Google Amazon Dust Bunnies
October 13, 2011
The addled goose has a bum eye, more air miles than a 30 something IBM sales engineer, and lousy Internet connectivity. T Mobile’s mobile WiFi sharing gizmo is a door stop. Imagine my surprise when I read “Google Engineer: “Google+ Example of Our Complete Failure to Understand Platforms.” In one webby write up, the dust bunnies at Google and Amazon were moved from beneath the bed to the white nylon carpet of a private bed chamber.
I am not sure the information in the article is spot on. Who can certain about the validity of any information any longer. The goose cannot. But the write up reveals that Amazon is an organization with political “infighting”. What’s new? Nothing. Google, on the other hand, evidences a bit of reflexivity. I will not drag the Motorola Mobility event into this brief write up, but students of business may find that acquisition worth researching.
Here is the snippet which caught my attention:
[A] high-profile Google engineer … mistakenly posted a long rant about working at Amazon and Google’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+. Apparently, he only wanted to share it internally with everybody at Google, but mistaken shared it publicly. For the most part, [the] post focuses on the horrors of working at Amazon, a company that is notorious for its political infighting. The most interesting part to me, though, is … [the] blunt assessment of what he perceives to be Google’s inability to understand platforms and how this could endanger the company in the long run.
I want to step back. In fact, I want to go into MBA Mbit mode.
First, this apparent management behavior is the norm in many organizations, not the companies referenced in the post.I worked for many years in the old world of big time consulting. Keep in mind that my experiences date from 1973, but management idiosyncrasies were the rule. The majority of these management gaffes took place in a slower, not digital world. Sure, speed was important. In the physics of information speed is relative. Today the perceived velocity is great and the diffusion of information adds a supercharger to routine missteps. Before getting too excited about the insights into one or two companies, most organizations today are perilously close to dysfunction. Nothing special here, but today’s environment gives what is normal some added impact. Consolidation and an absence of competition makes the stakes high. Bad decisions add a thrill to the mundane. Big decisions weigh more and can have momentum that does more quickly than a bad decision in International Harvester or NBC in the 1970s.
Second, technology invites bad decisions. Today most technologies are “hidden”, not exposed like the guts of a Model T or my mom’s hot wire toaster which produced one type of bagel—burned. Not surprisingly, even technically sophisticated managers struggle to understand the implications of a particular technical decision. To make matters worse, senior mangers have to deal with “soft” issues and technical training, even if limited, provide few beacons for the course to chart. Need some evidence. Check out the Hewlett Packard activities over the last 18 months. I routinely hear such statements as “we cannot locate the invoice” and “tell us what to do.” Right. When small things go wrong, how can the big things go right? My view is that chance is a big factor today.
Third, the rush to make the world social, collaborative, and open means that leaks, flubs, sunshine, and every other type of exposure is part of the territory.. I find it distressing that sophisticated organizations fall into big pot holes. As I write this, I am at an intelligence conference, and the rush to openness has an unexpected upside for some information professionals. With info flowing around without controls, the activities of authorities are influenced by the info bonanza. Good and bad guys have unwittingly created a situation that makes it less difficult to find the footprints of an activity. The post referenced in the source article is just one more example of what happens when information policies just don’t work. Forget trust. Even the technically adept cannot manage individual communications. Quite a lesson I surmise.
In search and content processing,the management situation is dire. Many companies are uncertain about pricing,features, services, and innovation. Some search vendors describe themselves with nonsense and Latinate constructions. Other flip flop for search to customer support to business intelligence without asking themselves, “Does this stuff actually work?” Many firms throw adjectives in front of jargon and rely on snake charming sales people to close deals. Good management or bad management? Neither. We are in status quo management with dollops of guessing and wild bets.
My take on this dust bunny matter is that we have what may be an unmanageable and ungovernable situation. No SharePoint governance conference is going to put the cat back in the bag. No single email, blog post, or news article will make a difference. Barn burned. Horse gone. Wal-Mart is building on the site. The landscape has changed. Now let the “real” consultants explain the fix. Back to the goose pond for me. Collaborate on that.
