Enterprise 2.0 When Enterprise 1.0 Doesn’t Work
November 26, 2008
At lunch yesterday, two of my colleagues and I talked about the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”.
I admit that I named my second Google study Google Version 2.0, because I thought the “2.0” designation was a convenient way of numbering my Google monographs. The “2.0” label suggested to me that the GOOG had kicked up its efforts a notch between the time I finished The Google Legacy in early 2005 and the September 2007 date of my second Google monograph.
At lunch, I told Don (a Windows and database expert) and Stuart (a master programmer) that I didn’t know what Enterprise 2.0 meant. Furthermore, with Enterprise 1.0 companies in big trouble, I thought that we should be talking about “Enterprise 0.35” or “Enterprise 0.1”, not some fuzzy wuzzy notion of life after the financial crisis. The crisis is here, getting worse, and likely to persist for the foreseeable future. With a $65 billion in revenue company having a share price of $20, there are some problems in technology land. Beyond technology, there are some challenges for General Motors, Citcorp, and the US budget. The idea of an “Enterprise 2.0” struck me as interesting.
Different Views of Enterprise 2.0
Don said, “Enterprise 2.0 is a buzzword. We had Web 2.0, which was meaningless. We had Search 2.0 which was silly. Now we have Enterpriser 2.0. This is a marketing play and it suggests that the next version will be better than the present version. Too bad it takes some companies three versions to get something to work the way it is supposed to. I just ignore the term.”
Stuart said, “I think Enterprise 2.0 is shorthand for moving some of the high profile Web functions into a company. I think the young employees and contractors already use these, but now companies want to get control of instant messaging, services like LinkedIn and Facebook, and mashups. I don’t think most of the people using the phrase ‘Enterprise 2.0’ know what it means, but the implication is that the cool Web stuff can help an organization do some things easier is why the terms is being thrown around.”
So, I am uncertain. Don thinks it is marketing baloney. And Stu thinks it is old people trying to tap what young people do without giving the service much thought.
Defining Enterprise 2.0
After lunch, I kept thinking about the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” and decided to poke around for more information. I navigated to Google and entered the search string “define:”Enterprise 2.0”. Google promptly spit back to me one definition. It was succinct and from an outfit called PandoraSquared. The definition was, “The use of freeform social software within companies.” Well, that didn’t help me, since I don’t know what the heck social software is. It is possible to send messages via email, participate in chat, and offer Web pages that allow users to vote Digg style on certain stories. I guess that stuff is social software. I don’t think I need a buzzword to describe these functions, but I’m an old and addled goose, so what do I know?
To master the different facets of Enterprise 2.0 requires a genius of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci, the last Renaissance man., Is there an MBA at work in a consulting firm who can carry Leonardo’s intellectual weight? Let me know if you have a candidate in mind.
Well, I probed more deeply and I found a conference focused exclusively on Enterprise 2.0. I want to submit a talk so I can explain that I know about uses of commercial off the shelf technology to help companies make more sales. I understand this approach, but I don’t need to say the words “Enterprise 2.0.”
Getting Ready for the SEO Grilling
November 24, 2008
For the last 20 years, I have been attending and participating in the International Online Show. The show is now in the capable hands of Incisive, a UK based company. Each year, there are one or two sessions that catch my attention. The show next week in London promises to be interesting for me. I am giving a talk about the future of search and participating in a panel about search engine optimization. I can summarize my endnote in one word: Google. My talk explains how Google will have more impact in the enterprise search market than it did in 2008. If you want to know how and what, you will have to attend or wait until I post a summary of the speech. I don’t make a PowerPoint deck available before my talks. I prefer posting a PDF of my speaker notes and letting those interested link to that version of my remarks.
But SEO. That is the session that could cause me to gulp another blood pressure pill.
