Gilbane 2008: Three Things I Learned
June 20, 2008
The Gilbane 2008 conference ended. Attendees seemed happy. In fact, as the exhibit tear down began, some attendees were sitting at tables in the registration area exchanging business cards and planning enterprise application moves. At times, the snap of business cards rivaled the noise in and around a Las Vegas 21 table.
I lost track of the sessions into which I poked my beak. Knitting together what I heard from earnest lecturers, in the break chats, and from exhibitors who smiled continuously for two days, I learned three things.
First, content management systems designed to end hassles with content for the Web and other outputs don’t work very well. One person told me, “CMS. My goodness, what a disaster.” I don’t think this youthful looking person was exaggerating. CMS is one of those software systems that is supposed to allow an organization with neither publishing work processes or people who can write very well do both and generate content automatically.
Second, enterprise search does not work very well. For the first time, a number of different people were talking about the problems of search, but what I heard boiled down to two issues: [a] users don’t use the system and [b] the system is tough to fix. One person told me, “I was surprised how many people admitted that their search systems were not what the companies thought they were buying.” Popular silver bullets and amulets included taxonomies, social search, and semantics. All incantations to keep search evils at bay.
Third, consultants feasted on the attendees looking for silver bullets. The UK outfit 451 and Gartner were making sales left and right. Lesser souls were also dragging in nets filled with prospects. I steered clear of the consultants because the flashing white teeth and the broad smiles frightened me.
Quite a lesson for me.
Stephen Arnold
June 20, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
