When Today Is Not As Good As Yesterday: Two Google Signals
July 21, 2015
Two Google items snagged my attention. The first is the new that a Xoogler has returned to Googzilla’s nest. The story was “The Soul of Google’: What the Return of Omid Kordestani Says About the Mountain View Monolith.” I interpreted this to suggest that Google has been operating without “soul” for five years.
According to the write up:
A year ago last week, CEO Larry Page brought him back to the position he birthed at Google, installing him permanently in October. Kordestani had come back to a very different Google. Revenue growth, once soaring, had started to flatten, and Google had suffered some embarrassing product setbacks. Wall Street was drumming louder about wasted funds on so-called moon shot projects such as Project Loon — its Internet-giving balloons — and Glass. More critically, Google faced rising criticism that its bloated size and insular leadership was stifling its ability to innovate. It risked becoming Microsoft.
Google is not Microsoft. Microsoft has its own demons and a unique fingerprint. Microsoft generates revenue from several different product and service lines. Google has one source of revenue: online advertising. Big difference in my opinion. The monoculture thing can endanger bananas and the GOOG. Charm may not work when parasites chip away at a monoculture.
The second item was “Silicon Valley’s Biggest Companies Take Samsung’s Side in Apple Patent Fight.” When you cannot innovate, litigate. I heard that mantra a number of times before I retired to my rocking chair in rural Kentucky.
For me these two stories point to a significant challenge Google faces. The company is fresh from a Wall Street home run. But are Wall Street home runs a one in four play? Google is not batting 1000 in the diversification of revenue department. The idea that a number of big companies are ganging up on the much loved, though slightly off center Apple outfit strikes me as a sign of weakness, not strength. What MMA fighter sends a lawyer into the octagon.
The message of Thomas Wolfe’s novel written in the 1930s seems clear, no matter what that wild and crazy Dr. Ed Chapman told me and my classmates: There is hope when you return home.
I am not so sure. Home and a return home are two different things. The return occurs with a flock of legal eagles and a vastly different online landscape. Search is different too. Relevance is still on vacation.
Stephen E Arnold, July 21, 2015
The Bestest Enterprise Search Diagram Ever. Really.
July 19, 2015
I like the word “bestest.” It is so right for diagrams that summarize the complex nature of search. The write up “The Best Enterprise Search Diagram You’ve Ever Seen” is a fetching smile to attract me the person who has never seen a better diagram ever to order a special report. What does the diagram look like? Here’s a not too legible version, but it is close enough for horseshoes:
The pink boxes are contributing activities. The red boxes in the middle of the diagram are direct search management tasks, and the red box in the gray rectangle is the total experience of search. Have at it. Let me know how you fair with your strategy tasks. Also, fill me in on how “search strategy” meshes with the location of the search box. Just askin? I am eager to hear how the search log insight is going to work. I like insight.
For those following this diagram, may I offer a suggestion: Look for a lateral arabesque within your organization or get a Subway sandwich franchise.
Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2015
Tips for Enterprise Search Vendors When They Disappoint Their Venture Pals
July 16, 2015
The video is not about enterprise search vendors. But I found the video via a recommendation from a person who spends endless hours with a dragline for odd ball management advice.
I clicked on the link to “Disappoint Someone.” The video is interesting because it provides the sort of advice that is guaranteed to create some excitement combined with consternation.
The video omits one tip which I have found helpful now that I am retired.
Make a video and send the person whom you wish to disappoint a link.
Works really well, but if you are into the face to face thing with funders who want revenue and profits now. Go for it.
I assumed the creator of the video would have included this tip. Their video delivered the goods for me.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2015
Information Technology: The Myth of Control
July 12, 2015
In the good old days circa 1962, one went to a computer center. In the center was a desk, usually too high to be comfortable for the supplicant to lean comfortably. There were young people ready to ask the supplicant to sign in, fill out a form to request computer time, and wait. Once in a while, a supplicant would be granted a time slot on a keypunch machine. Most of the time, the supplicant was given an time slot. But that was the start of the process.
I won’t bore you with the details of submitting decks of punched cards, returning to get a green bar print out, and the joy or heartbreak of finding out that you program ran or did not.
I figured out quickly that working in the computer center was the sure fire way to get access to the computer, a giant IBM thing which required care and feeding of two or three people plus others on call.
The pain of those experiences have not gone away, gentle reader. If you are fortunate enough to be in a facility with a maybe-is or maybe-isn’t quantum computer, the mainframe mentality is the only way to go. There are research facilities with even more stringent guidelines, but the average mobile phone user thinks that computer use is a democracy. Wrong. Controls are important. Period. But senior management, not information technology, has the responsibility to steer the good ship Policies & Procedures.
