Guest contribution by Atle Skjekkeland,
Vice President, AIIM international
Email: askjekkland@aiim.org
Web site: www.aiim.org/training MIKE2 is an information management delivery methodology developed by BearingPoint and made available to the public as Open Source at http://mike2.openmethodology.org/wiki/MIKE2.0_Methodology. The acronym MIKE stands for “Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment”, and AIIM has incorporated parts of the MIKE2 methodology into their new Enterprise 2.0 Certificate programs. 
MIKE2 HistoryMIKE2 has been used by BearingPoint in a number of engagements for information management systems of all kinds including content management, portals, knowledge management, business intelligence, and others. While initially focused around structured data, the goal of MIKE2.0 is to provide a comprehensive methodology for any type of Information Development. In this context, Information Development is about:
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| | · | Driving an overall approach through an organization’s Information Strategy |
| | · | Enabling people with the right skills to build and manage new information systems while creating a culture of information excellence |
| | · | Moving to a new organizational model that delivers an improved information management competency |
| | · | Improving processes around information compliance, policies, practices and measurement |
| | · | Delivering contemporary technology solutions that meet the needs of highly federated organizations |
Using a collaborative approach to the continuous improvement of this methodology, use of the MIKE2 wiki allows you to modify or add content that should be added to the methodology as appropriate. Participation is open so you should feel free to jump in and edit, refine, correct and add extra information as you like. In a true collaborative environment, contributing content to help other organizations in the implementation of solutions, based on your own experiences and insights helps drive refine emergent practices that are accepted as a whole. As described on the MIKE2 site, the idea of the methodology is not to re-invent the core methodology of implementation but to refine it over time.
Phased approach for implementing solutions
The conceptual framework overall should be quite familiar to anybody who has managed or worked on technology implementations. As MIKE2 discusses, implementation happens in a number of stages or phases with activities occurring in a specified order to help ensure that the systems built are targeted and remain targeted at the specific business drivers of your organization.
The above image, an illustration referenced at mike2.openmethodology.org, shows the five phases of MIKE2. These are:
Phase 1 Business Assessment
Phase 2 Technology Assessment
Phase 3 Information Management Roadmap
Phase 4 Design Increment
Phase 5 Incremental Development, Testing, Deployment and Improvement
Looking at these in greater details, we see that Phase 1 is what the creators of the MIKE2 methodology call the business assessment, forming the basis of the strategy for the entire implementation.
Phase 2 is the technology assessment. The purpose of this phase is to understand where you stand with current technology in your organization, where you want to go with the technology that will ultimately be deployed and where the gaps are between the current and future states of your technology infrastructure. (Note that the outcome of left side or early stages of MIKE2 is called the strategic program blueprint, a summarization of the combined work of phases one and two, which are the business assessment and technology.)
As we move forward in the MIKE2 diagram, we see that Phase 3 is the information management roadmap. This is where you begin to gather together everything that has been assessed in Phases one and two and move forward into building working systems, having decided what needs to be accomplished from a business standpoint, what technology is already in place, and what will need to be acquired and modified for the purposes of your project.
The circular nature of Phases three through five is derived from the lean and agile way of thinking. MIKE2 is oriented towards getting to working solutions that may start out relatively small with not much functionality then built upon and refined as you grow your implementation. This growth may be to the ultimate conclusion within a certain specific project, or in expanding an existing implementation to a larger setting, such as cross-departmental or enterprise.
The end result of this loop is that as you are building out the solution, you create a design increment in phase four that builds the system based on the roadmap and foundation activities. The design phase breaks apart the design of your ECM system into smaller pieces, in order to make meaningful designs available for quick turnarounds and use.
Phase 5 is the actual incremental development, testing, deployment, and improvement phase. Until the project is complete Phase five leverages a feedback loop to phase 3 for analysis of what did not work from the previously deployed iteration of the loop, allowing the implementation team focus on any fixes that need to be deployed, as well as new capabilities to be layered in the next design, deployment, and testing iteration.
The Advantage
Governance is an important aspect of MIKE2, and the governance model provides assessment tools, information standards, organizational structures and roles and responsibilities in relation to managing information assets.
The MIKE2 methodology differs from many traditional implementation methodologies, very often known as the “waterfall” implementation method, which have long-time lags between the completion of the upfront requirements gathering and when a working system is produced. The traditional delays can be weeks, months, or in extreme cases, years.
Using MIKE2, by building in continuously working models, the expectation is that any problems that arise in continuously building and improving the system can be addressed as part of the process of BUILDING the system, rather than finding out at the end of a prolonged implementation period of 6-18 months that the business requirements were not adequately captured or that the needs/expectations have changed over the course of the project.
Join MIKE2 now!
The MIKE2.0 Methodology uses a foundation of open source technologies with a number of extensions and customizations. The overall product is referred to as “omCollab” and is released in its entirety to the open source community as part of the project. The MIKE2.0 collaboration environment provides the following capabilities:
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| | · | A Wiki to collaboratively create and share content (based on the same MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia) |
| | · | Blogs to publish individual or group-based information (based on Wordpress) |
| | · | Social Bookmarking for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks |
| | · | Social Networking for the MIKE2.0 community to store basic profile information and to interact with one another |
| | · | Tag (metadata) and categories are used to classify articles, blogs and bookmarks into a common taxonomy. MIKE2.0 brings these two concepts together in the bookmarking component. |
| | · | Techniques and technologies to mashup to MIKE2.0, to build integrated solutions based on open content and internally held assets |
| | · | Search for users to discover content across federated repositories. MIKE2.0 uses Google Custom Search |
| | · | A rich user interface with advanced navigational components an integrated skin and single sign on to provide common look and feel across the platform |
| | · | An Open Methodology Compliance (OMC) capability to link an organization into the MIKE2.0 open standard |
Conclusion
MIKE2 is proving to be a comprehensive delivery methodology for information management solutions, but need more guidelines and best practices for implementing Enterprise Content Management. The fact that MIKE2 leverages Open Source and embraces an Enterprise 2.0 mentality of collaboration means that over time, refinement and strength will transform MIKE2 into an even more solid and consistent methodology that provides consistent accepted practices within our industry. By joining and providing your input now, you will help shape the future of delivering information management solutions in the future.
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