Where have I been?  Well, mostly, I’ve been getting myself comfortable in a new position.  Tomorrow marks my first anniversary as an employee of Deloitte.  I took on the role of Portal Program Lead for the Global Consulting Knowledge Management (GCKM) group.  This position carries a lot of the same responsibilities I had with Novell – I manage a small team of great people taking care of a portal and its associated search solution, its taxonomy and also interacting with and supporting a lot of people within the GCKM group and in the practice at large.

One big difference is that it’s not the “enterprise” portal and search solution I used to manage – instead, it’s the knowledge management portal specifically for Deloitte’s consulting organization.  Another big difference is that it’s a portal targeted at an audience that is many times larger than Novell’s employee population.  So a relatively small scope but a relatively much larger audience.  Definitely a much difference organization then the one I had been used to!

It’s been an interesting year – learning a lot and getting used to a new organization, new technical solutions, new business problems, and more.

This is probably as much rationalization as anything but I’ve been feeling like I wanted to wait until I had been at this new position long enough to begin writing again.  As in the past, I will mostly write about my own perceptions and learnings and thinking based on my experiences.  Given that I did not feel comfortable writing about what I had learned at Novell after I left, while at the same time, I did not feel like I had enough grounding at Deloitte to write about that experience, I have been in a holding pattern.

With tomorrow being my one year anniversary, I figure it’s time to jump back in. As always, opinions expressed here are mine and do not imply any belief on the part of my employer.

My first post back will be on Best Bet Governance.  Look for it shortly!

To given you a sense of what that means, here are some topics I’m planning for future posts:

• The content management lifecycle and how I see its relationship to a full content management solution for an enterprise
• Novell’s knowledge management architecture and how it relates to our content management solution
• The components of searchability (or is that findability?)
• Managing a taxonomy and guidelines for such
• Using a taxonomy within an enterprise
• Types of taxonomies and how they are used
• Communities of practice infrastructure and metrics
• Search at Novell (including how we manage and enhance our search, how we manage our “best bets”, how we manage responsibilities for search and other exciting aspects!)
• A discussion of how a taxonomy can be the “glue” in an enterprise dashboard
• Folksonomy and tagging within the enterprise
• Social bookmarking within the enterprise
• Search logs and taxonomies (including “taxonomizing your search logs” – a term I picked up from Marilyn Chartrand of Kaiser Permanente at Enterprise Search Summit West 2007)
• The role of a content architect in an enterprise
• The use of blogs and wikis within the enterprise (along with RSS!)

And probably a host of other topics along the way. A lot of things to write about and share and I hope you find it interesting!