Title, Session Link and Slides: Search as Strategy - Creating 'Information Gravitation' in the Firm
Description:
Enterprise search is all the rage but much of the talk is about search as an “application.” Can search be more than just another entry on the shopping list of applications firms buy? Can it serve as a foundation element in an overall information strategy? Some firms are beginning to talk about creating a kind of “information gravitation” both inside the firm and across the firewall to clients. With such gravitation in place, the right information flows to where it is needed, when it is needed and often without need for discrete searches. Learn the role such information gravitation play in overall information strategy, the impact such a goal has on choices of technology, security and privacy concerns, deployment timeframes and on levels of investment. If that is the vision, how do you enlist the whole firm in it?
Speaker(s):
Derek Schueren — Recommind
Felicity Badcock — Mallesons Stephen Jaques
My Take:
Derek of Recommind is one of the more visionary of the vendor representatives out there. And Mallesons is by reputation one of the more innovative firms Down Under, having won the Innovaction award for their PeopleFinder tool. I was looking forward to this session and it did not disappoint.
Derek started with a wonderful quote from Aristotle:
"Suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need…that shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro…and a plucker play a lyre of its own accord.”
(A plucker here is not a person undressing a chicken but presumably the plectrum or "guitar pick" of the ancient world).
Relevancy is the ability to retrieve material that satisfies the need of the user. (I usually think of relevancy in terms of how search result ranking and how well the results compare with the search terms, but this definition appropriately puts meeting business needs over some abstract fitness).
Derek discussed how Google treats relevancy as essentially a popularity contest. The most popular web pages have more incoming links and few outgoing links. This works pretty well on the web, but, because there is no comparable source of relevancy information inside the enterprise, consumers don't have the same experience with search inside the enterprise.
One potential advantage for enterprises, however, is that Google does not take into account who is doing the searching. Search tools might be able to show different types of results for partners, associates, or professional staff.
Derek compared web search and enterprise search.
Web
The Web contains a huge store of simple content. Internet content typically lacks much context beyond what is linked within its pages. All information available is completley public. Who authored the content is generally irrelevant.
Relevancy is based on key word match over layered with popularity score
Enterprise
Enterprises by comparison have small content stores but much complexity. The lack of link structures mean relevancy needs to be computed in a different way. But content in enterprises does relate to other information inside and outside of the information (think for example of matter numbers). The authorship of content really does matter to content validity or utility, (at least to someone like a senior litigation partner looking at a first year associate's research memo).
Enterprise search tools must respect security.
Metadata in the enterprise is much richer. You can provide more context for the document in the enterprise. You can filter down on information post-query, and relevancy can extend beyond the primary object to related content.
Integrating Search
Concept searching allows you to find documents that may not have all the key words, but that are correlated (related) to the search terms.
Content linking will be key. You might want to see a lot more than just contact information for a judge, such as pleadings for matters before the judge, people who have appeared before the judge, and so forth. The Document Management System (DMS) has great content but it doesn’t have everything. Matter information isn’t in the DMS. Enterprise search needs to blend content from diverse locations. Search is an information layer rather than just a box that provides results.
An example of search as information layer is providing information about citations. If you filter and add in the statutes cited, and also possibly some other data (such as case validity) from another source, you get a much richer user experience. (see these posts on Lexis' recent work on adding citation information to search results, and this Caselines post from last year on Recommind's work with West KM on that front.)
Collaborative Filtering
How does Amazon make it easy for me to find what I want?
Amazon knows what I’ve looked for and also what people like me have looked for and found in the past.
Content Linking
Content linking will really take advantage of the information available in the enterprise.
Felicity Badcock / Mallesons
Felicity, a former practicing lawyer like me, has been working in the legal technology for twelve years, including five at Clifford Chance in London.
She addressed information gravitation in three areas, email, enterprise tagging, and people-finding.
Email Gravitation?
At Mallesons, they try to predicting the needs of the user through Decisiv. This application will make a guess at where the person will want to file the email. The rate of prediction success is quite high.
The search will recommend searches based on the metadata in the email. Do you want to search for emails from the person who sent the email you’re on? Or to the company that received the email?
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking can help assess which content is worthwhile. You get the benefit of a large number of people who are also tagging and assessing relevancy.
Malleson’s “Scotty” system, in Beta, will generate tag clouds around content. It will have a firm-based taxonomy, but will also allow user-generated tags and ratings. (Tag clouds show the importance of the content related to the tag by the size of the tag word).
Visualization and People Information
Felicity described "visualization" as a quick way to display vast amounts of quantitative data such as business results. For instance, others have joined news mentions of disease outbreaks with Googlemaps in the disease finder, Health Map.
Malleson’s PeopleFinder (which, although Felicity modestly didn’t mention it, won the Innovaction award this year) pulls together data from a lot of sources.
It starts with a small box in the desktop bar that searches google, or Interaction, or what have you by letter codes like “c” or “g”. A Mallesons people result shows their current availability. The goal was to have fewer external calls go to voicemail. There are twelve different icons indicating the status, anything from "on extended leave" to "on the phone."
People are “available” if they are logged in to PC. Secretaries can use this to identify what to do with calls for an attorney. It saves tremendous amounts of time in not making or receiving calls when they can’t be dealt with. A “Communicator” status can be updated. A right-click can lead to a VOIP phone call, email, or IM. A full-screen view of a person record also shows their week's availability, as per their Outlook calendar. A right-click leads to a while range of options for communicating with the person, from dialing the phone, IM, or calendar appointment, to email. A click on a person's "floor" leads to a floor map highlighting the person's location on the floor.
A scaled-down version of the People-Finder was available through mobile devices. Mallesons is also contemplating making some aspects of PeopleFinder available to clients.
The next version will "push" information on a person's own home page or on their contact record, like the person's current matters, clients, documents, and so forth. This is delivering information, not in response to a user request, but in response to an anticipated need.
Information Gravitation
"Pushing" information in response to an anticipated (rather than expressly stated) need is one form of information gravitation. So is enabling navigation between types of information on a document search result, such as a link to a person or matter. Another form of information gravitation is accessing all the possible ways to contact someone from their contact record.
Ultimately "cloud" computing, where vast amounts of enterprise software and data are contained on giant server farms (as with Google or Amazon), may enable even more interlinking, pushed contents, and connections than is possible now. Aristotle's vision come to life?
Showing posts with label social tagging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social tagging. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Interwoven Universal Search
Title and Session Link: Interwoven Universal Search - Business Drivers and Case Studies
Description:
Is your firm taking a look at Interwoven's enterprise search product? Listen to member firms discuss the business drivers that led to their purchase decisions and what they're learning during implementation.
Speakers:
Peter Lamb - CIO, Torys, moderating
John Kuttler - Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP
Robert Guilbert - Knowledge Management Architect, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz
Chris Bull - COO of Osborne Clarke in the UK.
John
Finnegan is an IP firm with many offices. "Geek lawyers" tend to appreciate a service like enterprise search.
He saw a demo of IUS at ILTA 07, and thought that it would benefit his attorneys. They've had "Google mini." Unlike Universal Search, it doesn't respect security.
On their intranet, they have drill-down into matter and client systems that pull in information from many different systems including IP Docketing, Records, DMS (Interwoven), Financial Systems, and InterAction.
They've done a pilot test with attorneys, and hope to launch mid-September. First collections included DMS, Intranet, public internet, Exchange public folders, client-matter database (numbers and names only); file shares, and their CPI IP Docketing System.
Attorneys need and like both stemming and highlighting hits in context. It shows number of hits per author.
They customized IUS by only displaying client / matter number, and then a mouse-over shows full name.
They haven't turned it loose on people.
He would like to tune the results based on who is doing the searching (esp. with technical searches).
Robert
Wachtell is 275 lawyer firm in New York only. Search was driven by poor email search, it was frustrating to waste time looking for information. "I can search Google and find information across the entire internet in seconds...why can't I search within our own domain like that?"
Can sort by each repository. Can customize each data source, to show doc type from DMS and From and To for email.
They chose IUS for its scalability, open results within native applications, ease of setup, and so forth.
They spent three months on a Proof of Concept. The POC expanded from 20 to 100+ attorneys, and they had little choice but to purchase it.
