Search

I was really looking forward to attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA and the event didn’t disappoint.  Not only did I get to enjoy that southern California weather but I got the chance to get reacquainted with some old friends, meet some new people in the community and immerse myself in my favorite topic: enterprise search.

The number and range of session talks was staggering.  A few titles hit me right off of the bat as sessions I wanted to see:

• Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
• Best Practices from the Field: Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies with SharePoint 2010
• The Convergence of ECM and Knowledge Management: Strategies for Success

There were lots more, as well, so my days were pretty jam packed.  My most significant take-away from the conference was a general feeling of well-being as a result of learning that our approach to designing information architectures, taxonomies, and metadata schemas for SharePoint was exactly what Microsoft was advocating as best practice. 

It was also very interesting (and validating) that the song that we’ve been singing here at Earley & Associates for the last several years – that of Search as an Application – has become mainstream.  There were numerous sessions just on this topic, like:

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

This week I have had the privilege of teaching the information organization and access (AIIM IOA) course at a combined meeting of the Joint Task Force North, The Dept of Homeland Security, The US Army North and the US Northern Command.

From the JTF site: “The Joint Task Force North http://www.jtfn.northcom.mil/ is the Department of Defense organization tasked to support our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies in the identification and interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the continental United States. “

“Transnational threats are those activities conducted by individuals or groups that involve international terrorism, narcotrafficking, alien smuggling, weapons of mass destruction, and includes the delivery systems for such weapons that threaten the national security of the United States."

One of the primary goals of this mission is the capture and dissemination of knowledge throughout a network whose mission is the protection of the United States.  I was told by the head of the knowledge management organization, Dr Rick Morris, that my contribution would go directly to improving the security of the country.  I have to say that I am truly honored to be making such a contribution to our nation. 

Also from the JTF site: “JTF North’s homeland security support role is articulated in its mission statement:

Last week, Seth Earley blogged about the inefficacy of social tagging, but there's one scenario in which social tagging will breathe new life into an esoteric, 200-year industry: book indexing.

I've written hundreds of book indexes, presided over the American Society for Indexing, managed an international indexing partnership, taught courses, established standards, built tools, and consulted with a lot of influential folks, so trust me when I tell you that it pains me to see this happening. I believe with every fiber of my professional being that the human work of subject indexing is and will continue to be superior in quality to every alternative ever imagined. Oh well.

There is just too much information to index by hand, period. Books, periodicals, websites, blogs, messages, and documents are being produced or transformed too quickly for humans to keep pace, regardless of training and tools. Perhaps in response, the use of search algorithms becomes ever more popular, while overly optimistic expectations of retrieval quality grows increasingly preposterous. A more realistic response would be an increase in subject indexers' fees -- after all, demand is outpacing supply at an astounding rate -- but indexers haven't experienced a rate increase since the 1990s. The truth is that editorial indexing and all smart hands-on tagging is disappearing in favor of automatic approximations. And it is a reasonable argument that the substandard tagging of millions of pages and documents is better than leaving most of them without any subject metadata whatsoever.

The Faceted Fallacy

... If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?

Yes I know it’s a silly old question, with no real definitive answers but it makes our brains think creatively about ambiguous problems, which is fun.  A recent thread in the Taxonomy Community of Practice really got me thinking this way in relation to taxonomy.  

To summarize the thread, the question was raised, what are the most commonly used facets in an enterprise taxonomy? In response one member posted a “definitive” list of primary facets that could be used as an exhaustive skeleton for the “enterprise”.  From here the conversation split in multiple ways:

I often get frustrated by those who think Google is the greatest search engine that ever parsed. Don't get me wrong - I like Google, I use Google, I employ it as a verb. But if I hit the search button and get wonky results, I recognize that they are wonky and am not afraid to blame Google. (Full disclosure: I have a library science background which I'd like to think has made me into a pretty good searcher, so I will usually try a few different queries before I point the finger at the machine.)

