Gartner Steps on the PR Gas
October 15, 2008
After a couple of days in Illinois, I was surprised to find a number of Gartner related news stories in my trusty newsreader. The fall PR push for billable work is on. The story that caught my attention was “Gartner: Nine Most Contentious Issues for the Next Two Years”. The write up appeared on GovTech.com here. I don’t want to recycle the nine gems in the GovTech.com write up. However, I can flag three of the contentious items and provide a bit of color about the grip these issues will have in the next 24 months. I have a tough time thinking about the next day or two, but I am not a Gartner grade consultant, so I have shorter time horizons. My three faves from this list with my observations in italics:
- Vendors do not deliver what the vendor promised. Could it be that organizations with the advice and counsel of consulting firms combine to create a black hole of knowledge?
- Answering the question, “Who is in charge?” “Are organizations able to manage information technology projects?” I ask. “Not very well,” I answer.
- Skipping a formal methodology and just buying something. Going by the book is not too popular because no one has time to do the job correctly the first time in many situations, is it?
You will enjoy the other six issues because there is very little that one can do to address such challenges quickly. If senior management or the top dogs in key silos are not behind the initiative, change is difficult.
When I read MBA inspired analyses about information technology problems, I know that the real message is, “Hire us.” In the current economic storm, I expect more MBA speak applied to information access issues. The easiest way to avoid getting shot is to get out of the line of fire. By popping up a level, consultants who address MBA type issues, not technology challenges, may continue billing. The run of the mill software analyst may get a pink slip. With upstarts like Gerson Lehrman Group and Coleman Research exerting pressure on Gartner type outfits from below and blue chip consulting firms pushing down market, consulting firms in the middle may feel the pressure and must find new ways to generate revenue. I call this MBAIT; that is, slap business school jargon on technology. Like magic, it’s a new consulting domain floating above the bits and bytes of failed enterprise software. Agree? Disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, October 15, 2008
Yotify: A Social Search Engine
October 15, 2008
Technology Review, a publication with the imprimatur of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzes Yotify.com with some able help of the Kelsey Group. Andrew Freiburghouse’s “Making Search Social” reveals quite a bit about Yotify.com and about what the MIT-endorsed publication finds newsworthy. First, click here to read the full text of the October 10, 2008. You will have to dismiss the MIT-endorsed pop up advertisement and then you can read the full-text of the Yotify.com review. Man, I hate those pop ups, but if MIT likes them, what’s the opinion of an addled goose matter? No a whit I assure you.
Mr. Freiburghouse explains that a Yotify query is an alert with smarts. Yotify.com uses the word “scout”. Users provide information about their interests, and Yotify combines ads, collaboration, and search. To be fair, Mr. Freiburghouse notes that Yotify.com is skewed to shopping. And, towards the foot of the article, Mr. Freiburghouse quotes the Kelsey Group regarding Google’s market share. A consumer oriented search system, even with the lift of social search and software agent technology has its work cut out to gain market share.
I gave Yotify.com a quick look to refresh my memory. I ran a query for “quad core processor” and the system at 8 10 pm Eastern displayed:
A user can share results, get alerts hourly or daily, and use the related searches feature to refine the query.
This type of system will appeal to an individual who wants to obtain shopping, travel, and articles listed in classified ad systems. I fiddled with the Web log function, but it was less useful than the shopping content. Over time, the Yotify.com index will add poundage.
Why did Technology Review rev its engine when it learned about Yotify.com? My speculation is that Yotify.com is different from Google. Yotify offers social and collaborative functions. Yotify has lots of buttons, controls, and options to make the user feel as if he or she has control over the results. I think an hourly update on a “quad core CPU” might be just what the doctor ordered for a Technology Review editor needing a break from the intellectual cage match at the publication.