It is not. It never will be.
When I read “Cloudy with a Chance of Data Loss: Has Corporate IT Lost Control?” I was not comfortable. The reality is that corporate information technology has control in certain situations. In others, for all practical purposes, there is no organizational information technology department.
MBAs, venture capital types, and those without patience what what they want when they want it. The controls are probably in place, but the attitude of these hyper kinetic history majors with a law degree is that those rules do not apply to them. Toss in a handful of entitled but ineffective middle school teachers and a clueless webmaster and you have the chemical components of bone head information technology behaviors.
The information technology professionals just continue to do their thing, hoping that they can manage the systems in today’s equivalent of a 1960s air conditioned, sealed off, locked, and limited access computer room.
Other stuff is essentially chaos.
The write up assumes that control is a bad thing. The write up uses words like “consumer oriented,” “ease of use,” and “ownership.” The reason a non mainframe mentality exists among most people with whom I interact is a reptilian memory of the mainframe method. For most people, entitlement and do your own thing are the keys to effective computing.
If an information technology professional suggests a more effective two factor authentication procedure or a more locked down approach to high value content—these people are either ignored, terminated, or just worked around.
As a result of organization’s penchant for hiring those who are friendly and on the team, one gets some darned exciting information technology situations. Management happily cuts budgets. One Fortune 100 company CFO told me, “We are freezing the IT budget. Whatever those guys do, they have to do it with a fixed allocation.” Wonderful reasoning.
The write up concludes with this statement:
Modern IT departments realize that to overcome security challenges they must work together with users– not dictate to them. The advent of the cloud model means that smart users can readily circumvent restrictions if they see no value in abiding by the rules. IT teams must therefore be inclusive and proactive, investing in secure file-sharing solutions that are accepted by users while also providing visibility, compliance and security. Fortunately, there are good alternatives for the 84 per cent of senior IT management who admit they are “concerned” over employee-managed cloud services. The bottom line is this: there are times when we all need to share files. But there is never an occasion when any of us should trust a consumer-grade service with critical business data. It simply presents too many risks.
Nope. The optimal way in my view is for organizations to knock off the shortcuts, focus on specific methods required to deliver functionality and help reduce the risk of a “problem,” and shift from entitlement feeling good attitudes to a more formal, business-centric approach.
It is not a matter of control. Commonsense and the importance of senior management to create a work environment in which control exists across business policies and procedures.
The hippy dippy approach to information technology is more risky than some folks realize. As the wall poster in my server room says, “Ignorance is bliss. Hello, happy.”
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2015
Watson Still Has Much to Learn About Healthcare
July 9, 2015
If you’ve wondered what is taking Watson so long to get its proverbial medical degree, check out IEEE Spectrum’s article, “IBM’s Dr. Watson Will See You… Someday.” When IBM’s AI Watson won Jeopardy in 2011, folks tasked with dragging healthcare into the digital landscape naturally eyed the software as a potential solution, and IBM has been happy to oblige. However, “training” Watson in healthcare documentation is proving an extended process. Reporter Brandon Keim writes:
“Where’s the delay? It’s in our own minds, mostly. IBM’s extraordinary AI has matured in powerful ways, and the appearance that things are going slowly reflects mostly on our own unrealistic expectations of instant disruption in a world of Uber and Airbnb.”
Well that, and the complexities of our healthcare system. Though the version of Watson that beat Jeopardy’s human champion was advanced and powerful, tailoring it to manage medicine calls for a wealth of very specific tweaking. In fact, there are now several versions of “Doctor” Watson being developed in partnership with individual healthcare and research facilities, insurance companies, and healthcare-related software makers. The article continues:
“Watson’s training is an arduous process, bringing together computer scientists and clinicians to assemble a reference database, enter case studies, and ask thousands of questions. When the program makes mistakes, it self-adjusts. This is what’s known as machine learning, although Watson doesn’t learn alone. Researchers also evaluate the answers and manually tweak Watson’s underlying algorithms to generate better output.
“Here there’s a gulf between medicine as something that can be extrapolated in a straightforward manner from textbooks, journal articles, and clinical guidelines, and the much more complicated challenge of also codifying how a good doctor thinks. To some extent those thought processes—weighing evidence, sifting through thousands of potentially important pieces of data and alighting on a few, handling uncertainty, employing the elusive but essential quality of insight—are amenable to machine learning, but much handcrafting is also involved.”
