Great Moments in Mid Tier Consulting: The Apple Watch

March 21, 2015

Short honk: I couldn’t resist. I read “Apple Watch Is Like an Invasive Weed Says Gartner.” The idea is that Apple identifies a market (an ecosystem) and then acts like kudzu or a killer carp. Here’s a passage from the Register I highlighted:

Hetu [a Gartner “expert”] says Apple Pay and the Apple Watch are Cupertino’s new invaders, with the latter gadget set to “further revolutionize how consumers are influenced to purchase and their paths to making purchases.”

Colorful. Now let’s see if the Apple Watch is digital kudzu. I know that Gartner has one English major operating as a “search expert.” It seems another Gartner “wizard” is vying for the moniker of “Chief Metaphorist.”

Kudzu is a good way to characterize the thinking of mid tier consulting firms desperate to close deals, keep their jobs, and forget that outfits like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG may be out of reach. A happy quack to King County Government for the image.

Well, if it sells work to those with cash. More power to the mid tier crowd. (Will Dave Schubmehl, who sold a report with my name on it for $3,500 on Amazon,  and his cohorts at IDC move beyond recycling and into the realm of poetry?)

Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2015

IDC and Forrester: New Partnership, New Confusion among Mid-Tier Consultants?

March 17, 2015

I received this interesting email this morning (March 16, 2015).

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Notice the logo. The email is from IDG Connect based in Staines, Middlesex, UK. Now look at this headline:

Acquia Identified as a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015

When I clicked on the hyperlink in the title of the email, look what I found:

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This is a list of the promotions IDC seems to have done for its competitors. I thought that “real” consultants did not cross over into the pastures of other consulting firms. Obviously I am incorrect in this assumption.

That leaves me with the hypothesis that IDC is promoting Forrester’s “wave”—the me-too to Gartner’s Magic Boston Consulting Group Variant Quadrant without the Analytics—for content management.

Whoa, Nellie. I thought that IDC was one outfit, happily placed in Boston, America’s first city. Emerson, witch burning, Route 128, and the Big Dig. The marketing arm of IDG for this email comes from merrie old England. Is this content marketing and information shaping at a fairly interlocking level? What else do these mid tier consulting firms share? Client lists? Client problems? Content used without the permission of people like me who write stuff and then have it repurposed under a so-called expert’s name. (Yep, Dave Schubmehl again.)

Here’s what the email to me said:

We are pleased to announce that Acquia is a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015. “Acquia’s standout features include the cloud strategy, solid content management and delivery functionality, and a strong developer community and component ecosystem.” Like Forrester, we believe that digital experience delivery is the strategic technology investment for every brand. Ready to see the results? Download your complimentary copy today.

As you may know, IDC’s Dave Schubmehl (remember him, the search wizard) sold my content on Amazon. Now it appears that I can get a free report via the IDC email for the ordinarily “real money” research from Forrester. Confused yet?

When I clicked on the Click Here button I received a copy of Ted Schadler’s “The Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015 report. Here’s the link. Give it a while, but not promises: http://www.idgconnect-resources.com/rt.asp?I=5E892X4874X6&L=1627905

Who’s Forrester’s Ted Schadler? I have his photo.

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A quick check online reveals that Ted Schadler has a Forrester blog called “Ted Schadler’s Blog.” He covers quite a few topics; for example, broadband, Web content management, Internet regulation, free Web publishing systems, and experience gaps. He is a bit of a Leonardo it seems, and he has some marketing in his DNA too.

Intrigued, I ran a query for his name and IDG/IDC. Mr. Schadler has been a speaker at IDG’s tony CIO conference. Mr. Schadler’s topic was described this way:

Collaboration across the C-suite and the challenge of transitioning to a digital enterprise will have a special focus at this year’s event, which also features opening keynotes by Tom Davenport, author of “big data @ work,” and Forrester Research’s Ted Schadler, author of “The Mobile Mind Shift.” The symposium concludes with an awards ceremony recognizing the 2014 CIO 100 winners.

I will try to keep track of what mid tier (what I call an azure chip) consulting firm is promoting other of the same ilk.

If I were paying for one consulting firm, would I check to make sure my firm’s private information does not leak? I sure would.

Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2015

The Fraying of the GOOG: Blogger and Gmail Autocomplete

February 24, 2015

I love the GOOG. The only thing I love more is an expert who resells my content on Amazon without my permission. Yep, I remember the Dave Schubmehl adventure. I think of IDC and I think of fraying or bad intellectual tailoring.

To the business at hand. I noted two items in my Overflight round up this morning. Both of these suggest that some of the wonderfulness of Google may be fraying. You know. Fraying. Like the cuff of my too long exercise pants. The pants are perfectly okay for the gym. Just fraying.

The first item points out that the GOOG is trimming unsavory images from its blogging service. The details appear in “Adult Content Po9licy on Blogger.” Google bought Blogger a decade ago. Quick reaction time I suppose. I am okay with editorial policies for content. But 11 years?

The second item to a function that many love. I absolutely loathe it, however. Start typing and the system fills in what you mean. Well, what the algorithm calculates you mean. Navigate to “A Weird Gmail Bug Has Tons of People Sending Emails to the Wrong Contacts.” The rip in the tightly spun Google technical fabric is, according to the write up:

Google’s mail service seems to have a bug in its auto-suggest feature that’s causing a bunch of people to send messages to the wrong contacts. Instead of auto-completing to the most-used contact when people start typing a name into the “To” field, it seems to be prioritizing contacts that they communicate with less frequently.

What am I to make of decisions a decade in the making and upside down algorithms? Maybe fraying. You know. Good for the gym but I wouldn’t wear the pants to a funeral.

Stephen E Arnold, February 24, 2015

Attivio: New, New, New after $70 Million and Seven Years

February 7, 2015

With new senior managers and a hunt on for a new director of financial services, Attivio is definitely trying to shake ‘em up. I received some public relations spam about the most recent version of the Attivio system. The approach combines open source software with home brew code, an increasingly popular way to sell licenses, consulting, and services. To top it off, Attivio is an outfit that has the “best company culture” and Dave Schubmehl’s IDC report about Attivio with my name on it available for free. This was a $3,500 item on Amazon earlier this year. Now. Free.

Attivio’s February 3, 2015, news release explains that Attivio is in the enterprise search business. You can read the presser at this link. Not too long ago, Attivio was asserting that it was the solution to some business intelligence woes. I suppose search and business intelligence are related, but “real” intelligence requires more than keyword search and a report capability.

The release explains that Attivio is—I find this fascinating—“reinventing Big Data Search and Dexterity.” Not bad for open source, home brew, and Fast Search & Technology flavoring. Search and dexterity. Definitely a Google Adword keeper.

Attivio’s presser says:

Attivio 4.3 delivers new functionality and improvements that make it dramatically easier to build, deploy, and manage contextually relevant applications that drive revolutionary insight. Companies with structured and unstructured data in disparate silos can now quickly gain immediate access to all information with universal contextual enrichment, all delivered from Attivio’s agile enterprise platform.

I like “revolutionary insight.” Keep in mind that Attivio was formed by former Fast Search & Transfer executives in 2007 and has ingested, according to Crunchbase, $71.1 million in seven years. That works out to $10 million per year to do various technical things and sell products and services to generate money.

More significant to me than money that may be difficult or impossible to repay with a hefty uptick is that in seven years, Attivio has released four versions of its flagship software. With open source providing a chunk of functionality, it strikes me that Attivio may be lagging behind the development curve of some other companies in the content processing sector. But with advisors like Dave Schubmehl and his colleagues, the pace of innovation is likely to be explained as just wonderful. At Cambridge University, one researcher pointed out that work done in 2014 is essentially part of ancient history. There is perhaps a difference between Cambridge in the UK and Cambridge in Massachusetts.

What does Attivo 4.3 offer as “key features”? Here’s what the news release offers:

  • ASAP: Attivio Search Application Platform – a simple, intuitive user interface for non-technical users building search-based applications;
  • SAIL: Search Analytics Interactive Layer – offers more robust functionality and an enhanced user experience;
  • Advanced Entity Extraction: New machine-learning based entity extraction module enriches content with higher accuracy and improved disambiguation, enabling deeper discovery and providing a smart alternative to managing entity dictionaries;
  • Simplified Management: Empowers business users to handle documents and manage settings in a code-free environment;
  • Composite Documents: Unique ability to search across document fragments optimized to deliver sub-second response times;
  • New Designer Tools: Simplifies Attivio management through Visual Workflow and Component Editors, enables all users to design and build custom processing logic in an integrated UI.

