Usability: A Must Read from the WSJ
May 24, 2008
I’m too nerdy to read the Wall Street Journal every day. A few minutes with most stories, and I feel as if an MBA consultant were telling me that investment bankers are really nice people. I made an exception this morning, and I strong urge you to navigate to the Journal’s “Business Technology” Web log here.
The post “Business Software Vendor Finds Business Software impossible to Use” carries a date of May 21, 2008, but I just saw it. Nevertheless, this is an important story. The main point for me is this statement:
IFS, a business-software vendor, sent us [the Wall Street Journal] … the results of a survey earlier this year of more than 1,000 respondents. Its findings: “A full 60 percent of respondents said their enterprise software was somewhat difficult, very difficult or almost impossible to use. Only 9 percent characterized their applications as very easy to use.” The biggest time wasters, IFS found, were the need to search through complex navigation systems to find information and the need to learn how to use many programs that all worked differently.
Why is this important? First, the data substantiate my research, Sinequa’s data, and Jane McConnell’s information about enterprise search. High dissatisfaction rates and wasted time–these are the cripplers of some organization’s efficiency and decision making.
I’m going to try and get my hands on the full study from IFS. The Web log post doesn’t tell me how to get a copy. The WSJ provides this link to a study summary here. I filled in the IFS form here, but as of 7 am Eastern on May 24, 2008, I don’t have a copy. I want one. If you come across the full report, let me know.
Usability, not technology, is the key to success it seems. Hasn’t this been Steve Jobs’s mantra for a long time? Good work, Vauhini Vara. A content quack to you from the Beyond Search goose.
Stephen Arnold, May 24, 2008
Enterprise Search Endnote
May 22, 2008
A surprised squawk from the Beyond Search goose. In the end note (the wrap up talk for the two day conference about enterprise search in New York City), the data bunny made a brief and long-awaited appearance. The introduction to the end note made a note that her name was henceforth ‘search bunny’. After the laughter subsided, I made these points to summarize the more than 36 presentation dilivered over the 14 hours of the formal program.
The Data Bunny makes an appearance
First, this conference marked the first major meeting about enterprise that discussed ways to improve usability of existing systems and move beyond key word retrieval. The point was that most enterprise search users don’t feel comfortable sticking words and phrases in a search box and then perusing lists of results to see if the magic answer has been delivered.
Second, research data from my work and other industry experts substantiate the need for alternative interfaces. Graphics, although tasty eye candy, are not the answer. Information must be provided in a manner that meets the needs of individual users and the work task at hand. Forcing a laundry list of results on every user is out of step with today’s information environment.
Third, interfaces can use mobile functionality such as that available from Coveo’s mobile mail search service. An interface can combine a search box with a list of topics and categories like the one on the Oracle Technology Network’s Web site which is based on Siderean Software’s technology. Google has disclosed in a patent application an interface that presents a dossier or report. Instead of a list of topics, the output includes facts about the topic. One feature is a hot link to a map showing the location of the subject. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
To wrap up the conference, the audience was challenged to:
- Demand more from vendors. Passivity, which allows the vendor to lead the licensee, has to give way to the licensee getting the vendor to deliver the solution the organization needs to succeed.
- Recognize that Google’s more than 9,500 Google Search Appliance licensees are buying into the idea that complex search is expensive, expensive, and prone to problems. Simplicity, stability, and extensibility are more important than 1,001 meaningless features.
- Embrace the opportunity to take a clean sheet of paper and redeine search in terms of information access.
The novelty of typing in two words and getting some results has given way to a greater appetite to solutions that work in the context of a work task.
After the formal presentation, several of the more than 300 in the audience, posed some questions. Here’s a summary of the questions that were asked more than one time:
Question: What’s the future of metadata and taxonomies?
Answer: Metadata is becoming more important. News types of metadata — who changed what in a document when? Who were the recipients of the document? — and similar trans-meta types of tagging are the next wave in metadata. So, the work associated with metadata is in its infancy.
Question: Why do you say ‘Search is dead?’
Answer: That’s shorthand for saying, “Most users don’t want to be shackled to a search box. Some users will want the search box as a primary means of access. A larger number of users want options for access. The search box, therefore, can no longer be the primary access vehicle in my opinion.
Question: Why did you mention only three companies?
