Gray Lady Limping: A Troubled New York Times?
December 16, 2011
I don’t want to draw parallels between the management shifts at Thomson Reuters and the New York Times. Let me document the fact that another semi-surprise hit the struggling New York Times. Navigate to “NY Times CEO exiting, without Explanation.”
The Times Co gave no explanation for Robinson’s sudden departure, which caught analysts as well as company insiders by surprise. Speculation among industry observers and the analyst community centered on the company’s faltering stock price, which has declined more than 80 percent since Robinson was appointed CEO in December 2004. This year alone, shares are down nearly 25 percent, a performance that has frustrated investors.
Also interesting was the departure of Martin Nisenholtz, the person who has matched the dismal performance of the Financial Times’s online services. After pulling the New York Times from LexisNexis, the New York Times demonstrated that it was unable to generate big dough when it came to leveraging its brand in the online world. I view the misguided handling of the LexisNexis deal as the first benchmark in the Times’s fascinating financial decline. Business school case study anyone: LexisNexis to the first Times’s online service to the current line up of services to the fumbling of its own indexing to the handling of About.com to today. Yowza. I am glad I am in rural Kentucky, semi retired, hopeless confused, and no longer working in the newspaper industry. Anyone hear the sound of dead trees falling in the forest? When you walk alone and get lost, one can spend quite a while in the wilderness. Watch out. Here comes another dead tree falling.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
OpenText, Its Management Shift, and Search Challenge
December 16, 2011
Short honk: Management shifts are flashing yellow lights. Examples range from the shuffles underway at America Online to the RPMs at Thomson Reuters’ revolving door. Now OpenText, a collection of poorly integrated information and content processing companies, has allegedly started the process of replacing its top dog. I read “SGI’s Barrenechea To Run Open Text.” Here’s the passage I noted:
Open Text this morning said it has named current SGI chief Mark Barrenechea as president and CEO effective January {,2012].
Mr. Barrenechea’s background according to Forbes includes:
Mr. Barrenechea served as Executive Vice President and CTO for CA, Inc. (?CA?), (formerly Computer Associates International, Inc.), a software company, from 2003 to 2006 and was a member of the executive management team. Prior to CA, Mr. Barrenechea served as Senior Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle Corporation, an enterprise software company, from 1997 to 2003, managing a multi-thousand person global team while serving as a member of the executive management team. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Barrenechea served as Vice President of Development at Scopus, an applications company. Prior to Scopus Mr. Barrenechea was with Tesseract, an applications company, where he was responsible for reshaping the company’s line of human capital management software as Vice President of Development. Mr. Barrenechea holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Saint Michael?s College.
Interesting. Three developments to watch in my opinion are:
- OpenText’s ability to integrate a wide range of products and services into a cohesive offering. Compared to Autonomy’s marketing, also a company built via content centric applications, OpenText has not mounted compelling marketing campaigns which make the company’s products interesting.
- OpenText’s engineering to update some of its properties to keep those products in step with competitors’ offerings.
- OpenText’s cloud services deliver value and features to enterprise customers unable or unwilling to cope with the burdens of traditional on premises solutions.
One of the more interesting tasks for the new president will be figuring out what to do with OpenText’s line up of search systems. These include the aging BASIS and BRS Search, the Nstein system, the SGML search system, and the embedded components in such OpenText properties as RedDot. The cost of keeping each of these systems in step with competitive solutions strikes me as too large for even OpenText’s revenues.
Will OpenText be a kinder, gentler marketer? Will open text implement Computer Associates’ style of sales? Exciting 2012 for OpenText, its customers, employees, and technology staff. I hear the revolving door spinning in rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Quote to Note: PowerPoint
December 16, 2011
I encounter PowerPoint “decks” when indexing enterprise content. I should emphasize the plural. The bane of PowerPoint is that users skip over the metadata. When indexing an enterprise corpus, there are lots of versions of a particular PowerPoint deck. To make matters more interesting, some decks include confidential information. Running a query on a PowerPoint collection without figuring out versions, duplicates, access rights, and date and time conflicts makes for a long spell of opening, scanning, closing with the cycle repeated many times.
