The New SearchCIO Presents 219 Definitions of Failure
July 29, 2014
I received an email about the new “www.Search CIO.com” Here it is:
I was not aware of the old search CIO. I clicked a link that delivered me to a page asking me to log in. I ignored that and navigated to the search box and entered the query “failure.” The system responded with 13,060 articles with the word failure in them, 103 conversations, and 219 definitions of failure.
The first hit was to an IBM mainframey problem with a direct access storage device. Remember those from 2003 and before? The second hit was a 2002 definition about “failure protection.”
The new search system appears to pull matching strings from articles and content objects across TechTarget’s different publications/information services. I clicked on the DASD failure link and was enjoined to sign up for a free membership. Hmmm. Okay. Plan B.
In my lectures about tactics for getting useful open source information, I focus on services like Ixquick.com. No registration and no invasive tracking. The Ixquick.com approach is different from the marketing-oriented, we want an email address in use at www.searchcio.com. Here’s what Ixquick displayed, quite quickly as well:
The first hit was to a detailed chunk of information from IBM called “DASD Ownership Notification (DVHXDN). No registration required. The hits were on point and quite useful in my opinion. A happy quck for Ixquick.
If you have an appetite for TechTarget information, navigate to http://searchcio.techtarget.com/. If you want helpful search results from a pretty good metasearch engine, go for Ixquick.
Stephen E Arnold, July 30, 2014
IHS Enterprise Search: Semantic Concept Lenses Are Here
July 29, 2014
I pointed out in http://bit.ly/X9d219 that IDC, a mid tier consulting firm that has marketed my information without permission on Amazon of all places, has rolled out a new report about content processing. The academic sounding title is “The Knowledge Quotient: Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information.” Conflating knowledge and information is not logically satisfying to me. But you may find the two words dusted with “value” just the ticket to career success.
I have not read the report, but I did see a list of the “sponsors” of the study. The list, as I pointed out, was an eclectic group, including huge firms struggling for credibility (HP and IBM) down to consulting firms offering push ups for indexers.
One company on my list caused me to go back through my archive of search information. The firm that sparked my interest is Information Handling Services or IHS or Information Handling Service. The company is publicly traded and turning a decent profit. The revenue of IHS has moved toward $2 billion. If the global economy perks up and the defense sector is funded at pre-drawdown levels, IHS could become a $2 billion company.
IHS is a company with an interesting history and extensive experience with structured and unstructured search. Few of those with whom I interacted when I was working full time considered IHS a competitor to the likes of Autonomy, Endeca, and Funnelback.
In the 2013 10-K on page 20, IHS presents its “cumulative total return” in this way:
The green line looks like money. Another slant on the company’s performance can be seen in a chart available from Google Finance.
The Google chart shows that revenue is moving upwards, but operating margins are drifting downward and operating income is suppressed. Like Amazon, the costs for operating and information centric company are difficult to control. Amazon seems to have thrown in the towel. IHS is managing like the Dickens to maintain a profit for its stakeholders. For stakeholders, is the hope is that hefty profits will be forthcoming?
Source: Google Finance
My initial reaction was, “Is IHS trying to find new ways to generate higher margin revenue?”
Like Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier, IHS required different types of content processing plumbing to deliver its commercial databases. Technical librarians and the competitive intelligence professionals monitoring the defense sector are likely to know about IHS different products. The company provides access to standards documents, regulatory information, and Jane’s military hardware information services. (Yep, Jane’s still has access to retired naval officers with mutton chop whiskers and interesting tweed outfits. I observed these experts when I visited the company in England prior to IHS’s purchase of the outfit.)
The standard descriptions of IHS peg the company’s roots with a trade magazine outfit called Rogers Publishing. My former boss at Booz, Allen & Hamilton loved some of the IHS technical services. He was, prior to joining Booz, Allen the head of research at Martin Marietta, an IHS customer in the 1970s. Few remember that IHS was once tied in with Thyssen Bornemisza. (For those with an interest in history, there are some reports about the Baron that are difficult to believe. See http://bit.ly/1qIylne.)
Large professional publishing companies were early, if somewhat reluctant, supporters of SGML and XML. Running a query against a large collection of structured textual information could be painfully slow when one relied on traditional relational database management systems in the late 1980s. Without SGML/XML, repurposing content required humans. With scripts hammering on SGML/XML, creating new information products like directories and reports eliminated the expensive humans for the most part. Fewer expensive humans in the professional publishing business reduces costs…for a while at least.
