download.

Aside from being a good tool for client meetings it is important for me to know and understand consuming media on a device such as this because it will go beyond the iPad to other devices and this will happen quickly. Our customers are already starting to aggressively ask about iPad solutions (especially for the executive set who tend to be early adopters and important consumers of our content delivery solutions). Lucky for me, because of our alignment with the digital content side of our consumer business (the folks that brought us the WSJ iPad app) we already are a few steps ahead of the game in delivering.

A recent Wall Street Journal article 'Businesses Add iPads to Their Briefcases' on how
"Some Companies, Which Barred the iPhone, Build Apps for Tablet Computer and Give Apple Gadget to Employees" points into the direction this will be going, hopefully i didn't jump the gun too early and miss the handing out of iPads by corporate? (ok ok i would just have two :-)

Note: I had to jump on my computer to do some of the links, Blogger works but it could either be my inexperience with the iPad (e.g. copy and paste), or it is just not not optimized which i reckon will be the case with many sites and services on the web that do not have native Apps. i am ok with that.

This afternoon, I was looking for some good business intelligence use cases as i worked on a client presentation on integrating external news, financial data, social media and internal business data to create what i am calling a 'one-page' executive leadership view and I came across this video presentation on the 'History of Business Intelligence' by Nic Smith.

Nic is a senior marketing manager for business intelligence solutions at Microsoft and obviously has some killer presentation skills. Definitely worth the 10 minutes- including a couple of chuckles.


Where did i start my search? Slideshare of course. A great resource of smart people, with excellent presentation skills that feel that sharing with the community is more beneficial then hording their knowledge. thanks folks.

If you are a longtime reader of my blog, you know that i have been writing about the intersection of consumer information tools and the enterprise since early 2006 and that the topic is one that is very dear to my heart- so i am very pleased to annouce this new ebook today.

Although it seems like only yesterday, it was in early winter of 2007 that the title of our new ebook 'The Conversational Corporation' came to mind based on an on-site visit to Sun Microsystems with Robert Scoble, Greg Merkle and myself, three of the four authors of our newest ebook 'The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise'. The fourth author Shel Israel was brought in later on when Robert suggested that we use this ebook as a follow-up to their Naked Conversations book published in 2006 that was focused on Social Media, especially blogging for mostly a corporate audience (and what a difference it made in corporate blogging- i know i personally gave over 20 customers copies!!). In addition to the previous collaborations with Robert, Shel had also been doing a lot of work with Enterprise companies and had interviewed more than 300 people in 38 countries on social media’s impact on culture and business that we were lucky enough to leverage for this ebook.

In the ebook which is available for free download, we look at ways that corporate employees are communicating and collaborating, and we discuss their impact on the 'Corporation'—particularly on the changing expectations of customers and employees. I am a believer that there is a very true intersection between business and social media in today's enterprise employee toolkit that is needed for their day to day work and i think that the ebook does a good job of outlining some of these opportunities.

Out of that session (the image is from the whiteboard that day), Robert's “Starfish Approach” is covered and it is a concept that i have been sharing with customers that certainly resonates with them as they begin to put together an information strategy that uses multiple tools : “...like a starfish, your organization should be able to grow, adapt and even abandon new tools (“legs”) without threatening the health of the larger organism”.

The ebook took a while to publish due to various issues (mostly time constraints on 4 plus people's schedules!) and even this weekend as I reviewed the final version there are many things that i would have liked to add which i will cover here on this blog in the upcoming weeks. The original idea was to do a themed design like my 'Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise' ebook, the layout for this ebook however is simple- but hopefully you find the content and the ideas we explore useful and valuable enough to 'start' the conversation about how you can create a "Conversational Corporation' within your own companies.

We look forward to your thoughts and ideas on how to enable and drive a 'Conversational Corporation'- Enjoy!

Additional photos from the session (thanks to Carolyn Flynn) can be seen here.

Very similar to the possible benefits of the Semantic Web in what i like to call the research 'finding' environment in corporate enterprises and perhaps one of the most illustrative examples of the value of the Semantic Web i have seen in a while, this post titled Semantic Web in Education by Jason Ohler a professor of Educational Technology and Distance Learning at the University of Alaska paints a illustrative picture of some of the values end-users/consumers can derive from the Semantic Web. Flip it from an education research environment that Olhler is addressing to an enterprise finding environment and you have an interesting use case for why enterprises should look closely at the promise of the semantic web.