The quote appeared in the write up “PowerPoint Alternative Closes $14 Million Funding.” (Note: this is a Murdoch Wall Street Journal link which can go dark without much warning.)
If you have ever sat through a death-by-PowerPoint presentation (once described by commentator Michael Bywater as “the most loathsome, vicious and immoral piece of software ever produced.”)
I find the sequence loathsome, vicious and immoral fascinating. Software, not its users, are loathsome, vicious, and immoral. Hmmm. Software, not the users. I want a T shirt with the phrase printed across the chest area. Quite a conversation starter I wager.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Trade Tips and Prices at the SharePoint StackExchange
December 16, 2011
“We accept questions about the SharePoint platform. This is defined as the functionality within:· the SharePoint server range of products (i.e. SharePoint Foundation and Server, Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server)· SharePoint Designer· InfoPath where it integrates with SharePointWe also accept questions about community-owned, open source products based on the platform. We don’t accept questions about commercial products that integrate with, run on top of, or extend the platform. Questions can come from a variety of different roles… developers, admins and end-users are all welcome to ask questions here!”
IBM Redbooks Reveals Content Analytics
December 16, 2011
IBM Redbooks has put out some juicy reading for the azure chip consultants wanting to get smart quickly with IBM Content Analytics Version 2.2: Discovering Actionable Insight from Your Content. The sixteen chapters of this book take the reader from an overview of IBM content analytics, through understanding the details, to troubleshooting tips. The above link provides an abstract of the book, as well as links to download it as a PDF, view in HTML/Java, or order a hardcopy.
We learned from the write up:
The target audience of this book is decision makers, business users, and IT architects and specialists who want to understand and use their enterprise content to improve and enhance their business operations. It is also intended as a technical guide for use with the online information center to configure and perform content analysis with Content Analytics.
The product description notes a couple of specifics. For example, creating custom annotators with the LanguageWare Resource Workbench is covered. So is using the IBM Content Assessment to weed out superfluous data.
The content is, of course, slanted toward working with IBM solutions. However, there is also some more general information included. This is a good place to go to get a better handle on content management.
Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Intelligent Search Vital to Product Lifecycle Management Solutions
December 16, 2011
To be successful and turn products into profits, you need a product lifecycle management (PLM) system that helps you create higher quality products. Launch new products in less time and at a lower cost. Control your production processes instead of letting them control you. Infor’s PLM software helps you do all of this, reducing your time to scale by 50% or more, reducing materials usage by 20% to 50%, and increasing your on-time launches to 98%.
Catherine Lamsfuss, December 13, 2011
Keeping Data Governance Under Control
December 16, 2011
Adopting an enterprise solution is often seen as a move towards simplifying an organization’s data organization and retrieval needs. However, if it is not handled appropriately, an organization can create an enterprise model that creates more problems than it solves. The white paper, “Create a SharePoint Data Governance Model,” discusses how an organization can prevent loss of control in regulating their SharePoint sites.
SharePoint collaboration sites grow and grow and grow… and all too often grow to a point at which they are out of control. That’s not good – not if you’re a SharePoint admin. This 12-page paper will help you create a data governance model to bring those SharePoint sites back under control. Read the paper to see a simple model for data governance based on a typical SharePoint content management process. Each section discusses one major activity related to data governance within the document management lifecycle, and how it relates to key organizational roles like IT Administrators, Corporate Risk/Compliance Officers, Content Owners and Information Workers.
