Enterprise Search 2.0?

Posted on November 30, 2009 by

While visiting Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose I realized that enabling Enterprise 2.0 within enterprise search is the hottest trend at the moment. Is it Enterprise Search 2.0?

Andrew McAfee who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has released a book on the subject, spoke about how to use altruism to develop the enterprise. People are wired to help and if we stop obsessing about the risks and lower the bars for how people can help each other it is possible to make this work within a corporate environment.

He also spoke about how process control and how much workflow control. How much do we really need? Make it easy to correct mistake instead of making it hard to make them. With regards to innovation he pointed out that we need to question credentialism and build communities that people want to join. To leverage the intelligence aspects within the enterprise we should explore and experiment with collective intelligence such as prediction markets and open peer review processes. All in all make it easy for people to interconnect.

Very high improvement in access to knowledge, internal experts, satisfaction, increased innovation and customer satisfaction.

I also recommend to read Price Waterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast Summer 2008 to get a good overview of the available tools and technologies.

So how does this impact enterprise search? Search can be made to be the facilitator for Enterprise 2.0. Of course it is possible to index and make all blogs, wikipedias, tweets (yammer), online communities and social networks searchable, but that is only one way to make it this new environment more findable. If someone tweets or blogs about information we should use that information to impact on the search results and ranking. We could also track user behavior on a site to make certain information more visible with regards to implicitly expressed interests.

The ROI of Enterprise Search—Where’s the Beef?

Posted on December 15, 2008 by

When faced with the large up-front investment of an Enterprise Search installation, executives are asking for proof that the investment will pay up. Whereas it is easy to quantify the value of search on an e-commerce site or as part of the company helpdesk—increased sales, shorter response times—how do you go about verifying that your million-dollar Enterprise Search application has the desired effects on your revenue stream?

Search engines on the Web have changed the landscape of information access. Today, employees are asking for similar search capabilities within the firewall as they are used to having on the Web. Search has become the preferred way of finding information quickly and accurately.

Top executives at large corporations have heard the plea and nowadays see the benefits of efficient Findability. However, it costs to turn the company information overload from a storage problem of the IT department to a valuable asset and business enabler for everybody. So how do you prove the investment worthwhile?

The Effects of Enterprise Search

Before you can prove anything, you need to establish the effects you would like your Enterprise Search solution to have on your organization. Normally, you would want an Enterprise Search solution to:

Enable people to work faster
Enable people to produce better quality
Provide the means for information reuse
Inspire your employees to innovate and invent

These are all effects that a well-designed and maintained Enterprise Search application will help you address. However, the challenge when calculating the return on investment is that you are attempting to have an effect on workflows that are not clearly visible on your revenue stream. There is no easy way to interlink saved or earned dollars to employees being more innovative.

So how do you prove that you are not wasting money?

There are two straightforward ways to address the problem: Studying how users really interact with the Enterprise Search application and asking them how they value it.

User Behavior through Search Logs

By extracting statistics from the logs of your Enterprise Search application, you can monitor how users interact with the tool. There are several statistic measures that can be interesting to look at in order to establish a positive influence on one or more of the targeted effects.

A key performance indicator for calculating if the Enterprise Search application enables people to work faster is to monitor the average ranking of a clicked hit in the result list. If people tend to scroll down the result set before clicking a hit and opening up a document, this implies the application does not provide proper ranking of the results. In other words, users are forced to review the result set, which obviously slows them down.

By monitoring the amount of users that are using the system, by following the number of different documents they open up through search and by observing the complexity of the queries they perform, you can estimate the level of information your users are expecting to find through searching.

If the application is trusted to render relevant, up-to-date results, more users will use it, they will carry out more complex queries and they will open up a wider range of different documents. If your users do not trust the system, however, they will not use it or they will only search for a limited set of simple things such as “news”, “today’s menu” or “accounting office”. If this is the case, you can hardly say your Enterprise Search application has met the requirements posed on it.

Conversely, if the users access a wide set of documents through search and you have a large number of unique users and queries, then this implies your Enterprise Search application is a valued information access tool that promotes information reuse and innovation based on existing corporate knowledge.

