At GTEC 2008, I presented a seminar called “Managing Corporate Memory in Public Sector”.  The well-attended session explored the pending shift in workforce demographics as the Boomer generation approaches retirement age. Sectors at most risk included government, utilities, engineering, transportation and manufacturing. I sought to explore how IT and IM professionals could play a strategic role as our workplace transforms and to minimize risk of information and knowledge loss.

Though this is no longer a new topic challenging public sector management, the situation continues to grow in urgency and awareness.  Over the weekend, I noticed that Gartner Research VP, Jeffrey Mann, had twittered about a recent spike in his customer inquiries precisely on this topic.  He “tweeted”:  “three of this morning’s 4 calls are on knowledge management (two on capturing experience of retiring employees) who says KM is dead?”. Whether we call it knowledge management, corporate memory preservation, succession planning… whether the project is led by IM/RM, Human Resources or IT…  regardless of the tools we use to capture the intrinsic knowledge held in the brains of our most senior valued employees – we know it must be done. Public Sector is a knowledge-economy enterprise. Information, policies, and programs:  services are delivered to the citizens, residents, businesses within our jurisdiction to provide a stable infrastructure for social, commercial and political activities.  To not pay attention to prospect of losing mentorship, best practices, and institutional culture is to do a disservice to the investment we’ve made in cultivating depth and breadth of public sector experience.

We all have our “keep me up at night” moments. Mine is a story told to me at the annual ARMA Conference in 2006.  I was conducting a workshop on this topic of “Managing Corporate Memory” and a woman from an academic institution came up to me, very pleased to see the research I had done on the topic. As part of her Records Management responsibility, she was tasked with capturing the legacy paper and physical records of the scientists and engineers who retired from her institution. She told me the story of a scientist who upon his departure handed to her a large box of ore samples. He said to her very intently, “make sure you hang on to these… they are very very important”. And so she took them. And put them on a shelf, documented with the date and location and name of the scientist who left them behind.  She looked at me rather sadly, and admitted that she had no idea what those rocks meant, or WHY they were so important. There was no corporate memory preservation mandate to ensure the samples got to a new researcher who could continue the work. So to this day, they sit on a dark shelf.

Was the cure for cancer in that box of rocks? Did they tell us something about our world that could make our lives better? We may never know.

To learn more about this topic of Managing Corporate Memory, click here to listen to a recorded educational seminar we hosted earlier this year. Any comments or feedback welcomed.

Gartner’s recent scolding wasn’t enough. Public sector organizations that are dragging their feet on Web 2.0 applications and practices have caught another slap upside the head, courtesy of a British study which suggests that it’s really all about power.

Just weeks after the heavyweights at Gartner drew “a gloomy picture of current adoption and plans for Web 2.0 in government” around the world, the Society of IT Management has concluded that the British public sector in particular is excessively cautious on the social networking front. And author Chris Head thinks he knows why:

“Web 2.0 challenges the very roots of the public sector ethos,” he says. “As if the retreat from paternalism and recognition of the citizen as a customer were not enough, Web 2.0 provides the facilities to put citizens in control. This turns public sector thinking upside-down. It means marketing services, not rationing them. It means being proactive, and not responding defensively to criticism.”

That’s basically a brief on behalf of the digital democracy side of e-government, focusing the potential of technology not simply as a neat way to deliver government services but as a way to reinvigorate everything from public consultations to, no doubt, elections.

Open Text hosted its annual Canadian Public Sector Days in Gatineau, Quebec September 16-17, 2008, and were pleased to host 600 registrants from not only the Canadian Federal government, but provinces, cities and regional governments as well.  University of Waterloo Dean of Arts - Dr. Ken Coates – provided an inspirational and thought-provoking keynote on Tuesday morning, challenging public sector professionals to take up the task to help propel Canada into a leadership position internationally by accelerating our Digital Depth and becoming and information-rich nation.

One of the sessions I delivered has been an area of interest and research for the last year – Information Governance.  Inspired by some of the research from www.gartner.com over the last 2 years, Information Governance challenges information management professionals to think beyond compliance and retention pressures when considering an information management strategy.  According to researchers Debra Logan, Toby Bell and Ted Friedman, Information Governance is a “strategic business discipline that better controls data via valuation, policies and process”.  It “requires cross-disciplinary business and IT strategy … that better relate people, policies, processes and technology to the information needs of business leadership”[1]

We know that there are emerging challenges to public sector:  demographic shifts due to the retirement wave that is pending,  the disruptions to content and processes when reorganizations, mergers/spinoffs or elections occur,  the rise of the 2.0 culture and the cultural and technology changes it implies, as well as the constant need for vigilance to ensure business continuity and emergency preparedness to ensure delivery of citizen services during periods of crisis.  These challenges can only be adequately addressed by creating strategic perspectives and objectives with respect to the management of government information. Striking the right balance between security and open disclosure, aligning retention and storage practices with the value and importance of content types, ensuring meaningful categorization, metadata assignment and access controls on information throughout all key stages of its creation or capture, revision and review, publication and consumption and final storage and disposition.

Canadians can be proud that our federal government is internationally recognized as a leader in defining Information Governance strategies.  The most recent articulation of the “Management of Government Information” mandate by the Treasury Board is clear: government must “…achieve efficient and effective information management to support program and service delivery; foster informed decision making; facilitate accountability; transparency and collaboration; and preserve and ensure access to information and records for the benefit of present and future generations”.[2]

Open Text is pleased to be a partner with government to help build an Enterprise Content Management framework as part of a strategic approach to information governance. We are committed to providing ongoing education and communication with its Canadian public sector customer base.