Answer: I speak extemporaneously. I don’t read my talks. The examples–Coveo, Google, and Oracle–seemed relevant when I put together my examples 30 minutes before my remarks. I would like to have time to name many other vendors. I track the search and content processing technology of more than 50 organizations. In 20 minutes, there are hard limits on what I can do.
Question: Are you paid for these types of remarks?
Answer: I charge for everything. If organizations did not pay me, I would not be able to fund my research, pay for dog food, or buy airline tickets. As a consultant, my product is my time. Therefore, to use my time means that the conference organizer has to pay me.
Stephen Arnold, May 21, 2008
Payola Pony or Nerd Stallion: Who Will Win the Search Derby?
May 21, 2008
The software maker plans on Wednesday to launch a cash back program to those who buy things after using its search.
Silobreaker: When Intelligence Officers Solve Their Own Info Problems
May 20, 2008
“The Holy Grail”, one former intelligence officer told me, “is to walk in my office and have what I need on my desk, on the computer monitor, and on the screen of my secure telephone.” (You can recognize these whizzy mobile phones because some have an extra light and other features to make it hard for the bad guy to listen in on the call.)
I forget that most people in the online business don’t have experience working in intelligence, the military and law enforcement. When I see an allegedly “hot new semantic search system”, I often take a cursory look and then walk on by. The reason is that the idea of searching is not where the action is for serious intelligence.
If you do a search on Mother Google, you will find more than 300,000 references to the company. To give you a benchmark, if you search for this Web log, you get about 230,000 references with most of them to a search engine optimization company with the same name. The point is that certain services or resources, no matter how useful, are tough to find unless you know exactly what to enter in the search box.
Let me illustrate. Here’s a screen shot of a system that has been available for several years.
The query “semantic search” returned a main story, secondary items in smaller “newspaper” style boxes, an embedded live video from CeBIT, a bar chart about term frequency, and an “In Focus” section that provides the names of people and things the Silobreaker system identified as important. (If you look at the people in the “In Focus” box, you’ll see me (Stephen Arnold) identified despite my <230,000 Web log references in Google.)
Notice that Silobreaker’s default display is a report. The system delivers a synthesis of what’s important. There’s no result list. No single graphic gizmo floating in the browser without meaningful context. Silobreaker looks great but it contains a significant amount of go juice. Navigate here to explore the system yourself.
Silobreaker doesn’t do plain vanilla laundry lists. You can see a list of documents, but you see them in context; that is, a specific knowledge setting. You don’t have to ask, “What the heck does that mean?” Silobreaker presents the meaning of each item in a display.
Most of the search systems I see or get asked to review don’t do what I need done. I want to comment on a basic Silobreaker output and point out a few facts about the system. Once that housekeeping is done, I will make several observations in an effort to spark discussion about the sorry state of enterprise search and commercial business intelligence systems. For a reader who finds my criticism of the best that Silicon Valley has to offer offensive, stop reading now. If you want to see where the rubber meets the race track in the intelligence community, keep reading. Read more
Microsoft to ‘Innovate and Disrupt in Search’–Again
May 19, 2008
My newsreader popped this info tart in front of me this morning: “Kevin Johnson’s Memo On Yahoo & Their Strategy”. The focus of Gigaom’s Web log post is a memo, allegedly by Kevin Johnson. By the time you read this, my pathetic posting will be very old news. You need to read the memo and determine for yourself it it’s the real deal.
I’m commenting because of a series of emails I exchanged this morning about Microsoft’s search strategy. Among the points I made to the eager journalist who was, as my mother used to say, an empty vessel:
- Microsoft is implementing reactions, not a strategy. The cause of these knee-jerk reactions: mostly the Google and a business model challenge. Cloud services are coming round the mountain, and Microsoft can hear the whistle blowing.
- Yahoo has some sharp people and a truck load of search systems–Inktomi, Stata Labs, AllTheWeb.com (provided by Fast Search & Transfer), Flickr’s system, Overture’s search, and more). I’ve been told the company is rushing to be more like Google, which is not perfect, obviously. But Yahoo is grossly heterogeneous, and Google is more homogeneous in architecture.
- Google keeps on grinding forward. In Israel a day ago, Mr. Brin referenced Google’s multi dimensional database progress. My sources tell me that it is not progress; it is a leap frog play.