Stephen E Arnold, October 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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The Arnold Columns: May 2011
May 3, 2011
It is that time again. Four columns this month and for cash money. Every time I get a check I think of PT Barnum. The topics I tackled this month required research, thought, and some wordsmanship. This blog, on the other hand, is a record of the items that strike me as interesting. I have help converting my snips into write ups. If you want to know who works on this Beyond Search blog, check out the new Author tab available from the Beyond Search splash page.
So what did real publishers instruct me to cover or, in some cases, allow me to explore? Here’s the line up. Keep in mind that you will have to either get a hard copy of the publishers’ outputs or find my work on the publishers’ Web site. In one case, that could take you a day or two. Search is really easy when folks responsible for search don’t use their own search system. Such is life.
- ETM (Enterprise Technology Management, published by ISIGlobal.com), “Google’s Management Change and the Enterprise”. The idea is that Google is making significant management changes and, either intentionally or unintentionally, sending signals that indicate the enterprise unit is not part of Larry Page’s inner circle. I hope I am wrong, but if enterprise were the key to firm’s future, I think the management shake up would have added an olive and a dash of bitters to the enterprise group. What I saw was several squirts of cold water.
- Information Today, which is technically a newspaper, “When Key Words Fail, Will Predictive Search Deliver?”. The write up uses Recorded Future, funded by the CIA and Google, as a case example. The main idea is that semantic technology have to step up because the volume of data facing a worker and the worker’s diminished appetite for research require software to be smarter.
- KMWorld, “SharePoint Governance: Is Semantic Technology the Answer?”. My team has been immersed in things semantic. What our work revealed is that the baloney word governance really means indexing and editorial policies. The article provides some links to useful resources and then reminds the reader that putting the information horse back in the barn when the barn is on fire can be tough.
- Online Magazine, “Rob ROI: Open Source and Technology Costs.” I apologize for the literary license, my assumption that the readers will know about Sir Walter, the Waverly novels, and Rob Roy. The thrust of the write up is that open source software reduces some costs but not every cost. As a result, poor budgeting for open source software can yield the same ROI killing overruns that plague commercial software. Don’t agree with me? Sigh.
- Smart Business Network, a series of city business magazines and a Web site, “Coupon Monsoon: Downpours of Digital Deals.” The focus of the write up is the deluge of deals, coupons, and discounts. The problem with most of these services is building an audience and delivering offers that make sense to customers and merchants. I answer the question, “Should your business use coupons?”
Every two or three years I gather up these for-fee outputs and slap them in the ArnoldIT.com archive. However, you cannot rely on me to be much of an information professional. I can barely write these outputs. Organizing and archiving—beyond my skill set. Subscribe to these publications. The information in my for-fee columns is different from the Web log’s.
Stephen E Arnold, May 3, 2011
Not free. I am paid for columns so this write up is a shameless commercial promotion.
Dot Net, Not Yet for Some Hot Outfits
March 29, 2011
Microsoft is selling, licensing, or installing tens of thousands of SharePoint servers with a heart beat like that of a healthy mastodon. The problem that most of the cheerleaders in search and content processing overlook is that SharePoint is a giant services generator. Think of SharePoint as a digital money machine for English majors, failed Web masters, and journalists reinventing themselves.
I read “Why We Don’t Hire Dot Net Programmers.” Interesting information for sure. Here’s a snippet:
See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them. Microsoft started down this path when they were the only game in town, explicitly to maintain their monopoly by making it as hard as possible to either port Windows apps to non-Windows platforms, or to even conceive of how to do it in the first place. This decision — or this mandate for incompatibility, perhaps — has produced countless ramifications. Small things, like using backslashes in file paths rather than forward slashes like any dignified OS., or using a left-handed coordinate system with DirectX instead of right-handed as was used since the dawn of computer graphics. Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire. And a thousand other things in between: programming tools that generate a dozen complex files before you even write your first line of code, expensive servers that force a remote GUI terminal on you to do essentially anything despite a few keystrokes being perfectly adequate for everybody else, a programming culture almost allergic to open source licensing. The list goes on and on. None of this makes you a “bad programmer”. All these differences are perfectly irrelevant if you just want to make 1.6 oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. But every day spent in that kitchen is a day NOT spent in a real kitchen, learning how to cook real food, and write real code.
