Enterprise Information Catalogue Another Way

Enterprise information organization another way

By Victor Zhang

Jun. 2009

The prerequisite

Firstly let’s make clear what will talk about. We focus on:

Information used within an enterprise wide. Not for social hobby or interest groups

And target is how to aggregate , share , and access the information among our colleagues for business purpose.

By enhancing the findability to improve the collaboration in various scopes such as teams, department, branches etc.

Target objects focused on unstructured data, documents and applications

The popular way at present

Taxonomy;

Folksonomy; Enterprise social bookmarking; Semantic web; Ontology

Content management(CMS); Document management system(DCS);

Enterprise information portal; Central repository;

SOA

Mashup

The nutshell

Methodology

Top-down or centralized

Taxonomy, EIP, central repository

Bottom-up or decentralized

Folksonomy; Social bookmarking

Integration level

Specific, such as tag cloud;

Integrated, with CMS,DCM,Security integrated into one platform such as EIP

Federated, such as mashup, SOA and some EIP

Any other choices?

Technically NO. We have worked out so many technologies and facilities to handle information

But we can think our information another way. Not from how we create and store the information, but from the target—how will we use the information in enterprise, with the typical use cases. Then we may get something new out of it

OK, let’s first dig in the information itself

Information

What’s information? I define it as any systems that can support our daily work

Information is a facility rather than the detailed format or its data stores

So a document, a web page, a print-out, a contact, an application, or even an idea in someone’s head will be information as long as they are meaningful and will be used to fulfill a task.

Information – The target

Information is used to

Present any assigned or required job/task deliverables

Such as an analysis report, the information herein will be a document

Or any necessary parts that will assist to work out the deliverables

For example if you want to work out a report, you may need to access some contact points, reference to some SOP or guidelines

It’s chained by many typical processes to fulfill the tasks

An example—Access card

Let’s use a very simple case, you want to apply an access card to some working areas in your company

The typical process to conduct it is:

You figure out the procedure on how to apply it

Then you start to apply it

Then wait and query the result

Then use the card access the areas

Is the case simple? Yes, but let’s see what information you will need on hand

You figure out the procedure on how to apply it

Then you start to apply it

Then wait and query the result

Then use the card access the areas

The card access procedure

The application system (HR intranet, or just fill-out of a form)

The contact point, where to request

Your personal information (background, organization)

The application where to query

The contact point where to get the card

Some guidelines how to use it, the attentions, awareness

The guideline on how to renew it if expires

An example—Access card cont.

The current way how information stored and maintained

The card access procedure

The application system (HR intranet, or just fill-out of a form)

The contact point, where to request

Your personal information (background, organization)

The application where to query

The contact point where to get the card

Some guidelines how to use it, the attentions, awareness

The guideline on how to renew it if expires

\FileServerHRProcAccessCardApplicationHowToApply.doc

Http://intranet/AccessCard/Apply.htm

??? Ask HR or department assistant or you colleagues ???

??? Where to find organization chart and code ???

Http://intranet/AccessCard/QueryProgress.htm

??? Should I ask the same person when submit the application ???

http://sharepoint.company.com/HR/Guidelines/HowToUseAccessCard.aspx

http://sharepoint.company.com/HR/Guidelines/HowToRenewAccessCard.aspx

The current way on how to apply the access card with information

\FileServerHRProcAccessCardApplicationHowToApply.doc

Http://intranet/AccessCard/Apply.htm

??? Ask HR or department assistant or you colleagues ???

??? Where to find organization chart and code ???

Http://intranet/AccessCard/QueryProgress.htm

??? Should I ask the same person when submit the application ???

http://sharepoint.company.com/HR/Guidelines/HowToUseAccessCard.aspx

http://sharepoint.company.com/HR/Guidelines/HowToRenewAccessCard.aspx

Ask some one Scan with hundred search result web pages Ask some one Ask some one Scan with hundred search result web pages Ask some one Scan with hundred search result web pages Scan with hundred search result web pages

Issues of current way

Even with all kinds of file servers, or even with intranet such as sharepoint portal, even just want to do a simple task…

Users have to wander in the jungle of different data stores, URLs and ask different peoples