There are a couple of important features that are available in other vendors’ systems; for example, geographic functions, automated real-time content collection, automated content analytics, and automated outputs to a range of devices, humans, or other systems.

The notion of ASAP and SAIL are catchy acronyms, but I find them less than satisfying. The entity extraction function is interesting but there is no detail about how it works in languages other than Roman based character sets, how the system deals with variants, and how the system maps one version of an entity to another in content that is either static imagery or video.

I am not sure what a composite document is. If a document contains images and videos, what does the system do with these content objects. If the document is an XML representation, what’s the time penalty to convert content objects to well formed XML? With interfaces becoming the new black, Attivio is closing the gap with the Endeca interface toolkit. Endeca dates from the late 1990s and has blazed a trail through the same marketing jungle that Attivio is now retracing.

For more information about Attivio, visit the company’s Web site at www.attivio.com. The company will be better equipped to explain virtual, enterprise search, big data, and the company’s financial posture than I.

Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2015

IDC and BA Insight: Cartoons and Keyword Search

January 31, 2015

I kid you not. I received a spam mail from an outfit called BA Insight. The spam was a newsletter published every three months. You know that regular flows of news are what ring Google’s PageRank chimes, right?

Here’s the missive:

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The lead item is an invitation to:

Unstructured content – email, video, instant messages, documents and other formats accounts for 90% of all digital information.

View the IDC Infographic:
Unlock the Hidden Value of Information
.

With my fully protected computer, I boldly clicked on the link. I don’t worry too much about keyword search vendors’ malware, but prudence is a habit my now deceased grandma drummed into me.

Here’s what greeted me:

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Yep, a giant infographic cartoon stuffed with assertions and a meaningless chunk of jargon: knowledge quotient. Give me cyber OSINT any day.

The concept presented in this fascinating marketing play is that unstructured content has value waiting to be delivered. I learned:

This content is locked in variety locations [sic] and applications made up of separate repositories that don’t talk to each other—e.g., EMC Documentum, Salesforce.com, Google Drive, SharePoint, et al.

Now it looks to me as if the word “of” has been omitted between “variety locations”. I also think that EMC Documentum has a new name. Oh, well. Let’s move on.

The key point in the cartoon is that “some organizations can and do unlock information’s hidden value. Organizations with a high knowledge quotient.”

I thought I addressed this silly phrase in this write up.

Let me be clear. IDC is the outfit that sold my information on Amazon without my permission. More embarrassing to me was the fact that the work was attributed to a fellow named Dave Schubmehl, who is one of the, if not the premier, IDC search expert. Scary I believe. Frightful.

What’s the point?

The world of information access has leapfrogged outfits like BA Insight and “experts” like IDC’s pride of pontificators.

The future of information access is automated collection, analysis, and reporting. You can learn about this new world in CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. No cartoons but plenty of screenshots that show what the outputs of NGIA systems deliver to users who need to reduce risk and make decisions of considerable importance and time sensitivity.,

In the meantime, if you want cartoons, flip through the New Yorker. More intelligent fare I would suggest.

How do you become a knowledge quotient leader? In my opinion, not by licensing a keyword search system or buying information from an outfit that surfs on my research. Just a thought.

Stephen E Arnold, January 31, 2015

Autonomy: Leading the Push Beyond Enterprise Search

January 30, 2015

In “CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access,” I describe Autonomy’s math-first approach to content processing. The reason is that after the veil of secrecy was lifted with regard to the signal processing`methods used for British intelligence tasks, Cambridge University became one of the hot beds for the use of Bayesian, LaPlacian, and Markov methods. These numerical recipes proved to be both important and controversial. Instead of relying on manual methods, humans selected training sets, tuned the thresholds, and then turned the smart software loose. Math is not required to understand what Autonomy packaged for commercial use: Signal processing separated noise in a channel and allowed software to process the important bits. Thank you, Claude Shannon and the good Reverend Bayes.

What did Autonomy receive for this breakthrough? Not much but the company did generate more than $600 million in revenues about 10 years after opening for business. As far as I know, no other content processing vendor has reached this revenue target. Endeca, for the sake of comparison, flat lined at about $130 million in the year that Oracle bought the Guided Navigation outfit for about $1.0 billion.

