Tag Archives: information management

Generational renewal at work – a search challenge

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The big generational shift

There have been discussions surrounding the great generational renewal in the workplace for a while. The 50’s generation, who have spent a large part of their working lives within the same company, are being replaced by an agile bunch born in the 90’s. We are not taken by tabloid claims that this new generation does not want to work, or that companies do not know how to attract them. What we are concerned with is that businesses are not adapting fast enough to the way the new generation handle information to enable the transfer of knowledge within the organisation.

Working for the same employer for decades

Think about it for a while, for how long have the 50’s generation been allowed to learn everything they know? We see it all the time, large groups of employees ready to retire, after spending their whole working lives within the same organisation. They began their careers as teenagers working on the factory floor or in a similar role, step by step growing within the company, together with the company. These employees have tended to carry a deep understanding of how their organisation work and after years of training, they possess a great deal of knowledge and experience. How many companies nowadays are willing to offer the 90’s workers the same kind of journey? Or should they even?

2016 – It’s all about constant accessibility

The world is different today, than 50 years ago. A number of key factors are shaping the change in knowledge-intense professions:

  • Information overload – we produce more and more information. Thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web, the amount of information available is greater than ever.
  • Education has changed. Employees of the 50’s grew up during a time when education was about learning facts by rote. The schools of today focus more on teaching how to learn through experience, to find information and how to assess its reliability.
  • Ownership is less important. We used to think it was important to own music albums, have them in our collection for display. Nowadays it’s all about accessibility, to be able to stream Spotify, Netflix or an online game or e-book on demand. Similarly we can see the increasing trend of leasing cars over owning them. Younger generations take these services and the accessibility they offer for granted and they treat information the same way, of course. Why wouldn’t they? It is no longer a competitive advantage to know something by heart, since that information is soon outdated. A smarter approach of course is to be able to access the latest information. Knowing how to search for information – when you need it.

Factors supporting the need for organising the free flow of the right information:

  • Employees don’t stay as long as they used to in the same workplace anymore, which for example, requires a more efficient on boarding process. It’s no longer feasible to invest the same amount of time and effort on training one individual since he/she might be changing workplace soon enough anyway.
  • It is much debated whether it is possible to transfer knowledge or not. Current information on the other hand is relatively easy to make available to others.
  • Access to information does not automatically mean that the quality of information is high and the benefits great.

Organisations lack the right tools

Knowing a lot of facts and knowledge about a gradually evolving industry was once a competitive advantage. Companies and organisations have naturally built their entire IT infrastructure around this way of working. A lot of IT applications used today were built for a previous generation with another way of working and thinking. Today most challenges involve knowing where and how to find information. This is something we experience in our daily work with clients. Organisations more or less lack the necessary tools to support the needs of the newer generation in their daily work.

To summarize the challenge: organisations need to be able to supply their new workforce with the right tools to constantly find (and also manipulate) the latest and best information required for them to shine.

Success depends on finding the right information

In order for the new generation to succeed, companies must regularly review how information is handled plus the tools supporting information-heavy work tasks.

New employees need to be able to access the information and knowledge left by retiring employees, while creating and finding new content and information in such a way that information realises its true value as an asset.

Efficiency, automation… And Information Management!

There are several ways of improving efficiency, the first step is often to investigate if parts, or perhaps the entire creating and finding process can be automated. Secondly, attack the information challenges.

When we get a grip of the information we are to handle, it’s time to look into the supporting IT systems. How are employees supposed to find what they are looking for? How do they want to?

We have gotten used to find answers by searching online. This is in the DNA of the 90’s employee. By investing in a great search platform and developing processes to ensure high information quality within the organisation, we are certain the organisation will not only manage the generational renewal but excel in continuously developing new information centric services.