IHS climbed on the SGML/XML diesel engine and began working to deliver snappy online search results. As profit margins for professional publishers were pressured by increasing marketing and technology costs, IHS followed the path of other information centric companies. IHS began buying content and services companies that, in theory, would give the professional publishing company a way to roll out new, higher margin products. Even secondary players in the professional publishing sector like Ebsco Electronic Publishing wanted to become billion dollar operations and then get even bigger. Rah, rah.
These growth dreams electrify many information company’s executives. The thought that every professional publishing company and every search vendor are chasing finite or constrained markets does not get much attention. Moving from dreams to dollars is getting more difficult, particularly in professional publishing and content processing businesses.
My view is that packaging up IHS content and content processing technology got a boost when IHS purchased the Invention Machine in mid 2012.
Years ago I attended a briefing by the founders of the Invention Machine. The company demonstrated that an engineer looking for a way to solve a problem could use the Invention Machine search system to identify candidate systems and methods from the processed content. I recall that the original demonstration data set was US patents and patent applications. My thought was that an engineer looking for a way to implement a particular function for a system could — if the Invention Machine system worked as presented — could present a patent result set. That result set could be scanned to eliminate any patents still in force. The resulting set of patents might yield a procedure that the person looking for a method could implement without having to worry about an infringement allegation. The original demonstration was okay, but like most “new” search technologies, Invention Machine faced funding, marketing, and performance challenges. IHS acquired Invention Machine, its technologies, its Eastern European developers, and embraced the tagging, searching, and reporting capabilities of the Invention Machine.
The Goldfire idea is that an IHS client can license certain IHS databases (called “knowledge collections”) and then use Goldfire / Invention Machine search and analytic tools to get the knowledge “nuggets” needed to procure a missile guidance component.
The jargon for this finding function is “semantic concept lenses.” If the licensee has content in a form supported by Goldfire, the licensee can search and analyze IHS information along with information the client has from its own sources. A bit more color is available at http://bit.ly/WLA2Dp.
The IHS search system is described in terms familiar to a librarian and a technical analyst; for example, here’s the attributes for Goldfire “cloud” from an IHS 2013 news release:
- “Patented semantic search technology providing precise access to answers in documents. [Note: IHS has numerous patents but it is not clear what specific inventions or assigned inventions apply directly to the search and retrieval solution(s)]
- Access to more than 90 million scientific and technical “must have” documents curated by IHS. This aggregated, pre-indexed collection spans patents, premium IHS content sources, trusted third-party content providers, and the Deep Web.
- The ability to semantically index and research across any desired web-accessible information such as competitive or supplier websites, social media platforms and RSS feeds – turning these into strategic knowledge assets.
- More than 70 concept lenses that promote rapid research, browsing and filtering of related results sets thus enabling engineers to explore a concept’s definitions, applications, advantages, disadvantages and more.
- Insights into consumer sentiment giving strategy, product management and marketing teams the ability to recognize customer opinions, perceptions, attitudes, habits and expectations – relative to their own brands and to those of their partners’ and competitors’ – as expressed in social media and on the Web.”
Most of these will resonate with those familiar with the assertions of enterprise search and content processing vendors. The spin, which I find notable, is that IHS delivers both content and information retrieval. Most enterprise search vendors provide technology for finding and analyzing data. The licensee has to provide the content unless the enterprise search vendor crawls the Web or other sources, creates an archive or a basic index, and then provides an interface that is usually positioned as indexing “all content” for the user.
According to Virtual Strategy Magazine (which presumably does not cover “real” strategy), I learned that US 8666730:
covers the semantic concept “lenses” that IHS Goldfire uses to accelerate research. The lenses correlate with the human knowledge system, organizing and presenting answers to engineers’ or scientists’ questions – even questions they did not think to ask. These lenses surface concepts in documents’ text, enabling users to rapidly explore a concept’s definitions, applications, advantages, disadvantages and more.
The key differentiator is claimed to move IHS Goldfire up a notch. The write up states:
Unlike today’s textual, question-answering technologies, which work as meta-search engines to search for text fragments by keyword and then try to extract answers similar to the text fragment, the IHS Goldfire approach is entirely unique – providing relevant answers, not lists of largely irrelevant documents. With IHS Goldfire, hundreds of different document types can be parsed by a semantic processor to extract semantic relationships like subject-action-object, cause-and-effect and dozens more. Answer-extraction patterns are then applied on top of the semantic data extracted from documents and answers are saved to a searchable database.
According to Igor Sovpel, IHS Goldfire:
“Today’s engineers and technical professionals are underserved by traditional Internet and enterprise search applications, which help them find only the documents they already know exist,” said Igor Sovpel, chief scientist for IHS Goldfire. “With this patent, only IHS Goldfire gives users the ability to quickly synthesize optimal answers to a variety of complex challenges.”
