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Recently I chaired the Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Institute Conference in San Jose – in the heart of Silicon Valley. The event has ...
In another article, I discussed my research into ChatGPT and the interesting results that it produced depending on the order in which I ente...
Digital assistants are taking a larger role in digital transformations. They can improve customer service, providing more convenient and eff...
It has been a year of advances in AI with new tools that create art, write essays, and have conversations that are often (but not always) st...
AI assistants are a form of cognitive AI. They go by many different names. The different terms used to identify AI assistants are described ...
Hybrid AI is a method of combining machine learning, which uses statistical models to analyze data, and symbolic AI, which is semantic-based...
Creativity is considered to be a bastion of humanness and somewhat outside of the realm of artificial intelligence. But AI can be used to ge...
TRANSCRIPT What can seem very daunting to organization is the fact that this problem is big and challenging and difficult. However, there's ...
TRANSCRIPT So the question about making an investment in IA, it always has to happen. And whether you're doing it intentionally or not, you ...
TRANSCRIPT When you make investments in information architecture it does a lot of things. First of all, there are multiple levels. You're ac...
TRANSCRIPT Information Architecture is extremely important today, especially since there's a lot of new technologies, emerging technologies,...
TRANSCRIPT I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about decision making based on data. It's really about how we can measure the results of ...
The customer journey and the customer lifecycle are terms that are often used interchangeably, but there are nuances that make them differen...
TRANSCRIPT Information Architecture is a way of designing an information structure for any system or any process. And the analogy that I lik...
During the course of our clients' digital transformation projects it is common to be talking about the technologies and tools that need to e...
Consumer concerns and new regulations have put purveyors and users of third party data on notice that this source of data may soon be extinc...
If your organization is on a journey of digital transformation you need to intentionally and proactively manage, control and exploit the val...
The more quickly customers can find the product they are seeking, the more likely they are to complete a transaction and to return to the si...
2021 was a continuation of an extraordinary time. While the pandemic continued with cycles, waves and variants, businesses and individuals h...
When supported by an appropriate information architecture and designed with a deep understanding of the customer, virtual assistants can acc...
Most organizations are realizing that understanding and embracing the sea change that is impacting the marketing function will mean the diff...
How does knowledge architecture help with automating customer interactions? Automating routine interactions can provide consistency, speed, ...
Taxonomy is a critical component of data-driven applications and processes, but implementing and sustaining a program can pose a challenge. ...
There are many manufacturers who have started to take the leap forward in the digital space, but there are still a great number who rely sol...
To compete in today’s digital marketplace, B2B manufacturers and distributors must offer customers an experience similar to those offered by...
Today, every B2B is subject to similar expectations as top-tier B2C brands: providing customers with multiple channels in which to order, mo...
Product taxonomies are critical to the customer experience on ecommerce platforms, marketplaces and websites. In order for customers to find...
An effective customer engagement strategy is table stakes to compete in both the B2C and B2B markets today. Top brands commit to being custo...
A comprehensive customer engagement strategy is the most strategic competitive differentiator for organizations today. To successfully compe...
Product data management (PDM) is a crucial investment that top performers in the market have made to make their product information more fin...
Visual search has been gaining a lot of momentum. Product images are of course provided on websites to assure purchasers that they have sele...
Product data management and product information management might sound like the same thing – how different is product data from product info...
Why is stakeholder communication important? Once you have initial buy-in for a PIM project, how do you encourage the people who have an inte...
Modern-day companies are overwhelmed with data. Whether it's decades of product information or customer conversation history, there is no sh...
Knowledge management has gone through many cycles of popularity during which its value was alternately recognized or rejected. Most recently...
The pandemic was a trigger for changing work patterns and driving online behaviors that have become permanent - that it not only accelerated...
Is the money your company spending on product information management paying off? How do you know where you should invest? If you are not sur...
With the acceleration of digital transformations brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every organization is facing challenges in how ...
A new PIM system costs a lot of money, but is also a huge asset. It allows a company to organize its product data, which is almost as import...
Seth Earley joins Dr. Sharon Jones on her podcast "Coding the Future" for a wide ranging conversation about creating the data driven enterpr...
The online experience can be directly correlated to the quality of the product data in your key systems. Grocery has lagged behind other sec...