SEO: Consultant Heaven
I want to be crystal clear: SEO is a practice that annoys me. The reason is that content and correct code are what I value. SEO is a package of hocus pocus designed to create the sense that tricks will cause a Web page to appear at the top of a results list. Since most people don’t create substantive content, most Web sites don’t provide the indexing systems with much to process. Other outfits use a content management system like the ancient Broadvision or the remarkable Vignette. These systems generate Web pages that some Web indexing systems cannot process. Other people create Web pages with scripting errors. Sure, my team and I make scripting errors, and we try to fix them. If we can’t, we create a page without the offending function and live with the simplified presentation. Other companies pay 20 somethings from Cooper Union to create Web sites entirely in Silverlight, Flash or Adobe AIR. When a Web indexer or crawler hits these sites, the indexing system may not have much to work with or have to work overtime to figure what the site is “about”. I could list some other flaws in Web sites, but you get the idea. Click here for a listing of SEO experts.
Will you be the victim of an SEO consultant’s hold up?
Now people who are clueless about what good content is or what resources are required to create good content, don’t show up in a Google, Yahoo, or Live.com (maybe a new name is coming soon) results list. You can see this problem by running a query for “financial services.” You don’t get much meat because the phrase “financial services” has been co-opted by the SEO consultants.
Search Confusion: Increasing
November 22, 2008
In three separate engagements this week, I had to define some basic terms for the people paying me for my time. The baffler was the meaning of the word “search”. For the first group, search was a find-a-phone number problem. I explained that one could find a phone number by browsing a list of entries, typing a portion of the person’s name, or using a “word wheel” (a truly loathsome term) to browse the entries in the directory. I showed an example of looking for an entry with a geospatially aware mobile device. The Google service worked well. The group understood the options and was able to move forward in the discussion without cross talk about Web search, organic search, and other “types” of search that were not germane to the specific problem this outfit had.
The second conversation was about an end-to-end search situation. The idea was that at one end of an information pipeline were boxes of paper. There were archived files on tapes. At the other end of the pipeline were professionals who had to review the informiaton to determine if there was a product idea nugget that had been lost inadvertently. In the middle of the pipeline were what the group called “inputs”. These “inputs” were Web pages, third party information, and routine office electronic information. The task was to make the information available. “Search” for this group was a business process. The notion of typing a name and getting a result was assumed to be the probelm. The problem was not well defined. Yet the word “search” was used to describe scanning, transforming, indexing, classifying, and making accessible an unknown amount of information. “Search” was a glittering generality.
The third client wanted to eliminate search. The idea was that proprietary content would be blended with Web content from public sources like the state government in Ohio. The idea was to create a report, actually a mash up like a Google Map with real estate listings. The user would be able to type of word or two or just pick from a list of reports on offer. “Search” for this group was a business intelligence function. “Search” really meant, “We don’t want our users to have to search at all. We want to provide answers with a mouse click.”
I concluded that the “search industry” has a big problem. The term “search” is for practical purposes meaningless. Martin White and I in our new study Successful Enterprise Search Managment which will be releaed on November 28, 2008. (More information is here.) define search by its context. The message is that if one talks about search without getting consensus on what the group in a particular context means, the likelihood of a problem is greatly increased.
Complexity Is Definitely the Way to Go
November 20, 2008
My newsreader flagged “Enterprise Mashups Need Complexity to Create Value”, an article by Gil Yehuda. I surmised that Mr. Yehuda landed a think tank type job. I was right. He works at the mid-tier consulting outfit Forrester Research. I think that Forrester has an “in” with ZDNet, so the article appears as part of “The View from Forrester Research”. The point of Mr. Yehuda’s write up is:
… each data mashup is interesting, the right combination can transform my work behavior. There’s a who, what, when, and where, that all have to intersect onto a map and onto a calendar.
The idea, I think is to take multiple mash ups, use them as building blocks, and create mash ups of mash ups. In Mr. Yehuda’s opinion, these meta mash ups deliver:
data streams that matter most to me, (e.g. my CRM data), along with other streams and network information, it results in new information. The triangulation of these data sets means that I could predict whom I meet and what to do when I plan my trips. Moreover, my manager would be able see where the team’s travelers are now, and where they will be in the near future. My sales manager could see which of us will be traveling nearby other clients, and she may want take advantage of the proximity opportunities. Travel still happens, but we can get more value out of each trip. Enterprises like to hear that.