Some rollout delay occasioned by the use of search to find information that was previously and appropriately obscure.
Content searched includes WorkSite documents, email, Client memo databases, firm presentations database, and through federated search, some legal websites.
They went from ~300 searches a day in the first week to ~500 searches a day in the fourth week. Number of users per day also increased dramatically.
Search has "changed the way our attorneys work." Robert feels it gives them a competitive advantage.
The next steps for them are adding in Interaction, web 2.0 technologies like tagging and voting, and role-based searching.
Chris
He was involved as a program director, not a technologist. As COO he is responsible for KM as well as IT, HR, and so forth.
Osborne Clarke has 430 attorneys, 3 offices in the UK, 2 in Germany, 1 (small) office in Palo Alto.
They just launched MOSS in July 2008, and had a major KM systems overhaul. Their KM systems were scattered, and search was slow. They wanted to reduce email overload. Search was a critical part of intranet upgrade. They decided not to go with Sharepoint native search, because of the lack of federated search and the lack of integration with WorkSite.
They didn't do a Proof of Concept, although it probably would have sped up the selection process.
They wanted a single, simple search tool. It makes it look like you have a single database. They have 10 Practice Support Lawyers. Part of what they wanted was to get external knowledge from Lexis or PLC. The People and basic intranet search are powered by IUS.
They stripped out the library system. They added the library catalog in to IUS. People hadn't used the native application.
Ranking is really important. The right search results had to be on the first page.
- WorkSite--includes emails, KM library, and matter workspaces.
- PLC--external know-how database
- Intranet
- Library catalogue
They've had some issues with the amount of older content. They were able to get its rank reduced. Some people had bulk-profiled email, which wasn't coming back well. It really exposes improper profiling of documents.
"When you can filter as well as you can in IUS, you just have to educate people."
Their intranet has nice clean look, branded as "The OC Intranet." The professional KM practitioners don't like the clusters, everyone else likes them.
Each practice area has its own knowledge page. OC exposes a folder on WorkSite, to cater to people who like to browse.
Recap
These three had a very positive view of IUS. It sounds like you can tune and weigh different data sources' ranking to get what you need on the first page. These implementations are especially impressive in the IUS had little to no penetration in the legal market last year, and so the IUS team must have had very little experience on which to draw.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
My Boston KM Forum Presentation on Enterprise Tagging
It's been a busy couple of weeks. Right before I left on a week's vacation, split between a chamber music camp called "Heaven" and Cape Cod, I presented to the Boston KM Forum, which has a blog as well as its Web 1.0 website, on tagging inside the enterprise. My slides are also available there.
If you want to jump directly to other blogger's reactions, please see Sadie Van Buren's post and discussion about tagging as part of search activity and Suzanne Minassian's concise summary.
If you want to jump directly to other blogger's reactions, please see Sadie Van Buren's post and discussion about tagging as part of search activity and Suzanne Minassian's concise summary.
My main purpose was not to discuss how to implement tagging in the enterprise (my firm hasn't, so I can't), but rather to identify what I think are current business needs that could be met by tagging, some of the ways that enterprise tagging is different from tagging on the web, and to identify some of what I am looking for in tagging software.
I tied tagging to Prof. Andrew McAfee's SLATES paradigm of Enterprise 2.0, by which in my opinion any social software package needs to be assessed. SLATES=Search, Links, Authorship, Tagging, Extensions, and Signals; for more information, read the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. In that paper McAfee focuses on tagging on the Web and the way that it enables people to assign their own context to web sites, which can then be shared with others. Looking back at the paper it is striking that McAfee focused on how intranet and internet sites might be tagged and leveraged inside the enterprise, but did not extend the concept of tagging to more typical inside-the-firewall content such as documents, matters, people, or tasks.
Tagging will help law firms provide context and enhance findability with respect to the large number of similar documents generated by legal work. By having tags linked to actual identified people (unlike Delicious) tagging should help us identify internal experts, either through their work being tagged or through their own tagging activity. My hope is that it may also enhance our ability to find out about new work, for instance, through having an internal RSS feed on a particular tag that would signal, for instance, when a new brief about civil rights was filed or finished.
Another driver of enterprise tagging may be employee engagement. One theme of the Enterprise 2.0 conference is that employees just entering the workforce, members of the "Millenial" and "Y" generations, enter the workforce with a great deal of enthusiasm but can get disillusioned by the difficulty of making measurable contributions inside a large and beureaucratic organization. Tagging, along with other social collaborative activities, may be a way to enhance engagement and derive value from these employees, in a fashion similar to that they may already be familiar with on the web.
That is not to say that tagging inside the firewall will be the same as it is on the web. Tagging must to adapt to the enterprise.
Professional service firms of all kinds have to be able to have ethical "walls" for all their content at the individual, matter, and client level. Such "walls" can prohibit a particular person from viewing a set of content, or can prohibit all but a very small set of people from viewing the content. That is, a tag might itself reveal the existence of a confidential client or matter, or show to someone who shouldn't know that a particular event has happened on a matter.
Ideally, enterprise tags will extend to more than "just" web sites. I would like to see tags (in descending order of importance) on 1) our document management system 2) the other document repositories in the firm 3) people 4) intranet pages and other content 5) matters and 6) tasks and projects. Ideally, external web sites would also be taggable.
While tagging people is third on the list, I believe that attribution of tags to people, either through their own activity or through others, will be a huge benefit to large professional services organizations. That's because finding the friendly experts is particularly important for us. One major difference of enterprise tagging is that there is no expectation of privacy within an organization as to one's activities; accordingly, authorship of a tag should definitely be exposed.
Some firms may experiment with somehow giving tags different weights depending on the seniorty or institutional position of the tagger. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but I would like to see some way to expose who made the tag, and exposing the role of the tagger could be quite beneficial. In evaluating work product, a first year associate's tag should not be accorded as much weight as the junior partner's tag in the mind of the person viewing the tag, but reflecting that in a system poses many obvious problems.
I also spoke about some features that should enhance enterprise adoption of tagging.
As with any new technology, providing help and guidance at the time that users need it will be key. Ideally there will be training features built right in, as you see on Amazon, ranging from a "What's this?" link, to a very basic description of tagging built in to the feature, to automatic feedback on a user's tags. This last might be something like "This is the 149th item you've tagged with the word "document". Do you want to try another word?"
There was an interesting discussion afterwards about the timing of tagging. Again, this is not an issue that I have addressed directly. The users I work for apply some metadata to the documents at the time they save them (principally a matter number and a document type), and we do our best to leverage that matter number to apply other metadata to the documents. Tagging could be applied to some extent at the time a document is saved, but typically our users don't want to actually have to think at that point as they need to print, file, or send it. It may be better to have tagging applied by other users at the time they search for and view the document, person, or other content. That would be a better approach where search is federated across many different content sources as it would be difficult to have "native" tagging in many different legacy systems.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Day 4 of Enterprise 2.0 Boston: Lockheed Martin & Enterprise 2.0
I just saw an outstanding session on a real adoption and social collaboration success stories, from one of the biggest U.S. companies.
Their summary:
"Enterprise 2.0 at Lockheed Martin is sparking a knowledge management revolution enabling the business to more effectively compete, win, and perform. At its core, a social computing platform empowers knowledge workers by lowering the barriers to create, share, and find information. The platform evolved from collaborative tools and now includes Web 2.0 tools such as social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, discussion groups, weekly activity reporting, and personal/team spaces. This session will communicate what the platform is, demonstrate the components, and share some case studies and lessons learned from the E2.0 implementation at Lockheed Martin."
Christopher Keohane, Unity Product Owner, Lockheed Martin
Shawn Dahlen, Unity Program Manager, Lockheed Martin
The goal of their "Unity" project was to bring social collaboration; "Express * Discover * Connect" [nice motto and branding!]
One major purpose was to meet Retirement / Recruitment challenge. Another was because they collaborate too often with meetings, powerpoint, and email.
They wanted to allow each individual to express themselves in their day-to-day activities. Each must be grounded in the day-to-day activities, create content because it will help get the job done.
Put together key messages and a product strategy.
1) Provide user experience that users will love; else the contrast with the fun stuff they use at home will be too great.
2) Address "What's in it for me."; Provide tools to operate more effectively. Have to ground in personal utility. Network effects come later.