So “innovate and disrupt in search” is going to boil down to tackling these problems, forcefully, squarely, and well.
First, how many search platforms will Microsoft support? SharePoint, whizzy technology from Microsoft Research, Fast Search & Transfer’s ESP, and the legacy systems that just won’t die. Each search platform is a money hog. Get too many of these critters chomping on the cash, and you will be one poor data farmer.
Second, if–and this is a big if–Microsoft cuts a deal with Yahoo, exactly how will two shot up World War I biplanes contend with Google’s F-35? Time is running out because the GOOG keeps gobbling market and mind share. It is the number one site on the Internet and the world’s top brand. Quite a one-two punch for piston powered aircraft to shoot down.
Third, Google’s business model is based on advertising. Google wants to diversify, and Mr. Brin’s comments in Israel a day ago suggest that he wants to put a rocket booster on Google Apps. Interest in cloud-based services continues to creep up, and Google is in a good position to innovate and disrupt in that sector. The company already is innovating and disrupting in search.
We’re watching a clash of cultures and business models. When Microsoft swizzled IBM in the 1980s, it was clever. Google’s not just clever; Google has the technical platform to redefine search and enterprise applications.
Mr. Johnson’s memo does little to convince me that Microsoft–with or without Yahoo–can do much to stop Googzilla from doing Googzilla-type things.
Stephen Arnold, May 19, 2008
Semantra and Conversational Analytics
May 15, 2008
Semantra asserts that it is a “pioneering developer of conversational analystics software”, or so it says in the news release a helpful person sent me.
The companies “conversational analytics” application pushes “beyond key word search” because a user can use “common language commands to retrieve specific information from back end databases”. You can read the Semantra announcement here: www.semantra.com/library/Semantra%202.0%20GA%20FINAL.pdf
The lingo “common language commands” means natural language processing or NLP. A number of vendors have embraced this approach in order to [a] eliminate the need for a specialist to intermediate between an enduser with a question and the database with the answers and [b] allow faster interaction with a database. After all, in business intelligence, the idea is to get the information quickly. Calling up an SAS or SPSS analyst, having that person understand what’s needed, creating the queries, pulling down the data cube, and providing that chunk of info to a manager on a deadline is generally viewed as a problem.
What’s interesting about the Semantra approach is that its tool is designed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft’s push into CRM or customer relationship management has been erratic. To make the situation more interesting, Microsoft is working to move Dynamics (an unhappy amalgam of several products) into the Live.com or “cloud” environment. Semantra is hoping that Microsoft’s CRM offerings will generate even greater demand for third-party tools that tame the Dynamics’ beastie.
ArnoldIT.com analyzed the Dynamics product and technology late in 2007 and found that it was even more complex than Microsoft SharePoint Search. Given the multiple products that make up SharePoint Search, we were surprised to find that the Dynamics team had bested the SharePoint team on this important yardstick. The Dynamics product line up consists of Microsoft’s own technology, Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon components. These are mixed-and-matched into a somewhat complex suite of products.
We wish Semantra great success with their system. There will be strong demand for a product that can simplify the Microsoft CRM system. You can get more information about Semantra at wwwsemantra.com. The splash page for Microsoft Dynamics is at www.microsoft.com/dynamics. If you are interested in the ArnoldIT.com analysis of the Dynamics suite, contact seaky2000 at Yahoo dot com. The report costs US$125 via online payment for a password protected PDF.
Stephen Arnold, May 15, 2008
Vertica and Cloud-Based Business Intelligence
May 15, 2008
The IDG news service reported on May 12, 2008, that Vertica Systems will offer business intelligence as a service. You can read the complete IDG story here. Please, navigate to it quickly, since some IDG items can become tough to locate a few days after they appear. The computing horsepower will be provided by Amazon. Vertica will use the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) infrastructure introduced by Amazon in August 2006.
Vertica, another column-oriented database shop, sees an opportunity for hosted and software as a service products. Smaller firms often lack the resources to install industrial-strength business intelligence systems on premises.
The pricing for the service begins at $2,000 per month for 500 gigabytes of data. You can read the Amazon Web Services catalog entry here.