The conclusion to the write up is:
I have renewed faith in the relevance of mashups to enterprise computing. It’s just more complex than splashing a data set onto a map. That’s OK, enterprises are used to leveraging complexity to create value. And mashups can be the building blocks to enable their success.
I have mixed feelings about M. Yehuda’s argument. In a very general sense, I think that applications will combine data to deliver solutions. For IDC, Sue Feldman and I described Google’s dataspace work. Take it us, creating a dataspace to make meta mash ups work is not trivial. Some thorny problems have to be resolved, and I don’t think most organizations will have the appetite, the technical expertise, or the resources to handle the data management issues such as transformation themselves.
Instant potatoes, like facile consultant assertions, are a side dish with empty calories, not the main course.
However, on a more “here and now” level, I think Mr. Yehuda is 25 percent right. First, how can I accept him as an expert in Enterprise 2.0 when I don’t know what that means and when Enterprise 1.0 outfits are struggling. Mr. Yehuda must not correlate stock prices and quarterly reports with an organization’s ability to embrace Enterprise 2.0 technology. I do. Companies in the financial gutter won’t be doing much Enterprise 2.0 thinking until those firms can pay their bills and keep the lights on. Second, what the heck is knowledge management. I write a column for a publication called KMWorld, and I am upfront about my lack of understanding what this buzzword means. My current view is that it doesn’t mean much beyond information applied to decisions in an organization. Finally, people who “connect the dots” make me nervous. The dots have to be related in a meaningful way. Grabbing a range of applications that can run in a browser is not connecting dots. The collection is an impressionistic arrangement. I am not convinced that Mr. Yehuda is a management Marc Chagall based on his essay.
Let me urge you to read his article and make your own decision. My thoughts are:
Overflight: Google’s Web Logs Aggregated
November 17, 2008
Overflight is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. Click here to access the splash page. Google publishes more than 70 Web logs. When Dave Girouard made a comment at the Web 2.0 conference about Google Apps as a platform, this was old news. Via the Overflight service, the ArnoldIT.com analysts “knew” about this functionality and were able to relate the various posts about a hackathon and Google’s enterprise ambitions days before the Web 2.0 conference. Prior to the dissolution of several of the financial institutions to which ArnoldIT.com provided open source intelligence, we heard repeatedly, “You guys seem to be ahead of the curve when it comes to Google.” You can see how useful Overflight has been. Just click here and read about my two Google studies written in 2005 and 2007. The information revealed in these analyses are just now finding their way into the Google information mainstream.
That’s true and part of the reason is what we had been doing for a number of clients, including Threat Open Source Intelligence Gateway, which is not a public service. We also used these tools for projects when vendors wanted to know what type of activities one or more companies were likely to pursue.
Overflight is an RSS aggregation service. The service that is now publicly available aggregates the headlines from Google’s 74 Web logs. We group the most recent headlines using the same categories that Google favors. Our for fee service offers more bells and whistles, but now you can navigate to www.arnoldit.com/overflight and see at a glance what Google is publishing on its own Web logs. For example, click on one of these headings and you will be able to browse by individual Web log the latest headlines:
- Google wide, which is Google’s umbrella term for general Web logs. Most of the information that you read about the company in many well known news services appears on these Web logs first
- Google products, which is a collection of Web logs about specific products. Most of the postings are signed by product managers, but these posts go through Google’s internal clearance process to help ensure that the product comments are in sync with the corporate game plan
- Google ads, which is a round up of the advertising and and advertiser related Web logs. At ArnoldIT.com, we don’t pay much attention to advertising, but millions of people live or die because of the success of their Google ads. We noted that Google’s ad Web logs contain quite interesting references to certain little known innovations such as “matching”. You will be able to read more about these technologies in my forthcoming Google and Publishing study for Infonortics, Ltd.
- Google developer, which is a particularly interesting collection of Web logs that provide information about “where and how the rubber meets the road” when creating applications for the Google application spaces. Adhere Solutions, owned by my son, finds these posts quite interesting. The technical information is often unknown by Google’s public facing marketing and sales professionals.
- Google region, which is a collection of Web logs that provide information germane to Google’s segmentation of its global markets. Many of these Web logs are in English but some are not. You will need to use Google Translate to make sense of the postings. Our commercial version of Overflight automates the translation for you.