On most of our consulting engagements, at least one person will say "I want our search to be more like Google." I have a few problems with this kind of statement. Partly it's that most folks aren't terribly critical when it comes to evaluating the relevance of Google results. It's what we know, it's what we're used to. We don't mind that Wikipedia is almost always the first result on any query - many might find that a "feature".  We're generally happy to take whatever shows up in those top 10 results and roll with it regardless of what it is, mostly because we can't know everything that is out there so we trust Google to filter it for us. We satisfice (yes, it's Wikipedia, joke intended.)

In my last post I discussed a process for putting together a broad list of keywords intended to act as the starting point for our keyword research. The purpose of this step was to give us the ability to cast as wide a net as possible in an effort to uncover as much of the language being used by our potential customers when searching for our content, products and/or services online. Doing so not only gives us the opportunity to wisely target the correct keywords, but also lets us craft our content in such a way as to tap into as much into the long tail as possible. To illustrate, I’ll use the following Top Content report from Google Analytics. As you can see this particular page, although targeted toward a specific set of keywords, generated traffic from an amazing 5,766 unique keyword combinations! This alone demonstrates the power of the long tail in driving significant amounts of traffic to your website.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to generate traffic just for traffic’s sake; you want these visitors to do something while on the site, whether it’s to buy your product, fill out a form or contact your company. Web analytics aside, now that we’ve done all the groundwork and assembled our master list of terms, we’re ready to tackle the research part of our keyword research.

Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." (1)

Recently Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired magazine called the The End of Theory. The thesis of the article in a nutshell is that the impending petabyte era of data storage signals the end of the traditional scientific method of discovery. No longer are we bound to the outdated model of observation, hypothesis and measurement. Computers (developed by Google & IBM) "can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."

In my last post, I mentioned the difficulty that some clients/stakeholders have in letting go of certain terminology when they undertake a taxonomy project:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important tools in helping us taxonomists get hard data that is meaningful and fight against the inclusion of terms that are too cute, ambiguous or otherwise detract from the findability of content.

Enterprise Search Survey Sue Feldman, research VP, content technologies at IDC, and Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, the Enterprise Search Sourcebook, and conference programmer for the Enterprise Search Summit Invite you to participate in a short (2-4 minute) survey about enterprise search tool selection. They will present the results at the Summit and on the Enterprise Search Center.

Links:

• IDC: http://www.idc.com
• EContent: http://www.econtentmag.com
• Sourcebook: http://www.enterprisesearchcenter.com/SourceBook/default.aspx
• Summit: http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com
• Survey: https://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/2b4cg3261b

Challenges of Search

I just returned from a conference in Rome where I presented a session on search. The basic premise is this: Search is not a utility. Search is an application. Search needs to be thought through and integrated into the process that it is meant to support.This does not mean that there is no place for basic search - the plug and play utility model that tools like Google Search Appliance leverage. In that case, search provides a valuable function in helping people access large stores of unorganized content. As much Google bashing as I do, I am a frequent user of Google Desktop. Hypocritical? I don't think so. GSA is appropriate for what I use it for - searching through email messages and my hard drive for certain types of information. Sometimes I find what I am looking for and sometimes I don't. But this is because of the relative effort I place on organizing my content versus the time it takes to do so. It's easier for me to search as I do and risk not finding something than it is for me to organize all of my email. On the other hand, I have a more structured method for the information that I place higher value on - proposals, SOW's, client project documents and conference presentations.

I wanted to post a preliminary note about our new Jump Start calls planned for September and October. Each series will consist of 4 - 90 minute calls each with 2 - 3 presenters who are experts and practitioners in their fields. Here is the tentative schedule:

Content Management Jumpstart: Each Monday 1:30 - 3:00 EST September 25th through October 16th - Topics will include:

• The basics of content management
• Building a content management business case
• Content management frameworks & governance
• Integrating content management with business processes
• Tagging, metadata and taxonomies
• Content publishing models & reuse
• Personalization & targeted content
• CMS selection & deployment
• Web content management & syndicating content
• Global content management

Search Solutions Jumpstart Each Friday 1:30 - 3:00 EST, October 13th through November 3rd - Topics will include: