Notes from Enterprise Search Summit -- East

Last week I attended the ESS show at the New York Hilton. I think the most salient smoke screen to hit my radar was the game-changing notion that a successful search deployment (and there are more than a few to be found) shifts the stakes from a user to provider-centric view of enterprise content. But the first few steps are tentative. This is not so much a groundswell as a groundbreaker -- and once it catches fire, a deal-breaker too: Want to improve user experience? Increase provider participation.

The distinctions that once colored content producers and contributions continue to bleed together. If I offer an opinion about how well an instruction helps me do my job am I a passive consumer or an engaged community member? If I download a bunch of presentations and preview several others am I identified as a content collector? Does my mounting collection signify a degree of influence that the author has over my efforts to absorb, master, and ultimately leverage this material? No matter what the motivation, no matter what the conclusion ... what we do with content will one day eclipse the content itself.

My favorite new feature on display at the show was a passive approach to meta content, a.k.a. content about content. A vendor named BA-Insight has devised an ingenius way to capture the secret life of documents. These secrets reveal what sway the ideas conveyed by our peers have over us. In the publishing world this is a simple units sold formula. Behind the corporate firewall this is called a Wiki that gets updated almost as often as a freshly proposed solution is minted as a new product innovation, business model, or marketing approach. No matter what the end game it's a provider's market and the easier it is to reach it, shape it, and build on it, arguably the better the outcome.

So how did this play out at the vendor booth? BA-Insight's Longitude product collects all kinds of passive feedback -- downloads, previews, tagging, and other recordable sessions events take the opt-in approach to a whole new level of discretion. Essentially the record button is pegged to the user ID, rendering the idea of an active observer to that of the actions taken by that same user. This approach to meta-content is completely passive, preserving an untampered search session. That means no gaming, back-scratching, user surveys, or votes to cast (the equivalent of internal pop-ups). This is user feedback of the purest, organic degree. Perhaps the purity is why the team from Accenture that provided the case study has so far shied away from this feature?

The other nice-to-haves are alluring to any professional services shop that belches, respirates, and wheezes in PowerPoint. For instance Longitude's preview pane decouples bloated ZIP folders (the last refuge of a knowledge provider with no time or incentive to upload their stuff. Not only can you cut and paste right out of preview but you also see the pockets of relevance by page number, adhering to your keywords.

All the whizbangetry was blown away however by Kevin Dana's elegant and sparing AJAX customization that registers a keyword lookup on Accenture's back-end index. This search suggestion feature would come in handy for any enterprise where the user base is not graded on keyword creativity but their ability to reshape existing outputs in the form they've been tasked to regenerate. Creative? Well maybe on someone else's clock and with someone else's IP!

The search sugestion feature comes to mind when considering Tuesday morning's panel led by Jean Graef on social search where a discussion about user inputs into enterprise search quickly led to a familiar tradition-bound versus web 2.0 fight on who was better equipped to carry the findability mantle into the next round of version-dot-placeholder. MITRE's Laurie Damianos says that much of the collective intelligence (and foundational content) added in her enterprise comes from employees' pre-existing Del.icio.us tags. MITRE has built and fielded a social bookmarking prototype, creating public profiles from RSS feeds for internal indexing. Damianos says the effort has led to a referral system, promoting common tags and using recommendations for similar labels. She also raised the often overlooked question of content lifecycle management and the link root brought on by broken links and outdated page references. The team currently enforces freshness by purging all tags that go inactive after 90 days.

I thought the real panel-stumper was put to the next roundtable on BI Tools hosted by Steve Arnold. Graf Mouen of ABC News asked what Arnold, Northern Light's David Seuss, ISYS's Derek Murphy and SAP's Alexander Maedche saw in terms of their accounts investing the needed resources in something more critical than tagging feeds, search tools, preview panes, and text analytics -- that resource is on the firm's own domain experts. All deployments regardless of technology, vendor, cost, and implementation smarts can only go so far without their participation. The sober answer of "not much" belied the unnatural state of seeing Seuss and Arnold in actual agreement.