Is IHS’ new marketing push in “knowledge” and related fields likely to have an immediate and direct impact on the enterprise search market? Perhaps.
There are several observations that occurred to me as I flipped through my archive of IHS, Thyssen, and Invention Machine information.
First, IHS has strong brand recognition in what I would call the librarian and technical analyst for engineering demographic. Outside of lucrative but quite niche markets for petrochemical information or silhouettes and specifications for the SU 35, IHS suffers the same problem of Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer. Most senior managers are not familiar with the company or its many brands. Positioning Goldfire as an enterprise search or enterprise technical documentation/data analysis tool will require a heck of a lot of effective marketing. Will positioning IHS cheek by jowl with IBM and a consulting firm that teaches indexing address this visibility problem? The odds could be long.
Second, search engine optimization folks can seize on the name Goldfire and create some dissonance for IHS in the public Web search indexes. I know that companies like Attivio and Microsoft use the phrase “beyond search” to attract traffic to their Web sites. I can see the same thing happening. IHS competes with other professional publishing companies looking for a way to address their own marketing problems. A good SEO name like “Goldfire” could come under attack and quickly. I can envision lesser competitors usurping IHS’ value claims which may delay some sales or further confuse an already uncertain prospect.
Third, enterprise search and enterprise content analytics is proving to be a difficult market from which to wring profitable, sustainable revenue. If IHS is successful, the third party licensees of IHS data who resell that information to their online customers might take steps to renegotiate contracts for revenue sharing. IHS will then have to ramp up its enterprise search revenues to keep or outpace revenues from third party licensees. Addressing this problem can be interesting for those managers responsible for the negotiations.
Finally, enterprise search has a lot of companies planning on generating millions or billions from search. There can be only one prom queen and a small number of “close but no cigar” runner ups. Which company will snatch the crown?
This IHS search initiative will be interesting to watch.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2014
Color Changing Ice Cream: The Metaphor for Search Marketing
July 29, 2014
I read “Scientist Invents Ice Cream That Changes Colour As You Lick It.” The write up struck me as a nearly perfect metaphor for enterprise search and retrieval. First, let’s spoon the good stuff from the innovation tub:
Science might be busy working on interstellar travel and curing disease but that doesn’t mean it can’t give some time to ice cream. Specifically making it better visually.
The idea is that ice cream has an unsatisfactory user interface. (Please, do not tell that to the neighbor’s six year old.)
Spanish physicist and electronic engineer Manuel Linares has done exactly that. He’s managed to invent an ice cream that changes colour as you lick it. The secret formula is made entirely from natural ingredients…Before being served, the ice cream is a baby blue colour. The vendor serves and adds a spray of “love elixir”…Then as you lick the ice cream it will change into other colours.
My Eureka! moment took place almost instantly. As enterprise search vendors whip up ever more fantastic capabilities for key word matching and synonym expansion, basic search gets sprayed with “love elixir.” As the organization interacts with the search box, the search results are superficially changed.
The same logic that improves the user experience with ice cream has been for decades the standard method of information retrieval vendors.
But it is still ice cream, right?
Isn’t search still search with the same characteristics persistent for the last four or five decades?
Innovation defines modern life and search marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2014
HP Autonomy Opens IDOL APIs to App Developers
July 29, 2014
App developers can now work with HP Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer engine through the company’s new API program. We learned about the initiative from eWeek’s, “HP Autonomy’s IDOL OnDemand APIs Nurture Apps Ecosystem.” The piece by Darryl K. Taft presents a slide show with examples of those APIs being put to use. He writes:
“IDOL OnDemand delivers Web service APIs that allow developers to tap into the explosive growth of unstructured information to build a new generation of apps…. IDOL OnDemand APIs include a growing portfolio of APIs within the format conversion, image analysis, indexing, search, and text analysis categories. Through an early access program, hackathons and several TopCoder challenges, some great apps have emerged. During the weekend of June 7-8, developers participated in an IDOL OnDemand Hackathon in San Francisco, where participants built apps using IDOL OnDemand Web service APIs. This slide show covers several of the early apps to emerge from these events. Enterprise developers are also adopting the IDOL OnDemand platform, with big names such as PwC and HP taking advantage of the developer-friendly technology to accelerate their development projects using the API’s.”
See the slide show for a look at 12 of these weekend projects. Developers should then check out the IDOL OnDemand site for more information. Founded in 1996, Autonomy grew from research originally performed at Cambridge University. Their solutions help prominent organizations around the world manage large amounts of data. Tech giant HP famously purchased the company in 2011.
