Inside the Tokamak, Part 3: The Green Spheres of Community
April 4, 2008
In the second part of this essay, I explored the notion of context. The short comings of key word search and retrieval are easy to identify once we think in terms of what the user needs to do his job or accomplish a task. But context is larger than a single user, context spills into other areas as well and it gains significance when interacting with messages and community.
We’re ready to tackle one of today’s hottest ideas–community. I loathe the term social software, but English is what it is, and I can’t figure common usage. I will stick with the word community, and you can substitute social software, so this essay seems more in step with the times. You can see where the community function sits in this schematic:
When the Internet was unknown to the auto mechanic, community, not technology, allowed Internet Protocol to work. The early Internet and its precursor the Advanced Research Projects Agency was for a nerdy in crowd. I was lucky. The University of Illinois in Chambana was a player in this game. But for all practical purposes, Internet access when I started college was for an elite group. Flash forward four decades, and the Internet is dependent on people communicating. The surge of interest in point-and-click services like MySpace.com and Facebook.com defines millions of people’s Internet experience.
Community
One can argue that the Messaging “spheres” are little more than enablers of community. I won’t argue your point too much. What I am trying to get across is that within the organization there are at least two related but different manifestations of the group activities). The “blue spheres” identify some tools. The “green spheres” identify other social instrumentalities. Despite my linguistic and logical clumsiness, within the “gray boundary” in the center of the diagram, community, social, and communication ions and electrons outnumber the “red spheres”. I assert that community functions play an important role in search and content processing, and it’s obvious to me that mindless key word searching is not likely to be too useful unless it has affinity for community and messaging. Obvious to me, but it’s a notion that does not inform most of the search systems with which I am familiar. The counter argument is that search does not mean these other spheres. I cannot accept that definition of search. Now you why I have turned my back on the phrase enterprise search. It’s not just meaningless; the term incorrectly states the problem.
The Green Spheres
Let me make a few brief comments about each of the “green spheres”. I will conclude with some observations about the use I make of this collection of 20 “spheres”.
- Groups. Within an organization whether virtual or “real” people clump together. These groups have different life cycles. Assuming that a group has a continuing relationship is false. The fluidity of the groups and what the members do have enormous information value. A company called Tacit Software has made its reputation in this sphere. Take a gander at Tacit’s approach. It’s not search, but it’s germane to information access.
- Web pages and blogs. Organizations have been whipped into a slow walk by studies such as Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations. In some organizations I have visited in the last 12 months, there are two types of Web pages and blogs: [a] the ones the company knows about and [b] the ones the organization does not know about. In terms of competitive intelligence, the [b] category is particularly useful. Search vendors assert, “We index Web pages and Web logs”. This really means, “We can index these.” The reality, however, is often different because the due diligence for indexable content is downright shameful in many organizations.
- Skill matching. When I had a real job, most of my work involved working with other people. (Ugggghh!) The search problem was that I had to “ask around” to find out who knew something about a particular topic. In my work at Halliburton Nuclear and then at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, this “ask around” procedure did not work very well. It was a little easier at the newspaper and publishing company because these outfits put labels on people who knew or were supposed to know specific things. Does your key word search system help you identify the person in your organization who knows what widget vendor X provides?
- Spaces. Now we’re staring at one of the most important aspects of information retrieval. The information about dataspaces is sparse. I cover this topic in Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Search System Won’t Work. In a nutshell, information is handled in an atomic fashion. A space or more correctly a dataspace looks at the atoms, molecules, and constructs of information. If you want a more tangible definition, you’ll have to get a copy of Beyond Search or wait until 2013 when I recycle old wine in a new digital bottle.
I chose green for these community ions and electrons for a reason. Green signifies money. Tantalizing opportunities may be found in the other spheres. My bet is that big paydays await those who can manipulate the energy in these “green spheres”.
Back to Tokamak
I’ve identified a structure, the tokamak with its enabling and analysis “pressures” on the organization. Within the organization, I’ve explained that the easily identified needs in information retrieval may be described as a portal, collaborative work, and cooperative activities such as group reviews of documents.
Within our metaphorical tokamak, these easily identified activities are further decomposed into messaging, context, and community elements. Then each of these three elements are presented in terms of specific functions and activities. What we have is a conceptual frame and a number of specific “spheres” in our organizational plasma.
The importance of this approach to me is that I have a way to explain what behind-the-firewall search must do to move from a marginalizes function to a mainstream application. I think such companies as Autonomy, Endeca, and Fast Search & Transfer are on the right track. Autonomy offers its Pan-Enterprise IDOL platform, Endeca provides Information Access which encompasses search and business intelligence, and Fast Search has its ESP or enterprise search platform. Each of these companies knows that key word search is simply not a growth business. A broader positioning is necessary.
We can see that search at a primitive level operates as one enabling component. Another use of search is as a digital electronic in the crucial context cluster. With 20 “spheres”, search is 10 percent of the solution, problem, and opportunity. Ninety percent of what users mean when asked about search comes from one of the other spheres.
As I stated in Tokamak Part 1, this is an old diagram–more than five years old. I have a more up-to-date version, but this first cut helps me communicate what search means. We can take these 20 spheres and use it as a check list to identify strengths and weaknesses of vendors, we can use the spheres (updated, of course) to compare and contrast vendors. I used a version of these “spheres” in Beyond Search to create a map of the six emerging sectors in the content processing market.
My thought is that you might use this type of vocabulary in thinking about search. I would be interested in suggestions about how to improve these categories. The one idea to carry away from the three tokamak essays is that search is clearly “beyond search”.
Stephen Arnold, April 4, 2008
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