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MarkLogic: The Shift Beyond Search

Editor’s note: I gave a talk at a recent user group meeting. My actual remarks were extemporaneous, but I did prepare a narrative from which I derived my speech. I am reproducing my notes so I don’t lose track of the examples. I did not mention specific company names. The Successful Enterprise Search Management (SESM) reference is to the new study Martin White and I wrote for Galatea, a publishing company in the UK. MarkLogic paid me to show up and deliver a talk, and the addled goose wishes other companies would turn to Harrod’s Creek for similar enlightenment. MarkLogic is an interesting company because it goes “beyond search”. The firm addresses the thorny problem of information architecture. Once that issue is confronted, search, reports, repurposing, and other information transformations becomes much more useful to users. If you have comments or corrections to my opinions, use the comments feature for this Web log. The talk was given in early May 2009, and the Tyra Banks’s example is now a bit stale. Keep in mind this is my working draft, not my final talk.

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me to be at this conference. My topic is “Multi-Dimensional Content: Enabling Opportunities and Revenue.” A shorter title would be repurposing content to save and make money from information. That’s an important topic today. I want to make a reference to real time information, present two brief cases I researched, offer some observations, and then take questions.

Let me begin with a summary of an event that took place in Manhattan less than a month ago.

Real Time Information

America’s Top Model wanted to add some zest to their popular television reality program. The idea was to hold an audition for short models, not the lanky male and female prototypes with whom we are familiar.

The short models gathered in front of a hotel on Central Park South. In a matter of minutes, the crowd began to grow. A police cruiser stopped and the two officers were watching a full fledged mêlée in progress. Complete with swinging shoulder bags, spike heels, and hair spray. Every combatant was 5 feet six inches taller or below.

The officers called for the SWAT team but the police were caught by surprise.

I learned in the course of the nine months research for the new study written by Martin White (a UK based information governance expert) and myself that a number of police and intelligence groups have embraced one of MarkLogic’s systems to prevent this type of surprise.

Real-time information flows from Twitter, Facebook, and other services are, at their core, publishing methods. The messages may be brief, less than 140 characters or about 12 to 14 words, but they pack a wallop.

MarkLogic’s slicing and dicing capabilities open new revenue opportunities.

Here’s a screenshot of the product about which we heard quite positive comments. This is MarkMail, and it makes it possible to take content from real-time systems such as mail and messaging, process them, and use that information to create opportunities.

Intelligence professionals use the slicing and dicing capabilities to generate intelligence that can save lives and reduce to some extent the type of reactive situation in which the NYPD found itself with the short models disturbance.

Financial services and consulting firms can use MarkMail to produce high value knowledge products for their clients. Publishing companies may have similar opportunities to produce high grade materials from high volume, low quality source material.

Humans, regardless of their skills and numbers, cannot deal with real time information flows quickly enough to exploit what is happening now.

That’s one challenge many organizations face, and that challenge did not exist too long ago.

More Research

In the research for SESM, my team found some other interesting facts about electronic information. We wanted to focus on search and retrieval. We learned that users of high profile search and retrieval systems were, quite surprisingly, dissatisfied with those systems.

The reasons, as we learned in our interviews and from the research data obtained in the course of other client engagements in 2008, included:

Large flows of information. Systems could not cope with the volume of digital content in ways that were meaningful to users. This, as it turns out, has significant implications for costs and product innovation. Employees find work arounds which add time and expense to routine tasks.
Organizations have information walls. A person in marketing cannot find information needed for an important proposal. Information resides within digital silos or behind thick walls. Opportunities in hand are simply lost.
The tools in use are not up to the demands of today’s user. With industrial strength software offered by dozens of vendors, we learned that individual enterprise systems could not deal with the giant challenges of digital information.

Our study, despite its title “Successful Enterprise Search Management”, focuses on the need to deal in a pragmatic, direct way with complexity.

Today, I want to provide two examples of how information-centric organizations can create new products, reduce costs, and react quickly to new information flows. Revenue comes from an ability and infrastructure that leverages information. The objective is to allow the knowledge worker to move from Point A (idea) to Point B (revenue producing action) quickly and efficiently.