3) Balance the need to share with the need to know; there is competitive / HR sensitive information in there.
4) Foster an ecosystem around a standard platform (?); in a large organization, there are lots of IT groups.
UNITY platform was the result.
It was built on Google as Search, Windows Sharepoint Services, with Newsgator as feed reader. They added bookmarking, custom discussion boards, Weekly Activity Reporting, and a suggestion tool.
A Backend data warehouse collects all relationships, feeds into "spaces." There are personal spaces and team spaces. Both types can network and relate to each other. Each space can have blogs, wikis, documents, discussion forums, and bookmarks.
Users didn't want different sets of collaboration tools.
Each activity generates RSS feeds, that can be consumed by Newsgator or portal.
Activity reports integrated into a branded "UReport" tool. Let people tag their activities so they could be reported on later. Also great for transferring knowledge. Shows all tasks, people that have been met with over 6 months. Can look at individual status reports of individuals to see what they are doing, engage with the right people.
UReport is a custom .net application. Their idea of organizing around tasks / activities is a good one.
LM employees can subscribe to activities that people you follow. See stream of activity, be plugged into what they are doing.
What is the value of a list of friends? Real value is to be able to watch what people are doing and search network or ask question within group.
Personal network search--can search content just created by your network.
Right now the attention data is just from social system. They are looking at being able to watch different component that tracks activities, feed in to the attention system.
With 150,000 people, opportunities may be greater, but each person loses the ability to market value across the enterprise.
The personal space allows to connect and network. Shows interests (mountain biking, kayaking, child, astronomy). Shows stream of activity, so there isn't a blank page without content. It gets filled in through daily work.
They built basic platform in 2007; built beta and collected feedback. Rolled out Unity earlier in 2008. There are 4,000 personal spaces, growing 10% every three weeks. Want to roll out across all of LM in 3rd-4th quarter. The most succesful approach was to play up the team space and downplay the personal blog. Collect lessons learned every 3 weeks. Managers blogging in the team space really helped the engineers see the bigger picture and feel engaged. Specific expertise varies from area to area. Based ROI on ability to find information. What really sold them was customer's interest, expressed in RFPs. Wanted to potentially sell to clients. LM might potentially make available as open source. They are more systems integrators than software vendors.
Legal, HR, and Information Security are on the system, and some of them are the champions.
Growth has been viral to date. It's the early adopters spreading the word. They had to add some polish and enhance the look and feel after the first release. People who already have to collaborate between groups are good champions. Some organizations need this tool more than others (for instance, people developing process documentation).
Created tags using a custom version of 'free" Sharepoint lists. [I want to know more about their tags and how they feed into search, content, and the profiles].
Unity team had bimonthly hourlong training sessions, and developed wiki FAQ and screencasts. This wasn't effective enough. Also have a FAQ wiki. It answered questions like, "Why am I creating a wiki in the first place? Why am I blogging?" How & why are both key. Why am I using a wiki versus a blog?
The Unity development put together a "collaboration playbook" for themselves to show what you would use a wiki or a blog for. When do I use email / phone / wiki? Put together best practices. Depends on whether everyone else needs to know answer. Internally focused team of 40 needed to work together. Keep documentation simple and terse, bullets, not paragraph length. There was a request to share the playbook with the world. [we have developed a simplistic version of a playbook for us internally on the KM team at Goodwin, but haven't done much with it.]
"It's now baked into the rhythm of what we do as a team."
One way to sell it is to show people the power of links. When you're trying to get information you can link to other resources. Find and refind information serendipitously.
Wikis allow you to capture process and make documentation generation easy.
The intranet-style application has a nice look & feel. Tabs for "Home / Connect / Documents / List / Blog / Wiki / Tags."
They abandoned subsites. Created sites that can be networked together so that you can go in and change who the parent is.
Users create a space through a workflow.
Discussion boards are another custom application. People can put out a question on a forum. Responses come in in 15 minutes to an hour. People from all over the country responded to a question about a foreign country's navy.
Blogs shine in the team spaces. Team space for process compliance got input from geographically diverse set of people.
What's next?
--SIP labeling (sets security at item level at six tiers)
--Export control filters
--exposing team affiliation in profles.
Lessons Learned:
"Think big, start small, move fast."
Paint the biggest picture you can on how to solve the business needs. Get motivated and excited around clear goals. Show how you can transform the business. Demonstrate passion.
Shawn started small with an $8k pilot. It worked, got $50K for wiki. Now have 40 engineers. You have to incorporate feedback into the next steps.
These guys were excellent presenters because they were so excited about what they were doing. The backchannel was really excited by this one. I hope that they keep sharing this great story.
Their summary:
"Enterprise 2.0 at Lockheed Martin is sparking a knowledge management revolution enabling the business to more effectively compete, win, and perform. At its core, a social computing platform empowers knowledge workers by lowering the barriers to create, share, and find information. The platform evolved from collaborative tools and now includes Web 2.0 tools such as social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, discussion groups, weekly activity reporting, and personal/team spaces. This session will communicate what the platform is, demonstrate the components, and share some case studies and lessons learned from the E2.0 implementation at Lockheed Martin."
Christopher Keohane, Unity Product Owner, Lockheed Martin
Shawn Dahlen, Unity Program Manager, Lockheed Martin
The goal of their "Unity" project was to bring social collaboration; "Express * Discover * Connect" [nice motto and branding!]
One major purpose was to meet Retirement / Recruitment challenge. Another was because they collaborate too often with meetings, powerpoint, and email.
They wanted to allow each individual to express themselves in their day-to-day activities. Each must be grounded in the day-to-day activities, create content because it will help get the job done.
Put together key messages and a product strategy.
1) Provide user experience that users will love; else the contrast with the fun stuff they use at home will be too great.
2) Address "What's in it for me."; Provide tools to operate more effectively. Have to ground in personal utility. Network effects come later.
3) Balance the need to share with the need to know; there is competitive / HR sensitive information in there.
4) Foster an ecosystem around a standard platform (?); in a large organization, there are lots of IT groups.
UNITY platform was the result.
It was built on Google as Search, Windows Sharepoint Services, with Newsgator as feed reader. They added bookmarking, custom discussion boards, Weekly Activity Reporting, and a suggestion tool.
A Backend data warehouse collects all relationships, feeds into "spaces." There are personal spaces and team spaces. Both types can network and relate to each other. Each space can have blogs, wikis, documents, discussion forums, and bookmarks.
Users didn't want different sets of collaboration tools.
Each activity generates RSS feeds, that can be consumed by Newsgator or portal.
Activity reports integrated into a branded "UReport" tool. Let people tag their activities so they could be reported on later. Also great for transferring knowledge. Shows all tasks, people that have been met with over 6 months. Can look at individual status reports of individuals to see what they are doing, engage with the right people.
UReport is a custom .net application. Their idea of organizing around tasks / activities is a good one.
LM employees can subscribe to activities that people you follow. See stream of activity, be plugged into what they are doing.
What is the value of a list of friends? Real value is to be able to watch what people are doing and search network or ask question within group.
Personal network search--can search content just created by your network.
Right now the attention data is just from social system. They are looking at being able to watch different component that tracks activities, feed in to the attention system.
With 150,000 people, opportunities may be greater, but each person loses the ability to market value across the enterprise.
The personal space allows to connect and network. Shows interests (mountain biking, kayaking, child, astronomy). Shows stream of activity, so there isn't a blank page without content. It gets filled in through daily work.
They built basic platform in 2007; built beta and collected feedback. Rolled out Unity earlier in 2008. There are 4,000 personal spaces, growing 10% every three weeks. Want to roll out across all of LM in 3rd-4th quarter. The most succesful approach was to play up the team space and downplay the personal blog. Collect lessons learned every 3 weeks. Managers blogging in the team space really helped the engineers see the bigger picture and feel engaged. Specific expertise varies from area to area. Based ROI on ability to find information. What really sold them was customer's interest, expressed in RFPs. Wanted to potentially sell to clients. LM might potentially make available as open source. They are more systems integrators than software vendors.
Legal, HR, and Information Security are on the system, and some of them are the champions.
Growth has been viral to date. It's the early adopters spreading the word. They had to add some polish and enhance the look and feel after the first release. People who already have to collaborate between groups are good champions. Some organizations need this tool more than others (for instance, people developing process documentation).
Created tags using a custom version of 'free" Sharepoint lists. [I want to know more about their tags and how they feed into search, content, and the profiles].
Unity team had bimonthly hourlong training sessions, and developed wiki FAQ and screencasts. This wasn't effective enough. Also have a FAQ wiki. It answered questions like, "Why am I creating a wiki in the first place? Why am I blogging?" How & why are both key. Why am I using a wiki versus a blog?
The Unity development put together a "collaboration playbook" for themselves to show what you would use a wiki or a blog for. When do I use email / phone / wiki? Put together best practices. Depends on whether everyone else needs to know answer. Internally focused team of 40 needed to work together. Keep documentation simple and terse, bullets, not paragraph length. There was a request to share the playbook with the world. [we have developed a simplistic version of a playbook for us internally on the KM team at Goodwin, but haven't done much with it.]
"It's now baked into the rhythm of what we do as a team."
One way to sell it is to show people the power of links. When you're trying to get information you can link to other resources. Find and refind information serendipitously.
Wikis allow you to capture process and make documentation generation easy.
The intranet-style application has a nice look & feel. Tabs for "Home / Connect / Documents / List / Blog / Wiki / Tags."
They abandoned subsites. Created sites that can be networked together so that you can go in and change who the parent is.
Users create a space through a workflow.
Discussion boards are another custom application. People can put out a question on a forum. Responses come in in 15 minutes to an hour. People from all over the country responded to a question about a foreign country's navy.
Blogs shine in the team spaces. Team space for process compliance got input from geographically diverse set of people.
What's next?
--SIP labeling (sets security at item level at six tiers)
--Export control filters
--exposing team affiliation in profles.
Lessons Learned:
"Think big, start small, move fast."
Paint the biggest picture you can on how to solve the business needs. Get motivated and excited around clear goals. Show how you can transform the business. Demonstrate passion.
Shawn started small with an $8k pilot. It worked, got $50K for wiki. Now have 40 engineers. You have to incorporate feedback into the next steps.
These guys were excellent presenters because they were so excited about what they were doing. The backchannel was really excited by this one. I hope that they keep sharing this great story.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Enterprise 2.0, Day 2, Session 5; Thomas Vander Wal on Making Sense of the Flood of Information (Tagging!)
Thomas' presentation last summer was the only substantive and intelligible part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference I attended last year (I understand that his was one of two presentations last year that got "perfect" scores from the audience). Last years' got me excited about Delicious and tagging and I was happy to get a chance to hear him again.
Thomas is a consultant based in Bethesda, Maryland who coined the term "folksonomy, " putting him up there in the Enterprise 2.0 pantheon with McAfee in my opinion. His sparse but pretty powerpoints are on Slideshare.
Thomas is a consultant based in Bethesda, Maryland who coined the term "folksonomy, " putting him up there in the Enterprise 2.0 pantheon with McAfee in my opinion. His sparse but pretty powerpoints are on Slideshare.
Crowd Survey
He started by asking how many had internal bookmarking. Perhaps 10% of the audience did.
Too Much or Too Little?
He's learned that what you get after 6 months to a year is different than what you expect going in.
The "one year club" either says:
1) Nobody is using our services--only 2-5% using them
OR
2) Oh my goodness we have way too much information here.
1) Too Little Tagging
In the first scenario, how do you encourage use? Adoption rate does not vary between generations (boomer, X, Y, millenial) once value and understanding is known.
Improving Adoption
A) Guidance
Like much of Enterprise 2.0, the consumer space is way ahead of the enterprise. Amazon has a variety of ways that guide consumers in their use of tags.
- Label tags correctly and plainly, e.g., "Tags Consumers Associate With This Product."
- Describe process of tagging with a "What's this" link.
- Say what your behavior will do, e.g,. "Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people."
- Add shortcut key / guidance--e.g., "Press T twice to access."
- Suggest terms.
B) Understand that even light use can have high value
C) Don't worry about the number of tags per items, as most things get tagged only a few times even in Delicious.
D) Understand who is using the service, and assess the value gained. Value can be assessed from four perspectives:
Personal--Tagging can help a user refind things better, without input from anyone else. Some people also learn through tags by investigating who else might have tagged an object.
Group-- Most tools called "collaborative" are actually collective. A collective approach is people working in parallel on their own documents. Concept of editing someone else's page/work is scary to most. Collaborative is many different people working on one document/task.
Newbie--The Newbie hasn't tagged, but consumes tags developed by others.
Service Owner--Tags add to value to the service owner by acting as a pointer. Pointers help own search and helps Google seach external web site.
E) Show Commoncraft tagging videos.
F) Provide many use cases.
How would Marketing or R & D use tagging? Can it tie to CRM? How would middle managers use this tool?
For instance, he has seen managers use tagging to speed up monthly reporting process, through developing initials + monthly / yearly tags (0508=May 2008), and then collecting the information thus tagged.
G) Integrate tagging into all of other tools.
Tagging within Sharepoint is now available. ConnectBeam lets you show what certain people have bookmarked, subscribe to their bookmarks. Integrating tagging with search is key to adoption. Social search will show who else that I know has tagged something, and how many times. I have also seen tagging effectively integrated into enterprise search as Lynda Moulton's term social search with Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0, which I reviewed in October 2007.
2) Too Much Information
In the second scenario, where administrators and users are complaining that there is too much information, what do you do?
A) Single tags
People new to tagging will sometimes tag too much as "document" and then not see utility. e.g., Scuttle.
The proper solution is to have the user interface encourage a diversity of tags. Prompt with "did you mean to only use one tag?"
B) Tools too simple / Lack Context
Delicious doesn't surface who is doing tagging. Cogens and others do surface people. The smaller scale of an enterprise lets you surface context and role of people doing the tagging. If you know who is doing the tagging, you can understand more about the tag.
Another solution would be to group tags by the role or location of the people doing the tagging. [In the law firm environment, for instance, a tag from a litigator for a "settlement agreement" means something entirely different than an M & A lawyer tagging a "settlement agreement."]
C) Suggest facets of tagging
Is it a "red" a product , geographic referral, or a color? For these types of words, ask at the time the tag is applied to group them into categories.
D) Self-stem
Let searches and tag application both encompass the extended version of the word (tag, tags, tagging).
E) Synonyms
Ideally, tagging tools should surface the different meanings of words.
F) Mispellings
Simple tools don't spellcheck
G) Tools need guidance and self-help
(see 1.A. above)
3) Tagging Administration Practice Tips
A) Hire A Taxonomist.
Use a taxonomist who understands folksonomies; they can add structure to the tag set.
B) Watch scarce tags.
Address attention to tags that are used a lot. Watch tags used somewhat less. Use long tail to identify synonyms.
C) Embrace structure.
Co-occurence of terms;
Knowledge of social relation with tagger; and,
Link with existing tools such as search, profiles, and taxonomies.
D) Three tag contexts :
Human context--what are people calling it
Related Terms--what else are people calling it
Object--content of tagged thing
F) Value Proposition
The real value of tagging is refindability. Put that up front and users will adopt it.
4) Questions
I asked whether the Amazon "suggested terms" works within the enterprise. Thomas suggested that using other people's terms limits findability, it's better to suggest terms that the individual already uses, possibly by drawing on the user's terms that others have tagged the resource with.
Can suggest terms if they are from the users own slide set. The less time and thought that was put in, the better the refindability.
Some of this is in vendor roadmaps.
Another participant asked about delicious. Delicious has plateaued. It's missing contextualizing, stemming, and spelling. Delicious can't add in many-to-many relationships because it's so processor-intensive, but tagging inside the enterprise can pull it off.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Social Computing Platforms--IBM & Microsoft
I learned more about Lotus at this presentation, as my firm is a Sharepoint shop.
The Lotus Connections Speaker was Suzanne Minnassian, IBM Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM.
Lotus Connections lets companies set up communities that span the firewall, and are available through an external site. In her example (apparently drawn from real life), she hurts her ankle running on the Esplanade, and goes to the hospital web site looking for information about doctors who might be able to help. Through a standard search, she finds a sports medicine doctor. She sees more information about a doctor than just her contact data—she also sees a blog by the doctor that gets published inside & outside the firewall, gets access to doctor’s calendar to schedule an appointment [ I doubt that would ever happen! ], and sees what internal “communities” the doctor is involved with. If one of them is a “sports injury” community, she might be able to get advice on how to treat her injury in the short term from another patient.
