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Two examples flapped around my aging mind this chilly and dark Sunday, January 4, 2009. I am not sure why I woke up with the names Batista and Madoff juxtaposed. I walked my dogs, Tess (my SharePoint expert) and Tyson (my Google Search Appliance dude). I asked, “How can experts be so wrong?” Both looked at me. Here’s a picture of their inquiring minds directing their attention toward me.

Forget Batista and Madoff. We want breakfast.

On our walk in the pre-dawn gloaming, I thought about Felix Batista. In mid-December 2008, Mr. Batista (a security consultant and anti-kidnapping expert) was kidnapped. Although tragic, I wondered how a kidnapping expert in Mexico to give a talk about thwarting kidnapping could get himself snatched that day. I was reminded of search experts recommending a system that did not work. I have been in some interesting situations where kidnapping and mortar attacks were on the morning’s agenda. I am no kidnapping or mortar blast expert. But I figured out how to avoid trouble, and I just used commonsense. I am not as well known as Felix Batista, of course, but the risk of trouble was high. I did not encounter a direct threat even though I was in a high risk situation. I wondered, “What was this expert doing in the wrong place and the right time anyway?” (Please, read this brief and gentle account of Mr. Batista’s travails here.)

Now Bernard Madoff, the fellow who took a Ponzi scheme to new heights. I am not concerned about Mr. Madoff. What I thought about was the headline on the dead tree version of the Wall Street Journal: “Me, Madoff and the Mind: How a Gullibility Expert Was Scammed.” Another expert, another smarter-than-me person proven to be somewhat dull. I suppose that the notions of trust, ethical behavior, and honesty get mixed into the colors of expertise and knowledge. Mr. Madoff is colored a most disturbing shade of brown.

Common Themes

What do these two unrelated incidents have in common? That was the question I pondered on my early morning walk. Let me capture my thoughts before they flap away:

First, the cult of the expert has been a big part of my work at Nuclear Utility Services (a unit of Halliburton) and Booz, Allen & Hamilton (the pre-break up and messy divorce version, thank you). Experts are easy to find in nuclear energy. A mistake can be reasonably exciting. As a result, most of the people involved in the nuclear industry (classified and unclassified versions) are careful. When errors occur, really bad things happen. The quality assurance fad did not sweep the nuclear industry. Nuclear-related work had to be correct. Get it wrong and you have Chernobyl. Nuclear is not a zero defect operation. Nothing done by humans can be. If a nuclear expert were alive, that was one easy and imperfect way determine that the expert knew something. When nuclear experts are wrong, you get pretty spectacular problems.

Visualization of the Chernobyl radiation. Source: http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/04/chernobyl_radia.html

At Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the meaning of the word “expert” was a bit softer than at Halliburton NUS. BAH (as it was then known) had individuals with what the firm called “deep industry experience”. I learned that a recent MBA qualified as an expert for some engagements. The clients were gullible or wanted to believe that Mr. Booz’s 1917 could work its magic for International Harvester or the Department of the Navy. Some BAH professionals had quite a bit of post graduate training in a discipline generally related to the person’s area of expertise. I am still not clear what a Ph.D. in business means. Perhaps I can ask one of Mr. Madoff’s investors this question? The problem was that a BAH expert was not like a Halliburton NUS expert. My boss–Dr. William P. Sommers–told me that Halliburton NUS was a C+ outfit. BAH, he asserted, was an A+ shop. I nodded eagerly because I knew what was required to remain a BAH professional. I did not agree then nor do I agree now. Some of the consultants from the 1970s, like consultants today, have awarded themselves the title of expert. I can point to a recent study of enterprise search as evidence that this self-propagation is practiced today as it was in 1970.

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Interviews

In the 19080s I relied on a very fast search system for my personal computer. The program was Gopher from Microlytics. In the late 1990s, I met the founder of Gopher and tracker his interest in linguistic-centric search systems. I lost track of Mike Weiner, former president of Microlytics, but we spoke on the telephone a day or two ago. You can get information about Technology Innovations here. I captured his comments in an interview which is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speaks sub site here.

Two comments in my conversation with Mr. Weiner struck a chord with me. Let me highlight these in this brief news item about the interview.

First, search has grown beyond the desktop. Mr. Weiner said in response to a question about desktop search:

…the desktop of today and tomorrow are connected to the “world.” So there can be very clever background processing done on your behalf that can leverage off the information you access and the information you create. The question will be, what’s useful and important to you, and can the system fetch, or generate, this, for you, and in an efficient form you can cognitively benefit from. One of the next potentials for incredible retrieval will be intelligent “information extraction.”

Second, Mr. Weiner’s new interests pivot on innovation. Technology Innovations holds patents on different facets of electronic paper or “epaper”. About the future of epaper, Mr. Weiner said:

I see epaper heavily used in educational publications, where children and learners have questions, need definitions, etc. You may see a speller and thesaurus, and translation technology coming bundled on books with electronic chips in them.

If you are interested in search and publishing in the 21st century, you will find the Mike Weiner interview interesting.

Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2008

Profiles

Mindbreeze, headquartered in Linz, Austria, has caught the fancy of several of my European readers. The name was familiar to me, but I knew nothing about the company. KMWorld, the outfit who pays me to write a monthly column about the Google identified Mindbreeze Enterprise Search as “trend setting product of 2008.” I thought I was able to keep up to date on trend setting search systems, but Mindbreeze was a new player to me. You can read the news release about this recognition here. The news release–perhaps in the adrenaline rush of receiving the KMWorld award said, “US magazine KMWorld acclaims the ‘hottest’ products of the year.” Mindbreeze’s parent company–Fabasoft–seems to be working to reverse a decline in revenues.

With US search engines singing happy tunes to me, I have heard that several of the vendors are really struggling to “make their numbers.” Mindbreeze, it seems, is chugging along quite happily. Earlier this year, Intellisearch reallocated its resources. When I pinged the Intellisearch offices in San Francisco, I was redirected to the company’s offices in Europe. The flagships in search and content processing remain Autonomy (more of a diversified services vendor) and Exalead (a real challenger to the GOOG in engineering) dominate the European scene. I know there are many specialized vendors–for instance, Polderland in the Netherlands–and the revivified Oslo operation for Microsoft Fast Search & Transfer. I heard on my last trip to Europe of a number of new search and content processing vendors, and I will try to cover these as I get more information.

MES (Mindbreeze Enterprise Search)

Mindbreeze has an office in Beverly, Massachusetts. The US contact is David Cloyd, according to the document I reviewed. The managing director of the main company is Daniel Fallmann, who works from the Linz office. The marketing angle is what the company’s brochure calls CEVA or Content Enable Vertical Application. Here’s a diagram of how this works. The various components refer to software available from other Fabasoft companies.

The components show are a work flow component (Folio), a compliance archive (iArchive), a case management system (DUCX), and an operations manager. In this context, Mindbreeze seems to be heading in the same direction as MarkLogic, but I need to do more digging.

And what about Mindbreeze? (For more details you can download the Mindbreeze product brochure here.)

The company’s Web site provides no information about “latest news” as of October 3, 2008, at 8 30 am Eastern time. I expect that the news about the KMWorld award will be posted at some time in the future. The news archive reported on March 30, 2006 (the most recent entry) that a service pack was available for Mindbreeze Enterprise Search 1.6 was available.  My firth thought was, “No news in two years. Hmmmm.”

I did locate FAQs for Versions 1.6, 2.x, and 3.x. The most interesting items I noted were:

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