For the card application case to collect all the eight parts of information, suppose each information you need five minutes to find, it will be 40 minutes to get them all. That’s just for information sourcing, you don’t even start to kick off for a single step for the application

And moreover

You may be unlucky to get each information at the first shot

Others may get annoyed to be asked again and again for your questions

The version of the information you get may not be the up-to-date, otherwise you will waste a lot of time at the wrong way

Some of the information may not be documented at all and you can not find it on company data store

What about existing solution

The first thing come up to your mind may be the enterprise information portal or EIP

But two problems along with it:

Normally the EIP need all related information stored on a central repository or server, it’s hard to access with high performance

It’s hard to tailor-made to each business unit’s special requirement

Chances are after some time of the implementation there are lot of out-of-data information stuffed on the portal

What’s the root cause?

The granularity of information. This is the most important that people will overlook

People normally want the information related to a job or task as integrated, detailed and comprehensive as possible, it will make job more operable

On the other hand different types of information snippets have different characteristics in terms of stability, useful-life, importance, target users, ownership and security requirements

And normally we just treat them the same way and pack them into a single document or an application. And that will make the whole system hard to keep updated and agile to align with the frequent change

How-to-apply-access-card

General procedure on application

Special instructions of your dept

Contact point to submit request

System where to input request

System to query status

Contact point to get access card

System to renew your card

Guide on how to report missing

An example—the same case Stable and universal Variable based on different department Variable based on different location/branch Stable and universal May be various for different branches May be various for different branches Stable and universal Variable based on different location/branch

What’s the problem then?

Even for a single task the different pieces of related information may have different effective scope, different target users and different update frequency and then we have trouble with it:

If put them into one system—no matter a single document or an application or a portal—The whole information will be hard to maintain. Who is the owner? The corporate level administrator? Easy for them to maintain the high level policy but hard to grasp and keep updated of the department or branched based information. If delegate to certain department then even harder to extract the information from peer departments

If chop the information into different pieces then from an end user perspective how do they get the whole picture of all information related to that task?

The dilemma

If we put all task based information into one pack it will be hard to maintain

If we divide it into different sub-parts the users have to surf different systems to re-assemble the scattered pieces

The possible solution

Get the missing part back.

We separate the information chunk into reasonable granularity—to the extent that is easy and flexible to maintain

And we also provide the end user a way to customize the components into a meaningful view

The federated way

Decentralized content management, let the owner to care about the versioning;

Centralized catalogue based on target user groups(teams, departments, branches etc)

The final target of the system

Information aggregation & sharing , findability , usability and customization .

We want to pack the information based on business topic,unit and location, Then put the indexing catalogue(not the information itself) onto a place that can be easily shared and found by those who only work closely with us such as our team members

Aggregation & sharing

When talking about sharing we often think about to put everything that we need to share onto a company wide central place such as EIP

But when think about sharing twice there will be different requirements:

Some information you just want to share within your team or department such as SOP, job procedures, guidelines

Some information need to be shared at branch level such as the office location, layout, meeting rooms

And some information such as corporation level policies, news and events need to be accessed by all staff

So sharing information is not only enabling others to approach but to what scale of target user communities

Findability

This is the ultimate goal for my system.

The information is not easy to be found by others is useless.

But findability does NOT mean the information should be able to be easily found and accessed throughout enterprise wide. Chances are 99% of information created by someone just make sense to his or her team members.

People are always proud of their enterprise search engine or EIP because just by one click of keyword search, millions of information will flood to you – no matter which department or branch they are from. Is that cool? No.

When talk about findability, please bear in mind, the less is more

Usability

What does it mean about usability?

Likely the shared or published information will be used by others besides the creators, or themselves later time in the future. So without clear and enough descriptive you may forget what that information is even you can find it.