Will Microsoft agree? Nah. Will Microsoft certified companies and people agree? Nah. Will poobahs and mavens focused Microsoft SharePoint governance agree? Nah.
Who would agree? Maybe outfits like Facebook, Google, and Oracle.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2011
Freebie unlike unemployed journalists reminted as SharePoint experts.
Microsoft Fast’s Web Log High Fives Autonomy
November 10, 2008
I am fuzzy about the ownership and compensation for contributors to the FastForward Web log. I was not fuzzy when I read here a summary of Autonomy’s relatively new governance system for SharePoint. What was quite interesting was that in the guise of summarizing a consulting firm’s seminar about SharePoint, Autonomy got top billing in this Microsoft Fast centric Web log. The focus was not on Microsoft Fast. The spot light was aimed on Autonomy. The article “The SharePoint Sessions Revisited. Part Four. Enhancing SharePoint Information Governance” by Bill Ives.
Autonomy Information Governance Architecture integrates with SharePoint to help with this issue, see their site on Record Management, Information Governance and Disposition. This is consistent with Microsoft’s strategy of integration with best of breed players.
So, FastForward identifies Autonomy as a best of breed vendor. What’s more interesting is that Mr. Ives devotes a full four paragraphs to the Autonomy SharePoint governance system. Does Microsoft Fast criticize Autonomy? No. Does Microsoft Fast offer an alternative to Autonomy’s system? No. Does Microsoft Fast assert that SharePoint can be tweaked to deliver Autonomy type services? No.
In short, Autonomy gets a huge marketing push. I am delighted that Microsoft Fast is showing such support for its partners. I wonder if this is a new page in the Microsoft Fast marketing play book. Quite a change in my opinion. I am certain I will be informed that this type of vendor praise is standard operating procedure. If so, that’s good news in a market sector where carping and sniping are sometimes evident.
Stephen Arnold, November 10, 2008
A Challenge for Federal Records Management
October 6, 2020
Federal agencies are facing a mandate without adequate funding. This is sure to go smoothly. GCN explains why, for these entities, “Records Management Is About to Get Harder.” The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is requiring federal agencies to completely shift to electronic recordkeeping by the end of 2022, after which the National Archives and Records Administration shall accept no new paper records. The directive presents two challenges which overlap: digitizing existing records and providing a process whereby new records are created digitally in the first place. Officials plan to begin at the intersection of those requirements, invoking a Venn diagram. They must be as efficient as they can because, we’re told, Congress is reluctant to loosen purse strings enough to sufficiently fund the project.
The article cites a recent discussion among federal records management specialists regarding the transition. Reporter Troy K. Schneider writes:
“Although agencies’ readiness levels varied widely, most participants said they were on track to meet the M-19-21 deadlines. Yet whether the available tools and resources are sufficient, however, is another matter. ‘There never are enough resources,’ one official said. ‘We’ve got great resources to the extent that we have them,’ referring to the staff and the record schedules that have been developed, but the work will outstrip them — and this year’s telework-driven embrace of collaboration tools has only increased the degree of difficulty….“Complicating that resource challenge in terms of staff and money is the rapidly growing suite of communication tools agencies use. Too often, participants said, the adoption and deployment of those tools is happening before Federal Records Act requirements are accounted for.”