The folks at Gartner aren’t happy with the state of play on the e-government file around the world – specifically on web 2.0.

The tech research heavyweight talked to 80 government clients on five continents and checked in with what it described as “a gloomy picture of current adoption and plans for Web 2.0 in government.”

“Attention is still primarily focused on technologies and applications that aim at improving engagement and collaboration,” Gartner reported. “There is little evidence that government IT professionals appreciate (and indeed plan to pursue or at least pilot) the most disruptive, but also potentially rewarding aspects of Web 2.0, such as its impact on lighter, middle-out architectures that promote reusability and composability, and the shift from constituent-centric to constituent-driven initiatives.”

Rather scoldingly, Gartner added:

“Governments have always been — and will always be — conservative adopters of technology, as they are concerned with inclusion and accountability more than with the bottom line and market share. However, they should have learned a few lessons from their e-government ventures, where their attempts at modernizing their face and processes have had mixed results — even in the best cases, citizen engagement and uptake remain lower than expected.”

“There is a concrete risk of widening the disconnect between citizens who embrace technology and change their personal and professional behavior as a consequence, and governments that keep defending their turf, playing with technology at the edges.”

And, for the high-minded, Garter concluded with a reminder of the potential of web 2.0:

“Web 2.0 is not just a bunch of promising technologies. It is an opportunity for government agencies to step back, reflect on what their core mission is, and determine on how they should structure information and services that closely relate to that mission. This will allow the ecosystem of other agencies, intermediaries and communities to access those services and information in the most convenient, effective and efficient way.”

Nothing if not plain. . . .

A growing number of organizations of all sizes have been implementing virtualization of x86-based servers to run their production systems for a number of years and have been benefiting from increased efficiencies in their server operations and improved IT agility. As the technology has made a steady and powerful stride beyond development and testing environments into the mainstream of today’s IT infrastructure so has the focal point of server virtualization benefits shifted from the IT whiteboard to the executive boardroom.

The evolution of server virtualization and the ideas it promotes is a fascinating one, truly highlighting the powerful nature of this transformational technology especially since it profoundly impacts the most prevalent form of hardware - x86 servers. Shipments of x86 servers according to Gartner Research[1] currently represent 95% of the worldwide market and will capture 70% of IT spending by 2010 according to IDC. If you aren’t that familiar with the concept of server virtualization the following clip from InfoWorld / animation from TELUS illustrates the idea quite nicely without getting deep into technical jargon.

First it was all about consolidation. The ability to shrink the number of physical servers required to sustain an existing IT service operation and support additional computing capacity and applications provided organizations an excellent mechanism to reduce spending on servers. With a virtual server density (number of virtual servers per physical machine) reaching 12 to 1 on average, the constant pressure on IT capital budgets was greatly alleviated. Furthermore and especially in larger IT shops IT managers were now freed, temporarily at least, from the need to justify a costly expansion of their space, power or cooling constrained data centres.

Many organizations who had large server operations to start with and kicked off a virtualization practice centred on consolidation quickly realized there was much more than that. The increased flexibility and speed to provision virtual servers took over traditional server procurement to a level in which according to Gartner Research shifted the balance from physical to virtual[2] and where virtual servers workloads (workload being the operating system and the application) will be the majority by 2012.

The discussion has subsequently centred on the productivity gains of streamlined virtual server deployment, stronger alignment of IT to the overarching business strategy and easier management - all closely aligned with high operational efficiency through maintained or improved IT operations at the same or lower cost. And that’s without accounting for the power savings resulting from the reduced amount of server hardware required.

Evidently more and more IT decision makers are adopting a “virtualize first” approach in which a new server workload is preferably virtualized on existing server hardware and only if unsuitable for virtualization placed on a dedicated physical server.

If judging from the server virtualization market leader VMware (coincidentally another event partner of GTEC 2008), who claims to have sold into 100% of Fortune 100 businesses, a logical conclusion would be that most major organizations have already  bought in to server virtualization in their production IT environments.

Whether that is indeed the case or not, indications are that currently on a 7% share of the virtual server market opportunity has been addressed and that the install base is expected to grow tenfold in less than 5 years[3].

As the applicability of this technology transcends further into the mainstream and the early majority of technology adopters a larger proportion of small and medium organizations is expected to adopt it as well. According to a survey[4] of Canadian organizations with 100-999 employees conducted by IDC in 2006 and published a year later, over 40% of organizations were considering server virtualization and almost 30% where in various stages of implementing it. If indeed as this research suggests smaller firms lag in the adoption of IT optimization initiatives could it be that the direct financial benefits explained previously have less appeal to small and medium sized organizations or is it that the magnitude of savings does not justify change?

One would argue that for a smaller organization that needs to invest in IT skills and changes in established processes would need more to tip them over. Additional factors need to be layered on top of the capital and operational benefits to bring the discussion to a new level and to favour server virtualization over the status quo.

These factors would likely involve a combination of cost effective and previously unattainable opportunities for the organization to:

1)       Maintain high availability of applications and levels of service

2)       Reduce risk and resume operations promptly following a system failure

3)       Adopt environmentally efficient yet economical alternatives

More on these in the upcoming weeks.