thinkIntranet Strategic Intranet Management

I thought DeFrag on the whole was worthwhile - although I would have preferred much more time to brainstorm (forced to brainstorm, I guess) with attendees. I got the sense that the panel participants were not necessarily a whole lot smarter than the attendees in the audience. I was also bothered by the nonstop microblogging. I mean, guilty, as I got sucked into it (I hadn’t really microbloged before, so I was playing around with it) .. but come on - you come all the way to Denver to listen and pay attention - not to stare are your laptop. I think old bad habits die hard, and microblogging is just a worsening of the whole ADD problem with social technologies.

Making data accessible to all / using tools to maniuplate, analyze, view, publish are within reach.

The coming exaflood
3 trends:
Data moving to the cloud
Data being fragmented through APIs
Usability becoming a focus for data tools

Standards and best practices:
The programmable web (www.programmableweb.com)
API and activity streatm aggregators: GNIP
 friendfeed

Democratizing access to data - need to talk about who is using what - excel still most ubiquitous database on the planet.
Innovation: Vertica, hadoop, cloudera

Decentralization and democratization of information work
Where are the YouTube and WordPress for data? —> Freebase, Swivel

Interesting discussion during keynote2 about the responsibility of leaders at DeFrag (and beyond) to understand or illuminate the data problems that were underlying the current financial crisis. How could we build better perspectives/views into situations that are dangerous, unravelling, wrong…
soundbytes:
“It’s time to create information that matters…”
Discussion of a problem of trust and information sources and why nobody was catching what was going on in this space.
“…part of the problem the ability to extract signal from noise … “
“The metaphor for tools we use is breaking down..”
book: “normal accidents”
Discussion around empowering the individual, increasing individual responsibility and shift from listening to acting -

Interesting how this maps to social networking expectations - where the behavior of the individual is about being more empowered and responsible to comment - what if the approvers on the font line of mortgage co’s where able to share their thoughts about how these crazy mortgages were being approved? (ref article about WaMu brokers) - what if we all saw that?

what we need to do:

First keynote from day 1 of Defrag - located in Denver. William Duggan, author of “Strategic Intuition” presenting his idea of how inspiration happens - - an interesting and thought provoking take on how we create and innovate, using examples from history and deconstructing the process to make the case. The main idea is that intuition, inspiration, new ideas and innovation happens as a normal function of the human mind; the brain synthesizes historical experience, prior art, examples from non-related activity - adding resolve and using presence of mind to stay open and aware of where these pieces are.

It’s late at night, and I’m trying to set up a Live Meeting for a call that I’m holding in a couple of weeks. The steps leading up to this event were a good sign of how collaboration can happen at J&J - if you know where to look… I used a nascent tool called LINK (Leveraging Internal Knowledge) which runs on Tacit - LINK trawls your, and other participants’, email to come up with a match for the query that you have.

So I used LINK to find out who around the company is struggling with eroom migrations (see my blog post on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum’s blog: J&J Collaboration: SharePoint migration plans).

I got some great responses from around the globe and we agreed to hold a meeting using LiveMeeting to exchange information.

That’s where the trouble started.