Yes, incorporating human judgement is time-consuming. See the article for more on the challenges Watson faces in the field of healthcare, and for some of the organizations contributing to the task. We still don’t know how much longer it will take for the famous AI (and perhaps others like it) to dominate the healthcare field. When that day arrives, will it have been worth the effort?
Cynthia Murrell, July 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Walmart and the Big Data Elephant Riders
July 7, 2015
Navigate to the Capitalist Tool’s write up “Walmart: The big Data Skills Crisis and Recruiting Analytics Talent.” Stating the obvious is something that most jargon delivery mechanisms avoid. Why be clear when obfuscation provides so many MBA-type chuckles?
The write up states about Big Data:
There just aren’t enough people with the required skills to analyze and interpret this information–transforming it from raw numerical (or other) data into actionable insights – the ultimate aim of any Big Data-driven initiative.
I had to sit down. Imagine. Specific skills are required to assemble data, formulate hypotheses, configure the numerical recipes, obtain outputs, and then analyze what the magic of math delivers.
Who would have thought that the average marketer might be a tiny bit under equipped to deal with Big Data in the here and now?
The write up states:
Last year, they [sic. The reference is to the single firm Walmart] turned to crowd sourced analytics competition platform Kaggle. At Kaggle, an army of “armchair data scientists” apply their skills to analytical problems submitted by companies, with the designer of the best solution being rewarded – sometimes financially, in this case with a job.
That’s a great solution. No problem with confidentiality in the crowdsourcing ecosystem. But Walmart hired candidates. Walmart explains what it seeks:
“Fundamentally,” says Thakur [Walmart manager], “we need people who are absolute data geeks–people who love data, and can slice it, dice it and make it do what they want it to do.
Walmart also uses an “analytics rotation program.” I assume this is designed to ensure that the Big Data analytics wizard can “run in the right direction.”
Walmart, it appears, is the leader in using crowd sourced methods for finding talent. Perhaps Walmart perceives itself as one of the leaders in the use of this method. It is good to be a visionary in Walmart land. What is Walmart’s next innovation? I cannot anticipate the next revolutionary breakthrough from the retailer many local retail stores perceives as a good neighbor made better with Big Data.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2015
Lexalytics: GUI and Wizard
June 12, 2015
What is one way to improve a user’s software navigational experience? One of the best ways is to add a graphical user interface (GUI). Software Development @ IT Business Net shares a press release about “Lexalytics Unveils Industry’s First Wizard For Text Mining And Sentiment Analysis.” Lexalytics is one of the leading companies that provides sentiment and analytics solutions and as the article’s title explains it has made an industry first by releasing a GUI and wizard for Semantria SaaS platform and Excel plug-in. The wizard and GUI (SWIZ) are part of the Semantria Online Configurator, SWEB 1.3, which also included functionality updates and layout changes.
” ‘In order to get the most value out of text and sentiment analysis technologies, customers need to be able to tune the service to match their content and business needs,’ said Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics. ‘Just like Apple changed the game for consumers with its first Macintosh in 1984, making personal computing easy and fun through an innovative GUI, we want to improve the job of data analysts by making it just as fun, easy and intuitive with SWIZ.’”
Lexalytics is dedicated to helping its clients enjoy an easier experience when it comes to data analytics. The company wants its clients to get the answers they by providing the tools they need to get them without having to over think the retrieval process. While Lexalytics already provides robust and flexible solutions, the SWIZ release continues to prove it has the most tunable and configurable text mining technology.
Whitney Grace, June 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IDC: Knowledge Managemment and Knowledge Quotients
June 2, 2015
IDC tried to sell some of my work on Amazon without my permission. Much lawyering ensued, and IDC removed the $3,500 eight page heavily edited report about Attivio. I suppose that is a form of my knowledge management expertise: But $3,500 for eight pages without my caveats about Attivio? Goodness gracious. $3,500 for eight pages on Amazon, a company I describe as a digital WalMart..
I then wrote a humorous (to me) analysis of an IDC report about something called a knowledge quotient. You can read that Swiftian write up at this link: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/ . I write a column about knowledge management, and I found the notion of the KQ intellectually one of the lighter, almost diaphonous, IDC information molecules.
An I too harsh? No because now there is more evidence for my tough love approach to IDC and its KQ content marketing jingoism.
Navigate to “Where to for Knowledge Management in 2015: IDM Reader Survey.” The survey may or may not be spot on. Some of the data undermine the IDC KQ argument and raise important questions about those who would “manage knowledge.” Also, I had to read the title a couple of times to figure out what IDC’s expert was trying to communicate. The where to for is particularly clumsy to me.
I noted this passage:
“The challenge is for staff being able to find the time to contribute and leverage the knowledge/information repositories and having technology systems that are intuitive putting the right information that their fingertips, instead of having to wade through the sea of information spam.”
