Information Management Communities

We have tons of communities in the "open" around Information Management products.  MySQL has a vibrant community.  Other open source products such as Alfresco (content management) have good communities.  Products from big companies (such as DB2, Oracle) have their own communities. 

But what about communities around Information Architectures, their best practices etc.?  They have typically been "closed" (such as within the practioners in large service organizations such as IBM's GBS), or scattered.  To this end, I have a two interesting developments to report.

First, Bearing Point has open sourced its Information Architectures and methodology -- something called Mike 2.0.  I met a real visionary from BP -- Robert Hillard, their global leader of Information Management -- who successfully convinced his sales and practice leaders that open sourcing some of their crown jewels will only lead to information management practice become more endemic to organizations -- leading to more business to BP in the long run.  I salute his vision, and am looking forward to have IBM contributing to Mike 2.0's success.  Vincent McBurney from BP is an active blogger on Information Architectures.

Second, we just launched our own community portal, for community activites around our Information on Demand set of products, including Information Server.  While currently it is centered around IBM's products, I think the interplay between a product specific portal such as ours, and an open portal such as Mike 2.0, would lead to benefits for all organizations looking to reach the next level in Information Management. 

Comments

[Vincent McBurney]

Thanks for the link to my blog! (You can read my blog response if you click on my name). I had a blast at IOD and got a lot out of the sessions and networking and the reception to MIKE 2.0 was encouraging. I hope MIKE 2.0 and IBM's LeverageInformation can grow together. I think IM professionals are going to like both communities as they have a lot of passionate people invested in them.

[Robert Hillard]

Likewise, thank-you as well for the comments about MIKE2.0, as people who believe in the power of information, we can only be successful if we can agree common approaches so the more contributions made to MIKE2.0 (www.openmethodology.org) and similar initatives the better.