The Information Management Foundation collected 19 best practices in their first book from various areas within the information management domain. The book’s editors are Bob Boiko, one of the leading authorities on Content Managemnt, and Erik Hartman who among others organises the Hartman Event in The Netherlands. The cases are written by various authors that have many years of experience in their respective area. This is one of the first books that I have encountered that presents independent cases of real life situations. The are also a few more generic topics described for example the lessons learned from the Dublin Core Meta Data Initiative about setting and maintaining standards or how to develop your governance.
The independent cases is the strength and the weaknesses of this book. You gain insights into their specific challenges and how they went about this. At the same time this also limits the reach of the book because the cases do not cover the full breath of the information management domain. The focus is mostly on the content management side of the domain with a bias towards web content management and related topics for example meta data and search that are also more broadly applicable.
I hope that they will follow through with publishing more books, or perhaps a website that continuously collects best practices, where other topics such as records management, document management, email management, business intelligence, master data management, etc get more attention as well.
The book is great if you are looking for a proven approach how to go about projects in a specific area. If you are looking for actual solutions or architectures as a reference or as inspiration for your situation, I do not mean specific technology as such, then this book will provide you with little answers.
Do these limitations make this a bad book? Not at all! I will just have to keep looking to gain more insights into what organisations have actually implemented succesfully and why they decided to do things their way.