A Product Information Management (PIM) system provides a central location for product data that is used in downstream systems. It is where y...
Any organization that sells a solution with many options, components, or parts has a significant challenge when it comes to providing docume...
Governance is a program used to ensure data is being managed efficiently. There are many aspects of governance that should be considered whe...
As executives look for ways to improve the customer experience, it is important to realize that a good customer experience assumes you have ...
You wouldn’t go to a general practitioner for brain surgery, nor would you go to a brain surgeon for an orthopedic operation. Doctors are sp...
There are many famous quotes that tell you to “Just Do It” (Nike Slogan), “Start before you’re ready. Don’t prepare, begin.” (Mel Robbins*) ...
Not all PIM software packages are equal, there is not a one size fits all answer. Every company is different, has different requirements and...
Quite a few companies are actively experimenting with AI projects, but not many are in full production. Successful AI projects must have cer...
There are two primary approaches to powering AI. One is through machine learning, in which AI systems learn from examples. We hear a great d...
More organizations than ever are working to implement digital transformations, but stepping back to understand the critical steps can be dif...
Over the years, many definitions of AI have emerged, and a lot of them are misleading--particularly the ones that describe AI as the creatio...
Knowledge management is experiencing a resurgence because of the growing awareness that not only can it solve current problems, but it can a...
With the current crisis, organizations are finding that they have to quickly enable remote work. For some organizations this is not a big s...
How can you use analytics to understand and optimize your taxonomy to drive high-performance eCommerce? Three key metric sets help us unders...
There was a time when “customer experience” was defined by a combination of buyer persona attributes, market segment data and customer purch...
The importance of information governance is recognized by most organizations, both for its operational value and its role in supporting such...
In a poll we conducted during our webinar on “How Ontologies Drive Digital Transformation,” only 16% of the participants had developed ontol...
Everyone is talking about digital transformation, but few organizations are implementing it in a practical way. Digital transformation requi...
Digital transformations are all around us – technology innovation is enabling new applications, new insights and new operating models that a...
The display taxonomy on an ecommerce website is the backbone of the customer experience. It provides the structure, navigation paths, breadc...
In our last few blogs we’ve been focusing a lot on taxonomies and taxonomy design for ecommerce sites. In this blog we will shift gears a bi...
In this age of digital transformation, organizations compete on their data. Every interaction, whether internal to the company or external, ...
Many product taxonomies start with good intentions but are corrupted over time by a proliferation of “miscellaneous” nodes – virtual “junk d...
Or, How to Get More Than 1000 Words From Your Product Images. Images are powerful and becoming more vital to online success as B2B customers...
Mutual Exclusivity is an organizing principle for taxonomies which requires every SKU in your product catalog have one (and only one) place ...
The pressure is on for B2B distributors to up their online game as millennials, who are digital natives, are increasingly becoming their buy...
This blog originally appeared on the MDM.com. When was the last time you went shopping for something intangible? Where instead of being able...
Digital commerce leaders have made the mental shift from “what products do I sell?” to “how do my customers want to buy from me?” – savvy si...
Your customers are in control. They demand a personalized, accurate, and fulfilling journey with your enterprise, whenever and wherever they...
Information managers need to be able to quantify the value of information curation, because otherwise justifying its cost can be difficult. ...
Many life events can justifiably be called a transformation, and their effect is pervasive. Moving to another country, for example, may requ...
Let’s face it, the value of a taxonomy isn’t inherently obvious to everyone. Some people have to be convinced that a taxonomy can help them ...
“There’s No Budget for the Common Good” Organizations have been using digital technologies for decades, but the last several years have seen...
A great deal of attention is being given to digital transformation. According to Forrester, “Seventy-four percent of business executives say...
In a slight departure from our previous article on proactively (and tactically) preparing for a product data transformation, let’s explore s...
As your business and product data complexity grows, so too may your need for an enhanced Product Information Management (PIM) system that ac...
These days, no matter what industry you operate in, your competitive advantage depends on the quality of the data that is flowing through yo...
How to integrate Content, Product Data and Knowledge to Meet Your Customer’s Needs Organizations are continuing the never-ending journey of ...
I attended a conference a while back about the future of the digital worker and the use of artificial intelligence. I came to the event with...
