Why enterprise IM?

Facebook, that Web 2.0 phenomenon and favourite web site of the socially inept and the self obsessed, recently announced that it will launch a new instant messaging service for its users. The free service, imaginatively christened Facebook Chat, will allow users to IM each other from within the browser – no downloads required – but they won’t be able to message non-Facebook IM users, and there's no group chat function. It has been touted as a rival to more established public IM clients like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Microsoft Live, which are widely used in the enterprise, often under the radar of IT.

Now the role of IM in the enterprise has been a long-debated topic ever since the messaging system burst onto the scene in the form we know it today, somewhere back in the mid to late 90s. Information workers rightly see it as a productivity-enhancing tool for sharing and collaboration, but on the other side there are the IT enforcers and business managers who see public IM use as a potential security risk, a massive drain on productivity and a compliance risk.

The first two arguments can be pretty convincingly disputed. Security threats to public IM protocols have been relatively non-existent due to their being generally non-interoperable – the malware industry is economics-driven and if the potential group of infectees is relatively small, it's just not worth the hackers’ while. In terms of productivity too, while IM could be abused and used for idle chit chat when your staff really should be getting down to some work, its usefulness comes in those situations that call for a form of communication somewhere between a phone call and an email. Quick questions and clarifications are a perfect example; check the presence status of a name in your address book and fire off a query – no hanging around waiting for an email to come back or the socially-required procrastination of a phone conversation.

But compliance with laws and industry regulations is more difficult to ignore. Put simply, if firms don’t regulate and manage IM usage they could be in for some very large fines, or even worse. The head-in-the-sand approach adopted by many organisations, who seem nonetheless happy to profit from the productivity benefits of their staff using public IM, is not sustainable any longer. Firms need to accept their users are doing it and invest in enterprise-grade systems which will secure, monitor and more importantly, archive messages for any e-discovery purposes. And there's no shortage of options. Led by Lotus Sametime in the late 90s, and followed by Microsoft, Reuters Messaging, and other players like the French-based Process One, they offer enhanced functionality including interoperability with public IM clients, and multi-chat sessions for online meetings.

The alternative is, of course, to block it completely, but with some of the most important information shared within organisations via IM these days, this would fly in the face of good knowledge management. And it will become increasingly difficult to justify, as a new generation of workers who have grown up with the messaging system enters the workplace.

Second Life vs Real Life

Two recent encounters brought Second Life and real life into sharp contrast. And, it has to be said, on this particular occasion I preferred Second Life.

The idea behind my Second Life visit was to see if things had livened up at all in the last year or so. I headed for the library archipelago and was soon redirected to Info Island International where I met a bunch of interesting people who shared my interests.

Before long, I was off exploring their web presences and picking up interesting snippets. One link worth sharing is this one to a free profiling tool associated with the Groundswell book written by analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Gareth Otsuka (real life name Gareth Osler of Liverpool Libraries) tipped me off about the link, mentioning that it is in his library technology RSS feed. Cheers Gareth - nice feed.

Looking at my notes, I was amazed to find that I'd spent 35 minutes with Gareth and some of his colleagues and passers-by. Time passed quickly because of our common interests.

Contrast this with a physical gathering today. In theory, we all had an interest in 'social media'. But the engagement rules were very different. In Second Life, you can click on an avatar to find out about a person and choose not to engage, or move on without embarrassment. In real life you have to do it through conversation. But by the time you realise you want to be elsewhere, you're trapped.

Both environments rely on serendipity to work its magic but, in the case of Second Life, it's definitely aided and abetted by effective focusing and filtration mechanisms. And, assuming you have the graphics power and broadband width, Second Life scores because it also avoids the inconvenience of physical travel.

Feathering the Nest

MPs, they don’t do themselves any favours do they? Well, not that we know of – officially anyway, because as you have probably seen on the news there has been a High Court bid to block publication of expense costs for living in London following an ongoing Freedom of Information (FoI) request.

Based on the reticence to publish living expenses we could think the worst and presume that each MP spent the maximum amount, say £10,000 for a new kitchen and £6,335 for a new bathroom, all the way down to a £50 shredder (government is responsible with disposing of information carefully you see). The so called John Lewis list was compiled to act as a guideline to the maximum amount MPs can claim for their second homes.

Now admittedly an envious IWR will get pulled up before the boss if we try claiming a Grande rather than regular frothy mocha-frappe-latte (or what used to be known as a large rather than normal sized coffee) but I digress, the move to block the request by the Commons has come, they say, because of security issues relating to the publishing of home addresses. Well fine, don’t publish them then if that is the case.