Smoother Flying

In our nine months of research, we learned that publishing companies and governmental agencies are among those working hard to deal with electronic information. To our surprise, we found out that some companies, not in the information business, have an even greater challenge.

Consider a large airline, which as you have heard is a MarkLogic customer. When I gathered information for our new study, I did not know that MarkLogic would be the vendor tapped to resolve the content problems the organization faced.

The airline has had, I learned, a positive “search experience”. The reason, as you learn in a moment, is related to how the user interacts with the system. From the company, I learned that the underlying system is Microsoft SharePoint. In a regulated industry, two factors become drivers. The first is ensuring that content is available to users; for example, airline pilots, maintenance personnel, and regulatory officials. The second is cost control. MarkLogic’s XML server added needed functionality to the existing content infrastructure. The company’s system professionals needed to reinforce SharePoint, not rewire existing work flows. Employees used Microsoft Word to create content and were comfortable with the Microsoft applications.

MarkLogic’s solution was to “snap in”, not impose change on users. The content was mirrored to the MarkLogic server. The company used MarkLogic’s Word toolkit for Word so that employees could continue to create content within Word. The SharePoint work flow tools and other business logic were unchanged.

The result was that the airline chopped costs out of content repurposing. The time required to repurpose content for pilots, maintenance staff, and other users was reduced. How well does the MarkLogic system work. For the quarter just ended. The airline reported a profit. MarkLogic was a contributing factor.

The lesson from this example is that search is part of a larger data management system. Get the database and the information flow right, and the users can “find” information. As a result, search becomes a utility, not a magnet for multiple systems and the significant dissatisfaction that exists among users of information systems today.

This case example is not about revenue, but it is very much about cost reduction and the ability to generate content for users, customers, and regulatory authorities quickly and economically.

A Traditional Publisher’s Experience

Traditional publishing companies have a tough challenge because, unlike a start up in a garage in Mountain View, there are expectations built up over many years. In some publishing companies, a century or more of methods provides information that literally makes the difference between life and death.

One case example I uncovered is a publisher of reference books. Most of us in this room have used the publisher’s reference products in university. Like other publishing companies, The publishing company gets many inputs, and over the last decade, the number of information inputs coming into the firm’s professionals have exploded. Publishers provide information about their products and services. Editors and subject matter experts generate information. Unlike the halcyon days when there were only a few thousand books and magazine published in Europe, today there are hundreds of thousands.

The publisher has adopted the MarkLogic approach to information. The company is well along in the process of replacing older systems with the MarkLogic architecture. Here’s a broad schematic of what the implementation of the MarkLogic system installation will look like.

The major difference will be in the firm’s ability to update, access, repurpose, and output information in a range of formats. The combination of flexible output and quick updating opens the door.

The publisher’s Web presence has become more responsive to market needs.

First, the system eliminates many manual steps that were once required to create content for Web applications

Second, the system is refreshed on a schedule determined by the firm’s editors. Unlike the previous system when updates took as much as seven working days, today’s system can be updated daily or more frequently as required.

Third, the newer system allows the company to generate outputs for different formats efficiently. The installation gives a traditional publishing company the type of flexibility enjoyed by those innovators in a garage about 30 minutes away from where we are meeting today.

Conclusion

Let me close with two key findings from our SESM research:

First, modern systems such as the MarkLogic suite provide organizations in our information-centric world to surf on the data flows. Instead of being inundated, MarkLogic, we learned, makes it possible to ride opportunities, and if necessary abandon those that don’t meet objectives quickly and a lower cost.

Second, the new information environments are not the end of publishing. It is a new beginning. When the automobile first appeared on the street, people did not develop a better horse. Innovators responded with the automobile industry.

In closing, MarkLogic is a technology company that moves “beyond search”. Content within its XML server can be sliced, diced, repurposed, mapped, and piped into other applications. The system meshes with existing infrastructure, reducing the cost and time associated with traditional content transformation tasks.

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