Semantic Web - What's the future hold?

I came across the video below which looks at the concept of the semantic web, describes the semantic web and then looks at some of the human factors around the semantic web - looking at the question - "should there be an ontology?" There are the purist who think of course there will be an ontology and then there are the pragmatic folks who believe the relationships may be more "scruffy" where there is a blending of structured ontology and more "personalised" ontologies.

While this video looks at this issue from a "global" web community, the same types of dynamics can be seen across an enterprise. There are people who believe everything can be neatly categorised and that the relationships between the data and categories can be mapped in a manner that will provide a tidy, clear, precise depiction of the enterprise and all the entities within it. It seems to me to be human nature to try and put everything inside boxes, but we don't all see the same boxes or the same connections between the boxes. In order for information to be to be found in a user-friendly manner, the search parameters need to match the individual user's construct of the world, which may have similarities with the majority of other users but is also likely to have differences. How then do we make the vast amounts of information being produced by the enterprise easily discoverable? A structured ontology may provide a starting point but how do we get down to the user-based view of the world?

I'm not sure how is the web going likely to grow from it's manually integrated information paradigm of today. While new technology will cause some level of change, a major influence is the way people interact with the web and make use of the technology already available. People have a knack for finding work-arounds and coming up with interesting ways of using tools. What does the future hold?

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

EA to facilitate change

This Enterprise Architecture Gartner report states:

"Decisions may be heavily influenced by a business context and the organisation’s business landscape, people and politics, future state vision and experience. Regardless of the approach, EA must facilitate change. The key is to create, not the perfect or elegant architecture for the moment, but the most adaptable architecture for the future"

Which in my opinion is a great goal for EA - to facilitate change, to be adaptable and not to get into a vicious circle of defining an architecture down to the nth degree. This links back to a question of when do you know you've done enough? I don't think the answer lies in the question of when is enough enough, but rather in being more aware of how the products from EA are being used and adapting the EA work to assist the business in planning change. I have often seen great initial deliverables that have helped the business down a journey. But these first successes are followed by a split where the EA team goes off based on that outcome to try and create the elegant architecture and the business trots off in another direction to work on the organisational change management and when this happens EA loses its relevance.

I do wonder if some of this is due to short sighted EA consultancies looking to stay engaged with the ICT-side of the house, because in most organisations this is the organisation that has bought off on at least exploring the EA path. This easier path to a longer engagement results in spending time creating products that may not be relevant at the end of the day. As 10cc wrote:

"Art for arts sake, Money for gods sake
Money talks so listen to it, Money talks to me
Anyone can understand it, Money can’t be beat oh no
When you get down, down to the root
Don’t give a damn don’t give a hoot
Still gotta keep makin the loot"

This type of thinking may end up with people losing patience with EA efforts and considering them irrelevant. EA really needs to bridge ICT with other business support organisations and business operations to show relevance to all. By being engaged with all aspects of the business, in other words 'the enterprise', and being flexible in your EA approach based upon where the business is exploring change, EA will show value by being able to facilitate that business change.

Social is the Enemy of Business

Came across this and thought it would be good to post.


How will this reversal impact on enterprise alignment?

Social Media - What persona is appropriate where?

In a recent blog in TalentedApps, Amy Wilson explored how communication methods used at work vary from communication with friends, even when the people you are communicating with are the same people.

The selection of which social networking tool to use when and how, as well as what persona you display in each network, affects how people put together a picture of you. Some people will be connected through only one network but many may be connected across multiple networks and they get a broader picture of your life.

How does this access to our multiple personae impact our relationships? This is something each of us needs to come to terms with for ourselves. There are many organisations spreading warnings about the security of social networks and how much information a person who wants to exploit that material may find on the web. It is up to each of us to be informed and make our decision as to how much of our lives we wish to share with our networks, which networks should be kept internal to an organisations, which to expand into the realm of global access and which of your networks intersect and how. I am just starting my journey down this path and exploring my use of tools like facebook, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, blogger so I will keep you posted on my findings.

Digital Citizenship Awareness - Impact on Workplace?

I have been surfing around looking at the concept of digital citizenship and how social media is being used to increase awareness of digital ethics and acceptable behaviours. I particularly like this short video that looks at the choices a person has on-line. How their digital persona will behave.




What does this mean for the enterprise? As I noted in a previous post that looked at my son's behaviour with all things digital, digital natives just expect technology to be there, to work and to enable them to discover, create, and collaborate and we need to take this into account when offering services. But another aspect is that digital natives will be exposed to and likely taught what it means to be a "good digital citizen" at school, and it will be interesting to see how this will change the work environment both in the digital and analogue environment.

IHE - Information Integration in Healthcare. What can other industries learn from their experiences?

I'm currently doing research related to an electronic health records solution and I'm looking at the IHE initiative to integrate the healthcare enterprise. As I go through the processes, profiles and frameworks the problems that the healthcare industry are trying to resolve are very similar to other industries that I have worked with but the approach to integration seems more pragmatic than I have experienced elsewhere.

The frameworks look at sharing of information where there are multiple standards for information exchange as well as terminology. The proposed solutions do not put all the eggs in the "single standard" utopia. To quote one of the presentations on the IHE website:

"IHE provides a standard process for implementing multiple standardsimplementing standards"

The process looks at the realities of working in an environment with multiple authorities across regions (state/provincial, national) each with their own systems (electronic and paper) and their own political pressures around provision of service, privacy and managing costs.

It's an interesting problem space with much different drivers than integration in the financial sector or other largely commercial industries. I look forward to going through the lessons learned and the plans for the future.

Visualisation and Mash-ups with Social Media - Where could this take us?

This post has the theme of decision making in today's world of social media. What is the impact of social networks and data mash-ups and visualisations of their content on decision making?

The post on Talented Apps looks at the role of humans in the network the concept of balancing the size of the network (the number of the participants) and the voice of the individual.

A recent post Harvard Business Review: Four Ways of looking at Twitter demonstrates how trends can be pulled from social networks. Another post Tech Crunch: Five Ways to Mix, Rip and Mash your Data. provides an overview of tools that can be used to build agents to bring together information from RSS feeds and other sources giving people more tool sets to gauge information flow.

But what does popularity in tweets or RSS Feeds mean?

I find myself tossing between two quotes:

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
- George Bernard Shaw

and

"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause." - P.J. O'Rourke