UP FRONT: From the Editor

As Published In

May/June 2011

Get to the Right People

By Tom Haunert

Oracle WebCenter Suite helps connect people to job roles, projects, and each other.

A recent cover story in TIME Magazine—“Your Data for Sale” (March 21, 2011)—discussed, among other things, how personal information is being captured and sold.

The article made several good points about personal information data mining, privacy, public records, internet security, personal freedom, and more. Looking specifically at TIME’s discussion of the value of information and actions taken based on that information, however, I took away a few key points:

Personal information from random individuals has measurable, monetary value to data-mining organizations and advertisers.
Not all mined personal information is accurate.
Organizations generate and direct advertising and offers to people based on a minimum of mined data.

The advertising and offers based on inaccurate data mining don’t always go to the right people. Or, to look at it another way, sometimes the people targeted aren’t who the data miners and advertisers thought they were.

Get Personal and Accurate

Of course personal information gathered from miscellaneous public records and Web browsers and sold for profit is very different from corporate information. An organization’s corporate information is not for sale on an open market, and the information about the people in the organization—and the information for which those people are responsible—must be current and accurate.

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In my own work on Oracle Magazine, I’m fortunate that much of the current information I need is available in digital form in press releases, white papers, Web pages, user documentation, and so on. But a lot of what I do involves scheduling content six months to a year in advance, so I need more than current information: I need to identify and connect with the subject matter experts who will have information updates in six days, six weeks, and six months. Finding and connecting with the right subject matter experts and ensuring that any lost expertise on a project’s virtual team gets replaced can be the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of a magazine project. Getting, keeping, and meeting with the right people as an ongoing virtual team is the key to magazine project success.

With a focus on the power of connecting people—socially—to business processes, the “Social By Design” feature discusses enterprise social computing built on Oracle WebCenter Suite. One particular component of Oracle WebCenter Suite, the Oracle WebCenter Spaces feature, makes connecting experts to experts particularly easy. Oracle WebCenter Spaces includes

Home Space, which hosts a user’s personal pages and appropriate business role pages
Business Role Pages, which connects users to business roles and keep roles updated
Group Spaces, which organizes users around a single project goal

Group Spaces puts and keeps the right people on a project in the same virtual meeting room. And unlike personal information data mining and its generated advertising, with Oracle WebCenter Spaces, the right information consistently gets to the right people and projects.