Articles, Enterprise Search

This article appeared in the KMWorld May 2012 WhitePaper, Best Practices in Intelligent Search.  To receive KMWorld content, including this Whitepaper visit KMWorld.com.

Search is a conversation. If you ask me a question and I don’t understand, I can ask you for more information. With time you learn more about my interests, and can give better answers. Well-designed, intelligent search systems can do the same. We can facilitate this dialog by addressing three critical requirements for effective search. These are:

1. Search needs to feel like navigation
2. Search needs to be personal
3. Search needs to be adaptive, improving over time

1.     Search needs to feel like navigation

People find answers through haphazard and chaotic processes. Are you a searcher or a browser? It really depends. Most people shift perspectives between the two modes. We search when we know what we want and are trying to retrieve something. We browse when we don’t know what we want and need to discover knowledge. Navigational structures can teach us about available content, but we tend to shift back and forth between retrieval and discovery.  

Most consumers are now very familiar with faceted navigation. Search terms are part of the left navigation. When you click on a particular size, color, or brand, the system executes a query. A relevant result set is returned. The user can also see how many documents that contain each term are in the collection. Search terms that make no sense or that would lead to zero results fall off the list, so users will not go down blind alleys.

This article, by Seth Earley, was published on CIOUPDATE.COM on September 30, 2011.

Keeping up with a fast paced dynamic business is challenging if not impossible for most IT organizations. Fortunately, there are ways to improve agility and provide better support to fast moving enterprises. 

This article, the last in this series, discusses four key strategies for servicing the agile organization:

This article, by Seth Earley, was published on CIOUPDATE.COM on August 3, 2011.  

Business changes faster than technology can support. That is just a fact of a CIO’s life. But there are ways to improve organizational agility and better support the demands of an ever-changing enterprise. This three part series will discuss various strategies for better meeting business needs.

In this article, I focus on how to create a context for amplifying the business value of information. My straight-forward proposition is that organizations that focus on core practices for effective access to and integration of information get more value from IT investments.

The resistance to addressing information access and integration head-on is that it seems like a “boiling the ocean” problem. It doesn’t need to be. It is possible to focus on a business critical solution, but throughout the effort maintain an enterprise perspective designed to build information value incrementally.

Here’s the recipe.

1. Focus on a specific process as a starting point.
2. Create common business language across the enterprise.
3. Embed that language in tools, systems and processes to create new business capabilities and agility.
4. Create governance and change management programs to leverage these capabilities in day to day work processes.
5. Apply accepted practices to unstructured content processes to promote better information hygiene.
6. Measure the information management process.
7. Measure business impact of new practices, and
8. Repeat on department by department basis.

What follows is an elaboration of each of these steps:

This article was published online at Baseline Magazine on May 3, 2011.

IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson computer has been hailed as a technology triumph – the ability of computers to understand human language and broad knowledge topics – not just facts and trivia but ambiguous language including puns, double entendre’s and idioms.

The technology is impressive and IBM has set its sights on many commercial applications in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.   Few organizations have the resources it took to build Watson - $3mm worth of hardware (off the shelf servers with almost 3000 processors and 1 terabyte of RAM) – not to mention millions in research.  Nevertheless, the question remains, does Watson embed a solution approach that enterprises can exploit or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise? 

A few clues lie in the nature of knowledge access and in some of the challenges that Watson team members discussed in articles and interviews.   First, here are some principles that Watson exploited:

The most important issues to business today include information overload, integration challenges, improved efficiency, adaptability to competitive challenges, and the faster pace of business change. All of these require improved ways of connecting people with each other and with the information and systems on which they depend to do their jobs. A core challenge is that there is a disconnect between IT functions and the line of business people whose job it is to keep the enterprise delivering products and services to customers.

A successful approach to search needs to factor in integration of content tagging, best bets, faceted search, investment in federated search, and so on. You can have the basic infrastructure, but to get real value, additional investments need to be made in operations and technology. It is the application of search infrastructure to business problems that requires the same rigor that any application requires.

The information age poses all kinds of challenges, the most fundamental of which is how to find things — this article explores how a taxonomy, through the application of metadata, can help users find exactly what they need.

According to a recent nationwide study, roughly 33 million American internet users use a search engine to locate information at least once a day. The only task that was completed more often was checking email.  It is clear that the use of search engines has become a part of daily life and a necessary utility for finding information. However the question of how to best apply and leverage search in varied information environments, such as databases, portals, and websites has yet to be adequately answered.