However address details are not the issue here, rather why the Freedom of Information Act is being ignored and undermined at every step along the way? Assume for a moment each honourable member opted to max out the limit of their allocation, what exactly is there left to reveal? The BBC report the original FoI claim for expense details was made three years ago and it has been a battle to get the information published ever since.

What we should be asking is; How long do MPs spend in the Commons to warrant a fully furnished London pad? Is a hotel ever an alternative for members who don’t or can’t attend regularly? Does their attendance in Parliament or voting record reflect the need for a permanent dwelling? If expenses from the last three years are fully published and available for public consumption the argument being mooted is that MPs will then need a subsequent pay rise – why? Just buy the stuff and declare it. Stop hiding this information and be straight. It’s not as if MPs are expected to endure the IKEA experience at the weekend.

Have a look on www.theyworkforyou.com to see what activity your MPs past and present have been up to. Let us know what the results are. MPs will inevitably claim from the country more than the occasional cup of coffee, but stop wasting time, resources and Parliament’s reputation with this unending FoI evasion.

The black art of web science

I had the dubious honour of attending a recent IBM-hosted event on web science, where the great and the good gathered to explain how they are finding new ways of studying the web in all its complex glory. The Web Science Research Initiative was heavily represented at the event. This organisation was set up in late 2006 by the University of Southampton and MIT to promote the idea of an academic discipline, a “web science”, blending the sociological and the technical, and to lead in research, thought leadership and education. As Southampton Uni’s Wendy Hall said, the idea is not necessarily that they have all the answers but rather that they begin to formulate new methodologies for discovering them.

There was an awful lot of theorising going on, in particular by the arch web theoriser himself Tim Berners-Lee. He praised Google for enabling people to find stuff on the web, and discussed how the web of links developed, where success is based on how many sites yours links to and which ones link to you. And then came the semantic web; this is really Tim’s baby, and what he envisaged the web to be from the very start, where “the links aren’t the most important thing but the things on the other end of them”.

The semantic web has long been heralded as the future; it’s about having a web of data rather than a web of documents – which machines can process and make sense of. Creating a web which machines can understand in this way is going to take a while, but some organisations are already using these principles internally to organise and tag content in order help information workers find relevant information more easily. And now Yahoo has announced it is to embrace some semantic technology standards there seems to be a real sea change around how firms are organising and tagging their data assets.

The knock-on effects could be massive; not just for web search either, although this may well be the killer app the semantic web needs to jump into the mainstream. It could mean web search results actually become relevant – instead of returning a long list of results, the technology will be able to recognise the object being searched for and aggregate information around it.

Greenpeace slams Microsoft. Again.

Greenpeace has just published its seventh Guide to Greener Electronics. If you visit the website you can track your favourite manufacturer over the past eighteen months. This picture is just a static snap:

Despite lots of noise from the IT world about its green credentials it still falls short of the high standards demanded by the Greenpeace survey. In fact, in the seven reports to date, only one PC maker has ever reached an '8' - Lenovo. And that was a year ago.

The rankings are related to company policies on toxic chemicals and recycling. It is a mix of company claims and Greenpeace observation across a range of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles.

When companies are plainly competitive, then the chart serves a useful purpose. Acer, for example, ranks quite low among PC makers. If you were concerned about green issues rather than price (and this is still deeply unlikely) then you might standardise on Toshiba machines.

Once we get environmental regulations which penalise poor performers and/or reward good ones, then this will be reflected in prices. Goodness knows how long that will take but, in the meantime, we will probably continue to disregard any harm we might be accumulating for our descendants.

I carry no torch for Microsoft, but I did wonder what the heck it was doing in this survey. Especially so low. It's not as if any other software companies were listed. Then a bit of digging reminded me that it makes games consoles and that was the basis for its inclusion. The trouble with this is that, without a clear context, it makes Microsoft the company look like a poor environmental performer.

If I were Microsoft, I'd demand a clarification.

Gloves come off at BL debate

You may have thought that with no representatives from nasty media corp inc that the roundtable convened by the British Library to discuss the role of authors and publishers in the digital age may have been akin to a love in. Wrong, the discussion which was part of BL’s contribution to the intellectual property debate was a no holds barred conversation which aired plenty of views but which came to few real conclusions. Writes Peter Williams

Tracy Chevalier, (novelist Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels) Chair of the Society of Authors made a list of radical suggestions to secure payment to those who create the written word. My favourite was the idea of a book licence similar to the TV licence. Do you think TV detector vans could be modified? Next up was Simon Juden, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association who clashed mightily with Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think and associated of think-tank Demos.

Leadbeater accused the publishing industry of grabbing legislative or other devices to prop up an unsustainable position. The lesson he had learned from earning his living in the media (TV, newspapers, books, online and live) was that you got paid for what was scarce and if that meant turning up to perform live then go for it. Juden’s argument was that the publishing industry was a £5bn unsung success story of the British economy and it was already showing nerve, verve, creativity and innovation in facing up to the challenges and rigours of the digital age.

The big challenge is to find the sustainable business model. For him the future was exciting, honest. As for Mike Holderness freelance science write editor of www.londonfreelance.org , he said it was important for culture and democracy that authors could live on the proceeds of their created works. He said it was important to resist the (mostly US) free market notion that copyright is monopoly and should be stamped out. The other idea that, he said had to be resisted is the tecchy idea that geek code is law.

The only conclusions that chair Dame Lynne Brindley chief executive of BL could draw from the highly entertaining debate is that this is an industry in turmoil. Can’t argue with that.

To listen to a podcast of the event go to www.bl.uk/ip.

By the way can I assert my moral right to be identified as the author of this piece?

Enterprise search wars

IBM has sought to cement its position as a leader in the enterprise search space with a new version of its flagship OmniFind product launched last week. Features in there which might appeal to large organisations include the ability to crawl Lotus’ new social networking and collaboration tools which were launched at the last Lotusphere event. Analysts rightly believe that Lotus Quickr, Connections, and other similar applications will increasingly be the places where vitally important information resides in the organisation, so it’s a positive that Big Blue has acknowledged this.

There’s also stuff in there for multi-language support and a new Top Results Analysis feature which promises to display results graphically, so that users can drill down into particular areas as they see fit. This kind of thing isn’t new of course, but seems to be getting increasingly popular for discovery, rather than search, activities. The only barrier to this kind of technology could be that many users still can’t unlock a lot of value from it. More training please.

But then, what you believe is really important in enterprise search always depends on which search vendors you talk to. Speak to Google, Sinequa, Exalead and the other (relatively) young pups on the enterprise search trail and they’ll say the days of complex, costly, unwieldy search implementations is over. They’ll say that the whole consumerisation of IT trend is nowhere more obvious than in search, with worker bees and more importantly chief execs now so familiar with web search that they want the same easy-to-use functionality brought to bear on corporate data.

And then you go to IBM, whose programme director for search and content discovery, Aaron Brown, told me that actually customers don’t want this, they want to drive better use of information, and this goes so much deeper than search. And then you go to Fast, whose chief executive John Lervik once told me that firms could eventually have dedicated chief search officers to help manage the complexity of their environments. Mention this vision to a Google and you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of “you won’t need a chief search officer with our technology”. Which is true, but then again there isn’t such a thing as a typical organisation.

Left brains are useful, but...

Jill Bolte Taylor gave a most moving 19-minute presentation at the recent TED conference. It was all about the brain and about how we choose to use it. I defy you not to be gripped by her performance.

She's a neuroanatomist by profession. Her brother is schizophrenic. And she had her very own stroke which slowly shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. This experience gave her a profound and intimate insight to the workings of the brain.

We all know that the two sides of the brain do different things. People often declare themselves as 'left-brained' or 'right-brained'. Some people are adept at switching from one side to the other. Others struggle.

The right side is the bit that deals with 'now', with movement, with senses, with grabbing, in parallel, everything that's going on at the moment.

The left side is serial in nature and deals with past memories and future plans. It extracts, from the messages being passed from the right brain, those which it feels might come in handy or need a reaction.

When Ms Taylor had a stroke in the left side of her brain, she was able to keep functioning, after a fashion. But, over the course of a few hours, she lost just about everything. She reached a point where she literally curled up to die.

Throughout this process, the left brain flashed into life spasmodically, enabling her to seek help. It also meant that she could store memories of the process she was going through.

When her left brain was dormant, she found herself stress-free, memory-free, baggage-free and euphoric. She felt at one with the universe.  By contrast, she describes the left brain as where we are individual, isolated, and separate from others.

She says much more during her talk and she believes that we can learn from her insights to make the world a better place. I'll not steal her punchlines. But she has shone a torch into the darkness of my rather left-brained computer-centric life. And explained why my happiness increases the further away from computing I get.

A slowly melting glacier

The melting glacier that is open access seems to be thawing a little, according to a research report released last week. Writes Peter Williams

SURF is a Dutch-based collaborative organisation for higher education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. Its SURFfoundation has examined the copyright policies of traditional academic publishers. A group of forty seven traditional publishers, who do not currently allow Open Access, were assessed. The result: publishers are increasingly interested in allowing the depositing of articles into a publicly accessible repository.