Notes from Enterprise Search Summit -- East

Last week I attended the ESS show at the New York Hilton. I think the most salient smoke screen to hit my radar was the game-changing notion that a successful search deployment (and there are more than a few to be found) shifts the stakes from a user to provider-centric view of enterprise content. But the first few steps are tentative. This is not so much a groundswell as a groundbreaker -- and once it catches fire, a deal-breaker too: Want to improve user experience? Increase provider participation.

The distinctions that once colored content producers and contributions continue to bleed together. If I offer an opinion about how well an instruction helps me do my job am I a passive consumer or an engaged community member? If I download a bunch of presentations and preview several others am I identified as a content collector? Does my mounting collection signify a degree of influence that the author has over my efforts to absorb, master, and ultimately leverage this material? No matter what the motivation, no matter what the conclusion ... what we do with content will one day eclipse the content itself.

My favorite new feature on display at the show was a passive approach to meta content, a.k.a. content about content. A vendor named BA-Insight has devised an ingenius way to capture the secret life of documents. These secrets reveal what sway the ideas conveyed by our peers have over us. In the publishing world this is a simple units sold formula. Behind the corporate firewall this is called a Wiki that gets updated almost as often as a freshly proposed solution is minted as a new product innovation, business model, or marketing approach. No matter what the end game it's a provider's market and the easier it is to reach it, shape it, and build on it, arguably the better the outcome.

So how did this play out at the vendor booth? BA-Insight's Longitude product collects all kinds of passive feedback -- downloads, previews, tagging, and other recordable sessions events take the opt-in approach to a whole new level of discretion. Essentially the record button is pegged to the user ID, rendering the idea of an active observer to that of the actions taken by that same user. This approach to meta-content is completely passive, preserving an untampered search session. That means no gaming, back-scratching, user surveys, or votes to cast (the equivalent of internal pop-ups). This is user feedback of the purest, organic degree. Perhaps the purity is why the team from Accenture that provided the case study has so far shied away from this feature?

The other nice-to-haves are alluring to any professional services shop that belches, respirates, and wheezes in PowerPoint. For instance Longitude's preview pane decouples bloated ZIP folders (the last refuge of a knowledge provider with no time or incentive to upload their stuff. Not only can you cut and paste right out of preview but you also see the pockets of relevance by page number, adhering to your keywords.

All the whizbangetry was blown away however by Kevin Dana's elegant and sparing AJAX customization that registers a keyword lookup on Accenture's back-end index. This search suggestion feature would come in handy for any enterprise where the user base is not graded on keyword creativity but their ability to reshape existing outputs in the form they've been tasked to regenerate. Creative? Well maybe on someone else's clock and with someone else's IP!

The search sugestion feature comes to mind when considering Tuesday morning's panel led by Jean Graef on social search where a discussion about user inputs into enterprise search quickly led to a familiar tradition-bound versus web 2.0 fight on who was better equipped to carry the findability mantle into the next round of version-dot-placeholder. MITRE's Laurie Damianos says that much of the collective intelligence (and foundational content) added in her enterprise comes from employees' pre-existing Del.icio.us tags. MITRE has built and fielded a social bookmarking prototype, creating public profiles from RSS feeds for internal indexing. Damianos says the effort has led to a referral system, promoting common tags and using recommendations for similar labels. She also raised the often overlooked question of content lifecycle management and the link root brought on by broken links and outdated page references. The team currently enforces freshness by purging all tags that go inactive after 90 days.

I thought the real panel-stumper was put to the next roundtable on BI Tools hosted by Steve Arnold. Graf Mouen of ABC News asked what Arnold, Northern Light's David Seuss, ISYS's Derek Murphy and SAP's Alexander Maedche saw in terms of their accounts investing the needed resources in something more critical than tagging feeds, search tools, preview panes, and text analytics -- that resource is on the firm's own domain experts. All deployments regardless of technology, vendor, cost, and implementation smarts can only go so far without their participation. The sober answer of "not much" belied the unnatural state of seeing Seuss and Arnold in actual agreement.

Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand!

This post tries to shed some light on the often bewildering exchange between your users and the information they use (or uses them as the case may be).

Our discussion adheres to a simple, familiar concept that governs these interactions. Think of the marketplace. Think economic cycles. Think fundamental rules. Now apply the laws of supply and demand to your internal databases and networks:

Supply – The content we’ve already got posted and indexed.

Demand – Why our users are spending time in the systems we build them.

Again it’s that demand side where all the mystery unfolds. What attracts demand to supply on intranets? In retail this is a question answered with every new trip to the checkout counter. But we knowledge intermediaries don’t have the benefit of measuring demand by dollars spent. The only expenditure on our information assets is the attentions paid by our users – a payment rarely shared with us!

Still, for information architects the response might bear some resemblance to the common shopping experience in the form of...

* Freshness – continuous updates of volatile, time-sensitive information – especially where responses to pending changes are required

* Uniqueness – documents with exceptional properties and lacking the redundancy of more generic materials

* Transferability – The ease of getting document text, graphics, and formatting from one project to another

But are these qualities best measured in the algorithms of code or the minds our users? We all know who won that battle in the race to define relevancy on the web and it was Page Rank by a mile. But what about inside the firewall? What could be more organic than a formula based on most popular downloads? What could be more democratic than tracing click-throughs to the ultimate purchase -- not a catalog page, or a banner ad but the buying of an argument, the best-selling item in the shopping cart of any analyst.

Not so fast. What about voting qualifications? Are some elections to the hall of top docs more democratic than others? We all know the only impediment to gaming the world's most popular ranking formula. And it has far more to do with Google's hush-hush policies than the brilliance of its programmers.

Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand!

This post tries to shed some light on the often bewildering exchange between your users and the information they use (or uses them as the case may be).

Our discussion adheres to a simple, familiar concept that governs these interactions. Think of the marketplace. Think economic cycles. Think fundamental rules. Now apply the laws of supply and demand to your internal databases and networks:

Supply – The content we’ve already got posted and indexed.

Demand – Why our users are spending time in the systems we build them.

Again it’s that demand side where all the mystery unfolds. What attracts demand to supply on intranets? In retail this is a question answered with every new trip to the checkout counter. But we knowledge intermediaries don’t have the benefit of measuring demand by dollars spent. The only expenditure on our information assets is the attentions paid by our users – a payment rarely shared with us!

Still, for information architects the response might bear some resemblance to the common shopping experience in the form of...

* Freshness – continuous updates of volatile, time-sensitive information – especially where responses to pending changes are required

* Uniqueness – documents with exceptional properties and lacking the redundancy of more generic materials

* Transferability – The ease of getting document text, graphics, and formatting from one project to another

But are these qualities best measured in the algorithms of code or the minds our users? We all know who won that battle in the race to define relevancy on the web and it was Page Rank by a mile. But what about inside the firewall? What could be more organic than a formula based on most popular downloads? What could be more democratic than tracing click-throughs to the ultimate purchase -- not a catalog page, or a banner ad but the buying of an argument, the best-selling item in the shopping cart of any analyst.

Not so fast. What about voting qualifications? Are some elections to the hall of top docs more democratic than others? We all know the only impediment to gaming the world's most popular ranking formula. And it has far more to do with Google's hush-hush policies than the brilliance of its programmers.

Unstructured

Unstructured.

That's the word that vendors use to describe the state of the problem you are hiring them to fix.

Me, the content romantic: Send a crawler that can paw through the stacks of our towering piles in hopes of rescuing a lost lesson or past bid for potential greatness, sandbagged by the ravages of past downsizings and market disruptions.