Two very interesting and seemingly contradictory trends are taking place in the information landscape. On the one hand, technologies are evo...
What executives need to understand is the data, content and knowledge that feeds AI and machine learning algorithms are more important than ...
In 2012, IBM estimated that the number of devices that were expected to be connected to the internet by 2015 would be in 1 trillion. It turn...
WATCH: Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Management, and Chatbots This webinar resulted in several great questions that we were unable to get...
EIS was recently engaged by a client who needed an enterprise approach for addressing search and information access challenges. Like many la...
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) still has an air of mystery about it experiments with machine intelligence tools and AI applications are ...
I recently came across an article from ZD Net that contained an interview with Stephen Pratt, CEO of AI solution provider Noodle.ai. In the ...
Quick Summary The digital experience is comprised entirely of data. The mobile device effectively becomes the sales person. In the physical ...
I was invited to write an article for TeleTech's quarterly publication Customer Strategist called "Five Myths about Artificial Intelligence"...
Covid Is Accelerating Transformation of the Grocery Industry The grocery industry is the last major retail sector to seriously address consu...
AI-driven personalization holds a lot of promise for marketers. However, few have managed to put the promise into practice because the leap ...
Herding cats. Lack of management support. Not my job. A distraction. So much governance behavior can be described as a “people problem,” whe...
Knowledge is continually evolving, with new designs and discoveries leading to innovation across all industries. Sellers of technical produc...
Taxonomies have evolved over the years from being a way to navigate a website to providing the underpinnings of advanced ecommerce innovatio...
So, your digital merchandising team needs some help with their online customer experience. That's great! The first step is admitting you hav...
Knowledge management is undergoing a renaissance. However, it is not being called knowledge management. Instead, it is hiding under the cove...
When I speak to CIO’s and CTO’s, they are grappling with two things: Staying up to date with new capabilities that the business either wants...
We have been seeing significant progress in the field of machine learning – programs that “learn” as they process information in order to pr...
Digital transformation as a concept has lost a lot of its meaning and has become a catch-all for many types of information initiatives. What...
The term “taxonomy” is used in many ways, and therefore can be confusing. Taxonomy has many use cases and many different functions. Google d...
Organizations are maturing in their understanding of knowledge management. But true engagement and acceptance is still a major obstacle to s...
We get asked this question a lot-what is the difference between taxonomy and ontology? In this post we will share some examples that will he...
Our information landscape is changing faster than ever – solving problems in the short term while preparing for the future requires a differ...
When I was checking out definitions online, I saw that it was hard to find the whole set I was looking for in one place and that most of the...
Governance is essential to product information and taxonomy management. Governance ensures consistency, accuracy and adherence to the brands...
In the age of observational outcomes, skyrocketing healthcare costs and personalized medicine, applied knowledge impacts every aspect of the...
At the Opus Research (@opusresearch) Intelligent Virtual Assistant Conference in San Francisco this week, I heard from vendors, analysts, gu...
An insights-driven organization makes decisions about its customers based on data, primarily internal data. This concept goes beyond custome...
Every house has one: The junk drawer. The place you shove things when you are not quite sure where to put them or whether to keep them. Most...
Ask Google, Facebook, Uber or any of the $billion startups (the so called unicorns) out there if metadata runs the world. A friend sent me a...
If you’re a B2B distributor that’s been around for a while, then you probably grew up in a specific vertical and developed a reputation with...
The proper use of product relationships can really build the sale. Recently I was shopping online for some stain for a furniture refinishing...
What do curated content, personalization and machine learning have in common? Personalization is all about giving people appropriate informa...
If you’re like most B2B manufacturers or distributors, you’re taking a page from the B2C playbook and you’re building out the product experi...
You no doubt have heard about cognitive computing and see the inroads that AI is making in daily life as one technology company after anothe...
Companies make use of many taxonomies to organize information about their product line. One of the most important of these is the display ta...
What do we mean by “semantic tagging”? Isn’t that just tagging? The answer is yes and no. Semantics refers to the study of meaning. Tagging ...
Congratulations! You just selected a business intelligence tool. This product or platform will be either a new undertaking in your company o...
“If artificial intelligence has its way, discounting could disappear, thanks to software that tells retailers exactly what and how many prod...