"One vision of a well-developed semantic web includes a search feature that would return a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report would draw from many sources, including websites, articles from scientific repositories, chapters in textbooks, blog dialogue, speeches posted on YouTube, information stored on cell phones, gaming scenarios played out in virtual realities-anything appropriate that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The report would consist of short sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from your research, with keywords identified and listed conveniently off to one side as links.

The information in the report would be compared, contrasted, and collated in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps associating these with political positions or contrasting research. Because the web knows something about you, it also alerts you to local lectures on related topics, books you might want to read, TV programs available through your cable service, blog discussions you might find relevant, and even local groups you can contact that are also focused on this issue. Unlike a standard report, what you receive changes as the available information changes, and you might have wiki-like access to add to or edit it. And because you told your agent that this topic is a high priority, your cell phone will beep when a significant development occurs. After all, the semantic web will be highly inclusive, providing a common language for many kinds of media and technologies, including cell phones. The net result, ideally, is that you spend less time searching and sifting and more time absorbing, thinking, and participating."

Starting in February, Christine Connors and I will be conducting a three part Webinar titled 'Discover the Semantic Web' that will address some of these enterprise specific opportunities to leverage the Semantic Web.

Image|Flickr|AlexBarros

Mike Gotta, an analyst at Burton Group published a good post on the Social Computing Magazine site that i recommend enterprises who want to take advantage of '2.0' check out. Gathered from his own client interactions on the topic, the article titled 'Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009' outlines a couple key topics and areas that business and IT decision makers should be aware of.

Specific items that caught my interest:

Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment" - Since early 2007 i have used the term 'Change Management 2.0' when addressing this subject. Buying/building a 'Web 2.0' tool and installing it within your existing infrastructure does not guarantee success-there are a lot of adoption items like for example social and generational issues in your Enterprise that one needs to be prepared in advance to address in order to be successful.

Social Platforms: Managing The Gap - Gotta's point is that organizations that have selected specific "tools to fill gaps in existing collaboration and content platforms" and are now faced with products that have "grown into mini-suites". This brings up issues of not only multiple technology implementations but of course issues around putting together a successful long term strategy around information management and findability.

Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision - The recent piece on ReadWriteWeb titled 'R.I.P. Enterprise RSS' specifically including all 70+ comments and all of Marshall Kirkpatrick's updates after the initial post (ah the beauty of the Blog platform!) is certainly a recent must read on the topic of Enterprise RSS. Gotta's points are relevant including his statement that although we use the term "RSS" we should be focusing on Atom because RSS is a dead-end and architecturally deficient. Regardless, one thing that also must be addressed is how to incorporate the features and use cases of using feed syndication into the common non-technical users mindframes in the Enterprise space.

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence- I think there are two sides (if not more!) of the analytics discussion. One is the value an organization can gain from actually doing it and the second how employees in the future will be 'rated' in some sort or other by their interactions and contributions to the company, their partners and their clients. Mostly everything in the Enterprise needs to be measured, especially if it is eating up operational capital- so Enterprise 2.0 tools are no different, it is just that we do not know what to measure or how. Peter Reiser's work at Sun Microsystems around 'Community Equity' is an interesting early look at how a large company is implementing and adopting analytics as part of their collaboration platforms.

Other highlights that i am always interested in that Gota includes; digital life and digital work convergence specifically around identity, standards for integration and interoperability (he highlights specifically Microformats) and record management specifically as a long term issue that might sound boring compared to all the other things he highlights but as we all know creating data in the enterprise has very different compliance issues then the consumer space.

Gotta also highlights some vendors to keep an eye on as well as open source alternatives that Enterprises should look into.

Image|Flickr|spike55151

This is a re-post from a post i just published on the Dow Jones Synaptica and Taxonomy Services Team Blog- Synaptica Central. It is based on real conversations i have been having with clients that they can have access to our taxonomy and metadata management tool as a service instead of a client hosted application (something i find not may are aware although it specifically states it on the bottom of our features list).