The vendor responds: We are not in the business of fixing something that is too unruly, rampant, and culturally taboo for your colleagues to care -- let alone change or hire an outside firm to go fix. Besides, the vendor doesn't sell to the business -- it sells to my IT group and it's a message of plug and play -- not asset recovery.

The vendor proposes a work-around that indexes every file and treats it with the same deference that one might your recyclables at curbside: this was a leaf pile and those were some egg cartons but either way they're being carted off in the same truck.

But how does unstructured become structured? Content is not reducible to "1"s and "0"s. Content is about subjects and predicates. This is not how IT thinks and this is not what's being sold here. When it comes to the recycling of your unstructured data the vendor has some useful wrappers for "re-purposing" the IP trash you might otherwise toss with your document shreddings. For instance there might be some kind of precanned attempt to classify your unlabeled inventory by mapping some recurrent keywords in your index to sets of selective phrases that hint at structure. But it's just a tease.

There's no more credence between your content and organizing it than a simple passing match-word resemblance to the phrases reproduced in the vendor's approximation of your salient concepts -- what the document is about.

Is that better than nothing? It's better than nothing if you've already surrendered to the notion that unstructured information was never meant to be...

* recovered
* gathering electronic dust like some deep cryogenics freeze of your firm's institutional memory
* re-dedicated to a higher state of usefulness -- even though so many of these past lessons hold shelf lives beyond the retention of a major account, product line, or fading wisdom of a key former contributor).

Really, when you get down to unstructured it's only the structured world's way of saying that it can trap context, meaning, and judgment in the same binary webbing that entraps numbers and facts in spreadsheets and databases. But trapping is not the same as translating or interpreting why yesterday's document landfill could become tomorrow's breakthrough thinking. True structuring requires an understanding of the actions taken with the information as the basis for any formal content structure.

Unstructured

Unstructured.

That's the word that vendors use to describe the state of the problem you are hiring them to fix.

Me, the content romantic: Send a crawler that can paw through the stacks of our towering piles in hopes of rescuing a lost lesson or past bid for potential greatness, sandbagged by the ravages of past downsizings and market disruptions.

The vendor responds: We are not in the business of fixing something that is too unruly, rampant, and culturally taboo for your colleagues to care -- let alone change or hire an outside firm to go fix. Besides, the vendor doesn't sell to the business -- it sells to my IT group and it's a message of plug and play -- not asset recovery.

The vendor proposes a work-around that indexes every file and treats it with the same deference that one might your recyclables at curbside: this was a leaf pile and those were some egg cartons but either way they're being carted off in the same truck.

But how does unstructured become structured? Content is not reducible to "1"s and "0"s. Content is about subjects and predicates. This is not how IT thinks and this is not what's being sold here. When it comes to the recycling of your unstructured data the vendor has some useful wrappers for "re-purposing" the IP trash you might otherwise toss with your document shreddings. For instance there might be some kind of precanned attempt to classify your unlabeled inventory by mapping some recurrent keywords in your index to sets of selective phrases that hint at structure. But it's just a tease.

There's no more credence between your content and organizing it than a simple passing match-word resemblance to the phrases reproduced in the vendor's approximation of your salient concepts -- what the document is about.

Is that better than nothing? It's better than nothing if you've already surrendered to the notion that unstructured information was never meant to be...

* recovered
* gathering electronic dust like some deep cryogenics freeze of your firm's institutional memory
* re-dedicated to a higher state of usefulness -- even though so many of these past lessons hold shelf lives beyond the retention of a major account, product line, or fading wisdom of a key former contributor).

Really, when you get down to unstructured it's only the structured world's way of saying that it can trap context, meaning, and judgment in the same binary webbing that entraps numbers and facts in spreadsheets and databases. But trapping is not the same as translating or interpreting why yesterday's document landfill could become tomorrow's breakthrough thinking. True structuring requires an understanding of the actions taken with the information as the basis for any formal content structure.