John Brunswick is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution Consultant at Oracle Corporation, specializing in enterprise portal and content management solutions. Passionate about both business and technology, Brunswick focuses on maximizing IT's ability to streamline and optimize business. Sharing tips and strategy from field experience, his writing is available at AIIM's E2.0 Expert Blog, Oracle's Fusion ECM Blog and InfotechAligned. Read more about John's background.

  • Ultimate Context - Social Business Processes
    In the absence of context, Enterprise 2. 0 is often a "technology in search of a problem".   Enterprise 2...
  • Three Rules of Zero Calorie Donuts - "Unregulated Collaboration with Built-in Governance"
    Is it possible to enjoy eating fried dough, glazed with sugar, without consuming any calories?  What if it was possible to enjoy all of the benefits of Enterprise 2. 0, instant ad-hoc collaboration, but suffer none of the downside related to approvals and governance processes? To maximize ROI from Enterprise 2. 0 collaborative technologies people should be able to create online workspaces without as needed...
  • Enterprise 2.0 Implementations Limit Collaborative ROI
    Enterprise 2. 0 implementations are limiting our collaborative efforts. E2...
  • McKinsey's Technology Enabled Business Trends - New KPI Strategy?
    There is promising news in the ROI justification department for collaborative technologies.  In Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch McKinsey revisits some technology trends they indentified a few years ago, citing case studies and metrics from a survey that will be publicly available in September. These trends are closely bound to what Enterprise 2...
  • Can Social Networking Enforce Content Governance?
    The chasm separating excitement levels around social networking and governance could not be wider. Governance has never been, and will never be a fun topic. It is something that is necessary like washing dishes, going to the dentist or paying bills. However - without performing these activities on a routine basis, we will not have a pleasant existence. The same is true with the content in an enterprise. Interestingly, there is the potential to gain significant value from the hidden intersection of two seemingly strange partners - social networking technologies and governance enforcement - to help make the process of governance one that people naturally participate in.
  • Slash E2.0 Management Costs - Be like an LDAP Service
    Corporate LDAP services should serve as a reference for E2.0 deployments. For better or worse, many E2.0 technologies are quick to install, configure and deploy. This often leads to multiple instances of similar technologies, with varying degrees of maturity, being deployed in pockets across the enterprise. Over time this can create huge issues that ultimately drive up management costs and clutter an enterprise architecture with similar, but disparate systems that are isolated, each requiring different expertise for management. In order to reduce the management costs of E2.0 it needs to be treated like a corporate LDAP - implement a single, robust enterprise-class service and provision it to various systems. It is time to put the Enterprise back in Enterprise 2.0.
  • Conquering Enterprise Information Overload with E2.0
    We generate massive amounts of content within our organizations. The pace of this production will only continue to increase - forcing us to devote huge amounts of time searching, cataloging and saving links to critical information for our job roles. Now multiply this effort by the number of people in your organization. In order to get our work done we have all had to become enterprise librarians on top of our regular functions. To make matters worse, a sizable percentage of that effort is redundant. What can be done to fix this?
  • You Don't Want Facebook for the Enterprise
    Facebook has no place in the enterprise. As enterprise social technologies first arrived in the workplace they needed a way to express what they did. At that time the most direct analogy was to exclaim that the tools were "Facebook for the Enterprise". A more appropriate analogy is needed. For our organizations to succeed we want a "LinkedIn for the Enterprise".
  • Portals - Good to Great using Qualitative Analytics
    User's interactions are not clinical. What does this mean? As much as computing's beloved ones and zeros can create amazing online solutions, they fall short of being able to accurately express how effective our efforts have been in helping to enable users. Wait - don't analytics provide insight into user behavior? To an extent, but they only begin to scratch the surface of providing information that can truly help to take a mediocre or good solution and make it great.