Lotus provides much richer set of information for users inside the firewall.
Compared to Microsoft, it looks a lot more user-friendly and easy to adopt. Microsoft is stronger in having so many partners and applications developers that are willing to invest in integrating with Sharepoint.
Lotus has really built out a fully mature social networking and collaboration system. Suzanne noted that “the longer a social application is out there, the more data gets added to it” and it also looks like the longer a social collaboration system has been published and actively modified, the more and better features it has.
I totally ate up the rich use of social tags in Connections. For starters, bookmarks, in their “Dogear” system, apply to people, items such as blog entries, documents, and external web sites. In all environments, tags are links to what others have tagged with that word. Tags are directly integrated with search, such that documents tagged with the search term come up higher in the list. Furthermore, people who have been tagged or who have tagged using that word are displayed alongside, in case you’d rather call someone than look at a document. You can filter down search results by tags, with guided navigation, so that you can see which content has to do with “Liu” and “environment” after two clicks.
Suzanne noted that having your content “pre-filtered” by other users through tags has greatly enhanced search at companies that have adopted the system. Tags and combinations of tags generate RSS feeds as “watchlists” so users can monitor content additions containing particular terms.
Users have profiles, with a rich set of data pulled from their work, connection, and tagging activities. Allows people to establish formal “connections” with people (I wonder if this is mediated, i.e., if the person on the other end of the proposed connection has to agree to form the connection.) Each user also has an “iGoogle”-like landing page with a set of widgets that can be moved around, such as blog posts, tags, activity by other users, activity on tags, and so forth.
Lotus Connections also allows quick creation of “Communities.” They’ve learned that different groups organize around different types of activities, and so their communities have flexible features such as discussion boards, other live communication such as IM, wikis, shared bookmarks, and feed views.
A feed view is a list from an RSS feed that people can comment on and share with particular people. There are also “Activities” which constitute flexible project management spaces.
The one social piece missing is a feed reader, which Lotus still has in Beta (it’s called “Spectacular”.
Connections also has a very flashy-looking social networking analysis tool built in. You can view a person’s connections, in the form of icons that are closer to the main person’s icon the closer the relationship. Like ContactNetworks, strength of relationship is determined by mining email and IM. The strength can be filtered by date, division, or country. You can also search networks for a particular keyword, which shows clusters of people and lets you identify the key people who connect clusters of people. In the example Suzanne ran, she found the key IBM person working on, of course, “tagging.”
The Lotus Connections Speaker was Suzanne Minnassian, IBM Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM.
Lotus Connections lets companies set up communities that span the firewall, and are available through an external site. In her example (apparently drawn from real life), she hurts her ankle running on the Esplanade, and goes to the hospital web site looking for information about doctors who might be able to help. Through a standard search, she finds a sports medicine doctor. She sees more information about a doctor than just her contact data—she also sees a blog by the doctor that gets published inside & outside the firewall, gets access to doctor’s calendar to schedule an appointment [ I doubt that would ever happen! ], and sees what internal “communities” the doctor is involved with. If one of them is a “sports injury” community, she might be able to get advice on how to treat her injury in the short term from another patient.
Lotus provides much richer set of information for users inside the firewall.
Compared to Microsoft, it looks a lot more user-friendly and easy to adopt. Microsoft is stronger in having so many partners and applications developers that are willing to invest in integrating with Sharepoint.
Lotus has really built out a fully mature social networking and collaboration system. Suzanne noted that “the longer a social application is out there, the more data gets added to it” and it also looks like the longer a social collaboration system has been published and actively modified, the more and better features it has.
I totally ate up the rich use of social tags in Connections. For starters, bookmarks, in their “Dogear” system, apply to people, items such as blog entries, documents, and external web sites. In all environments, tags are links to what others have tagged with that word. Tags are directly integrated with search, such that documents tagged with the search term come up higher in the list. Furthermore, people who have been tagged or who have tagged using that word are displayed alongside, in case you’d rather call someone than look at a document. You can filter down search results by tags, with guided navigation, so that you can see which content has to do with “Liu” and “environment” after two clicks.
Suzanne noted that having your content “pre-filtered” by other users through tags has greatly enhanced search at companies that have adopted the system. Tags and combinations of tags generate RSS feeds as “watchlists” so users can monitor content additions containing particular terms.
Users have profiles, with a rich set of data pulled from their work, connection, and tagging activities. Allows people to establish formal “connections” with people (I wonder if this is mediated, i.e., if the person on the other end of the proposed connection has to agree to form the connection.) Each user also has an “iGoogle”-like landing page with a set of widgets that can be moved around, such as blog posts, tags, activity by other users, activity on tags, and so forth.
Lotus Connections also allows quick creation of “Communities.” They’ve learned that different groups organize around different types of activities, and so their communities have flexible features such as discussion boards, other live communication such as IM, wikis, shared bookmarks, and feed views.
A feed view is a list from an RSS feed that people can comment on and share with particular people. There are also “Activities” which constitute flexible project management spaces.
The one social piece missing is a feed reader, which Lotus still has in Beta (it’s called “Spectacular”.
Connections also has a very flashy-looking social networking analysis tool built in. You can view a person’s connections, in the form of icons that are closer to the main person’s icon the closer the relationship. Like ContactNetworks, strength of relationship is determined by mining email and IM. The strength can be filtered by date, division, or country. You can also search networks for a particular keyword, which shows clusters of people and lets you identify the key people who connect clusters of people. In the example Suzanne ran, she found the key IBM person working on, of course, “tagging.”
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Connectbeam syncs with Google
In response to my post about the launch of an Enterprise 2.0 Task Force at my firm, someone named "Paul" without a blogger profile from Connectbeam posted a nice comment, along with somehow self-aggrandizing comment about how this will lead to great return on our efforts. I sure hope so, but it's way too early to tell.
Flattery gets you everywhere, and I followed the link he posted to the latest demo of Connectbeam. I have previously noted that their software integrates tagging with search. I was really surprised to see that they have managed to integrate with Google search, so a search for "aspirin side effects" brings back a list of relevant tags and internal content in a pane right next to the Google results (kind of like the Google targeted ads). This is a great idea. It brings the internal content to where many of the users already are, and is well integrated with the workflow. We don't like to have our attorneys have to jump through hoops to get access to the good content, and this is an example of making it easy for the user and keeping it in one place.
Flattery gets you everywhere, and I followed the link he posted to the latest demo of Connectbeam. I have previously noted that their software integrates tagging with search. I was really surprised to see that they have managed to integrate with Google search, so a search for "aspirin side effects" brings back a list of relevant tags and internal content in a pane right next to the Google results (kind of like the Google targeted ads). This is a great idea. It brings the internal content to where many of the users already are, and is well integrated with the workflow. We don't like to have our attorneys have to jump through hoops to get access to the good content, and this is an example of making it easy for the user and keeping it in one place.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Vivisimo hits the bullseye--Rebecca Thompson on Velocity 6.0
I'm attending a presentation at the Omni-Parker Hotel on Vivisimo's new enterprise search tool that promises to bring enterprise 2.0 to search. Rebecca is the VP of Marketing at Vivisimo. I attended a reception afterwords, but did not partake of the "Terminal Velocity" tequila drink.
Organon --"Where enterprise search is today."
Rebecca showed a sample search screen from pharmaceutical company Organon. As she rightly pointed out, most companies do not have a search this effective. Their enterprise search has content from a variety of domains (types of sources) including people bios / intranet / internent / sharepoint/ documentum / network. Like other Vivisimo GUIs I've seen, it has multiple sets of clustered results, one based on its semantic navigation, and two others by criteria (or metadata) specific to pharma, one by "therapeutic area" metadata and another by "brand name" metadata.