Written by: Maria “Ia” Björk & Joar Svensson

Presentation: Enterprise Search – Simple, Complex and Powerful

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Every second, more and more information is created and stored in various applications. corporate websites, intranets, SharePoint sites, document management systems, social platforms and many more – inside the firewall the growth of information is similar to that of the internet. However, even though major players on the web have shown that navigation can’t compete with search, the Enterprise Search and Findability Report shows that most organisations have only a small or even a non-existing budget for search.

Web Search and Enterprise Search

Web search engines like Google has made search look easy. For enterprise search, some vendors give promises of a magic box. Buy a search engine, plug it in and wait for the magic to happen! Imagine the disappointment when both search results and performance are poor and users can’t find what they are looking for…

When you start planning your enterprise search project you soon realize the complexity and challenge – how do you meet the expectations created by Google?

The Presentation

This presentation was originally presented at the joint NSW KM Forum and IIM September event in Sydney, Australia by Mattias Brunnert. It contains topics as:

  • Why search is important and how to measure success
  • Why Enterprise Search and Information Management should be friends
  • How to kick off your search program

Book Review: Search Analytics for Your Site

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Lou Rosenfeld is the founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media and also the co-author (with Peter Morville) of the best-selling book Information architecture for the World Wide Web, which is considered one of the best books about information management.

In Lou Rosenfeld’s latest book he lets us know how to successfully work with Site Search Analytics (SSA). With SSA you analyse the saved search logs of what your users are searching for to try to find emerging patterns. This information can be a great help to figure out what users want and need from your site.  The search terms used on your site will offer more clues to why the user is on your site compared to search queries from Google (which reveal how they get to your site).

So what’s in the book?

Part I – Introducing Site Search Analytics

In part one the reader gets a great example of why to use SSA and an introduction to what SSA is. In the first chapters you follow John Ferrara who worked at a company called Vanguard and how he analysed search logs to prove that a newly bought search engine performed poorly whilst using the same statistics to improve it. This is a great real world example of how to use SSA for measuring quality of search AND to set up goals for improvement.

a word cloud is one way to play with the data

Part II – Analysing the data

In this part Lou gets hands on with user logs and lets you how to analyse the data. He makes it fun and emphasizes the need to play with user data. Without emphasis on playing, the task to analyse user data may seem daunting. Also, with real world examples from different companies and institutions it is easy to understand the different methods for analysis. Personally, I feel the use of real data in the book makes the subject easier (and more interesting) to understand.

From which pages do users search?

Part III – Improving your site

In the third part of the book, Rosenfeld shows how to apply your findings during your analysis. If you’ve worked with SSA before most of it will be familiar (improving best bets, zero hits, query completion and synonyms) but even for experienced professionals there is good information about how to improve everything from site navigation to site content and even to connect your ssa to your site KPI’s.

ConclusionSearch Analytics For Your Site shows how easy it is to get started with SSA but also the depth and usefulness of it. This book is easy to read and also quite funny. The book is quite short which in this day and age isn’t negative. For me this book reminded me of the importance of search analytics and I really hope more companies and sites takes the lessons in this book to heart and focuses on search analytics.

Search Conferences 2011

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During 2011 a large number of search conferences will take place all over the world. Some of them are dedicated to search, whereas others discuss the topic related to specific products, information management, usability etc.

Here are a few that might be of interest for those of you looking to be inspired and broaden your knowledge. Within a few weeks we will compile all the research related conferences – there are quite a few of them out there!
If there is anything you miss, please post a comment.

March
IntraTeam Event Copenhagen 2011
Main focus: Social intranets, SharePoint and Enterprise Search
March 1, 2 and 3, 2011, Copenhagen, Denmark

Webcoast
Main focus: A web event that is an unconference, meaning that the attendees themselves create the program by presenting on topics of their own expertise and interest.
March 18-20 , Gothenburg, Sweden

Info360
Main focus: Business productivity, Enterprise Content Management, SharePoint 2010
March 21-24, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, USA

April
International Search Summit Munich
Main focus: International search and social media.
4th April 2011, Hilton Munich Park Hotel, Germany