For one thing the British company BAE (British Aerospace Engineering) licensed the Autonomy system and began to refine its automated collection, analysis, and report systems. So what? The UK became by the late 1990s the de facto leader in automated content activities. Was BAE the only smart outfit in the late 1990s? Nope, there were other outfits who realized the value of the Autonomy approach. Examples range from US government entities to little known outfits like the Wynyard Group.

In the CyberOSINT volume, you can get more detail about why Autonomy was important in the late 1990s, including the name of the university8 professor who encouraged Mike Lynch to make contributions that have had a profound impact on intelligence activities. For color, let me mention an anecdote that is not in the 176 page volume. Please, keep in mind that Autonomy was, like i2 (another Cambridge University spawned outfit) a client prior to my retirement.) IBM owns i2 and i2 is profiled in CyberOSINT in Chapter 5, “CyberOSINT Vendors.” I would point out that more than two thirds of the monograph contains information that is either not widely available or not available via a routine Bing, Google, or Yandex query. For example, Autonomy does not make publicly available a list of its patent documents. These contain specific information about how to think about cyber OSINT and moving beyond keyword search.

Some Color: A Conversation with a Faux Expert

In 2003 I had a conversation with a fellow who was an “expert” in content management, a discipline that is essentially a step child of database technology. I want to mention this person by name, but I will avoid the inevitable letter from his attorney rattling a saber over my head. This person publishes reports, engages in litigation with his partners, kowtows to various faux trade groups, and tries to keep secret his history as a webmaster with some Stone Age skills.

Not surprisingly this canny individual had little good to say about Autonomy. The information I provided about the Lynch technology, its applications, and its importance in next generation search were dismissed with a comment I will not forget, “Autonomy is a pile of crap.”

Okay, that’s an informed opinion for a clueless person pumping baloney about the value of content management as a separate technical field. Yikes.

In terms of enterprise search, Autonomy’s competitors criticized Lynch’s approach. Instead of a keyword search utility that was supposed to “unlock” content, Autonomy delivered a framework. The framework operated in an automated manner and could deliver keyword search, point and click access like the Endeca system, and more sophisticated operations associated with today’s most robust cyber OSINT solutions. Enterprise search remains stuck in the STAIRS III and RECON era. Autonomy was the embodiment of the leap from putting the burden of finding on humans to shifting the load to smart software.

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A diagram from Autonomy’s patents filed in 2001. What’s interesting is that this patent cites an invention by Dr. Liz Liddy with whom the ArnoldIT team worked in the late 1990s. A number of content experts understood the value of automated methods, but Autonomy was the company able to commercialize and build a business on technology that was not widely known 15 years ago. Some universities did not teach Bayesian and related methods because these were tainted by humans who used judgments to set certain thresholds. See US 6,668,256. There are more than 100 Autonomy patent documents. How many of the experts at IDC, Forrester, Gartner, et al have actually located the documents, downloaded them, and reviewed the systems, methods, and claims? I would suggest a tiny percentage of the “experts.” Patent documents are not what English majors are expected to read.”

That’s important and little appreciated by the mid tier outfits’ experts working for IDC (yo, Dave Schubmehl, are you ramping up to recycle the NGIA angle yet?) Forrester (one of whose search experts told me at a MarkLogic event that new hires for search were told to read the information on my ArnoldIT.com Web site like that was a good thing for me), Gartner Group (the conference and content marketing outfit), Ovum (the UK counterpart to Gartner), and dozens of other outfits who understand search in terms of selling received wisdom, not insight or hands on facts.

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Enterprise Search Lacks NGIA Functions

January 29, 2015

Users Want More Than Hunting through a Rubbish

CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access is, according to Ric Manning, the publisher of Stephen E Arnold’s new study, is now available. You can order a copy at the Gumroad online store or via the link on Xenky.com.

cover for ads

One of the key chapters in the 176 page study of information retrieval solution that move beyond search takes you under the hood of an NGIA system. Without reproducing the 10 page chapter and its illustrations, I want to highlight two important aspects of NGIA systems.