--------------------
The way companies are using software has been shifting- and if your head hasn't been in the clouds over the last few years i am sure you have noticed the shift to SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings and more services moving to the "cloud'. From The Economist's recent 14-Page Special Report on Corporate IT titled 'Let it Rise' focused on cloud computing, Microsoft's recent Azure announcement indicating an even bigger investment to moving services to the 'cloud', the recent discussions around Tim O'Reilly's post Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing , and of course discussions about the economics of cloud computing in today's world it is evident that these models- which are not really 'new'- are here to stay.




It is a little known fact- one that i am trying hard to ensure the marketplace knows, but Synaptica is available as a hosted application with complete access to most of all the features that are available (this includes access to robust Web Services). And just like the recent buzz in the marketplace, having access to Synaptica as a 'service' is something that recently we have been getting more and more requests about.

Who has interest in a Taxonomy and Metadata Management tool as a hosted model? Well it is not for everyone who has a need for a tool like ours, but for those who are interested it really varies. For example:

• Small to Medium, Corporate libraries or Product Manager/Marketing groups who are managing various taxonomies and do not have a lot of IT resources for bringing a tool in-house but can really benefit from a centralized taxonomy management tool that can be accessed via the internet securely by their global colleagues that work on the vocabularies collaboratively


• Companies that have an urgent need for a tool but don't have the resources to bring it in-house quickly at that specific point and chose a hosted model as a first phase to get their taxonomy development and deployment done


• Companies that perhaps have an technology architecture that is based on the LAMP Stack that Synaptica at this point can not fit nicely into


• Start-ups who are building a consumer service that requires a tool to manage their controlled vocabularies (e.g. product categories, navigation taxonomy etc.) but who do not have the IT infrastructure to host an application like Synaptica (e.g. most of their stuff is already in the 'cloud')

So with our hosted model, we can provide at whatever tier a company is at- an affordable and secure way to manage an important part of their business.

And the best part? Well coming in at the low-end, with access to a Synaptica hosted annual license (with full access to all editorial and administrative features including Web Services), you can basically choose to either use one of the premier taxonomy management tools in the marketplace or if you are so inclined- you can instead choose to spruce up your office by buying a Hyacinth Macaw Parrot, or perhaps you can buy one of your employees a nice baby shower gift like this blinged out Baby Pram or even update your office outside picnic patio area with the Kalamazoo Bread Breaker Two Dual-Fuel grill - yes, it really is your choice.

Like i have said before, if i am not planning and organizing some sort of event (personal or work related) i am not happy- perhaps i missed my calling as an 'events coordinator' or something.

On September 22nd from 2-6pm in Palo Alto, CA - Christine Connors the Director of Semantic Technology Solutions for Dow Jones and the Business Champion for Synaptica, will be leading a roundtable discussion on the subject of Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise.

Many of our Enterprise Customers have been asking us about semantic technologies and since Christine will be in town to present at Taxonomy Bootcamp in San Jose, we thought it would be a great time to schedule a roundtable discussion on the subject since our May scheduled one had to be canceled due to last minute scheduling conflicts.

Some of our previous roundtable events that i have coordinated have been very successful and have covered subjects such as Social Media Measurement and Folksonomies and Taxonomies in the Enterprise. This event will be at our Palo Alto office that also houses the local printing plant for The Wall Street Journal. This means that afterwards we get to do a special guided tour of the printing plant which is always a highlight for the attendees (and no matter how many times i do it - for me as well!).

The roundtable portion of the event will cover topics such as:

• What can Semantic technologies do for your organization?
• How can the Semantic Web help you in your job role?
• Where do you start and what are best practices?
• How do you “sell” Semantic web investment concepts internally?

I still have a couple of seats left at the table- so if you an individual at a company that is looking at using or are already using semantic technologies in your enterprise and are interested in coming to meet some of your fellow Bay area colleagues that are working on similar projects- please e-mail at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com or visit our registration page. {please no vendors or consultants at this time, the aim is to make this a BoF (Birds of a Feather) type of roundtable}

If you know of someone that might be interested in the topic please feel free forward this post to them.

Also- if you are interested in just the tour part of the printing plant i might be able to squeeze in a couple of additional people- please drop me a line.