ECIR 2011: European Conference on Information Retrieval
Main focus: Presentation of new research results in the field of Information Retrieval
April18-21, Dublin, Ireland

May
Enterprise Search Summit Spring 2011
Main focus: Develop, implement and enhance cutting-edge internal search capabilities
May 10-11, New York, USA

International Search Summit: London
Main focus: International search and social media
May 18th, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London, England

Lucene Revolution
Main focus: The world’s largest conference dedicated to open source search.
May 25-26, San Francisco Airport Hyatt Regency, USA

SharePoint Fest – Denver 2011
Main focus: In search track: Enterprise Search, Search & Records Management, & FAST for SharePoint
May 19-20, Colorado Convention Center, USA

June
International Search Summit Seattle
Main focus: International search and social media
June 9th, Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle, USA

2011 Semantic Technology Conference
Main focus: Semantic technologies – including Search, Content Management, Business Intelligence
June 5-9, Hilton Union Square, San Francisco, USA

October
SharePoint Conference 2011
Main focus: SharePoint and related technologies
October 3-6, Anaheim, California, USA

November
Enterprise Search Summit Fall Nov 1-3
Main focus: How to implement, manage, and enhance search in your organization
Integrated with the KMWorld Conference, SharePoint Symposium and Taxonomy Bootcamp,

KM-world
(Co-locating with Enterprise Search Summit Fall, Taxonomy Boot Camp and Sharepoint Symposium)
Main focus: Knowledge creation, publishing, sharing, finding, mining, reuse etc
November 1 – 3, Washington Marriott Wardman Park, Washington DC, USA

Gilbane group Boston
Main focus: Within search: semantic, mobile, SharePoint, social search
November 29 – December 1, Boston, USA

Query Suggestions Help Users Get Unstuck

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Several papers at the HCIR09 workshop touched on the topic of query suggestions. Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini presented a poster about query reuse in exploratory search tasks and Diane Kelly presented results from two different studies that examined people’s use of query suggestions and how usage varied depending on topic difficulty. (Their papers are available for download as part of the proceedings from the workshop.)

According to Shah and Marchionini users often search for the same things. They reuse their previous queries e.g. search for the same things multiple times. Users use their previous searches to refind information and also to expand or further filter their previous searches by adding one or more keywords. There is also a significant overlap between what different users search for suggesting that users have a tendency to express their information needs in similar ways. These results support the idea that query suggestions can be used to help users formulate their query.  Yahoo and YouTube  are two of the systems that uses this technique, where users get suggestions of queries and how they can add more words to their query based on what other users have searched for.

Diane Kelly concludes that users use query suggestion both by typing in the same thing as shown in the suggestion and by clicking on it. Users also tend to use more query suggestions when searching for difficult topics. Query suggestions help users get “unstuck” when they are searching for information.  It is however hard to know whether query suggestions actually return better results. The users expectation and preferences do have an effect on user satisfaction as well. User generated query suggestions are also found to be better than query suggestions generated by the search system. So the mere expectation that the query suggestions will help a user could have an positive effect on his or hers experience…

Query suggestions are meant to help the users formulate a good query that will provide them with relevant results. Query suggestions can also work as with yahoo search where query suggestions both suggest more words to add to the query but also provides the users with suggestions for other related concepts to search for. So searching for Britney Spears will for example suggest the related search for Kevin Federline (even though they are now divorced) and searching for enterprise search will suggest concepts such as relevance, information management and off course the names of the different search vendors.

If you apply this to the enterprise search setting the query suggestion could provide the user with several different kinds of help. Combining the user’s previous searches with things other users searched for but also providing suggestions for recommended queries or concepts. The concepts will be high quality information and suggestions controlled by the team managing the search application. It is a way of combining quick links or best bets with query suggestions and a way to hopefully improve the experienced value of the query suggestions. The next step then is to work with these common queries that users search for and make sure that they return relevant results, but that is an entirely different topic…