Mobile, social and heading for the clouds!
Jinfo Blog

By Dale Moore

Abstract

We’re living in a highly connected world with information coming at us from all directions. The big questions for me as an information professional are: how to filter it, how to make sense of it and what to do with it? In short, how to manage it.

Item

This morning I did something very unusual; I woke up early (about 6.30 – which is pretty early for me!). But what I did next was the really weird thing. I reached for my smartphone to check … I’m not entirely sure what, but I just felt I need to check something. The weather? My email? My social status? Checking my phone has become something of a habit recently – not because I want to; because I feel I have to. What’s happening to me? Am I reverting back to a teenager or am I just afraid I might be missing something important? 

I’m not sure I know the answer but I do know that we we’re living in a highly connected world with information coming at us from all directions. The big questions for me as an information professional are: how to filter it, how to make sense of it and what to do with it? In short, how to manage it. This applies as much to me as an individual as to how I help the people in the organisation I work for.  

It seems I’m not alone and help is at hand in the form of an upcoming conference called, Managing Information in the Social, Local and Mobile Era. The three day conference, hosted by AIIM and to be held in San Francisco in March, features such luminaries as John Mancini, Clay Shirky and David Pogue and promises a juicy series of talks containing a heady mix of technology and techniques. It’s reassuring to see a focus on the "this is how you do it" alongside the usual "this is what you need to do it" aspects of information management. The big themes are big data, cloud computing, social computing and mobile computing. Oh yes, this is the future and I’ll be in good company! 

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend as the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge too far for me, but I can console myself that there will be an AIIM UK Roadshow sometime after. 

The cloud, social and mobile themes have been gaining ground for quite a while now and have been helped along by the late Steve Jobs who famously announced that Apple was primarily a mobile device company, and the influential paper Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT which did much to bring social media into the firewall. 

But now that we understand the importance of mobile devices and social technologies, it’s having somewhere to store and manage the data, content and information produced, circulated and consumed that’s grabbing all the attention. Hence Google’s Cloud Kit and the myriad other "primers" widely available. 

If you’re convinced that the cloud is the way to go, and returning to the conference season for inspiration, how about the Cloud Computing Bootcamp coming up in the summer in New York? Well, I have my mobile device and I’m socially engaged, now all I need is a plane ticket.

« Blog