Why am I making this service available? There are three reasons:
- A number of people have discovered that my studies of Google (more information is here) are two or three years in front of Google. I thought that it would be easier to put up a version of Overflight to show people how open source intelligence can reveal significant information before the high profile media outlets or the big buck, dead tree tech writers reveal a scoop that is to me “old news”.
- I funded a new award at the JBoye 08 conference to acknowledge individuals who are putting actionable intelligence in the hands of European information and technology professionals. At the JBoye 08 conference, I explained that I wanted to “give back” cash, recognition, and tools. I am nearing the end of my career, and I don’t really feel the need to keep the Google Web log collection under cover any longer.
- Google has spawned an amazing number of news services, stories, and Web log postings. Frankly, I was tired of seeing information that was stale. Many of the stories appear on the Google Web logs and then these are recycled as breaking news. I decided to put the source in front of people so individuals can decide if they want to get Google information that is a bit fresher.
Keep in mind that Google would like to convert this addled goose into paté. If a Web log or Web logs disappears, we will try to work around a glitch. At this time, I plan to leave the service up for at least six months. If there is interest in the service, I may make available some additional content processing tools. I have no “search” function activated. If you think that would be helpful to you, post a comment.
If you wish to criticize the service or make suggestions, please, use the comments section of this Web log. If you are cut from the same cloth as Barry and Cyrus, two people who offer assertions, not hard facts, be aware that specifics are what makes this goose happy. If you don’t find the service useful, don’t use it.
If you want to talk with my team about our open source intelligence services, feel free to write me at seaky2000 @ yahoo dot com. Put “overflight” in the subject line. In a lousy economy, good intelligence can make the difference between a successful organization and an unsuccessful organization. Napoleon’s alleged statement is appropriate today, “The right information is nine tenths of any battle.”
Stephen Arnold, November 17, 2008
Overflight Award for Excellence
November 10, 2008
ArnoldIT.com and J Boye created an award to recognize the best presentations at the Boye 08 Conference held in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference attracted more than 260 attendees and featured more than 40 speakers from around the world.
The winner of the Overflight Award for Excellence was Caroline Coetzee from Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK. Caroline did a very interesting and relevant talk on The business case game (or is a website really more important than a maternity unit?) which explained how to get senior management support in the first place. An honorable mention went to Niklas Sinander from EUMETSAT in Germany, who did a popular talk on Wiki from theory to practice. The winner and runner up received a Lucite trophy with the award logo. The winner received 500 euros.
Left to right, Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT.com, Niklkas Sinander, EUMETSAT, runner up, Caroline Coetzee, Cambridge University Hospitals, and Janus Boye, JBoye.com.
Janus Boye and Stephen Arnold created the award to permit the community attending the conference to identify presentations that met the following criteria:
- Information that would be useful to delegates upon returning to work
- Research supporting the presentation
- Quality of the delivery and examples
- Importance of the speakers’ topics at the time of the conference.
A panel of distinguished attendees and information practitioners had the task of assessing the presentations and determining the winners. The judges were:
- Andrew Fix, Shell
- Volker Grünauer, Wienerberger
- Magnus Børnes Hellevik, The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration
- Ove Kristiansen, Region Syddanmark
- Pernilla Webber, Alfa Laval.
The Overflight Award will become a permanent feature of the conferences organized by Janus Boye. A happy quack to the winners and to the judges who made the selection for this award.
Stephen Arnold, November 10, 2008
Apple Google Salesforce: Attack Incumbent Market Leaders
November 9, 2008
The flight from central Europe to the autumnal hills of Kentucky was a delight. The flights were filled with happy, loud children. Considerate coach travelers talked loudly and without stop for 8.5 hours. The Delta flight crew served wonderful meals, and the food. Ah, the food–to die for. With so much right with major corporations using their business acumen to acquire Northwest Airlines, I was shocked to read that Apple was resisting IBM’s legal attempt to prevent an executive from quitting Big Blue and falling into the Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field. On one side, Apple a purveyor of expensive gadgets challenging the $100 billion mega-enterprise. Goodness. Then Google with its black eye from its run in with US Federal regulators suggesting that Microsoft and Oracle were off base about cloud computing. You can read about the Apple IBM dust up here. You can learn more about the Google and Salesforce.com criticism of Microsoft and Oracle here. If these links, go 404ing into oblivion, you will be able to find numerous posts about these two unrelated incidents.