SharePoint and Office 365 are but two examples of software in which agencies have invested much that may not be able to keep pace with current governance needs and a greatly increased cloud-centered user base. One suggestion is to mimic the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Program now used by the Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration for their approved product lists, reporting requirements, and cybersecurity funding. Whatever the solution, we’re told:
“Ultimately, the group agreed, fundamentals are more important than specific technologies. ‘What I’ve seen in looking at my compatriots in other agencies is they spent incredible sums of money to deploy a technology,’ one participant said. ‘And those solutions have not been nearly as effective as they have been sold as because some of the fundamentals hadn’t been done — like understanding your record schedule and the organizational and institutional changes around processes and capabilities that really need to be in place to feed the right records.’”
Indeed, rushing to choose a solution before closely examining one’s needs is a recipe for waste and disappointment. Let us hope decision makers think things through and spend the limited funds wisely. If they do not, our nation’s records are bound to become a huge, paperless mess.
Cynthia Murrell, October 6, 2020
The History of ZyLab
February 10, 2016
Big data was a popular buzzword a few years ago, making it seem that it was a brand new innovation. The eDiscovery process, however, has been around for several decades, but recent technology advancements have allowed it to take off and be implemented in more industrial fields. While many big data startups have sprung up, ZyLab-a leading innovator in the eDiscovery and information governance-started in its big data venture in 1983. ZyLab created a timeline detailing its history called, “ZyLab’s Timeline Of Technical Ingenuity.”
Even though ZyLab was founded in 1983 and introduced the ZyIndex, its big data products did not really take off until the 1990s when personal computers became an indispensable industry tool. In 1995, ZyLab made history by being used in the OJ Simpson and Uni-bomber investigations. Three years later it introduced text search in images, which is now a standard search feature for all search engines.
Things really began to take off for ZyLab in the 2000s as technology advanced to the point where it became easier for companies to create and store data as well as beginning the start of masses of unstructured data. Advanced text analytics were added in 2005 and ZyLab made history again by becoming the standard for United Nations War Crime Tribunals.
During 2008 and later years, ZyLab’s milestones were more technological, such as creating the Zylmage SharePoint connector and Google Web search engine integration, the introduction of the ZyLab Information Management Platform, first to offer integrated machine translation in eDiscovery, adding audio search, and incorporating true native visual search and categorization.
ZyLab continues to make historical as well as market innovations for eDiscovery and big data.
Whitney Grace, February 10, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Improving the Preservica Preservation Process
April 17, 2015
Preservica is a leading program for use in digital preservation, consulting, and research, and now it is compatible with Microsoft SharePoint. ECM Connection has the scoop on the “New Version Of Preservica Aligns Records Management And Digital Preservation.” The upgrade to Preservica will allow SharePoint managers to preserve content from SharePoint as well as Microsoft Outlook, a necessary task as most companies these days rely on the Internet for business and need to archive transactions.
Preservica wants to become a bigger part of enterprise system strategies such as enterprise content management and information governance. One of their big selling points is that Preservica will archive information and keep it in a usable format, as obsoleteness becomes a bigger problem as technology advances.
“Jon Tilbury, CEO Preservica adds: ‘The growing volume and diversity of digital content and records along with rapid technology and IT refresh rates is fuelling the need for Records and Compliance managers to properly safe-guard their long-term and permanent digital records by incorporating Digital Preservation into their overall information governance lifecycle. The developing consensus is that organizations should consider digital preservation from the outset – especially if they hold important digital records for more than 10 years or already have records that are older than 10 years. Our vision is to make this a pluggable technology so it can be quickly and seamlessly integrated into the corporate information landscape.’ ”
Digital preservation with a compliant format is one of the most overlooked problems companies deal with. They may have stored their records on a storage device, but if they do not retain the technology to access them, then the records are useless. Keeping files in a readable format not only keeps them useful, but it also makes the employee’s life who has to recall them all the easier.
Whitney Grace, April 17, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Microsoft, Text Analytics, and Writing
January 21, 2015
I read the marvelously named “Microsoft Acquires Text Analysis Startup Equivio, Plans to Integrate Machine Learning Tech into Office 365: Equivio Zoom In. Find Out.”