When a person requires information under time pressure, traditional systems pose a problem. The time required to figure out which repository to query, craft a query or take a stab at what “facet” (category) may contain the information, scanning the outputs the system displays, opening a document that appears to be related to the query, and then figuring out exactly what item of data is the one required makes traditional search a non starter in many work situations. The bottleneck is the human’s ability to keep track of which digital repository contains what. Many organizations have idiosyncratic terminology, and users in one department may not be familiar with the terminology used in another unit of the organization.

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Register for the seminar on the Telestrategies’ Web site.

Traditional enterprise search systems trip and skin their knees over the time issue and over the “locate what’s needed issue.” These are problems that have persisted in search box oriented systems since the days of RECON, SDC Orbit, and Dialcom. There is little a manager can do to create more time. Time is a very valuable commodity and it often determines what type of decision is made and how risk laden that decision may be.

There is also little one can do to change how a bright human works with a system that forces a busy individual to perform iterative steps that often amount to guessing the word or phrase to unlock what’s hidden in an index or indexes.

Little wonder that convincing a customer to license a traditional keyword system continue to bedevil vendors.

A second problem is the nature of access. There is news floating around that Facebook has been able to generate more ad growth than Google because Facebook has more mobile users. Whether Facebook or Google dominates social mobile, the key development is “mobile.” Works need information access from devices which have smaller and different form factors from the multi core, 3.5 gigahertz, three screen workstation I am using to write this blog post.

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Is Enterprise Search Exempt from Intellectual Dishonesty?

January 20, 2015

I read “Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Tech Media: A Lot of Intellectual Dishonesty.” I figured out that “intellectual dishonesty” covers a large swath of baloney information. I have been involved in “technology” since I was hired by Halliburton Nuclear in 1972. In that period, I have watched engineers try to explain to non-engineers the objective functions of processes, algorithms, systems, and methods. I learned quickly that those who were not informed had a tough time figuring out what the engineers were saying or “meant.” Thus, the task became recasting details into something easily understood. Yep, nothing like simplified nuclear fission. It’s just like boiling water over a campfire. There you go. Nuclear energy made simple.

This article is a brief interview with a Silicon Valley luminary. The point seems to be that today much of the information about technology is off the mark. Well, let me make this simple: Almost useless. Today, thanks to innovation and re-imagineering, anyone able to click a mouse button can assert, “I am a technologist.” Many mouse clickers add a corollary: “I can learn anything.” No doubt failed middle school teachers, unemployed webmasters, and knowledge management experts have confidence in their abilities. Gold stars in middle school affirm one’s excellence, right?

In this interview, there were two observations that I related to my field of interest: Information Access.

I noted this comment about technology information:

Another problem: lying by omission, hyperbole and other forms of intellectual dishonesty are creeping into more tech reporting.

Ah, lying, hyperbole, and “other forms of intellectual dishonesty.” Good stuff.

I found this remark on point as well:

Most of the people who can offer key insights for understanding the industry are not incentivized to write, so a lot of crucial knowledge just never appears online. It’s just passed along to certain privileged people in the know.

I think this means that those with high value information may not produce listicles every few days. Too bad.

So what about enterprise search? Some thoughts:

  1. Consultants and experts who write what the prospects or the clients want to get money, consideration, or self aggrandizement. Dave Schubmehl, are you done recycling my research without permission?
  2. Vendors who say almost anything to close a deal. That’s why enterprise search vendors hop from SharePoint utility to customer support to business intelligence to analytics. The idea is that once the money is in hand, the vendor can code up a good enough solution
  3. Cheerleaders for failed concepts promise “value” or performance. The idea that knowledge management or innovation will be a direct consequence of finding information is only a partial truth.
  4. Open source cheerleaders. Open source is one source of information access technology. Open source requires glue code and scripting and often costs as much as a proprietary solution when direct and indirect expenses are tallied and summed. But free is “good”, right?
  5. Bloggers, experts, newly minted consultants, and unemployed English majors conclude that they are expert searchers and can learn anything.
  6. Job seekers. I find some of the information available on LinkedIn and Slideshare quite amazing, fascinating, and unfortunately disheartening.
  7. Unemployed search administrators. These folks want to use failure as a ladder to climb higher in their next job.

Net net: In enterprise search, the problems are significant because of the nature of human utterance. Those who are uninformed cater to the customers who may be uninformed. The result is the all-too-predictable rise and fall of companies like Delphes, Convera, Entopia, or Fast Search & Transfer, among many others. For example, Google tried to “fix” enterprise search with a locked down appliance. How is that working out?

