InQuira IBM Knowledge Assessment
July 18, 2009
A happy quack to the ArnoldIT.com goose who forwarded the InQuira Knowledge Assessment Tool link from one of my test email addresses. InQuire, a company formed from two other firms in the content processing space, has morphed into a knowledge company. The firm’s natural language processing technology is under the hood, but the packaging has shifted to customer support and other sectors where search is an enabler, not the electromagnet.
The survey is designed to obtain information about my knowledge quotient. The url for the survey is http://myknowledgeiq.com. The only hitch in the git-along is that the service seems to be timing out. You can try the survey assessment here. The system came back to life after a two minute delay. My impressions as I worked through this Knowledge IQ test appear below:
Impressions as I Take the Test
InQuira uses some interesting nomenclature. For example, the company asks about customer service and a “centralized knowledge repository”. The choices include this filtering response:
Yes, individuals have personal knowledge repositories (e.g., email threads, folders, network shared drives), but there isn’t a shared repository.
I clicked this choice because distributed content seems to be the norm in my experience. Another interesting question concerns industry best practices. The implicit assumption is that a best practice exists. The survey probes for an indication of who creates content and who maintains the content once created. My hunch at this point in the Knowledge IQ test is that most respondents won’t have much of a system in place. I think I see that I will have a low Knowledge IQ because I am selecting what appear to me to be reasonable responses, no extremes or categoricals like “none” or “all”. I note that some questions have default selections already checked. Ideal for the curious survey taker who wants to get to the “final” report. About mid way through I get a question about the effectiveness of the test taker’s Web site. In my experience, most organizations offer so-so Web sites. I will go with a middle-of-the road assessment. I am now getting tired of the Knowledge IQ test. I just answered questions about customer feedback opportunities. My experience suggests that most companies “say” feedback is desirable. Acting on the feedback is often a tertiary concern, maybe of even lower priority.
My Report
The system is now generating my report. Here’s what I learned: my answers appear to put me in the middle of the radar chart I have a blue diagram which gives me a personal Knowledge IQ.
Here’s how my results stack up against my industry (red) and overall (green). Looks like my industry consulting does not hit homeruns.
Net Net
What I find interesting is:
- InQuira is positioning itself as a solution for customer support. That solution involves meeting the needs of larger organizations, embedding search in a knowledge repository type of solution, and tapping into some of the trendy developments in information retrieval; for example, “communities and collaboration”.
- The survey tool appears to be an InQuira system which uses default answers and Flash, two interesting touches
- Allows the user to view the results immediately, send the results to a colleague, start over (?), offer feedback about the survey system, and ask InQuira to contact the survey participant.
I give the tool a good grade. I left the Knowledge IQ test with the impression that InQuira is intentionally acting in a passive, non-invasive way. My instinct would have been to ask the survey participant to navigate to his or her email address to receive a link to the report so I could insert another marketing message in the process. One downside of this particular survey is that I found the word choice somewhat odd and a number of questions offered default settings which a respondent in a hurry may be inclined to accept without thinking.
Will other search and content processing vendors follow in InQuira’s footsteps? Yes, because the marketplace is not a welcoming place for companies as I write this. Interesting marketing technique overall.
Stephen Arnold, July 19, 2009
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