Besides the description the information must be retrieved and presented to target users with bundled with other related information

Customization

Information can be stored centrally, or at least the information map can be maintained centrally. But it should not be presented to the users with a mixed-up way;

Each user should have a tailor-made information window which filter on most useful information to that user with the unit of team or department. Otherwise it is useless

Summary

Create a place where

Users can easily tag the information

And make the indexing system intuitive to retrieve and understand

A map or guide which can easily navigate the users to the information physical location

Light-weight to be quickly accessed centrally

How to? That’s the real question

Information physical location v.s. logical link

Due to traditional OS file system we normally think the information(or document) as the composition of data store and location together. Say for a security policy document you will think it as \FileServerFolderSecurityPolicy.doc;

But the physical location of a file is hard to remember and understand

And for physical location normally it has only one fixed path and it’s not easy to be reused for multiple purposes or topics;

So we create the concept ‘bookmarking’ or ‘tagging’

I call the book mark as logical(or soft) link in contrast with the file’s physical location

Information logical link

Easy to understand the logical link based on bookmark or tag

Normally it has several characteristics

The pointer to physical information location

The brief description to help people to understand the content

By involving logical link we untie the limitation of information from its physical location and can reference the same information to multiple topics where needed

People can retrieve information based on intuitive description rather than obscure file name and lengthy path

Logical link to information chunk

Information logical link is nothing new but tagging or bookmarking stuff. And we can roll it up to a higher level—The information chunk

A information chunk is a group of logical links which make up of a meaningful topic. And moreover it has some more additional properties:

The name of the chunk, the description as context of the group information

The keyword or tag property for retrieval

The release status(draft or release)

The date stamp

The access control to decide who can use or view the tag

By presenting end users information as chunk format with necessary context background rather than single information we can improve the findability and readabilty

Information chunk--Sample

Say when we want to organize the about company email system we can have it as below:

Chunk name: Email system

Detailed logical links involved:

1) Where to get the email client and how to setup it

2) How to get account

3) Where to get support

4) Company email codes

5) Special distribution list of your department

And for each detailed link we can point them to the exact information location such as a document on share-drive, or a web page on intranet, or just brief free text etc.

We can freely tailor-make the content in the chunk based on our requirement without caring about too much details about where the physical files are located

Why does information chunk and logical link matter

Maybe everybody will mock the simple idea, it’s nothing but bookmark; But think it twice, the most important is the granularity of information.

By separating the information’s physical location with its logical link and group the link set into the chunk we provide end user a proper granularity to freely organize the information based on logical topics;

For different pieces of information items in a chunk they have different characteristics to maintain. Some is stable but some is frequent to be updated; Some owned by your team but some owned by other department;

Imagine the normal cases when you have created a huge document which includes every aspects of a topic but some section may be frequent to change, and 90% of the time the big document is in the status of out-of-date; Nobody is interested to use the document because you are not sure if it’s up-to-date

Information chunk and Enterprise information map

Information physical path to logical link; Logical link to topic based chunk; Let’s head up to a larger vision, information chunk up-link to department information asset library, then to branch and finally to corporation level information map, we can get a holistic view of what information hot spots the enterprise has.

With the holistic view different level of management can easily browse information asset based on the composition of:

The business unit(division, BU etc)

The location of each branch

The topic based information chunk maintained by each department(Division@Branch)

For example the top management can easily locate all related information of operational job standards or procedure of R&D department at New York branch

Enterprise information map--diagram Any share drive \BranchADeptOneFunc1.1 \BranchBDeptTwoFunc2.1 Any intranet portal http://team1.sharepoint.company/PolicySet/Summary.htm http://intranet.company.com/HR/holidayPlan/2009/ Any internet resources http://www.internet.com/product.php http://www.techsite.org/ Or even any print-out Bulletin on BranchA gate One Any critical knowledge in some people’s memory Jack know how to solve a type of complex tech issue How to get email client Where to get email account Where to get support of email Email codes Job A standards or guideline Job B standards or guideline Tech field one Reference info Tech field two Reference info News and event of dept A News and even of dept B Branch A football Club info Email 360—How to Job standards and procedures Company events and news Recreations and clubs Department A Department B Department C Company BU entities Topics/Info chunk Logical links Physical info locations

Nutshell

From my viewpoint the most difficult part on how to catalogue and share the information within an enterprise is:

The fixed physical location of information entity is hard to understand and reuse by multiple purpose or use case

The information topic outlining or hierarchy is hard to build with easy to customize to target user’s requirement and at the same time flexible to change

By introducing the concept of information logical link, information chunk, topic based information organization we can a practical balance between the information accessibility, granularity, findability

It’s nothing new in terms of technology but just the composition of the proper function to typical use case

OK, let’s have a glance at the software itself

First, how I do my daily job with the system

First I collected all management hotspots and list them on one page. Then source all related materials and tag them under the corresponding topic. Thus I've a platform by which I can review my team's daily job with an integrated picture more than ever.

