A software TESARAC

Extracts from "A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS" by Dave Pollard.

• Rather than using a document submission process or enabling automated knowledge harvesting, as occurs in many organizations today, the individual would simply post to his or her personal weblog all of the documents that would normally be placed in the individual's filing cabinet or saved to the My Documents or Sent E-mails folder.
• An enterprise-wide interface would be developed to index and publish each individual's posts to the company's Intranet. This interface would allow posting of entire documents, or just document titles or links, and would allow the user to specify whether each post could be viewed by anyone in the company, or selected communities only, or (for confidential information) no one at all.
• The Intranet would then archive all posts by account, project and/or subject, using the enterprise's taxonomy or an automated taxonomization tool. Newsfeeds and articles purchased from external vendors could be similarly archived.
• The individual employee would be able to extract knowledge from the Intranet using a variety of tools:
  By subject, using a browsable table of contents or catalogue
  By keyword, using a search engine
  By subscription to any additions to documents on a particular account, project or
  subject
  By subscription to any additions to another person's weblog
  By subscription to any additions in a specific category on the weblog of any person in a
  specified community.
• The knowledge culture change program of the company could be simplied to "Publish Your Filing Cabinet".

• The employee would author or amend documents, e-mails etc. using an HTML-capable text/document processor (most commercial weblog tools include one, and allow simple posting from most other processors).
• Rather than Saving to File or Sending documents, the employee would Post each document to his or her weblog. If necessary, documents could be indexed by the company's taxonomy, and access restrictions specified, at the moment of posting.
• 
  The employee would access knowledge from the Intranet, Extranet, Internet, peers and external vendors from his or her weblog home page, using any of the following tools:
  
  Table of Contents of the individual's weblog, or the enterprise-wide Intranet (browsing)
  
  Search Engine to search the individual's weblog, the enterprise-wide Intranet, the public Internet, or the pertinent categories of all the weblogs of a particular community
  
  The News Aggregator for automatic feeds of external vendor and public Internet news, publications, others' weblogs and new posts to the Intranet on specific subjects, to which the employee has 'subscribed'
  
  The BlogRoll, to link directly to others' weblogs or send an e-mail to canvass others in one's community

The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality.

Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.

Fantastic point! The world of the semantic web and metadata. It is almost more important to know how to find information that the information itself. If done correctly, these "links" can mimic people in your enterprise and getting to content is simply a manner of connecting through the people/links until you get the information you need - even if that means gathering no information during each hop.

Each employee thus defines his or her own taxonomy (the same way each employee currently decides how to organize and index his or her own filing cabinet and My Documents folder). Each employee defines his or her own communities (by who is included in the BlogRoll), so communities truly become self-organizing and self-managed.

I made the point in a previous post that i agree with this 50% of the time. However, i do feel that an imposed, yet transparent structure can be very powerful. If your entire team are working on a given project, you want to make sure the union on your posts equals 1 set of collected posts and not a set of distributed posts. equally, there should be some kind of network between those of you on a project, those of you across of the nework working on similar areas and such. Transparency is the key however.

Culturally, these two features of a weblog-based content architecture are hugely advantageous, because they turn control over the management and sharing of knowledge to individual employees, allowing them to organize knowledge in accordance with their personal mental models (the way they think and learn), and allowing them to retain pride in and responsibility of ownership of their personal knowledge 'stocks'.

This is where i fully agree that a lower level dynamic web has to operate. However i wonder if this may work better as a community - i.e. the ability to organize not only your own ideas, but others as well. Build better knowledge together.

The advantages of this architecture are therefore:

• Much more knowledge is codified and available for sharing (including sharing with customers via Extranets)
• Knowledge is kept more current and complete
• The context of knowledge is more apparent and hence richer
• Knowledge is easier to find
• Less centralized Intranet management and technology is needed
• Evaluation of individuals' contribution to organizational knowledge is easier to gauge
• Less effort is needed to persuade individuals to share knowledge
• Communities of practice can develop spontaneously and flexibly
• Peer-to-peer knowledge transfer (the most valuable kind in most organizations) is facilitated, and new knowledge is automatically 'pushed' to 'subscribers' on a timely basis

# posted by weblivz : 12:46 PM