  • For an Effective Intranet: Throw Out the Corporate Home Page
    Relevancy is value. In a world where projects are justified through ROI analysis it is odd that most of today's corporate intranet "Home Pages" consistently supply users with an exceptionally high noise to signal ratio. Instead of acting as enablers, they pour an overwhelming maze of information onto users - with questionable relevancy. Does it really make sense to use a key touch point in the enterprise to bombard users with low relevancy global information? There is a good chance they are not even familiar with the details of their own department. A huge opportunity is being missed by not taking some simple steps to allow users to more effectively access pertinent information related to their job functions and more easily navigate the overall organization.
  • Portal Content Personalization
    To make the most effective use of a portal and content management platform, personalization is a critical component of delivering the most value to end users. Regardless of what type of constituents you may be serving, content relevance is key to supporting business goals like self-service, communication within a geographically distributed organization, lead generation . ...
  • 6 Best Practices for Enterprise 2.0 Implementations
    In the February installment of Oracle’s INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTER Content Management Edition I had an opportunity to share a series of tips around addressing business issues, management costs and deployment strategies for the latest generation Enterprise 2. 0 technologies. Read the complete article – 6 Best Practices for Enterprise 2...
  • The Minimalist’s Approach to Content Governance
    On Oracle’s Fusion ECM Blog I authored a 4 part series that outlined a pragmatic, minimalist approach to content governance.   Please read on below for the detail on each of the phases and links to more detail. The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance Let’s be honest – content governance is far from an exciting topic...
  • Content Platform Migration Strategy – Artifacts vs Perishable Content
    Tremendous value and cost savings can be realized by rationalizing multiple, existing content repositories into a single platform.   A mature, enterprise-caliber content management platform has the ability to maintain and govern all unstructured information across various systems from a secure, central location – reducing management costs and increasing the value of your existing content.   The ...
  • Project Mission Statements – Justifiable, Objective Focus
    It is not uncommon for project mission statements and organizational mission statements contain lofty, heartfelt missions that sound terrific – but fail to translate into meaningful guidance for a project or company.   If you ever had a chance to use the Dilbert mission statement generator before it was decommissioned, you may have created mission statements . ...
  • Misconceptions – Redesigns and Information Architecture
    In the world of web site management and development, the term “redesign” may at first seem harmless, but can have far reaching implications as to what will be done to deliver a successful project. I recently worked with a customer who was interested in redesigning various internal and external web sites for their organization. ...
  • Business Value – Minimal Investment, Maximum Impact
    Looking at web technology it is easy to feel that great business value and user productivity can be gained from creating deep, complex integrations presented through elegant user interfaces.  This could be the truth, but it is often far from it. As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is ...
  • Intranet Page Usability – Like a Good Dinner Party
    A great web page is structured like a good dinner party – not everyone can be the center of attention at the same time.   To maximize effective participation it is best to have small pockets of focus exist throughout the dinner that people can engage with.   In order for those pockets of focus to stand ...
  • Intranet User Experience Design
    In the world of corporate web portals user experience tends to take a backseat during a project. After all – with the requirements gathering, coding, configuration and additional tasks that need to be completed, who can bother setting aside time to deal with something wildly subjective like user experience? What intranet team has . ...
  • Intranet Content Maintenance Tips
    Anyone familiar with intranets knows the pain of not applying best practices to content maintenance strategies upfront in an initial deployment. As part of a governance plan it is essential to design the maintenance strategy early on in a deployment. The pain generally becomes apparent when trying to figure out why old content exists within ...
  • Large Project Success – Pragmatic Phasing
    I marvel at the complexity of various finely made time pieces. I cringe at the complexity of various projects. A timepiece is generally valued by the number of “complications” or moving parts that it has...
  • Principles of Natural Participation
    * Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch Community December 2007 and Portalsmag. com Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide...
  • Unlocking the Value of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration and Authoring Tools
    Enterprise software vendors now include Web 2. 0-influenced product suites with blogging, wiki, and mashup functionality. Some vendors attempt to provide programmatic development tools to incorporate these new features, while others have created end user-centric authoring environments...