I have a different take on these actions, and my view is influenced by my analysis of Delta and its buy out of Northwest Airlines. You probably wonder, “What’s the relationship? Airlines haven’t treated passengers well in a decade or more. Northwest Airlines is a turkey made of aluminum and fiberglass composite. This addled goose has suffered a meltdown.”
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Apple, Google, and Salesforce.com assert that IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are little more than early 20th century thinkers when it comes to cloud computing. The Apple, Google, and Salesforce.com approach is more modern, zippier, and more “right” for the times.
I beg to differ.
The old order is represented by the Delta-Northwest business decision. Two losers don’t often make a financial winner. The investment bankers and consultants make a killing, but the Delta-Northwest tie up underscores the folly of dinosaur businesses trying to cope with a financial climate that almost guarantees that dinosaurs will die. At best, offspring will end up as birds, tiny birds struggling for survival. In Kentucky, a crow and a shotgun are not evenly matched. The shotgun wins unless my neighbor is juiced on white lightning.
IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are dinosaurs. All three are on the evolutionary path that leads to becoming a bird, maybe bigger than a crow but smaller than a dinosaur. Your reaction to my suggesting that these three companies are in decline is probably, “You are definitely an addled goose.”
Microsoft Fast: Confusion over NXT and Folio Billing
November 8, 2008
I did a bit of spelunking with the improved search service for Google Groups. If you haven’t tried it out, click here and give it a whirl. In the course of my tests, I came across an interesting thread about Microsoft Fast and its renewal policies for Fast NXT licensees. NXT is a product Fast Search acquired in the pre Microsoft, pre police raid days. I don’t want to explain what NXT does or does not do. You can get up to speed by clicking here and scanning the information on the Fast Search Web site. NXT consists of Folio, which is a long in the tooth content management system.
The thread I discovered on Google Groups can be found here. If the link doesn’t work, just navigate to Google Groups and enter the query “Folio User Groups”. The disclaimer for this series of snippets is that these may be a spoof or doctored. You will have to verify the information that I have located via the Google Groups’ search engine. Beyond that, I am not sure what to make of these points.
Set Up
The seed post is by a person from Canada. You can learn a bit about him here. His post here asserts that he received an invoice, a follow up which he interpreted as annoying, and and, as he stated on September 10, 2008:
I told them to sue me… It is quite insulting to be accused since 1. M&S was paid every year the past many years even though they failed on their part to even produce ONE upgrade every 12 months for their software; 2. if anyone did break any contract it was them when they announced unilaterally that they canceled views; 3. I have been selling/using views since the early 1990’s. We have been FBP and OM whatever they called it then partner and then were unilaterally flushed when they decided to change their distribution pattern; 4. We are a Folio Publisher and views is a software we love dearly, but we are now forced to look for a replacement since it was discontinued unilaterally.
Follow Up
After some posts from other NXT Folio licensees, an individual identified as Jim Moser posted a reply. You can find some information about Mr. Moser here. Mr Moser allegedly wrote the person in Canada saying:
…our [Microsoft Fast] accounting department was simply following up on an invoice. Since it hadn’t been paid and we hadn’t heard from you, we wanted to confirm your intention. This isn’t a new onerous policy started by our acquisition by Microsoft; it’s just good business practice. I’m sure that you, as a business owner, follow up with your customers to ensure payment.
Many of our customers are set up on an auto-renewal process for Maintenance and Support. This process helps ensure that our customers receive seamless M&S [maintenance and support] by (hopefully) preventing accidental lapses in M&S [provisions]. Standard contracts going back to the original Folio Corporation provided for this. Those contracts also have a standard 60-day notification requirement should you choose to not renew. This gives us a chance to appropriately update our systems.
I am certain our accounting department did not “accuse” you. I am also certain that we can find a way to work this out. It does get more complicated once an invoice is issued, but it can still happen.