Next Steps--Enterprise Search 2.0
Web 2.0 is changing user expectations. People now want to interact with the information in a simplified way. If they have to take a training class, it's not going to happen. People go home to web 2.0. they use delicious, facebook, digg it, and share information (my informal surveys of our youngest associates suggest that these tools have not quite penetrated as far as Rebecca suggests). The new generation's method of communicating has been facebook--there is no need to send email when they can post. (This is certainly true--see my colleague Doug Cornelius' post on summer associates' use of web 2.0 technology). The sites are so easy to use that people won't suffer through training. Their common complaint is, "Why can't we have a corporate facebook."? They want "a better way to communicate and collaborate."
Enterprise search is a natural fit with collaborative software because the search goes across content domains and pulls in content from different sources.
Organon --"Where enterprise search is today."
Rebecca showed a sample search screen from pharmaceutical company Organon. As she rightly pointed out, most companies do not have a search this effective. Their enterprise search has content from a variety of domains (types of sources) including people bios / intranet / internent / sharepoint/ documentum / network. Like other Vivisimo GUIs I've seen, it has multiple sets of clustered results, one based on its semantic navigation, and two others by criteria (or metadata) specific to pharma, one by "therapeutic area" metadata and another by "brand name" metadata.
Next Steps--Enterprise Search 2.0
Web 2.0 is changing user expectations. People now want to interact with the information in a simplified way. If they have to take a training class, it's not going to happen. People go home to web 2.0. they use delicious, facebook, digg it, and share information (my informal surveys of our youngest associates suggest that these tools have not quite penetrated as far as Rebecca suggests). The new generation's method of communicating has been facebook--there is no need to send email when they can post. (This is certainly true--see my colleague Doug Cornelius' post on summer associates' use of web 2.0 technology). The sites are so easy to use that people won't suffer through training. Their common complaint is, "Why can't we have a corporate facebook."? They want "a better way to communicate and collaborate."
Enterprise search is a natural fit with collaborative software because the search goes across content domains and pulls in content from different sources.
Social search gives people power and control over their search, also leads to buy-in through their investment and participation in the process.
Three aspects of social search in Velocity 6.0
· Social Tagging
· Collaboration
· Social Networking
Social Tagging
There are three types of social tagging in Velocity 6.0 ("6.0").
The first and simplest option is "voting" on usefulness of results by clicking on a green "thumbs up," or a red "thumbs down." Votes can affect relevancy, or not, as you choose. There can also be some "super-raters" whose votes have more weight or who are the only people whose votes count. The system knows who you are, so you can change your vote (and can't vote multiple times on one document).
A second kind of tagging is "rating." One to five stars, and average rating is also displayed. Rating has the same set of controls on whether relevancy is affected. The engine can sort results by ratings.
The third way is adding keywords (I'd call this real "tagging"). The keywords become metadata bound to the search result and add context to the documents that you and others can see. The firm can control the available vocabulary for tagging--auto fill or drop-down list. Permissions to tag are controlled in the same fashion as voting and rating. Tags will not reveal documents otherwise marked as secure and documents are not revealed to a walled-off person just because they search on that tag. The engine will start to show similarly-spelled tags as you type. The 6.0 engine displays and finds tags by clusters on your search result.
Collaboration
Users can also annotate search results with their own thoughts and commentary. People's comments on documents remain as a type of institutional knowledge. This can turn into a view of people's work and experience.
Every user has a profile and can be alerted if there is a change in a search result or a given tag. This is a "reader-like" feature that can lead to more collaboration as users can see others that are working on similar issues or documents.
Virtual Folders
6.0 has "virtual folders" where search results can be stored. Folders can be public or private, although I did not see the "private" feature in the GUI of the demo. Individual search returns, that is, pieces of content, are dragged into that folder.
Virtual folders are shared on a group or public level.
One client of theirs, a "major NY-based media company", has a fixed group of KM / library researchers who set up folders on particular topics, and then grant project teams have read-only access.
Virtual folders appear only when relevant to your particular search.
One limitation, elicited by a questioner, is that you can't tag or annotate an external URL. Binding search results to documents rather than URLs allowed faceted guided navigation.
Social Networking
Search for personnel shows the tags that they've used. A search for content can also switch to a view of the people who have authored or tagged the content.
Clustering on employee results--after running a search for a particular key word, 6.0 can further cluster semantically on the employee information. This approach appears to be a great way to find particular types of employees with particular expertise.
Administration
As an administrative and KM tool, 6.0 has a set of tagging dashboards. They show top keyword tags, top taggers, by time frame. It helps manager see what employees are doing and demonstrate ROI.
The next step will be to give people more control over what they see in the results.
Other Thoughts
Rebecca recommended to treat search as an ongoing, living project. Don't set it up and walk away. Keep an eye on user behavior and on how content is changing.
Velocity 6.0 can be configured to ignore or stop clustering on certain terms, or to relate one "theme" to another, if, for instance, a company name was also an acronym.
Looking Back At What I Wanted
- Pivoting on other users' tags and favorites;
- Pivoting around others' tags;
- Ranking or segregating people's tags on documents based on their role within an organization;
- Controlled sets of tags (as an option);
- Predicting and displaying others' tags based on what you have started typing;
The short answer is, the demo I saw absolutely had features 1, 2, 4, and 5. It also had the ability to rank the tagging based on a person's role in the organization, which is close to what I was looking at in feature 3 (you can have "super taggers").
Reaction
Vivisimo has really hit the Enterprise 2.0 target here. The four different ways that 6.0 brings in social collaboration into search have the potential to provide a rich, intuitive search experience inside the firewall, without much training required. Both tagging and virtual folders have tremendous potential to enhance collaboration and findability of content and people. And it's already associated with a really strong enterprise search engine.
The lawyerly skeptic in me wonders if lawyers will start contributing by rating, ranking or tagging, when a social collaboration tool like this is turned on. I think, however, that because a tool such as tagging has immediate personal benefit (i.e., it will help you find what you've previously found), without requiring significant investment of time, it will likely catch on. Tagging has even more benefit the more and more broadly it is used.
Taking advantage of the annotation feature will be more complicated and may require significantly more structure and institutional investment such as organization by practice areas, since lawyers by training can be quick to criticize and are proportionally more concerned about others' criticism of their comments.
Lynda Moulton on Social Search
It feels like there has been a tremendous crunch on my time since roughly mid-November. With the holidays approaching I am finally getting around to revving up some posts on this blog again, and clearing out some discussions that I have been saving up for a while.
I attended (in person) Lynda Moulton's talk introducing business motivators for social search , part of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 Boston event in Boston that I posted about earlier. Lynda's talk was quite dense but provided a "knowledge management" take on this collaborative technology; that is, she explained in terms familiar to knowledge practitioners the reasons why social search provides such an advantage over search without social context.
Lynda posted on the session as well.
Why does social search help?
Under the knowledge management concepts of "trust and validation," people will use most and seek to find content (such as a prior brief of a litigation expert) that has been validated by someone they trust. The extent of someone's trust in content is based on the content's expertise, authority, and affiliation as well the seeker's professional and personal relationships with the source or "voucher" of the content.
Seeking the company of others with similar business challenges is an existing, sound KM model for "bringing more to your work." Meeting in a trusting spirit and participating in sharing is known as a great way to get more out of content and your business.
How Does Social Search Help?
There are several different styles or methods of knowledge sharing.
Together these tools play to our inclination to be self-sufficient with our technologies (and these tools work together in a social search enterprise tool). The human touch has much to offer clarity of knowledge. People are willing to engage in knowledge sharing when in fits in their workflow. You have to have early adopters, enthusaistic self-starters, and sharers. Once they demonstrate to others, it becomes contagious. Being able to see how others view a set of content, without having to ask them, is a new way of looking. We expect social search to play a strong role in organizing activities and work, at many levels.
Because of people's demand for trust, who was associated with a document can be just as important as what it is. (to provide an example, the brief on an evidentiary point authored by a partner noted for his learning on the subject is infinitely more valued than the one-off memo of the summer associate).
Metrics
A woman in the audience asked if metrics for proving success are different with social search? Lynda suggested that the best metrics are stories. Search logs can also be a good source of success proof. You can set up a system where the expectation of how it is supposed to work is conveyed up front.
( I don't find this satisfactory--can't you look at amount of content, ranking, annotations contributed, to develop metrics and establish a return on investment? Another way to establish success would be to conduct pre-and post-rollout surveys of people's satisfaction with their ability to find stuff. The hazard there would be conducting the survey too soon since the value of this type of search would increase dramatically after people had been contributing content for a while).