In the meantime, Amazon has worked hard to build out its Web services. I’ve heard that the company has embraced Hadoop (a Google File System variant in open source) and Xen (another open source solution). Amazon has experienced some technical hiccups but has recovered quickly.
Amazon’s putting significant effort into its Web services, and Vertica’s use of the EC2 service will be an interesting one to watch. Amazon’s cloud services have beaten Google and other firms to the punch. Although one Google source pointed out to me that Google is able to learn from Amazon’s efforts. The implication is that Google can watch and wait until the market is “right” for Google to make a move. When it comes to infrastructure investments, Amazon’s spending lags behind Google’s. Amazon also has a leaner technical team. If Google enters this sector in a major way, Amazon’s technologists will have an opportunity to demonstrate their superiority to Google’s cloud-centric engineering.
I’m going to watch the Vertica service. If successful, it may spark a strong run up for Amazon. Then Vertica will have to make the math work. A typical Vertica on premises installation costs about $125,000. So, Vertica will have to make up the difference on volume, since the cloud service is likely to generate less revenue per customer. If support and customization costs rise, Vertica may find that getting the math to work could be tricky. Meanwhile, Google watches and learns.
Stephen Arnold, May 14, 2008
Collective Intelligence Anthology Available
May 14, 2008
The Arnoldit.com mascot admires the new collection of essay by Mark Tovey. Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, published by the Earth Intelligence Network in Oakton, Virginia (ISBN: 13: 978-0-97-15661-6-3) contains more than 50 essays by analysts, consultants, and intelligence practitioners. You can obtain a copy from the publisher, Amazon, or your bookseller.
The ArnoldIT mascot completed reading the 600-page book with remarkable alacrity for a duck.
The collection of essays is likely to find many readers among those interested in social phenomena of networks. Many of the essays, including the one I contributed, talk about information retrieval in our increasingly inter connected world.
This essay will provide a synopsis of my contribution, “Search–Panacea or Play. Can Collective Intelligence Improve Findability”, which I wrote shortly before completing Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Search System Doesn’t Work“. My essay begins on page 375.
Social Search
The dominance of Google forces other vendors to look for a way over, under, around, or through its grip on the Web search. The vendor landscape now offers search and content processing systems that arguably do a better job of manipulating XML (Extensible Markup Language) content, figuring out who knows whom (the social graph initiative), and the “real” meaning of content (semantic search). There are more than 100 vendors who have technology that offers, if one believes the marketing collateral and conference presentations, a way to squeeze more information from information.
Social search is the name given to an information retrieval system that incorporates one or more of these functions:
- Users can suggest useful sites. Examples: Delicious.com and StumbleUpon.com
- The system discovers relationships between and among processed documents and links: Powerset.com and Kartoo Visu
- The system analyzes information extracts entities and identifies individuals and their relationships: i2 Ltd (now part of ChoicePoint) and Cluuz.com
- Monitoring of user behavior and using data to guide relevance, spidering and other system functions: public Web indexing companies
There are other types of social functions, but these provide sufficient salt and pepper for this information side dish. The reason I say side dish is that social functions are not going to displace the traditional functions on which they are based. Social search has been in the mainstream from the moment i2 Ltd. introduced its workbench product to the intelligence community more than a decade ago. “Social” functions, then, are a recent add-on to the main diet in information retrieval.
Old Statistics and Cheap, Powerful Computers
What’s overlooked in the rush to find a Google “killer” is that the new companies are using some well-known technologies. For example, the inner workings of Autonomy’s “black box” is somewhat dependent on the work of a slightly unusual Englishman, Thomas Bayes. Mr. Bayes left the world a couple of centuries ago, but his math has been a staple in college statistics courses for many years. To deploy Bayesian techniques on a large scale is, therefore, not exactly a secret to the thousands of mathematicians who followed his proofs in pursuit of their baccalaureate.
Commercial Intelligence: A Better Way to Do Competitive Intelligence
May 13, 2008
Business intelligence and competitive intelligence are “not really intelligence”, asserts Robert D. Steele, well-known advocate of open source information and managing director of OSS.Net. In an exclusive interview with Beyond Search, Mr. Steele–who is one of the strongest advocates for the use of open source information for intelligence–says that commercial business intelligence “systems are edging toward failure. The systems aren’t very good, useful, or usable.”