Ah, ha. KM is about search.
Wait. Not so fast. I highlighted this statement:
Technology is making it easier to integrate systems and connect across traditional boundaries, and social media has boosted people’s expectations for interaction and feedback. The result is that collaboration across the extended value chain is becoming the new normal.
Yikes. A revelation. KM is about social collaboration.
No, no. Another speed bump. I marked this insight too:
“There is also a fair gap between knowledge of the theoretical and knowledge of how things actually work. It is easy to say we should assign metadata to information to increase its discovery but if that metadata should really be more of a folksonomy, some systems and approaches are far too restrictive to enable this. Semantics is also a big issue.”
Finally. KM is about indexing and semantics. Yes, the info I needed.
Wrong again. I circled this brilliant gem:
“Knowledge management has probably lost it momentum as the so-called measurement tools are really measuring best practice which in turn is an average. Perhaps the approach should be along the lines of “Communities of Process” where there is a common objective but various degrees and level of participation but collectively provide a knowledge pool,” he [survey participant]observed.
The write continues along this rocky road of generalizations and buzzwords.
The survey data make three things clear to me:
- The knowledge quotient jargon is essentially a scoop of sales Jello, Jack Benny’s long suffering sponsor
- Knowledge is so broad IDC’s attempt to clarify gave me the giggles
- Workers know that knowledge has value, so workers protect it with silos.
I assume that experts cooked up the knowledge quotient notion. The pros running the survey reported data which suggests that knowledge management is a bit of a challenge.
Perhaps IDC experts will coordinate their messaging in the future? In my opinion, two slabs of spam do not transmogrify into prime rib.
Little wonder IDC contracts is unable to function, one of its officers (Dave Schubmehl) resells my research on Amazon without my permission at $3,500 per eight pages edited to remove the considerations Attivio warranted from my team. Then an IDC research unit provides data which strike me as turning the silly KQ thing into search engine optimization corn husks.
Is IDC able to manage its own knowledge processes using its own theories and data? Perhaps IDC should drop down a level and focus on basic business processes? Yet IDC’s silos appear before me, gentle reader. and the silos are built from hefty portions of a mystery substance. Could it be consulting spam, to use IDC’s own terminology?
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2015
Free Book from OpenText on Business in the Digital Age
May 27, 2015
This is interesting. OpenText advertises their free, downloadable book in a post titled, “Transform Your Business for a Digital-First World.” Our question is whether OpenText can transform their own business; it seems their financial results have been flat and generally drifting down of late. I suppose this is a do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do situation.
The book may be worth looking into, though, especially since it passes along words of wisdom from leaders within multiple organizations. The description states:
“Digital technology is changing the rules of business with the promise of increased opportunity and innovation. The very nature of business is more fluid, social, global, accelerated, risky, and competitive. By 2020, profitable organizations will use digital channels to discover new customers, enter new markets and tap new streams of revenue. Those that don’t make the shift could fall to the wayside. In Digital: Disrupt or Die, a multi-year blueprint for success in 2020, OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea and Chairman of the Board Tom Jenkins explore the relationship between products, services and Enterprise Information Management (EIM).”
Launched in 1991, OpenText offers tools for enterprise information management, business process management, and customer experience management. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company maintains offices around the world.
Cynthia Murrell, May 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Is Collaboration the Key to Big Data Progress?
May 22, 2015
The article titled Big Data Must Haves: Capacity, Compute, Collaboration on GCN offers insights into the best areas of focus for big data researchers. The Internet2 Global Summit is in D.C. this year with many exciting panelists who support the emphasis on collaboration in particular. The article mentions the work being presented by several people including Clemson professor Alex Feltus,
“…his research team is leveraging the Internet2 infrastructure, including its Advanced Layer 2 Service high-speed connections and perfSONAR network monitoring, to substantially accelerate genomic big data transfers and transform researcher collaboration…Arizona State University, which recently got 100 gigabit/sec connections to Internet2, has developed the Next Generation Cyber Capability, or NGCC, to respond to big data challenges. The NGCC integrates big data platforms and traditional supercomputing technologies with software-defined networking, high-speed interconnects and visualization for medical research.”
Arizona’s NGCC provides the essence of the article’s claims, stressing capacity with Internet2, several types of computing, and of course collaboration between everyone at work on the system. Feltus commented on the importance of cooperation in Arizona State’s work, suggesting that personal relationships outweigh individual successes. He claims his own teamwork with network and storage researchers helped him find new potential avenues of innovation that might not have occurred to him without thoughtful collaboration.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 22, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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