I attended (in person) Lynda Moulton's talk introducing business motivators for social search , part of Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0 Boston event in Boston that I posted about earlier. Lynda's talk was quite dense but provided a "knowledge management" take on this collaborative technology; that is, she explained in terms familiar to knowledge practitioners the reasons why social search provides such an advantage over search without social context.
Lynda posted on the session as well.
Why does social search help?
Under the knowledge management concepts of "trust and validation," people will use most and seek to find content (such as a prior brief of a litigation expert) that has been validated by someone they trust. The extent of someone's trust in content is based on the content's expertise, authority, and affiliation as well the seeker's professional and personal relationships with the source or "voucher" of the content.
Seeking the company of others with similar business challenges is an existing, sound KM model for "bringing more to your work." Meeting in a trusting spirit and participating in sharing is known as a great way to get more out of content and your business.
How Does Social Search Help?
There are several different styles or methods of knowledge sharing.
- Informing--reflected by commentary and analysis
- Visualizing--done by dashboards, clustering
- Demonstrating--reflected in clustering and federating
- Expository--done by annotating and tagging
Together these tools play to our inclination to be self-sufficient with our technologies (and these tools work together in a social search enterprise tool). The human touch has much to offer clarity of knowledge. People are willing to engage in knowledge sharing when in fits in their workflow. You have to have early adopters, enthusaistic self-starters, and sharers. Once they demonstrate to others, it becomes contagious. Being able to see how others view a set of content, without having to ask them, is a new way of looking. We expect social search to play a strong role in organizing activities and work, at many levels.
- for communities of practice--organize people
- for domains--organize content repositories
- for content--organize search targets, be they documents, video, web pages, or people's expertise
- for clusters--organize content groupings
- for tags--social tagging has no controlled vocabulary, metatagging is controlled.
Can social search "transform behaviors into business wins"?
Social search has the potential to elevate search discoveries into teaching moments:
- it can leverage lost assets
- it can save others time by placing discoveries in view with notations
- nuggets of information can place content in context.
Because of people's demand for trust, who was associated with a document can be just as important as what it is. (to provide an example, the brief on an evidentiary point authored by a partner noted for his learning on the subject is infinitely more valued than the one-off memo of the summer associate).
Leveraging your network can save you time--annotating what you learn as you learn it increases your own understanding and that of others as well.
Clustering has the effect of revealing relevant content no matter how you search for it.
Tagging can prevent the "second fire drill."
Benefits of these social behaviors accrue over time.
Social Search Adapts Content To The Culture Of Organization
Social search moves the content into an organization that members of a common culture understand.
For instance, the pharmaceuticals industry is highly technical, with strong demand for efficiency, and its teams are made up of professionals with advanced degrees (I think Lynda suggested that taggers and annotations in this culture can afford to be quite technical and not intelligible to those without a Ph.D in biology.)
In media, content is multi-media, poorly labeled. Teams are highly collaborative, and need in-depth and accurate fact-finding.
Financial services pushes tens of thousands of products and funds out to its millions of customers. Customers have a wide variety of sophistication. Customers are also trading partners.
Perhaps more collaboration and knowledge sharing in the defense industry would have led to a lower priced toilet seat.
Recommendations For Social Search Projects
Lynda recommended that a social search project needed to start with some questions about an organization's content:
What are our most important knowledge assets?
Could we benefit from collaboration?
Why would content sharing get to better business processes?
Lynda had several recommendations for implementation of any social search.
- Build a map of who works and what content they use (I don't see how this is any kind of prerequisite for implementation of social search. Part of the idea is to let people build thier own maps of the content they use and see how they fit with others' maps).
- Find teams with early adopter attitudes and with serious information gathering challenges;
- Get a vision, a target that will give an edge;
- Get a bunch of wins;
- Communicate the outcomes and plan for the next; and,
- Don't expect technology to solve the problem.
Metrics
A woman in the audience asked if metrics for proving success are different with social search? Lynda suggested that the best metrics are stories. Search logs can also be a good source of success proof. You can set up a system where the expectation of how it is supposed to work is conveyed up front.
( I don't find this satisfactory--can't you look at amount of content, ranking, annotations contributed, to develop metrics and establish a return on investment? Another way to establish success would be to conduct pre-and post-rollout surveys of people's satisfaction with their ability to find stuff. The hazard there would be conducting the survey too soon since the value of this type of search would increase dramatically after people had been contributing content for a while).
Friday, October 12, 2007
Major enterprise search development--Vivisimo & social search
Enterprise search vendor Vivisimo announced this week that they will be including a social collaborative component with the next version ("6.0") of their software. Lynda Moulton blogged about it; she is presenting next week at both a Vivisimo-sponsored webinar and also a more private event that I will be attending (disclosure: I may get a free lunch out of the deal). I have heard Lynda speak in the past and have generally been impressed with her depth of knowledge about search.
Accessing Group Smarts Through Tagging and Ranking
Providing some social context, through user tagging, shared user search result ranking, and exposure of other's favorites, has great potential to enhance findability and context inside the firewall, and I think 6.0 is a major development. I have previously posted an introduction to tagging, pivoting in Del.icio.us, and on CommonCraft's "howtoon" video introduction to social tagging.
The leading example of leveraging mass opinion to enhance findability that I know of outside the firewall is Amazon. Amazon uses not just these three methods of social collaboration, but also now has designated key reviewers, user blogs, and much more, such as listing "what do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?" But the key remains other people's reviews, which let you know if what you are considering buying is any good, and other people's tags, which help you find the products. It is no accident that other major evendors such as Tiger and even brick-and-mortar powerhouses like Sears have jumped on the customer review/ranking bandwagon. It simply works, for the users and the companies.
I've been reading legal scholar Cass Sunstein's Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, which provides a clear explanation for the effect of "group wisdom" on decision making. He is quite hopeful, though not Pollyannish, on our ability to pool information. If people on average are more than 50% likely to rank and tag accurately (substitute "answer a question right" or "make a decision" as needed), then with a large group, ranking will tend to dramatically enhance accuracy, that is, the group will almost always identify "the right answer" or the most relevant page or document for the particular search. The outlier case is the converse; if users are not likely to be accurate (as when asked to guess the distance to the moon, or who will win the next Federal Circuit decision on obviousness leading to patent invalidity), then a large group will be even less likely than an individual to be accurate.
The more people and the more content you throw at it, the better group intelligence will do. By contrast, interpersonal collaboration and intrafirm internal communication becomes much harder the larger (and more geographically scattered) the enterprise gets. Tagging, like other enterprise 2.0 tools, has a way of making the enterprise feel smaller.
Other Social Software Inside The Firewall Vendors
There was some fairly insightful coverage of Vivisimo's announcement in eWeek comparing Vivisimo's offering with a social collaboration module introduced by guided navigation pioneer Endeca. From a professional services perspective, I think it compares more closely with Connectbeam. Connectbeam provides social collaboration inside the firewall, organized around private, group, and company "topics," but does not itself have a search component; their publicity materials indicate, however, that they have connectors and have integrated with "major enterprise search engines" (by which they seem to mean Google and Fast.) Honeywell apparently implemented Connectbeam with Google Enterprise in March 2007.
There was also coverage of 6.0 in Information Week.
Another enterprise social software vendor, this one purely on the "tagging" side, is Cogenz. They have an excellent demo that serves as a good introduction to tagging (see also my previous post on Del.icio.us, a free web tagging service that can be integrated with Cogenz' product) I especially liked their promotion of tagging as the way to "tap into the collective intelligence of an organization by collecting, sharing and connecting around unstructured information."
One question is whether these tools have a connector or can readily be integrated with Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 intranet / DMS search. Many firms already have it, it's free, and some firms (like Sheppard Mullin) have used it as the basis for intranet searches.
Features of 6.0?
I'll be curious to see if, like Connectbeam, "6.0" will allow users to pivot on other users' tags and favorites, as well as pivot around others' tags. Will it be possible to rank or segregate people's tags on documents based on their role within an organization? A litigation partner might only want to look at sample complaints or settlement agreements that have been used or endorsed by another such person.
