In recent weeks my Facebook "wall" has started to yield a treasure-trove of high-school era picture, stories and flashbacks, including associations of names to groups, events and interests I never then fully appreciated - but do now. A few years back, I was addressing a US National Archives program called the " Electronic Records Archives " (ERA), a program aimed at improving the nation's ability to "indefinitely" (i.e. even after Google and Microsoft go out of business in the year 3000) preserve government electronic records - including emails, online chat, digital photos, video and other data. One of the key challenges was promoting this program to users and organizations, and coming up with ways to encourage authors and managers of electronic records to identify, tag and contribute items to the records management system (to ultimately be assessed and possibly saved "forever" in the ERA system). Facebook is apparently the new "National...

Had a conundrum the past few days with Twitter - among several IDs, one was being populated with a mix of "business" and "community" news. With twitter, there's no clear way of categorizing tweets or conversations by tags or categories; the conversations are aggregated but reflect not necessarily a single topic, but either (1) a non-purpose-driven dialogue, either instance-based or continuing, or (2) or purpose-driven dialogue, where the communicators intend to resolve a question, promote something or provide alerts/updates. In traditional knowledge management terms, communities typically exist as (a) communities of interest (COIs), (b) communities of practice (COPs), or communities of purpose (COPRs). Since the ultimate outcome of these sorts of communities was to add to and share elements of a knowledgebase, the concept of "communicating for communications or simply socializing's sake" isn't really included in these three community-type defi...

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...