Please note that we continue to offer Maintenance and Support services for the Folio and NXT products. Maintenance includes correcting defects, delivering software patches. Support includes access to our support staff, who continue to answer questions, provide work-arounds, log defects where appropriate, and help our customers with deployment and functionality questions.
If you have additional concerns, please bring them up with me directly. [Emphasis added by Stephen Arnold to highlight points he found interesting to him. Mr. Moser’s spelling errors fixed for readability as well.]
The bold faced snippets caught my attention. First, the notion of “following up” is given an extra apologia with the gratuitous “simply”. When a customer gets dinged for payment, the vendor wants its money. The “simply” doesn’t make this a routine business business practice. Something is a amiss. I noted the inclusion of “it’s just good business practice”. Hey, there. Didn’t this company’s Oslo office experience a police visit during which the police removed business files and records as part of an active investigation which may be related to improper financial practices. What the heck is “a good business practice” for a company that has the cops sifting through its records as part of a financial investigation. I have to tell you that my pin feathers quivered when I connected–perhaps inappropriately–the police raid with “simply” and “good business practice”. In my freshman rhetoric class in 1962 Dr. Josephine Pearce told us about “cognitive dissonance”. I am not sure if this an example of cognitive dissonance or not. The September 2008 words and the police action in mid October 2008 agitated this old goose.
Second, I am quite surprised with the “certain”. When a person is certain, I think that there is zero chance for error. I have been working since I was 15 years old, and I have learned one thing. I am unable to be certain about one person does. Unless I am there and paying attention or the interaction is captured in some reproducible way, this type of “certain” means zero. In this context, I think the Microsoft Fast Mr. Moser assumes or believes that no person trying to collect a bill would accuse a customer of not paying. I don’t have direct experience being dunned for a late payment. Being an unemployed goose does have its advantages. But I have been on site in a collections agency as part of a project. I have listened to the calls made by the 95 percent performers; that is, the collection professionals who get the money 95 out of 100 cases. I heard some pretty interesting statements. If were on the receiving end of a 95 percenter’s calls, I would probably have my attorney deal with the caller’s employer. Pretty tough talk as I recall.
Ask: Yet Another Play for a First Impression
November 6, 2008
Author’s Note: This post will not render correctly in Internet Explorer 7.0. I am looking for a fix.
My newsreader pointed me to “Ask.com Speeds Up Its Searches” on the IOL Technology Web site. The author was Rachel Metz. The article’s main point is that Barry Diller’s Ask.com has been tweaked to make it display results more quickly. The most interesting statement in the article was:
Ask.com, owned by InterActiveCorp, encountered the repeat-visitor problem after launching a version of its search engine, Ask 3D, in June last year. With Ask 3D, the site moved away from showing search results as a long list and sorted them into three vertical panels, one of which included photos and other multimedia content related to users’ queries. Ask 3D was well-received, chief executive officer Jim Safka said, but it was too slow at downloading search results. “A lot of people tried the site, but wouldn’t come back.”
A year, maybe 18 months ago, I had dinner with two people from a third tier consulting firm. One of the consultant’s comments lodged in my mind. The keen thinker said, “I think Ask.com is doing a very good job. I use the service because I find it more useful than Google.”
Quite useful for 11 year olds. Not so useful to me.
After this comment, I make Ask.com a regular stop on my swing through Web search engines. I come back to ask, so I am a repeat visitor. The problem is that I don’t use Ask.com, and it has zero to do with the interface. Speedier performance, related results, and skins don’t mean much to me. I learned in September 2008 that some middle school students find Ask.com a useful resource.
I don’t even know a middle school kid, so I can’t begin to think about an online search from that point of view. I made a couple of inquiries and learned that a middle school assignment is a personal narrative or a biography of an important person such as George Washington. I ran the query “George Washington” on Ask.com, Live.com, and Yahoo.com. I skipped Google because everyone I know uses Google for most searches. I wanted to see what the also-rans were doing to win me over.