I am waiting for Yotify.com to create an enterprise version. Granted the Craigslist.org content may have to be swapped out for something more substantive. Procurement teams and information technology professionals looking to deploy a search system that works may find the Yotify.com technology applied to a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals just the cure for ails information access. Until there is an enterprise version, I like Yotify.com as a system that offers some interesting features for consumers. If you are intrigued by consumer search systems, give Yotify.com some attention.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
Wonderful Google Quote
October 14, 2008
I collect quotations. One of my favorites is “The right information at the right time is nine tenths of any battle.” That gem is allegedly Napoleon’s. The exact citation I have long since misplaced. I visualize Napoleon making this statement before he heads towards Moscow. The great general’s information was a bit sketchy with regards to mud, cold, and Russia’s ability to let nature take care of most of Napoleon’s troops.
The New York Times’s Web log posting “An Elephant Backs Up Google’s Library” explains that some Google friendly libraries want to set up their own online service for scholars and researchers. The quotation below is attributed to Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries, at the University of Michigan. He said:
‘Google will probably be better than we are at large scale consumer applications.’ But Mr. Courant said that for some services aimed at scholars ‘we’ll be as good or better than them at that.’
A couple of thoughts. First, research means Google to most of the people under 30 whom I have met, surveyed, and interviewed. Institutions can offer an alternative to the Google, but I’m not sure the libraries have the plumbing to deliver. Second, Google is in a position to become the pivot point for scientific, medical, and technical information. This means that Google’s ability to aggregate and provide context will trump the same information without Google’s software value adds. Third, libraries are not exactly at the top of the world’s best endowed institutions. Budgets are tight, and the cash demands of duplicating what Google does may be too great for library overseers.
I want to hang on to Mr. Courant’s statement. In a year or two, we’ll know whether he is correct or like Napoleon before the march to Moscow.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
Microsoft SharePoint: Risks and Rewards
October 14, 2008
ZDNet published SharePoint: What Are the Risks and Rewards by Larry Dignan on October 13, 2008. This is a very good write up, and you can read the full text here. The core of Mr. Dignan’s article was a Gartner presentation about SharePoint. Mr. Dignan includes a link to that material, so I can’t rehash the details Mr. Dignan presents. For me, the most important points were three. Also, my opinions are in italics,
- There’s lots of interest in SharePoint. No kidding. Microsoft has 65 million to 100 million licensees
- SharePoint is complex and therefore expensive. No kidding. Everything seems to require a script. Good for Certified Professionals, bad for the licensees.
- Stuff doesn’t work. No kidding. Ever try to hook Microsoft’s own business intelligence or Dynamics CRM into SharePoint. Good luck on that.
My take on the SharePoint frenzy that seems to be sweeping conferences, consultant reports, and the trade publications is that SharePoint sounds great. The demos look good. The Microsoft fan boys think that SharePoint can be tamed without too much effort.
However, none of these points matter. Microsoft has a very good marketing machines. Its Certified Partners know there is gold in those hills. Bottomline: Microsoft will disseminate SharePoint. When the customer wants a search solution that goes beyond the built in functionality, Microsoft and its partners will sell Fast Search’s Enterprise Search Platform. The licensees won’t know the power of that one-two punch until the someone tallies the costs of the licenses, the infrastructure, the staff and consultants, and the time required to customize, tune, and upgrade. SharePoint could, in the right circumstances, put those not in fighting trim out for the count..
Agree? Disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
Eggheads Figure Out How to Make Government IT Projects Work
October 14, 2008
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to a Web site with the consultants’ seal of approval stamped on it–the Harvard Business Review. Here’s the link to an article that provides a sneak peek at study findings by two super smart business wizards. The author of the article is Rita McGrath. The title of the posting is “Six Problems Facing Large Government IT Projects (and Their Solutions). To be candid, the melt down of the US financial system and the sterling decisions of several high profile government agencies loomed large as I read this Web log posting. I can’t find much about which to grouse regarding Ms. McGrath’s six problems. In fact, each of these is standard operating procedure due to factors that are tough to control or change. When I was working at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Ralph Vinovich, Congress Robert Michel’s admnistrrative assistant told me, “A new president issues an order. It takes three years and nine months to move from the White House to an agency and then down to the workers. The response then takes another three years to move from the workers back to the administration. As a result, changes initiated by one administration take two terms to make a round trip through an agency. Then a new administration comes in and the process begins again. Change is tough.” I assume Ms. McGrath and the researcher who compiled this list of six problems have data that prove Mr. Vinovich off base. I noted some causes of IT failure listed in Ms. McGrath’s posting. My list included:
- Inept and uninformed consultants.