The study asked publishers if they supported principles formulated by SURFfoundation and JISC, regarding publishing in traditional journals. The conclusion was that a growing number of traditional publishers support some, if not all, of the current open access repository principles. Furthermore, many of these publishers were said to be looking into changing their current policies to encourage an environment of sharing academic materials.

These principles attempt to clarify and balance the relationship between the rights of authors and publishers, to enable a wider access to scholarly literature, which in turn would make journals compliant with a growing number of funder requirements.

The main characteristics of the principles are that authors retains copyright of their work, while granting the publisher the required rights to publish the work, and that authors are entitled to freely deposit their work in a research repository with an embargo before public release, for a maximum of six months.

One third of the publishers in the study have developed a repository policy which is compatible with these principles and, the study reports, a similar proportion of publishers currently use a licence to publish instead of copyright transfer. In addition to having drafted principles, JISC and the SURFfoundation have also created a model Licence to Publish.

This initiative is an interesting attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional publishers and the Open Access movement. How successful it will be remains to be seen.

Government data woes continue

As if it couldn’t get any worse, the government has suffered another data protection PR disaster. Hang on, I’m sure we’ve said that before. Anyway, a firm called Garlik has just announced new evidence that most major government departments are still failing to implement data protection policies. Garlik has been around for a year or so now and specialises in services which allow customers see how much personal information about them is out there on the world wide web, and who has access to it. So you can see why they started this project.

After making 14 Freedom of Information requests, the firm found that HM Revenue and Customs, Ministry of Defence, and the Department of Health, among others, all came up short in certain areas. These include not having any data correction policies or funds to correct erroneous data, and possibly the most damming – “never having been subject to an independent audit in order to prove compliance with the Data Protection Act” (DPA).

Now the news might not surprise most people, which in itself is a pretty damming indictment on the government’s approach to data security, but it doesn’t actually prove any wilful transgression of the Data Protection Act. It is, though, yet another indication of the worryingly little heed government departments seem to pay to the value of personal information. The national ID register and NHS database projects look distinctly flaky when one considers the departments responsible have no policies around data correction.

When data errors occur, as Garlik rightly says they doubtless will, how can they be identified and corrected if there aren’t even any funds allocated to do this? Interestingly I was contacted a few weeks ago by a concerned citizen who'd made it his life's work – or at least a passionate hobby – to investigate the government’s record on data protection. He submitted the same FoI requests as Garlik and assimilated a significant amount of evidence amounting to the same findings. It’s all down to people and policies, training and institutional culture – no quick technology fixes here.

Garlik’s Ilube also told me people are generally more concerned about the fact that government might hold erroneous data on them than the fact that it might go missing, but I’m not so sure. The issue of data security has plagued the government in recent months and is surely more emotive than this new revelation. After all, having your name misspelled on your patient records is a slightly different proposition to having your personal details nicked from a government laptop.

HP's new labs address information issues

Last night (UK time) Hewlett Packard announced its new Labs structure. By focusing on five areas, it hopes it will become more effective. The five areas are: information explosion; dynamic cloud services; content transformation; intelligent infrastructure; and sustainability. All are jolly important and all reflect today's hot issues for the company.

Of the 23 labs in total, the biggest ones will be in Palo Alto, then Bristol and the remainder strung out around the world. Prith Bannerjee, the director in charge, talked of "twenty to thirty big bets, rather than the 120 to 150 of the past."

It would be interesting to know how many of Hewlett Packard's past successes came about as the result of serendipity rather than focused research. Bannerjee says that the approach of the past was appropriate for its time. I remember some of the garage startup style tinkering that used to take place. It often led to interesting software products, but none of them set the world on fire. So perhaps he's right.

Bristol has landed semantic web research. China is looking into searching visual content. Cloud services are personalised to where you are and what you're using. You'd expect more research into digitisation and digital to analog (pictures on buses for example). And you'd be right. Intelligent infrastructure is all about secure networks for banks, governments and the like. And sustainability is about ways of moving to a low carbon economy.

The new labs will work closely with the outside world, with venture capitalists,  entrepreneurs-in-residence and university students. You can take a look at some of what's going on at the IdeaLab website. HP Labs will seed HP's own business with teams, creating more of a start-up environment for new initiatives.

Apparently, although the labs are highly focused, they will still allow blue sky research within them. A third of the work will be applied research, a third will be advanced product development and a third will be blue sky.