User Expectations through Surveys

Another way to collect information for assessing the return of investment of your Enterprise Search initiative is to ask the users what they think. If you ask a representative subset of your intended users how well the Enterprise Search application fits their specific purposes, you will have an estimate of the quality of the application.

There are a lot of other questions you can ask: Does the application help the user to find relevant corporate information? Are the results ranked properly? Does the application help the user to get an overall picture of a topic? Does it enable the user to get new ideas or find new opportunities? Does it help him avoid duplicating work already done elsewhere within the organization?

A Combination of Increased Usage and Perceived Value

As we have seen, the return on investment of an Enterprise Search initiative is often hard to quantify, but the impact such an application has on a set of targeted effects can be measured using search logs and user surveys. The data collected this way provides an estimate of the value of Findability within the firewall of an organization.

Nowadays, hardly anybody questions the marketing value of a good corporate web site or the impact email has on the way we communicate. Such channels and services are self-evident business enablers today. In this respect, the benefits of precise and quick information access within the corporation should be self-evident. The trick is to get the tool just right.

A Change of Focus to Search Driven; or Control vs Openness Part Two

Posted on July 28, 2007 by

The Shift Towards Portals with Search Driven Functionality

A lot of the people I meet in my work use these new web 2.0 tools daily. They ask me why metadata and taxonomies have to be so complicated when you can do “that web 2.0 stuff” with tagging. They say they prefer “the easy way” and prefer folksonomies over structures; they don’t think they can trust the structures anyway. People, who would like to work in an organization like Charlies.

Traditionally intranets are about control; we want to control what information people get and when and how they get it, instead of trying to make sure that people have the information they need when they need it.

I did some sketches for a search driven portal the other day. One of the comments I got was: “Wow! Why can’t we do that?” Actually, people are doing that. There are dozens of services out there like iGoogle and Superstart; all about customizing the experience for each user. This is like the intranet I want!

In order to achieve this, the companies need a change of focus. It is not about having control over every detail, or about just seizing control. It’s about finding a way to manage communication and make it easier for people to find what they want when they need it.

The search vendors have started to realize that. There is a shift towards portals with search driven functionality.

The design is not static, but reflects what is new and important to you, the specific user.
There are no menus in several levels; instead information about current events and information about what has happened since the last time you visited, take up the information space. Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs can be used internally to improve communication and collaboration.

Are you looking for something special? Search for it! You don’t need to know where it is in order to find the information you are looking for.

This is off course the vision, where few organizations have dared to go. But there are off course exceptions to this. I have been working in a project where there is no fear of seizing control over every little detail. The aim is instead to understand how to best support the users in their work, using enterprise 2.0 tools and search as a vital part of the solution. I would like to see more organizations like Charlie’s…

The Right Information at the Right Time; or Control vs Openness

Posted on July 13, 2007 by

There is obviously a difference between what people want and do and what the organisations think and want to do.

I saw a good definition of what enterprise 2.0 is the other day. Meet Charlie is a good example of how web 2.0 tools can be used in the enterprise area. Because people do use them; these new tools have changed the way we communicate and collaborate. If your not an organization that is.

I think social media is here to stay. Things like flickr and youtube ultimately changed the way we deal with our photos and videos. Look at the competitive analysis valuecurve for flickr to see how it changed the business behind photo services. (Flickr is now also the second most popular photo site.) And social media isn’t just for kids. You can find booktips from the library in Norrköping at youtube, many professionals have profiles on LinkedIn, we subscribe to dozens of blogs and blog ourselves.

There is a lot of professional networking going on on the web. People of today have a need to share their thoughts and ideas. So there are a lot of Charlies out there. Howcome there are so few of his employers?

According to Gartner, today 80% of Business is conducted on unstructured information, which is about 85% of all data. And yet most of the development för IT is done for the rest of the information, the 15% that is structured and semi-structured. People go for openness and collaboration but organizations go for structure and control…

Using Search for Web and Enterprise 2.0? Plan for the Future!

Posted on June 21, 2007 by

Buzzwords such as ‘the long tail’, ‘user generated content’ and ‘web 2.0’ has been around for some time now, but does it automatically mean that everyone understands the way that technology is heading? And what happens with search?