- Government executives who know zero about technology yet are responsible for technical projects and adjudicating technical issues when disagreements surface.
- Contractors who are better at selling jobs and keeping government executives happy than making IT systems work.
- Software vendors who install software and then work like beavers to write code to make the system somewhat similar to what was in the statement of work.
- Statements of work that include hefty chunks of science fiction, thus ensuring that a system will never be finished because the technology to perform such tasks as “intelligent case management” or “data reconciliation and transformation” are hard, expensive, and beyond the capabilities of commercial off the shelf software.
One quick example. A unit of the White House licensed a high profile, expensive content management system. The project manager wanted to manage links on a Web site. The government procured a massive, hugely complex system that had many features but not the one the project manager needed. The result? The big, expensive system and the smarmy consultant are still billing to make this pig fly. The project manager worked to get a headcount increase in order to manage the links manually. Double your expense, double your fun.
No wonder we have a fiscal crisis.
Stephen Arnold, October 15, 2008
DC Gets Googley
October 14, 2008
I have a long history with Washington, DC. I attended Oxen Hill Maryland’s elementary school. After attending university as a dull normal goose, I worked at the nuclear unit of Halliburton and later at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Then in 2000, I had some work for a little-known Federal agency.
To be candid, I never think of Washington, DC and Google as synonymous. Nevertheless, Ars Technica here educated me in the tie up. David Chartier’s “Washington DC Latest to Drop Microsoft for Web Apps” explains that the government of the District of Columbia has embraced the GOOG. The story struck me as out of sync with Microsoft’s paid listing on Techmeme here. Microsoft’s Channel 10 here asserts that Microsoft is doing “the coolest things”. “Cool” obviously means one thing on the left coast and another in the right coast’s District of Columbia.
For me, the most interesting statement in Mr. Chartier’s useful write up was:
The deal will provide District employees with applications like Gmail for communication, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, the recently launched Google Video for business, and Google Sites to wrap it all together with intranets and wikis.
I have heard that the Google Search Appliance has planted its cute self on premises as well. My take is that Google is plugging along, sucking in universities (San Jose State), school districts (New South Wales and 1.5 million users), and city governments (the District of Columbia). These “wins” are trivial, probably not even significant in Google’s ad revenue, but these are significant for two reasons: one, the camel has its nose under the Microsoft tent and two, Google can say with a straight face, “these are not enterprise applications.” Baloney. Google is implementing the ink spot tactic; that is, a drip and then with each cycle more of the white space gets colored with Google’s cheery blues and yellows. The red is a reminder of the red ink the company is going to spill over the balance sheets of those firms who insist on telling me that Google is a search and ad company.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
Google and Publishing
October 13, 2008
Update, October 16, 2008.
Another view of Google’s content play on YouTube.com is here.
Original Post
My publisher Infonortics Ltd. called me Saturday, chiding me for not having the new “Google Publishing” monograph completed. I have been a busy little goose and the new study by Martin White and me took a bit longer than I anticipated. Nevertheless, the Google publishing monograph is moving forward. I have done a couple of posts on this Web log and on my Web site about Google and its publishing technology. I don’t want to rehash the “dossier” function I discussed at the Enterprise Search Summit in May 2008 nor will I rehash the technologies I described for the Buying and Selling eContent crowd in April 2008. What I want to do is define publishing because there seems to be almost as much confusion about my definition of the word “publishing” as there is about the word “search”.