Then I share the platform with the other team members and that will help them to find whatever materials, facilities, tools, information they will use for concrete job. Think what happened then? Now everybody can do their job efficiently without asking my guide or help. They know where to find the standards, policies and the involved facilities. I can wash my hand to standby for daily job. Everybody is happy, I'm out-of repeatedly baby-sitter stuff and they are clear what to do and how to do. And most of the time of my daily job is to communicate with other teams for project based solution, review the management topic map to see what we are missing and where we can make it better. When some new game rules setup I just tag or patch them onto the tree and my people will automatically use the new version even without notifying them.

Screen shots of the topic of my department As you can see I group all hot spots that I think is important to my team’s work into six categories, they are my team’s function and goals or values, the organization chart, various standards/policies/methodologies for job, facilities used for job, plans/logs/records of job, and finally the training and staff career path stuff. They are just brought based my perspective but most of them are common to general management and operation. Then I dig into each group and fill the detailed topics under each. For example for sub-group 04.02 Job standards/procedure… I added four topics and they are corresponding to different fields or services we are now engaging

Drill down sample of one topic group Now we have two trade BPO projects. For each project we have two topics one is for all kinds of support process how-tos and another is for project background for further reference.

Further detail of a topic—the information chunk Then for each topic we have some information that need to highlight, for example for one topic we have seven types of jobs need to fulfill. And finally for each information we will consolidate operational sub-information that will be used for my team member to do their daily jobs. And we use the information logical link to chain them up When user right click some topic then all useful related soft links will be unfolded. They are not concrete information such as files on share-drive or sharepoint portal. Instead they are just the links or tags which will automatically navigate my people to touch the final information. So that’s the true trick or advantage. A project will involve multiple parties with multiple information hosts and various medias or storage. No one single medias or application will host all the needed information and suit everybody’s requirement. Take the the highlighted one as sample we do have a project sharepoint portal but it’s for high level use for PMO. And we have to store some material on our own share-drive, But from soft link viewpoint they are listed the same format under a logical topic no matter where and how the exact files are stored

The topic organization and dispatching And after digging in the topics I found something more interesting, now that the management topic are comparatively stable and universal so we can deploy or spread it to more departments and more branches easily. Just imagine the enterprise are composed by three key factors: The locations, the division(or group), and the functions or target of each department. Then I setup a bigger picture which involves all of them into that. Please see pictures below:

As you can see through my system the enterprise level administrator just fills out the locations of their branches, and the divisons or SBUs, then list all the management hotspots they think are critical, then the management topics will be cloned or copied to each of departments(I think department = Divison at some Branch). Then no matter which division or where the staffs are working at when they logon to the system all the highlighted management or operational topics will be listed. There will be no concrete information under each topic for the initial stage but it will guide the corresponding management to think the how-tos based on the syllabus. That will make their department running clearly and effectively.

Will that limit the creativities or styles of each manager? No because the system just provide a framework or matrix of common management topics, it has no concrete implementation so they can fill out the leafs based on their situation as-is. For example, both A department and B department have the topic ‘Job tools  IT facilities’ to implement, Dept A has a powerful intranet portal to support some kind file share so they can input the leaf node as the portal’s URL, while at the same time B has no portals or even no share drives, and they can just input as simple text: ’We use cabinet No. 32 at the end of the corridor to store SOP information, and the whiteboard at entry to show daily to-do-list’. As long as it’s clear and applicable to team members for use I think both departments have good management in terms of that aspect. You do not need always to pursue more advanced application to make your job professionally.

About enterprise topic organization

Holistic view of your enterprise information Another advantage of the system is that for executives they will have the chance to look inside how the subordinate divisions run their daily job with a closer sight than ever. Besides all kinds of reports or meetings like traditionally the management team can just log into the system and view their BU based management topics or aspects. Please see below screen shot: Management team have multiple options or path to dig in the enterprise running status. One is by Location  Division  Management topics(It’s for top executives); Second is from the Division  Location  Management topics, it’s for all divisions or SUBs’ managers, they can view the implementation of each departments located at different branches.