  • Intranet Success Workbook – Winning is not a Guessing Game
    Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from . ...
  • Maximizing Portal ROI – Education, Production Capacity and Stewardship Delegation
    “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” -Chinese proverb If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. ...
  • Social BPM - Benefits & Getting Started
    With the introduction of BPM 11G Oracle provides a series of pre-integrations that allows BPM processes to be surfaced within WebCenter in the context of other relevant information and applications. This provides a wide range of business benefits that I eleborate on in an AIIM post - Ultimate Context - Social Business Processes...
  • Getting Started with Site Studio for External Applications (SSXA)
    The majority of IT organizations realized long ago that managing content was not a business that they wanted to be in. To address this, these organizations implemented some form of a content management system to allow business users direct management of content within their web sites...
  • Site Studio Mobile Example - WCM Reuse
    Mobile internet usage is growing by leaps and bounds and it is theorized that in the not-to-distant future it will eclipse traditional access via desktop browsers. Mary Meeker, a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of their global technology research team, recently predicted that mobile usage will eclipse desktop usage within the next 5 years in an Events@Google series presentation...
  • WebCenter .NET Accelerator - Microsoft SharePoint Data via WSRP
    Platforms in the enterprise will never be homogeneous. As much as any vendor would enjoy having their single development or application technology be exclusively adopted by customers, too much legacy, time, education, innovation and vertical business needs exist to make using a single platform practical...
  • WebCenter 11g UI Examples
    Anyone interested in learning more manipulating the WebCenter UI should definitely stop by John Sim's blog. He has produced an excellent set of UI examples and details around how he achieved them...
  • Oracle UCM Integration with WebCenter
    Portal deployments always contain some level of content that requires management. Like peanut butter and jelly, the ying and yang, they are inseparable...
  • Elevating Customer Experience through Enterprise Social Networking
    I am not sure about most people, but I really dislike automated call center routing systems. They are impersonal and convey a sense that the company I am dealing with does not see the value of providing customer service that increases positive perception of their brand...
  • Portal Content Personalization
    To make the most effective use of a portal and content management platform, personalization is a critical component of delivering the most value to end users. Regardless of what type of constituents you may be serving, content relevance is key to supporting business goals like self-service, communication within a geographically distributed organization, lead generation and customer loyalty effectively...
  • WebCenter Spaces 11g - UI Customization
    When developing on top of a portal platform to support an intranet or extranet, a portion of the development time is spent adjusting the out-of-box user templates to adjust the look and feel of the platform for your organization. Generally your deployment will not need to look like anything like the sites posted on http://cssremix...
  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Retire Phase
    Good news - the Retire Phase is actually more fun than the Manage Phase. During the Retire Phase our content management team should not have to track down content creators if the Request Phase of this process was completed successfully...
  • E2.0 Newsletter - 6 Best Practices for Enterprise 2.0 Implementations
    I had a chance to share some of my thoughts around implementation using the latest E2. 0 technologies from Oracle...
  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Manage Phase
    Most people would probably agree that creating content is the enjoyable part of the content life cycle. Management, on the other hand, is generally not...
  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Create Phase
    In this installment of our Minimalist Approach to Content Governance we finally get to the fun part of the content creation process! Once the content requester has addressed the items outlined in the Request Phase it is time to setup and begin the production of content. For this to be done correctly it is important the the content be assigned appropriate workflow and security information...
  • The Minimalist Approach to Content Governance - Request Phase
    For each project, regardless of size, it is critical to understand the required ownership, business purpose, prerequisite education / resources needed to execute and success criteria around it. Without doing this, there is no way to get a handle on the content life-cyle, resulting in a mass of orphaned material...
  • The Minimalist's Approach to Content Governance
    Let's be honest - content governance is far from an exciting topic. BUT the potential of a very small intranet team creating and maintaining a platform that provides an organization with relevant, high value information, helping workers to get their jobs done with greater accuracy and in less time is exciting...