Defining the Human Entity
August 11th, 2007by Jeremy Thomas
Paula Thornton wrote a very interesting post yesterday about how Enterprise 2.0 helps us define connections between a human and the footprint they leave behind on the intranet. Before the notion of Enterprise 2.0 this was not possible as she writes:
Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order…
This got me thinking about a post my boss wrote about information management where he discusses a Master Data Management scenario where the enterprise attempts to define a human entity by pulling in metadata from disparate sources (it took me a while to understand the scenario as I’m not a data guy by the way, but once I got it it made a lot of sense). This is an area that Enterprise 2.0 overlooks. Most corporations have a lot of information about their employees already (without Enterprise 2.0), but the problem is it’s scattered. And this is where data management plays a key role.
Imagine a scenario where we not only deployed an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (knowledge market, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, enterprise search etc.) but also implemented a data management strategy to harvest the metadata about all human entities within the organization from all of the legacy, “1.0″ systems. We could then define a single and discoverable master identify for a person and enrich the social discovery process significantly. We might define a relationship between the human entity and any of the following legacy assets:
- project deliverables (word documents)
- project plans
- white papers
- resume
- skill set (Java, C#, SQL etc - most HR systems store this info)
- position in the corporate hierarchy
This approach makes sense for the enterprise because it leverages the legacy investment it spent years patching and upgrading. It makes sense for knowledge workers because we can link them to their legacy footprint (so they get credit for work they’ve already done) and to the emergent data we get out of Enterprise 2.0.
Defining the human entity in this way needs to be an integral part of any Enterprise 2.0 rollout.
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August 12th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Jeremy,
The model looks like an enhanced version of the current CRMs that we see in the market (such as PeopleSoft). Perhaps this is an opportunity for CRM developers to stretch their current “entity profile” management to include Enterprise 2.0 SLATE elements to materialize the above model.
This could also potentially be part of a transformation strategy that corporations can employ (in all industries) in order to “pull in the resources at the right time for the right job”. Search will again be another profound element in order for the new ecosystem to work.
August 19th, 2007 at 9:46 am
hi nice post, i enjoyed it
August 21st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Jeremy, great observations. Without time to respond in detail, the way to capitalize 2.0 is architecturally. A reference point that needs to be challenged and reworked is Zachman’s Enterprise Framework. Having data is not the same as committing resources (human and infrastructural) to leveraging them…and leveraging them cannot be done without cross-collaboration between various dimensions of architecture (mainly the columns of Zachman’s Framework — but also some of the rows).
All the while, the field of Applications Development needs to realize that as in the commercial building industry (which has been testing practice methods for years), various architects come together and work out the issues between their ‘perspectives’. Requirements for development come out of design — not before.