It’s a pretty straightforward economic reality hitting local and regional businesses right now - how to drastically reduce marketing and advertising expenses, while continuing to attract new customers and grow revenues. In any economy, good or bad, it is absolutely essential that your business, service and products continue to be represented and advertised in public media - in order to attract new, paying customers. This is Information Management 101 - but in the public domain. Read more about this Business Internet Marketing and Information Management topic, and why Internet Marketing, SEO, and Online Marketing and Advertising are topics worthy of considerable attention and exercise for all businesses right now, large and small.

A recent Op Ed piece in FCW highlights the fact that Records Management responsibilities in the Federal Government have been abdicated by half of those responsible, namely GSA. While NARA focuses on records management policies, schedules and the science of digital preservation (i.e. the "Risk Management" side of the equation, as FCW asserts), GSA was ostensibly charged with the Information Management side of the equation (the "economy and efficiency" aspects) - i.e. how do agencies, as a practical, tactical matter, create processes and leverage technology to actually enforce records management policies and populate the government's record catalogue with well-formed records and metadata? Regardless of whether the records should be preserved indefinitely (i.e. by NARA) or not? There certainly exist enough policy guidance, solution guidance and eRecords expertise within the Federal community to attack the records management problem, as well as legions of Enterpris...

Here's a very motivating video about the role of Information Management professionals intersecting with the discipline of Knowledge Management and Web 2.0. I Am Knowledge Worker 2.0 View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: collaboration office2.0 )

The processes involved in managing and governing an IT system lifecycle can be extremely complicated and are frequently uncoordinated - these include governance processes associated with capital planning and investement reviews, acquisition management, portfolio management and enterprise architecture governance (which includes Information Management and Data Governance ). If the various governance processes, governance bodies and ultimately the decision-makers in an organization aren't coordinated - IT programs are doomed to marginal return on investment or significant delays, cost over-runs....you name it. Blackstone Technology Group's expertise in this area, developed over years of IT service consulting to Commerical and Government CIOs, IT Managers and Financial Control Officers, is now packaged in a solution offering termed " IT Governance Process Integration ". This is the first end-to-end services consulting offering in the market that enables integrated alignme...

"Information Management" is a very broad term, and many consultancies and standards groups have tried over the years to wrestle it into ontologic submission - categorizing the subjects and domains most often along the lines of product release, availability of subject matter experts (SMEs), or the Enterprise Architecture model of the day. Taking a view of Information Management from the angle of "Digital Assets", I've created a view of the myriad of subjects and topics that are relevant to delivering (whether it's your stuff or someone else's) actual, monetized value on digital information you generate. Digital Assets are defined as instances or packages of digital content that are delivered as information to consumers, with the express intent of deriving monetary value. Much of your digital content may not end up described this way - i.e. directly targeted at generating revenue, for example internal company handbooks or photos. I will make the case th...

A really great article on Internet Reputation Management concepts for government was recently posted at FCW, entitled " Who is Watching Your Online Image "? In it, Andy Beal speaks to the cautious but imperative initiave of public service agencies to extend eGovernment initiative into the Social Media space, most especially the blogosphere. But this extension of services and participation in the online dialogue is double-sided; on the one hand, this may offer great advantages to the government agency and its constituents, on the other hand, it needs to be carefully controlled from an online reputation management perspective - though government blogging and social media participation is precisely what may really help, in cases where the agency's reputation or position is besmirched. Here's another recent take on Internet Identity and Reputation Management, from Fox 5 News in DC - more from a consumer and business perspective, than government. But the tenets and advic...

While the domain of "Information Management" is well known to extend to both internal and externally-distributed information assets, it's not so obvious that this domain requires a certain degree of Marketing & Communications expertise. Information governance processes that extend outside the corporate boundary are typically for purposes of compliance, protocol, or other business agreement - though in the past few years it's become more and more necessary to apply information governance techniques TO Internet (or Intranet) Marketing efforts, and leverage Internet Marketing techniques FOR delivering information governance. There are two binding elements between Internet Marketing and Information Management. The first are the search engines and their automated indexers (i.e. "bots") - Internet Marketing techniques leveraged to influence search engine results (i.e. Search Engine Optimization/Marketing) should very much reflect corporate governance of extern...

I recently participated in a very interesting discussion about mechanisms and issues for leveraging external (i.e. outside the firewall) social networking tools in the Federal Government; for example, browsing and executing searches in Facebook, using Flickr for socializing and recieving comments on photographs, and participating in "open" blog discussions. While this isn't necessarily a new issue, and many agencies are gradually enabling "Government 2.0" for both their constituents and employees/contractors (more quickly in the Intelligence arena), the rapid growth and pressure to utilize these tools for mission purposes is unmistakable and requires more rapid, cross-government address (or at least really well thought-out and vetted models for experimentation, leverage, best practice development). Commercial businesses are generally ahead of the curve (from government) in addressing this need, and "Information Governance 2.0" is fast becoming an absol...

Just about every day, I use Google - probably at least 20-30 times a day. I'm not alone, obviously, as by many measures Google is the most utilized search engine on the Internet. There are others, of course - even Google points this out in its analytics results. But which ones are best for what kind of tasks, and what kind of people use each? (The diagram in this post isn't mine, but has been distributed about the web for some time...). From a pure organic Internet Marketing perspective, your organization's website really should focus on page ranks in Google - both for the volume of search traffic probable (since Google's indexing reach is so large, and their paid content distribution is so broad), and the fact that Google's results are very tied into the overall context of the Internet and relationships among online content, including websites, blogs, social media, discussions, wikis, documents, etc. Google is also leveraged as the core index behind other, 3rd-part...

A new "Enterprise Data Management Policy" was signed this week within the Homeland Security Department - to those unconcerned with the business and technology of information management, this won't create a stir...but to those "fighting the good fight" across the Federal Government information-sharing and management parochial boundaries, it's a valuable new tool, at least 2 years in the making. In essence, the Directive, administered by the DHS CIO, outlines the department's policy with respect to sharing, contributing and leveraging wherever possible Enterprise data, and the Enterprise data management procedures and assets made available through the EDMO (Enterprise Data Management Office). Having lived through many of the difficulties associated with sharing and reusing data between Federal components, agencies and departments, with respect to policy differences, metadata and semantic disagreements, security classification issues, or simply reluctance ...

To start things off, here's a locally interesting Government 2.0 story that kicked off 2008, where a local government official complains via email about a real estate blog's veracity, demands material be removed, and refuses to "respond via the blog" - thereby provoking, as we understand all too readily in the Internet Marketing and Social Media industry, a firestorm of comment and much broader exposure of his unfortunate position. Information Management, as an IT discipline to care about and pay attention to, includes not only the information you and your organization generate within your "domain", but also the information you, your organization, and everyone else generates on the Internet regarding your virtual domain.

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