The volume of misinformation, disinformation, and reformation makes accurate, objective analysis of search an almost impossible job. When everyone is an expert in search and content processing, most information about information access has almost zero knowledge value.

Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2015

IDC PCWorld Sees Lemonade in Google Glass

January 18, 2015

I am not sure what the folks in Massachusetts are thinking. I read “Google Glass: Down but Not Out.” Reading the story was an interesting exercise in filling a small tumbler with not-so-hot lemonade.

Here’s the passage I noted:

True, Glass has struggled to find its place in the mainstream.

Now that’s a statement that puts Brin and X Labs in some context.

“Struggled.”

Then I highlighted in yellow:

But make no mistake: Glass isn’t going away—not without more of a fight. While it’s struggled to find support among consumers, some businesses have been highly receptive to the electronic eyewear, and the next iterations of Glass might suit them even better.

Chuck full of quotes, the write up points out some of the issues; for example, backlash, the economics, and wonderful phrase “glasshole.”

But what was not said may be more important. The big thinker on this project was the multi-named Babak Amir Parviz. Then there was the alleged interaction between one of Google’s founders and an employee. There was some discord, which is a pretty nice way of summing up some fast dancing in the interpersonal relationships department. Finally there has been the two step in reorganizing the Glass house.

What we have is a write up that ignores the impact of business and personal decisions on a product that warranted a business school type of analysis. That means looking at the company, the professionals involved, the market reaction, and the social implications of hard-to-detect Glass functions.

Like much of IDC’s work, including Dave Schubmehl’s sale of my research under his name on Amazon, the issue of covering a topic is almost more interesting than the high school lab experiments themselves. But who cares? In an age of content marketing and zoom-zoom analysis, there just isn’t time between Oscar antics, analysis, and making sales, is there?

A photo of a Glass fashion show featuring Mr. Brin and Ms. Rosenberg would have helped put the write up in a fashion context. Remarkable that Vanity Fair would have more substance than an IDC publication. Fascinating.

Fascinating. I assume that’s lemonade in the IDC mug.

Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2015

Worlds Apart: The Schism between Information Access and OId School Keyword Search

January 9, 2015

Ah, Dave Schubmehl. You may remember my adventures with this “expert” in search. He published four reports based on my research, and then without permission sold one of these recycled $3,500 gems on Amazon. A sharp eyed law librarian and my attorney were able to get this cat back into the back.

He’s back with a 22 page report “The Knowledge Quotient: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information Using Search and Content Analytics” that is free. Yep, free.

I was offered this report at a Yahoo email address I use to gather the spam and content marketing fluff that floods to me each day. I received the spam from Alisa Lipzen, an inside sales representative, of Coveo. Ms. Lipzen is sufficiently familiar with me to call me “Ben”. That’s a familiarity that may be unwarranted. She wants me to “enjoy.” Okay, but how about some substance.

To put this report in perspective, it is free. To me this means that the report was written for Coveo (a SharePoint centric keyword search vendor) and Lexalytics (a unit of Infonic if this IDC item is accurate). IDC, in my view, was paid to write this report and then cooperated with Coveo and Lexalytics to pump out the document as useful information.

My interest is not in the content marketing and pay-for-fame methods of consulting firms and their clients. Nope. I am focused on the substance of the write up which I was able to download thanks to the link in the spam I received. Here’s the cover page.

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For background, I have just finished CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. Fresh in my mind are the findings from our original and objective research. That’s right. I funded the research and I did not seek compensation from any of the 21 companies profiled in the report. You can read about the monograph on my Xenky site.

What’s interesting to me is that the IDC “expert” generated marketing document misses the major shift that has taken place in information access.

Keyword search is based on looking at what happened. That’s the historical bias of looking for content that has been processed and indexed. One can sift through that index and look for words that suggest happiness or dissatisfaction. That’s the “sentiment” angle.

But these methods are retrospective.

As CyberOSINT points out the new approach that is gaining customers and the support of a number of companies like BAE and Google is forward looking.

One looks up information when one knows what one is seeking. But what does the real time flow of information mean for now and the next 24 hours or week. The difference is one that is now revolutionizing information access and putting old school vendors at a disadvantage.

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