Publishing to me means creating information and distributing it. This worked for Johannes Gutenberg, and it works today. Distributing is a little more slippery. In the dead tree age of publishin, distributing meant putting a paper instance in the hands of a reader. The Romans anticipated this by posting important information in public places on wax tablets, animal skins, and sometimes stone for lasting messages. Now the digital age allows distribution to occur via RSS feeds and other paper free mechanisms like Tweets.
The confusion arises because traditional publishing companies do not really create information. Most publishers get people to collect, synthesize, and write down information. The publisher is really a packaging and marketing operation. The author is roughly akin to a farmer. The publisher is the giant company that converts the raw material into Wheaties.
The digital age, citizen journalism, and other developments have disrupted the farmer-cereal company process. Now publishers can and are being disintermediated. The lousy reports of newspaper revenues make clear that publishers sell ads. The block buster dependence of book publishers illustrate the business model of push out lots of stuff and hope that one title hits. The sci tech publishing model of charging authors for page proofs and then hitting libraries for hefty subscription fees clarifies the business model.
I am confident that professional publishers will howl with my definition and the farmer-Wheaties metaphor. That’s okay. My real focus is Google.
Where does Google fit into publishing? Here’s a quick run down. For the sources, the patent documents, and the technical papers, you will have to hang on until the new monograph appears or dig these references out of the papers and articles I have already published.
First, Google is an end to end content engine. In its early days, Google was little more than a directory maker. It indexed and people looked up where to find information. The company’s additioin of ads and the system for advertisers to input their copy is publishing in my definition.
Second, Google’s acquisition of JotSpot gave it a more robust content intake system. When combined with Dr. Guha’s programmable search engine (described in the BearStearns’ report a year ago), Google has the plumbing to ingest information, metatag those data, and recombine those data to create a new construct. Mark Logic sells this type of system; Google has its own.
Third, Google has Web logs, the Google Base, and the intake systems visible as Google Docs.
Fourth, Google has traffic, monetization functions, and methods to match ads to queries. I don’t think I am too far off base when I suggest that Google can rejiggle these pieces to generate a link to a Google assembled output in response to a user’s query. In short, on demand assembly of content: that’s what commercial publishers do using human intermediated methods. Google uses algorithms.
If you want to argue that Google is not a publisher because Google’s Eric Schmidt asserts to publishers that Google is not a publisher, I’m not interested. If you have examples that refute these four points, let me receive a fact broadside in the comments section of this Web log.
One final point: Google may not think of itself as a publisher. Google follows the clicks, follows the money. There’s money in new assemblies of existing facts and opinion. Google may be in the publishing business blissfully unaware that it is the digital equivalent of Henry Ford’s River Rouge. Iron ore and coal went in one end and automobiles came out the other. History is repeating itself but today’s River Rouge is a digital factory built, owned, operated, and monetized by the GOOG.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
Google Analytics Explained
October 13, 2008
Navigate to TechRadar.com and read “Complete Guide to Google Analytics”. The article summarizes what Google Analytics does. The write up also points to useful information about using Google Analytics to reveal the secrets of Web traffic. This is a long article and it has four parts. Make sure you read and capture the information. Very useful. A happy quack to TechRadar.com. Another good piece of work. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
Googler Drops in to Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Drops in!
October 13, 2008
Earlier this year, a very wealthy and intelligent person yelled at me. The occasion was my summarizing several scenarios regarding Google and its warming relationship with Russia. Remember, I perceive Google as a new type of company, a supra national entity that is tough to regulate. Most people are happy seeing Google as a big Web search company that sells far too many ads than it should. Everyone understands ads; everyone understands Web search; therefore, everyone understands Google. I don’t agree with this “logic” but I’m an addled goose.
I do my rundown of scenarios, which I get paid to do for people silly enough to hire me. Now I had a heart event in February 2007. When the wealthy and intelligent person shouted that my comments about Google’s rapprochement with Google, still under the “invisible hand” of Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer and until recently president of Russia, I thought I was heading for the Great Beyond.