Download the full text of the white paper to learn more. We also recommend exploring third party solutions to fill in some of the gaps that SharePoint has yet to close. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a suite of solutions that are designed with usability and uniformity in mind. Mindbreeze works in conjunction with an already existing SharePoint implementation or as an alternative to SharePoint. Read more about their Folio software:
“Fabasoft Folio is the standard software product for Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Compliance Management, agile Business Processes and Information Governance. The solution provides uniform, reliable and controlled management of digital content in the enterprise. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise links Fabasoft Folio for uniform enterprise-wide information access.”
The moral of this story – control your enterprise solution, do not let it control you. Best practices and other suggestions can help your organization optimize SharePoint, but other third party solutions, such as Mindbreeze, might produce better results with less effort.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Connexia Characterizes CXAIR
December 16, 2011
Connexia has put out a new white paper detailing its search & business intelligence application titled “CXAIR: Technology Overview.” Ease of use is one of the primary selling points for this product. We learned from the write up:
The product has been designed around 3 core principles: speed, flexibility and performance. CXAIR is designed for use by everyone, not just analysts, and knocks down many of the barriers prevalent in traditional BI technologies to finally make reporting, ad-hoc analysis and dash-boarding as easy and as straightforward as searching the Internet.
The paper also boasts of single-point access to data from multiple data stores; drill-down-able visualization tools, including Venn diagrams; multi-dimensional cross tabulations; and rigorous security features.
Do check out the paper for more details. Keep in mind, though, that there are lots of folks in the fusion and business intelligence space, many of whom style themselves as the “next generation” or something similar. A few examples include Digital Reasoning, PolySpot, and JackBe. (As in “Jack be nimble.” Cute.)
Connexia, founded in 2006, focuses on tying together business intelligence, enterprise search, and data access. It prides itself on making data management accessible to non-techies.
Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Hewlett Packard Lusts after Big Data
December 16, 2011
As Web users continue creating structured and unstructured data at higher volumes than ever before we are starting to need technology to analyze it.
According to the Dec 1, Front Line article “HP Predicts 50 Zettabytes of Data will be Created Annually by 2020,” Hewlett Packard (HP) predicts that by 2020, fifty zettabytes (fifty billion terrabytes) of data will be created every year. This will present a major challenge for businesses.
Prith Banerjee, head of HP Labs, said at the firm’s Discover event:
By 2020 there could be as many as 10 billion people on the planet and some four billion of these will be online interacting on social networks. While now there are 2.5 million tweets per day this will rise to tens of millions.There’s also going to be a huge increase of sensors on the network measuring everything from temperature to heart monitoring. We expect there to be one trillion sensors by 2020.
HP Labs is currently working to address this issue by investigating technology that tracks a variety of complex events which must be correlated so that patterns can be detected. It could contextually analyze what customers say on twitter a mere ten seconds after the tweet is sent.
What will Autonomy’s role in this big data love fest be? Stay tuned.
Jasmine Ashton, December 16, 2011
Google Intern Explains Android Lag
December 16, 2011
Leave it to a student intern. Not even the X Factor interns reveal the inside scoop about technology.
Here’s a useful insight into the Google method of “good enough.” Apple Insider reports that a “Former Google Intern Explains Why UI Lag Occurs More Often in Android than iOS.” The intern in question is one Andrew Munn, who ironically took to Google+ with his explanation.
Munn, who interned on the Android team, listed several reasons for the slowness of Android as compared to Apple’s iOS. See the write up for specifics, but it all boils down to one thing. The article asserts:
The original Android prototype didn’t have a touchscreen, as it was meant to be a BlackBerry competitor. As such, Android’s architecture is meant to support a keyboard and trackball. Munn further claimed that after the original iPhone arrived in 2007, Google rushed to complete Android, but ‘it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.’. . . ‘Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone,’ the report noted.
The current state of affairs may be acceptable to Google now, but more may be needed to capture half the market for smart TV sometime in 2013. Munn, for one, is confident that his former team will make the rewrite. “Eventually,” he said.
We’re waiting for an intern to explain open that is closed and fragmentation that is not fragmented. Is UX pronounced “Yuk”?
Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