Taking a deep breath I read the article. Here’s what I deduced: Word and presumably PowerPoint will get some new features:
While Office 365 offers e-discovery and information governance capabilities, Equivio develops machine learning technologies for both, meaning an integration is expected to make them “even more intelligent and easy to use.” Microsoft says the move is in line with helping its customers tackle “the legal and compliance challenges inherent in managing large quantities of email and documents.”
The Fast Search & Transfer technology is not working out? The dozens of SharePoint content enhancers are not doing their job? The grammar checker is not doing its job?
What is different is that Word is getting more machine learning:
Equivio uses machine learning to let users explore large, unstructured sets of data. The startup’s technology leverages advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sort documents into themes, group near-duplicates, and isolate unique data.
Like Microsoft’s exciting adaptive menus, the new system will learn what the user wants.
Is this a next generation information access system? Is Microsoft nosing into Recorded Future territory?
Nope, but the desire to covert what the user does into metadata seems to percolate in the Microsoft innovation coffee pot.
If Microsoft pulls off this shotgun marriage, I think more pressure will be put on outfits like Content Analyst and Smartlogic.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2015
Enterprise Search: Fee Versus Free
November 25, 2014
I read a pretty darned amazing article “Is Free Enterprise Search a Game Changer?” My initial reaction was, “Didn’t the game change with the failures of flagship enterprise search systems?” And “Didn’t the cost and complexity of many enterprise search deployments fuel the emergence of the free and open source information retrieval systems?”
Many proprietary vendors are struggling to generate sustainable revenues and pay back increasingly impatient stakeholders. The reality is that the proprietary enterprise search “survivors” fear meeting the fate of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Perfect Search, Siderean Software, TREX, and other proprietary vendors. These outfits went away.
Many vendors of proprietary enterprise search systems have left behind an environment in which revenues are simply not sustainable. Customers learned some painful lessons after licensing brand name enterprise search systems and discovering the reality of their costs and functionality. A happy quack to http://bit.ly/1AMHBL6 for this image of desolation.
Other vendors, faced with mounting costs and zero growth in revenues, sold their enterprise search companies. The spate of sell outs that began in the mid 2000s were stark evidence that delivering information retrieval systems to commercial and governmental organizations was difficult to make work.
Consider these milestones:
Autonomy sold to Hewlett Packard. HP promptly wrote off billions of dollars and launched a fascinating lawsuit that blamed Autonomy for the deal. HP quickly discovered that Autonomy, like other complex content processing companies, was difficult to sell, difficult to support, and difficult to turn into a billion dollar baby.
Convera, the product of Excalibur’s scanning legacy and ConQuest Software, captured some big deals in the US government and with outfits like the NBA. When the system did not perform like a circus dog, the company wound down. One upside for Convera alums was that they were able to set up a consulting firm to keep other companies from making the Convera-type mistakes. The losses were measured in the tens of millions.
HP Offers Autonomy Powered Legacy Data Solution
July 9, 2013
What happens when old data meets new technology? The result is not always pretty. Now, reports ITProPortal, “HP Autonomy Launches Legacy Data Cleanup Software for Improved Info Governance.” The software, called Legacy Data Cleanup, is underpinned by Autonomy’s ControlPoint and hauls outdated information into the light where it can be accessed, classified and, if appropriate, safely deleted. The write-up tells us:
“Legacy data is sometimes called ‘dark data,’ as it is effectively wasted space on limited storage, forcing organisations to buy more storage and hindering the modernisation of infrastructure and the transition to the cloud. This data includes obsolete SharePoint sites, old email stores, and a variety of other files that no longer serve any function.
“The Legacy Data Cleanup solution helps businesses identify this unnecessary data and remove it responsibly, leaving an audit trail behind to meet company data retention policies. It can also help with the establishment of a records management system, which offers improved access to and more efficient legal holds on old data.”
The write-up asserts that most organizations have a legacy data problem, though for many the issue has not yet become prominent. It also notes that it is best to address the issue before an eDiscovery demand or a security breach rears its head. True enough; is HP‘s new software the solution?
Cynthia Murrell, July 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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