Back in 2016 residents of a property an hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, were suffering through some very strange and unpredictable activi...
I was just given an Amazon Echo as a gift and was very excited to connect it and set it up. For those of you less familiar with Echo, it is ...
Today’s shoppers are visually-influenced, and simultaneously engaging across a greater variety of touch points than ever before. Rising comp...
Our family recently came across the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, a best-selling life-changing book about simpl...
A very common complaint from people using content management systems is “Search doesn’t work.” Now, that’s a broad statement and probably ne...
When an office supplies chain found that in-store sales were lagging, a series of strategic decisions were made to improve the top and botto...
Knowledge management portals have gone in and out of style over the years. Portals were the rage back in the early 90’s, promising the “inte...
As technologies evolve and processes are digitized, the marketing and customer experience function is being transformed. Whether this transf...
Digital Marketing is the subject and focus of so many things nowadays that many have come to accept the axiom that “all marketing is digital...
When EIS evaluates an ecommerce website we judge it according to a collection of heuristics. A heuristic gives us a way to compare what is c...
Sometimes a business problem that sounds simple to solve turns out to be a major challenge. For example, getting a count of a company’s cust...
While predictions are difficult to make, especially about the future, there is no doubt that technical capabilities in the field of making c...
So we’ve all heard the term “big data” by this point - lots and lots of data coming from many sources, some of them disparate, most of them ...
Product Taxonomies, on the whole, are iterative in nature. If your company starts selling products it's never sold before, you might need to...
After a prospective customer has gone through an Internet search, successfully arrived at your company’s website, and searched for the speci...
Given that few people go beyond the first page or two of search results, most organizations find that the incentive is high for using every ...
"Master Data, enterprise architecture and digital transformation begin with a conceptual view of the enterprise." In the online world, a gre...
Site search is an often-overlooked weapon in the digital arsenal available to Internet retailers. However, site search is becoming a much hi...
Most marketing people involved in marketing technology (also referred to as “martech”) are by now familiar with the Lumascape technology lan...
Since entering this profession (information management), I have been amused by the expression “comparing apples and oranges,” which is used ...
Analytics is undergoing a revolution in tools, technologies, applications and adoption. The industry is rapidly evolving and organizations a...
Here’s a short piece of advice for the practicing taxonomists out there: Try to avoid concatenated labels. Concatenated labels are those cat...
In today’s world of content and data coming from multiple sources and in multiple formats, the idea of aggregate content is one of much disc...
In today’s highly competitive and ubiquitous ecommerce environment, offering a fresh and personalized experience is more critical than ever....
Relevant, personalized content can significantly improve outcomes and improve revenue—some organizations have reported uplift of 70% for pro...
“Big Data” has become one of the hottest topics in both information science and corporate settings alike. As the internet and its amount of ...
An article in the Harvard Business Review online entitled “Why Nordstrom’s Digital Strategy Works (and Yours Probably Doesn’t)” addressed co...
Many of today’s ecommerce platforms offer the ability to create and curate search suggestions using type-ahead lists within the search box. ...
I just returned from a working session with a large retail client, during which we discussed ways to begin the next phase of their content s...
IDC’s research report on knowledge workers and information findability is often quoted when people are trying to build the business case for...
Building shared understanding and a common vision is part of the process. One of our enterprise customers is a large retail organization tha...
Last year a client asked us to integrate web analytics into their Intelligent Assistant to measure how much it was being used. The request c...
Metadata gives information meaning. Metadata is therefore the basis for monetizing information, because the ability to monetize depends on a...
Organizations from large enterprises to one-man shops are in the midst of a digital transformation. Some gladly embrace the change. Others r...
Much has been done to advance the efficiency and effectiveness of field service delivery – smarter parts inventory management, intelligent r...
Creating clear, concise service procedures is the first step toward driving consistent service technician performance. After all, how can we...
Whether your mobile development strategy includes native apps, hybrid applications or mobile optimized websites, the bottom line in mobile d...
If the name Garrison Keillor rings a bell, you know that in Lake Wobegon, “all the children are above average.” “We just want you to be aver...
The story of the blind men and the elephant illustrates how a limited perspective can lead to erroneous conclusions. Big Data can create the...
"Intelligent assistants recognize what users are looking for; and provide precise and relevant answers." How do you go from the search syste...
We often think of search results as a list of links to documents or webpages. The more precise and relevant the better. But that’s not reall...
We all like to believe that knowledge is important, and possibly even accurate as well. Once that knowledge is documented, however, its valu...
How do you know your work is any good? And I mean, really know? (This is the second post in my Heuristics and Empirics series. You can find ...
Semantics is the study of meaning. So a semantic search is one which “seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and ...
A simple question -- How do you know when you’re right? – led me down a long and treacherous path of self-discovery. The truth is that it is...
Look up ‘DITA’ in the Acronym Dictionary and you’ll find 6 different definitions. Even knowing what the letters stand for (*) doesn’t put us...
Metadata in the news? Who would have thought that metadata would be explained to the public through mainstream media outlets? Nearly everyon...
My initial title for this was “Why Enterprise Integration Matters”. This seems like an obvious statement. Of course it matters. It’s like sa...
Digital Asset Management has a particular meaning with regard to classes of technology. The term usually refers to the management of rich me...
I was in a meeting with a client discussing the approach to Information Architecture – how to develop scenarios and use cases for a target a...
I've always been fascinated by how challenging it can be to make analogies between digital content strategies and the "real world." We organ...
Cloud applications development, NoSQL database environments, and hybrid platforms, such as MongoDB, treat metadata as data encoded in script...
Hachette Book Group has a mobile app for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, one of the world's most recognized classic reference books. This pr...
Should departmental or organizational structures be managed as a taxonomy? While there are advantages and limitations to organizational stru...
The single most prevalent factor in business across sectors is the increasing speed of knowledge and information processes. The difference b...
In the Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Perspectives e-alert for August there is some interesting analysis/insight on Post Merger Integration...
Taxonomy development might seem like a straightforward case of setting up categories for products or services, but in fact it is more comple...
It’s a very open question … as they always are … and it depends on the weighting of some of the considerations we’ll look at below. We’re wo...
For many information science professionals, it’s easy to become accustomed to common problems and their attendant solutions as basic or obvi...
Google has just announced the Google Knowledge Graph (GKG). Check out a video about Google Knowledge Graph here. According to Google, this i...
As the cost of creating and managing digital assets drops, organizations are finding that many different business processes are seeking to i...
This is a continuation of a previous post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos. Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and meta...
Clients I work with struggle with many issues. Among these, two often rise to the top. How do we show the impact of metadata on our business...
Healthcare information technology is undergoing enormous changes with broad consumer impact. One major area of innovation is mobile healthca...
How can you tell the difference between an introverted records manager and an extroverted records manager? The extrovert stares at your shoe...
What is content choreography? Here's a little background on the term and what we mean by it. A major global high tech company engaged EIS to...
Organizations are paying more and more attention to Master Data Management (MDM). MDM comprises a set of processes and tools that consistent...
Selling online is dependent upon information. Without information for the customer to process it is essentially impossible to sell online. I...
In this blog post I’m going to talk about a couple of the likely pain points in your product master data world –places where your product da...
We’re several months into a large project implementing Oracle PDQ (Product Data Quality) for a major online retailer. This is the first of w...
Clink, clink went two halves of a Japanese rifle shell case on my researcher's desk at the National Archives and Records Administration faci...
Taxonomists never work in isolation: they collaborate with subject matter experts, content managers, systems integrators, information archit...
After a decision has been made to invest into DAM or MRM solutions and the system has been introduced, one of the realizations that many mar...
Digital assets come in a seemingly limitless variety of flavors. Some intrinsic metadata comes along for the ride with particular formats, b...
Regardless of whether you're designing front-end interface functionality or crafting an information architecture that serves as the clothes ...
Taxonomies, as hierarchical vocabulary structures, clearly define relationships between words and concepts. If a taxonomy is implemented and...
Here is the question posed by Arnold King (http://arnoldkling.com) "I am interested in the phenomenon of knowledge specialization.For exampl...
Some say that subject matter expertise is necessary in taxonomy development. This is understandable; it makes sense to assume that the more ...
We recently had a prospect ask what they needed to consider as part of their taxonomy RFP. Here are some things to include: Specific approac...
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