If you haven’t seen the rather old, but brilliant video The machine is us/ing us on Youtube you should. If you have, you should take a look at the updated version.

When working with search on a daily basis one tries to get behind the fuzzy words to see how blogs, wikis, RSS, mash-ups and social tagging among other things will affect the way we interact and do business in the future. Linking Wikipedia to these words is only one example of knowledge sharing that wasn’t possible a few years ago.

The tools that the new web 2.0 development provides us with helps us create and gather more information than ever. As the amount of information increases rapidly, according to Gartner an average company doubles (!) its information every 6-18 months, the need for efficient search solutions becomes crucial in order to handle the vast amounts of data.

All search vendors claim that they will be able to provide effective search for these purposes. As a customer you should ask yourself; what is the future need of my business? Do I need a search solution that provides support for basic functionality such as spellchecking and static relevance adjustments? Is there a need for more advanced functionality that increases cross-functional sharing in the organisation such as dynamic navigators and common workspaces? Do I want to use search to increase knowledge sharing powered by web 2.0 tools?

An interesting and short debate presentation can be found here. In conclusion; Different stages of maturity require different approaches to achieve different outcomes.

These questions may seem to be looking too far ahead? I can say for sure that by asking the right questions from the beginning you can save yourself a lot of time and the company a lot of money (and use your solutions for present as well as future needs).

By knowing your users, your organization and its future you can make search solutions that help enable knowledge discovery, sharing, and connection, which in the end is what web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is all about.

Lifestreams and Google

Posted on June 18, 2007 by

Google recently announced their new experimental site and it holds a feature to see search results grouped on dates, visualized in a time line, based on extracted dates from the source documents.

Simple entity extraction isn’t that complicated, especially not when it comes to keeping track of dates – some regular expressions can easy detect date formats and normalize them for any search engine to keep track. However, other vendors have at the most visualized them as dynamic navigators or just used it as metadata . The key lies in visualizing it and providing a user friendly interface, which I must say Google, again, has succeeded with. This announcement made me think of something two researchers from Yale wrote an article about in 1996.

Freeman and Gelmter (1996) introduce a new metaphor, “Lifestreams” – an idea for users to organize their own personal workspace. The concept is that everything a person creates or are involved with are attached to a lifestream, which simply is a visualized time line linked to a storage repository. Later the user can add filtering and alerting functions to monitor and summarize their the streams for easier overview or just narrow their streams down to suit their current information need.

For example, if a user wishes to add a meeting, there is no need to open up the calendar, just attach the meeting entry to the life stream in the future. Adding the proper alerting, one will still be reminded. Lifestreams are not only historical, the concept also expands into the future. Furthermore, the concept grows to having various substreams, one for your private, one for your professional, dynamically as you create it.

Furthermore Google also announced their new map search, where one could search for a almost anything and get a rough overview (of course on a map) where places related to the query is displayed highlighted on the map. It’s noticeable that Google hasn’t utilized all their content in these two experimental features, but I must say I’m really looking forward when they do. I would say that Google now are really starting showing off that they definitely are capable to deal with true contextual search.

So, what about the lifestreams? Well, the recent buzz around Enterprise 2.0 and moving the Web 2.0 with social networking and blogging inside the corporate firewalls could really learn from these three concepts. If some vendor would provide functionality for ordinary businessmen to build personal lifestreams, hook their documents, meetings and resources to it combined with easy controlled vocabulary tagging and visually on a map attaching it to location. Let’s add the last magic spice: search to aid building up enterprise historical lifestreams and provide easy access, entity extraction, filtering and alerting one would have the silver bullet. One could follow the lifestream of an organization as one follow the heartbeat of a human being. Enterprise Lifestreams of aggregated deparment lifestreams of aggregated individual lifestreams. Imagine visualizing an organizational lifestream and tap into the pulse of an enterprise organization. Imagine to share professional lifestreams with collegues and interestgroups.

Not to take over John Lennon’s role about imagine, but I feel this could the next killer enterprise application that would glue all enterprise 2.0 concepts together. This could be the next step in social networking and truly support processoriented organizations’s everyday work! What do you think? Are our enterprises ready for something like this?