View the information by BU And moreover management can view some interested topic based on different locations/divisions. Say if CIO is interested in the IT facilities of company’s department he or she will has the following view: Look at the screen copy if it’s of the topic what IT facilities and how we are using them clear? CIO can view that topic based on different branches and different departments which makes the comparision very easy. And similarly the PMO management can review project related topics throughout any department at any locations without asking local manager the details. And also for FA management the same way. By create such as management topic framework different type of management can easily investigate the running status of all corporation covered affiliates. They can view them by certain topics, or by location, or by division/SBU.

Interestingly we can compare it with the accounting system. By accounting system financial people do not instruct staffs how to run their business of each activities, but they create a series of catalogues and the behind procedures on how to capture each business activities into the system and finally enables the management to have a full picture on how their business is running in terms of financial benchmark. Likewise why don't we create such a picture for the information we use everyday? Analogy to financial accounting system

Some questions about the system (Q1)Do I think I’m the smartest guy that can take all critical management topics into the system at one time on my own? (A) That’s the best question, I can not work it out by myself and nor we can make it one size for all, in fact it’s a dynamically evolution system, each division, department or even each branches can raise the topics they think are important to them, so in the system we have a function that allows divisions to create their custom topic groups and combine them into the corporate standard or common topics. For example our IT support department find there should be staff leave record to cater to our working calendar, then we create that by ourselves and combine it into the legacy topic tree like below:

Some questions about the system- cont. Then when management review our department’s structure they will see that and can decide whether it should be a good practice to make it standard of corporate level, or should it be combine under other topics, or just leave it as is. Please study the following screen copy from management’s view; As you can see when navigating to branch Dalian  Department (SS)IT support service center the management will see a custom group with blue highlight. They can continue to dig-in what’s under that topic.

Some questions about the system- cont. (Q2)Is it applicable to all different departments to follow the same (management topic) map? <Of course not, as you can see in question #1 any department or division can add any topics which are important to them. But whatever it’s corporate standard or division customized they can be under monitoring by top management> (Q3)Can it replace the legacy IT facilities/infrastructure? <No, it does not contradict any existing IT applications or tools, in fact it sit on them and for the logical link of information it need to be stored in traditional storage such as share-drive or sharepoint portal etc. It’s a matrix which can organize those scattered information and present the end user a logically unified view from management topic perspective> (Q4)How about the security of company information asset? <Company information will be hosted in legacy applications, even people who has the right can see some department’s management framework they still need access to view the concrete files or records in target applications; And we have built-in function to segrate the topic view based on different BUs, departments or even teams> (Q5)What key advantage can different roles(front-line staff & managers, top management) expect to get out of the system? <For different level of management they can review the company’s management status based on different angles, also it provides them a baseline to optimize and refine the management details step by steps, otherwise all manager have to think about it by themselves from scratch. Also for people turnaround the successor have to spend a lot of time to gather all information and recreate the map on their own, it is really inefficient For front-line staffs it will be very clear for them to understand how they do their jobs and how the department is running, Also it’s pretty quick for them to search any critical information to fulfill their daily job. Our department is just a typical example, people do not waste time to source all kinds of details, contacts, URLs, instructions any more>

One more feature of the system Due to the limit of time I can only present part of the features of my product. At last let me introduce another key function of it. You know for typical Windows OS it has a Start menu on left bottom which can navigate the user to any installed applications. Likely we have another popup menu on the right bottom like below: Just by couple of clicks user can quickly find any operating information. I’ve to say this function make my everyday job easily and happy. Also it provides a quick info window which enable each user to choose any useful information based on their responsibility and assemble into a short-cut when, that will furtherly shorten their time to reach the target information, like below: Say if I’m a guy who doesn’t care about the organization and management stuff most of the time then I just pickup the Job standard/procedure and IT facilities related information and each time I can get my information within seconds. It’s the cool, right?

Summary I’m not a professional who has deep expertise or study in information access and search but just try to work out a tool which can facilitate my daily job and make it more happier. Nor I’m representing any company or trying to sell some kind of software to the folks. I just want to share with the others about my idea and welcome any type of discussion or study on this topic. You can contact me anytime via victor.reload@gmail.com