Data Management: A New Search Driver
November 4, 2008
Earlier today I reread “The Claremont Report on Database Research.” I had a few minutes, and I recalled reading the document earlier this year, and I wanted to see if I had missed some of its key points. This report is a committee written document prepared as part of an invitation only conference focusing on databases. I follow the work of several of the people listed as authors of the report; for example, Michael Stonebraker and Hector Garcia-Molina, among others.
One passage struck me as important on this reading of the document. On page 6, the report said:
The second challenge is to develop methods for effectively querying and deriving insight from the resulting sea of heterogeneous data…. keyword queries are just one entry point into data exploration, and there is a need for techniques that lead users into the most appropriate querying mechanism. Unlike previous work on information integration, the challenges here are that we do not assume we have semantic mappings for the data sources and we cannot assume that the domain of the query or the data sources is known. We need to develop algorithms for providing best-effort services on loosely integrated data. The system should provide some meaningful answers to queries with no need for any manual integration, and improve over time in a “pay-as-you-go” fashion as semantic relationships are discovered and refined. Developing index structures to support querying hybrid data is also a significant challenge. More generally, we need to develop new notions of correctness and consistency in order to provide metrics and to enable users or system designers to make cost/quality tradeoffs. We also need to develop the appropriate systems concepts around which to tie these functionalities.
Several thoughts crossed my mind as I thought about this passage; namely:
- The efforts by some vendors to make search a front end or interface for database queries is bringing this function to enterprise customers. The demonstrations by different vendors of business intelligence systems such as Microsoft Fast’s Active Warehouse or Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine make it clear that search has morphed from key words to answers.
- The notion of “pay as you go” translates to smart software; that is, no humans needed. If a human is needed, that involvement is as a system developer. Once the software begins to run, it educates itself. So, pay as you go becomes a colloquial way to describe what some might have labeled “artificial intelligence” in the past. With data volume increasing, the notion of humans getting paid to touch the content recedes.
- Database quality in the commercial database sector could be measured by consistency and completeness. The idea that zip codes were consistent was more important than a zip code being accurate. With statistical procedures the value in a cell may be filled and it will include a score that shows the probability that the zip code is correct. Similarly, if one looks for the salary or mobile number of an individuals, these probability scores become important guides to the user.
“Pay as you go” computing means that the most expensive functions in a data management method have costs reduced because humans are no longer needed to do “knowledge work” required to winnow and select documents, facts, and information. The company able to implement “pay as you go” computing on a large scale will destabilize the existing database business sector. My research has identified Google as an organization employing research scientists who use the phrase “pay as you go” computing. Is this a coincidence or an indication that Google wants to leap frog traditional database vendors in the enterprise?
In the last month, a number of companies have been kind enough to show me demonstrations of next generation systems that take a query and generate a report. One system allows me to look at a sample screen, click a few options, and then begin my investigation by scanning a “trial report”. I located a sample Google report in a patent application that generates a dossier when the query is for an individual. That output goes an extra step and includes aliases used by the individual who is the subject of the query and a hot link to a map showing geolocations associated with that individual.
The number of companies offering products or advanced demonstrations of these functions means that the word search is going to be stretched even further than assisted navigation or alerts. The vendors who describe search as an interface for business intelligence are moving well beyond key word queries and the seemingly sophisticated interfaces widely available today.
Despite the economic pressures on organizations today, vendors pushing into data management for the purpose of delivering business intelligence will find customers. The problem will be finding a language in which to discuss these new functions and features. The word search may not be up to the task. The phrase business intelligence is similarly devalued for many applications. An interesting problem now confronts buyers, analysts, and vendors, “How can we describe our systems so people will understand that a revolution is taking place?”
The turgid writing in the Claremont Report is designed to keep the secret for the in crowd. My hunch is that certain large organizations–possibly Google–are quite far along in this data management deployment. One risk is that some companies will be better at marketing than at deploying industrial strength next generation data management systems. The nest might be fouled by great marketing not supported by equally robust technology. If this happens, the company that says little about its next generation data management system might deploy the system, allow users to discover it, and thus carry the field without any significant sales and marketing effort.
Does anyone have an opinion on whether the “winner” in data management will be a start up like Aster Data, a market leader like Oracle, or a Web search outfit like Google? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, November 4, 2008
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