This is the logo:

It bothers me that 'HP' and 'Labs' are being boxed in by those brackets. Could that be a subliminal message? Let's hope not.

Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere

An assistant librarian at a commercial law firm in Edinburgh, Jennie Findlay started
blogging to release her inner geek, never imagining anyone would ever stumble across it

Q Where is your blog?
A It’s at http://jennielaw.blogspot.com. I’ve also been invited to take part in a collaborative international law librarian blog initiative at http://lawlibrarians.wordpress.com

Q What’s your blog like?
A I’m interested in Web 2.0 technologies and how they work (or don’t) for libraries, particularly commercial libraries. I also look at developments in Scots law, either legal or technical. I get particularly irritated when organisations lump all parts of the
UK together; it makes finding out whether things apply to my jurisdiction hard work.
I am cautious about opinions that might be too controversial, as my posts may be linked to or reflect on my employer. I often post light-hearted stuff rather than in-depth
commentary on certain topics.

Q How long have you been blogging?
A I’ve had a personal blog for almost three years, but started my work-related one in July 2007.

Q What was it that started you blogging?
A Well, everybody else was doing it, so I thought I’d join in! I started my work blog
mainly because I wanted to discuss library, technology and legal topics. I didn’t really think anyone would ever even find my blog, and that it would just be a personal reminder of things I‘d found interesting, to refer back to when needed. It hasn’t turned out that way, though.

Q Which bloggers do you watch, link to and why?
A James Mullan. As another commercial law firm librarian he tends to post the info most directly relevant to me and my work. The Lo-Fi Librarian posts useful technical tools, and lists them in a handy weekly roundup. I also read a lot of everyday librarian blogs, just to get an idea of what people are getting up to in other sectors.

Q Do you comment on other blogs?
A I comment if I feel I can add something useful to a discussion, and if it hasn’t already been said, which in practice means that I don’t comment very frequently. I think that commenting on blogs is important, as it’s often the only feedback and encouragement that a blogger gets.

Q How does your organisation benefit from your presence in the blogosphere?
A I’ve learned huge amounts from blog-hopping, and have been able to assess whether various products or ideas would enhance our library service. By being more informed about what it is possible to do with the tools out there; I can give a better response to the users of the library service, and hopefully take some shortcuts at times. And not being bamboozled by the technical stuff is also a bonus.

Q What do you personally get out of it for your career?
A I’m not hugely career-focused, so it’s not really been about getting anything out of it for my career. I’ve just been enjoying getting to know lots of interesting people, learning lots of new things, feeling like I’m involved in something useful and exciting, and seeing where things develop.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of blogging?
A I’ve learned about lots of useful sites and tools, kept up to date with all the news that’s relevant to me and my firm, and I’m able to put names to faces at conferences. I was also asked to write for a collaborative blog about libraries and library bloggers around the world, http://infobib.de/blog/features/libworld/, but had to turn the offer down as I don’t know enough about Scottish library bloggers.

Q Which blogs do you read for fun?
A Nothing To Do With Arbroath at http://arbroath.blogspot.com covers the more bizarre news stories out there. Boing Boing, www.boingboing.net, because it covers so many random topics. Popular Science, http://popsci.typepad.com/popsci, to satisfy my inner science geek. And finally, the Hedgehog Librarian, http://hedgehoglibrarian.
blogspot.com, and her yarn-happy life and work in a public library in the depths of Wisconsin.

What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
Most of them; we librarians are a reputable lot, don’t you know?
But mainly:
James Mullan
http://ligissues.blogspot.com/
Binary Law
www.binarylaw.co.uk
The Lo-Fi Librarian
www.lo-fi-librarian.co.uk
IWR
http://blog.iwr.co.uk
Scott Vine
www.informationoverlord.co.uk

Questions, questions, questions

As an IWR reader you will probably have some strong opinions on Intellectual Property (IP) law and how to bring it in line with modernity.

I see that over at the British Library (BL) website they are currently running a questionnaire on copyright issues. I assume that this is a part of their involvement in the Intellectual Property (IP) debate following on from the Gowers review and the BL’s involvement in the next step of the ongoing copyright consultation process.

It’s a straight-forward, five minute affair. There are a few questions on fair dealing and IP use as well as the opportunity to add your own comments and your understanding of the terminologies. The BL are encouraging any UK resident to enter; so worth circulating among any interested (and eligible) colleagues and peers.

The questionnaire can be found at www.bl.uk/ip so get on board and have your say. I’d imagine that any results the BL garner from the questionnaire results will be well considered in the final consultation report.