The fix to the problems of today’s software-based approaches to intelligence is a mixed approach. He says that a better approach:
…consists of requirements definition (understand the question in context, the desired outcome); collection management (know who knows), source discovery and validation (generally done by expert humans who have spent their life mastering the domain, at someone else’s expense); analysis, which can be aided by but does not necessarily require automated support; and compelling timely actionable presentation to the decision-maker.
You can read the full interview on the Interview section of the Beyond Search Web log site here.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2008
Former Clandestine Operative Says Automated Systems Not Good Enough
May 13, 2008
Editor’s Note: Robert Steele, former Marine Corp. officer and intelligence operative, was one of the first, if not the first, intelligence professional since World War II to question the relative value of secret sources and technologies in relation to open sources and technologies. Mr. Steele agreed to meet me near his office in suburban Washington, D.C. The full text of the interview appears below. After we spoke, Mr. Steele provided me with illustrations he referenced in our conversation. I have included these in the transcript at the point where Mr. Steele references them. You can read more about Mr. Steele at his Web site, OSS.Net.
How did you get interested in using information that’s readily available to anyone in a library, in newspapers, and online as a source of useful intelligence?
I went into the international spy program at CIA with a Master’s in International Relations, and knew quite a bit about citation analysis and primary research. What I was not expecting over the course of my clandestine career was the obsession with stealing secrets to the exclusion of all that could be known from open sources.
Robert D. Steele
The clandestine officers also refused to interact with the analysts—before leaving for my first overseas assignment, the Chief of Station took me to the analysis side of the house, and on my way there he said something along the lines of “these folks know nothing useful, and we tell them nothing.”
When the Marine Corps asked me to leave CIA to create the Marine Corps Intelligence Center in 1988, I promptly did what I thought the government wanted; that is, I spent $20 million on a codeword analysis center, including a Special Intelligence Communications (SPINTCOM) work station. I thought it would do everything except kill the terrorist.
Was I in for a shock. I had put a PC with Internet access in an isolated room, not connected to any government network. The PC had a modem. I was curious about online and bulletin board systems. In a short time, analysts were leaving their super charged workstations to stand in line to use the PC. These professionals were looking for information that was not in the government system and not known to our officers in the field (including diplomats and commercial or defense attaches).
What a wake up call.
That is when I learned that expensive systems are as good as their sources—narrow casting into the secret world made much of our multi-billion dollar technology virtually worthless. Analysts using the PC showed me that 80 to 90 percent of the information we needed could be obtained using the PC and public information to include direct calls to overt human experts. I also learned that useful information was available in 183 other languages no one in the US Government can speak or understand. Even today, a large number of Washington officials don’t understand the intelligence value of open sources of information including commercial imagery, foreign-language broadcasts that must be accessed locally, and gray literature, such as university yearbooks for a photo of a terrorist. Washington is completely out of touch with human experts that are not US citizens eligible for a secret clearance—the spies don’t want them unless they agree to commit treason, and the analysts are not allowed to talk to them by paranoid ignorant security officials.
Almost every vendor asserts that their systems can “do” business or competitive intelligence. In your experience is this accurate?
Look. BI and CI are not really intelligence.
BI or business intelligence is commonly used as a descriptor for what is nothing more than internal knowledge management, spiced up with a point-and-click graphics dashboard. Not only are most of these system non-interoperable with everything else, they are as smart or as stupid as the digital data they can access.
The reality of information in most organizations is that most of what is really valuable is not digital. And, most CEOs have zero idea what intelligence (decision support) actually means.
CI or competitive intelligence focuses on competitors. What I practice, Commercial Intelligence, focuses on
- External information
- Collaborative work
- Knowledge management
- Organizational intelligence.
Commercial intelligence leverages what can be drawn from the human social networks interacting with an organization and the other sources of information. External information is not information about competitors. It includes such factors as “true cost” of goods and next-generation “cradle to cradle” opportunities. You have to factor in the art and science of retaining Organizational Intelligence. I will send you a diagram that shows my view of this commercial intelligence space.
In my experience, today’s systems are edging toward failure. The systems aren’t very good, useful, or usable. As the Gartner Group recently said about Windows, it is untenable. I like Microsoft for its cash flow—they need to dump the legacy and launch an open source network with shared call centers and Blue Cube power processing.
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