I will also look for how 6.0 manages the tension between the organization wanting control over what the tags might be (and perhaps to drive them to certain content and away from other content) and the necessity to free up people to make up tags that make sense to them. I've noticed with my Delicious tags that it is all too easy to add a comma or use a slightly different word and thereby miss much of the context that tagging can provide. Cogenz handles this tension by predicting and displaying others' tags based on what you have started typing. I'm curious if more popular tags will be displayed first.
Accessing Group Smarts Through Tagging and Ranking
Providing some social context, through user tagging, shared user search result ranking, and exposure of other's favorites, has great potential to enhance findability and context inside the firewall, and I think 6.0 is a major development. I have previously posted an introduction to tagging, pivoting in Del.icio.us, and on CommonCraft's "howtoon" video introduction to social tagging.
The leading example of leveraging mass opinion to enhance findability that I know of outside the firewall is Amazon. Amazon uses not just these three methods of social collaboration, but also now has designated key reviewers, user blogs, and much more, such as listing "what do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?" But the key remains other people's reviews, which let you know if what you are considering buying is any good, and other people's tags, which help you find the products. It is no accident that other major evendors such as Tiger and even brick-and-mortar powerhouses like Sears have jumped on the customer review/ranking bandwagon. It simply works, for the users and the companies.
I've been reading legal scholar Cass Sunstein's Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, which provides a clear explanation for the effect of "group wisdom" on decision making. He is quite hopeful, though not Pollyannish, on our ability to pool information. If people on average are more than 50% likely to rank and tag accurately (substitute "answer a question right" or "make a decision" as needed), then with a large group, ranking will tend to dramatically enhance accuracy, that is, the group will almost always identify "the right answer" or the most relevant page or document for the particular search. The outlier case is the converse; if users are not likely to be accurate (as when asked to guess the distance to the moon, or who will win the next Federal Circuit decision on obviousness leading to patent invalidity), then a large group will be even less likely than an individual to be accurate.
The more people and the more content you throw at it, the better group intelligence will do. By contrast, interpersonal collaboration and intrafirm internal communication becomes much harder the larger (and more geographically scattered) the enterprise gets. Tagging, like other enterprise 2.0 tools, has a way of making the enterprise feel smaller.
Other Social Software Inside The Firewall Vendors
There was some fairly insightful coverage of Vivisimo's announcement in eWeek comparing Vivisimo's offering with a social collaboration module introduced by guided navigation pioneer Endeca. From a professional services perspective, I think it compares more closely with Connectbeam. Connectbeam provides social collaboration inside the firewall, organized around private, group, and company "topics," but does not itself have a search component; their publicity materials indicate, however, that they have connectors and have integrated with "major enterprise search engines" (by which they seem to mean Google and Fast.) Honeywell apparently implemented Connectbeam with Google Enterprise in March 2007.
There was also coverage of 6.0 in Information Week.
Another enterprise social software vendor, this one purely on the "tagging" side, is Cogenz. They have an excellent demo that serves as a good introduction to tagging (see also my previous post on Del.icio.us, a free web tagging service that can be integrated with Cogenz' product) I especially liked their promotion of tagging as the way to "tap into the collective intelligence of an organization by collecting, sharing and connecting around unstructured information."
One question is whether these tools have a connector or can readily be integrated with Microsoft's Sharepoint 2007 intranet / DMS search. Many firms already have it, it's free, and some firms (like Sheppard Mullin) have used it as the basis for intranet searches.
Features of 6.0?
I'll be curious to see if, like Connectbeam, "6.0" will allow users to pivot on other users' tags and favorites, as well as pivot around others' tags. Will it be possible to rank or segregate people's tags on documents based on their role within an organization? A litigation partner might only want to look at sample complaints or settlement agreements that have been used or endorsed by another such person.
I will also look for how 6.0 manages the tension between the organization wanting control over what the tags might be (and perhaps to drive them to certain content and away from other content) and the necessity to free up people to make up tags that make sense to them. I've noticed with my Delicious tags that it is all too easy to add a comma or use a slightly different word and thereby miss much of the context that tagging can provide. Cogenz handles this tension by predicting and displaying others' tags based on what you have started typing. I'm curious if more popular tags will be displayed first.
Monday, August 27, 2007
New CommonCraft Video--Social bookmarking
CommonCraft Video has the best training materials I've seen on social collaboration tools. See for instance Doug Cornelius' KM Space posts on Wikis and also on RSS feeds, "RSS in Plain English."
Their next video educates about the power of social bookmarking:
Last month in Pivoting In Delicious I dug down a little bit more into the social collaborative aspect of the tagging than Lee Lefever does here. In particular, I explained how you can examine others' Delicious tags for a particular URL, and, how useful that social context can be.
Their next video educates about the power of social bookmarking:
Last month in Pivoting In Delicious I dug down a little bit more into the social collaborative aspect of the tagging than Lee Lefever does here. In particular, I explained how you can examine others' Delicious tags for a particular URL, and, how useful that social context can be.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Pivoting in Delicious; Litigation KM and Social Tagging
Before I first started using Del.icio.us last week (yes I am a connectivity software newbie), I questioned the value of tagging. I thought tagging would merely help me find web sites that I was interested in, and that other people's tags would be of comparatively little interest. Since I was fairly happy with storing web sites I used in the IE "Favorites" list, I didn't really see why I should bother.
Circling back, what does this have to do with litigation knowledge management?
Imagine that a tagging system for documents and URLS is implemented internally at a law firm, such that others in the firm can see what you call another document, can see your tags, and aggregates the tags. It would be significantly easier than it currently is to identify and find:
Count me in as a convert. The power of site tagging is not simply that it helps me find and logically group my own sites. Since so many people are using it, Delicious also provides access to a very substantial collective intelligence about topics I care about, simply through the happenstance of having tagged web sites with the same or closely comparable words.
But as an incredibly important bonus, the tags not only lead you to the web sites, they also point to the delicious accounts of the people who made them. In other words, tagging has uncovered not just the information, but the people who are interested (and may be working on) the same things that I am working on. You can mine other's delicious pages to see not just the tags that you have in common, but the other words and sites that they think are significant.
The example that educated me was the tag "enterprise2.0."
I had tagged the website for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference that I caught the tail end of last week with the logical tag "Enterprise2.0." When I went back to my delicious site, and clicked on my "enterprise2.0" tag, I saw that I could view others' use of that tag, either the most "Popular" uses or "All" uses.
Delicious cleverly puts these "popular" and "all" tags into readily comprehensible and recreatable URLs, such that you can see the page for the enterprise2.0 tag at http://del.icio.us./tag/enterprise2.0 and the popular tags for "Enterprise2.0" at http://del.icio.us/popular/enterprise2.0.
Next to each of the sites listed, Delicious identifies the number of people who have tagged that site (the pink lines).
Each of these pink lines is in turn a hyperlink to the Delicious page devoted to that link or resource (with an indecipherable URL, in this case http://del.icio.us/url/59d38fef1d29b2b73e9b2d5add9e1d34) .
The presentation at this "URL" or "link" page is different; it is now easy to see who has tagged what, and to jump into the user profiles, since the tagger's name is listed beneath their tags and description of the URL, if any. For understandable reasons, however, doubtless having to do with spammers and privacy, you cannot actually contact or reach out to the other Delicious users. I had hoped that there would be some way to direct a comment or reach out in some way to the Delicious users with whom I apparently have a lot of interests in common.
In effect Delicious lets you "pivot" and explore idea categories (tags), those who created them (the users) and the resources themselves (in this case, web links).
Circling back, what does this have to do with litigation knowledge management?
Imagine that a tagging system for documents and URLS is implemented internally at a law firm, such that others in the firm can see what you call another document, can see your tags, and aggregates the tags. It would be significantly easier than it currently is to identify and find:
- the documents that people go back to again and again (a/k/a exemplars, forms, models);
- what people think documents pertain to (removal, subject-matter jurisdiction, pulp plants);
- who is concerned with which issues and trends (Joe Partner in DC, Amy Associate in NY).
I am trying to provide these same resources day after day to the attorneys in my firm, which is possible through my extensive time investment in the available search technologies and databases that my firm offers. With social tagging they wouldn't have to call me, but could take advantage of other's perspectives.
Social tagging has the potential to allow attorneys to add rich context to their work product and search efforts, and to lower the effort required to take advantage of the work of others in the firm.
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