The wealthy and intelligent person, based on what I could figure out from his apoplectic tirade directed at me and my analyses was that no person forced to flee from Russia would ever go back. No person whose family had been ill treated by the Russian state would ever deal with the country again. There were other memes and nuggets in this verbal, machine gun fusillade, but I can’t recall them. Intelligence and money can combine to cause a “failure to communicate” I learned.
This morning I read the Washington Post story here by Maria Golovnina “Google Founder Brin Visits Russian Space Cosmodrome” here, I thought about the wealthy and intelligent person’s response to my discussion of rapprochement scenarios. Ms. Golovnina does a very good job of summarizing the “surprise” visit to Baikonur’s cosmodrome. I’m not sure the phrase “surprise visit” captures the hoops one must go through to visit certain areas in Russia. But she likes the word surprise, so I guess we have to assume Mr. Brin just dropped in to the base in the middle of that tourist haven Kazakhstan. “Dropping in” is hard for me to grasp based on my visits to Mother Russia. She also reminds us that Mr. Brin paid $5 million as a deposit to ride into space. The Space Adventures travel agency took the money, and I suppose handled the paperwork which had to be approved by someone in the Russian government.
Also, Google has an office in Moscow, and my recollection is that the company has been hiring people, if my source at Moscow State University knows what he is talking about. Another source suggested that the office, the space ride, the visit to central Kazakhstan indicates that some people in the Russian government want to keep the lines of communication open with Google.
Alleged Moscow Google employees playing Wii golf to ease the tension of processing the world’s information. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexminza/438520348/in/photostream/
Why is this important to me in rural Kentucky?
In a distributed, massively parallel computing infrastructure, it is possible to concentrate certain processes in certain data centers. I keep thinking that it would be difficult to monitor, regulate, tax, and execute oversight if some computer processes were running on a honking big data center in a nation state such as Russia or some other country friendly to Google but too eager to cooperate with authorities in other nation states. Taxes come to mind as one possible benefit.
My remarks to the wealthy and intelligent person were greeted with outright rejection of the rapprochement between Google and Russia. I don’t know what will result from this space trip, the training, the visits with the folks from the travel agency, and others who happen to be in Kazakhstan when Mr. Brin is there.
Who knows? Maybe the Russian authorities will leave Mr. Brin without an exit option from the comfortable air strip at Baikonur.
In my opinion there may be some value in considering different scenarios, digging for information, and assigning probabilities to certain eventualities. This is a thought game, not the “real world” of wealthy American executives.
In my view, it’s not helpful to reject thinking about what this type of cultural exchange might stimulate. Shouting at me for thinking about the upside and the downside of Mr. Brin’s Russian reveals more about the shouter than the shoutee. My hunch is that money can buy a lot of things, but I am starting to believe that you can buy mental agility.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
PopGist: A BOSS Powered Search Service
October 13, 2008
One of my two or three readers called PopGist to my attention. You can click here to visit the site. The system takes a query, runs it against the Yahoo index via BOSS (build your own search system), receives the results and performs some useful post processing. I ran one of my favorite test queries–Arnoldit–and received a list of results with discussions grouped under each result. I found the service useful. Take a moment and check it out. I have included a screen shot so you can see how the results appear.To see another search service using BOSS, click here.
Will these services yield the cash Yahoo needs to pay for its heterogeneous computing platform’s operation? Catch up with Google in ads? Break into new markets? No. Yahoo is an aging company. For too long the company has been working of home run projects that usually get a runner to first or second and then leave the runner stranded. Yahoo’s original directory business has morphed into an America Online variant. The model no longer works for AOL, and it no longer works for Yahoo. Is BOSS the super hero search service to save the day? No, but it does yield some useful value adding services like PopGist. Yahoo needs more: more guidance, more astute technology programs, a more pragmatic approach to business. Unless the company gets back on track, I can hear the sounds “ya-whoooo” but when I read the letters, they spell “ya who?”
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
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