The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 71 - 1 May 2012
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In This Issue
Forbes' Guidelines for ESN Adoption
ACM TechPack: BI and Data Management
Conferences in Europe
Real-Time Operations
SharePoint Competition
Seen Recently
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Forbes: 10 Guidelines for Choosing an Enterprise Social Network
This Forbes article may not break new ground, but it's a good list of adoption issues. The word "choosing" in the title seems to imply recommendations about specific networks, which is not the case. The guidelines are about ensuring success by recognizing and addressing key non-technical challenges
ACM TechPack: Business Intelligence and Data Management
The ACM BI/DM TechPack is a collection of references to books and articles, with analysis by experts. Topics include data warehousing, data quality, data governance, metadata management, unstructured data, and business and information system architectures.
The papers referenced in the TechPack are made available for free to members of the ACM. 
Spring in Europe: Conferences are Blooming

It's this time of the year, when several software-related conferences happen in interesting locales in Europe. Of note: 

Innovation and Support for Real-Time Operations
If your responsibilities include enabling and supporting any kind of real-time operatiions, especially in an industrial context (process plants, refineries, etc.) you should read a paper presented at the Society of Petroleum Engineers' Intelligent Energy 2012 conference at the end of March. Entitled "Transforming IT to Innovate and Support Real-Time Operations Globally," and co-authored by six people from Schlumberger, it provides a wealth of well-illustrated examples and advice.

SPE members should be able to get the paper for free as part of their membership, or can download it from the link above for a nominal fee. Non-members can buy the paper at the same site for $25, or can get it for free after joining the Intelligent Energy "Vision 2020" Web site (click on the "SPE Papers" tab). 
More SharePoint Competition
Yes, you can still meet people who say "we don't use SharePoint." But while there is a market for alternate suites or combinations of tools that support document sharing and collaboration, few have achieved anything close to the same ramp-up and penetration, at least in large enterprises.
Sharepoint came at the problem from a document and database sharing angle, i.e. the Lotus Notes/Domino space, and has been struggling to add a social dimension to it. Its profiles, blogs and wikis were initially weak, and are still criticized for their relative lack of ease of use, functionality, and performance.
Yammer, one of the best-known "enterprise social network" (ESN) providers, is moving in the opposite direction. Coming from a social collaboration starting point, it is adding file management through its acquisition of OneDrum, a rather obscure UK software company. Meanwhile, its users are grumbling about the lack of administrative controls, leaving CIOs unable to choose what new features their users get to see.
As mentioned in an earlier issue, Igloo Software took yet another tack: this Canadian collaboration-in-the-cloud provider was largely founded by ex-employees of Documentum, who included document management capabilities such as versioning and checkin-checkout from the start.
Seen Recently...

"Security is inherently different from other aspects of computing due to the presence of an adversary. "

-- ACM announcement for a cybersecurity on-demand webinar,

in what must be a puzzling statement to many CIOs

as they count their (internal) adversaries in all their projects