Cynthia Murrell, July 29, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Data Boom Pushes Schools to Create Big Data Programs
July 29, 2014
Can education catch up to progress? Perhaps, especially when corporations take an interest. Fortune discusses “Educating the ‘Big Data’ Generation.” As companies try to move from simply collecting vast amounts of data to putting that information to use, they find a serious dearth of qualified workers in the field. In fact, Gartner predicted in 2012 that 4.4 million big-data IT jobs would be created globally by 2015 (1.9 million in the U.S.). Schools are now working to catch up with this demand, largely as the result of prodding from the big tech companies.
The field of big data collection and analysis presents a previously rare requirement—workers that understand both technology and business. Reporter Katherine Noyes cites MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who will be teaching a course on big data this summer:
“We have more data than ever,’ Brynjolfsson said, ‘but understanding how to apply it to solve business problems needs creativity and also a special kind of person.’ Neither the ‘pure geeks’ nor the ‘pure suits’ have what it takes, he said. ‘We need people with a little bit of each.’”
Over at Arizona State, which boasts year-old master’s and bachelor’s programs in data analytics, Information Systems chair Michael Goul agrees:
“’We came to the conclusion that students needed to understand the business angle,’ Goul said. ‘Describing the value of what you’ve discovered is just as key as discovering it.’”
In order to begin meeting this new need for business-minded geeks (or tech-minded business people), companies are helping schools develop programs to churn out that heretofore suspect hybrid. For example, Noyes writes:
“MIT’s big-data education programs have involved numerous partners in the technology industry, including IBM […], which began its involvement in big data education about four years ago. IBM revealed to Fortune that it plans to expand its academic partnership program by launching new academic programs and new curricula with more than twenty business schools and universities, to begin in the fall….
“Business analytics is now a nearly $16 billion business for the company, IBM says—which might be why it is interested in cultivating partnerships with more than 1,000 institutions of higher education to drive curricula focused on data-intensive careers.”
Whatever forms these programs, and these jobs, ultimately take, one thing is clear: for those willing and able to gain the skills, the field of big data is wide open. Anyone with a strong love of (and aptitude for) working with data should consider entering the field now, while competition for qualified workers is so very high.
Cynthia Murrell, July 29, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Commvault to Help Sponsor SharePoint Fest Denver
July 29, 2014
For anyone in need of a little SharePoint training for the fall, SharePoint Fest Denver will be held September 22-24. Mark your calendar. Commvault is a platinum sponsor this year, and the press release, “Commvault Confirmed as Platinum Sponsor of SharePoint Fest – Denver 2014,” tells more.
The article begins:
“Commvault is a Platinum Sponsor of SharePoint Fest Denver, and joins other sponsors in bringing this conference to the Colorado Convention Center on September 22-24, 2014. Conference delegates will hear from keynote speakers and attend breakout sessions. Over 70 sessions will be offered across multiple tracks, as well as an optional day of workshops preceding the conference.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and follows all things SharePoint on his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint feed is a good place to check in on the latest trainings and professional development opportunities. He also follows the latest tips, tricks, and workaround, which are helpful for SharePoint implementations of all shapes and sizes.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 29, 2014
Google Searches, Prediction, and Fabulous Stock Market Returns?
July 28, 2014
I read “Google Searches Hold Key to Future Market Crashes.” The main idea in my opinion is:
Moat [female big thinker at Warwick Business School’ continued, “Our results are in line with the hypothesis that increases in searches relating to both politics and business could be a sign of concern about the state of the economy, which may lead to decreased confidence in the value of stocks, resulting in transactions at lower prices.”
So will the Warwick team cash in on the stock market?
Well, there is a cautionary item as well:
“Our results provide evidence of a relationship between the search behavior of Google users and stock market movements,” said Tobias Preis, Associate Professor of Behavioral Science and Finance at Warwick Business School. “However, our analysis found that the strength of this relationship, using this very simple weekly trading strategy, has diminished in recent years. This potentially reflects the increasing incorporation of Internet data into automated trading strategies, and highlights that more advanced strategies are now needed to fully exploit online data in financial trading.”
Rats. Quants are already on this it seems.
What’s fascinating to me is that the Warwick experts overlooked a couple of points; namely:
- Google is using its own predictive methods to determine what users see when they get a search result based on the behavior of others. Recursion, anyone?
- Google provides more searches with each passing day to those using mobile devices. By their nature, traditional desktop queries are not exactly the same as mobile device searches. As a workaround, Google uses clusters and other methods to give users what Google thinks the user really wants. Advertising, anyone?
- The stock pickers that are the cat’s pajamas at the B school have to demonstrate their acumen on the trading floor. Does insider trading play a role? Does working at a Goldman Sachs-type of firm help a bit?
Like perpetual motion, folks will keep looking for a way to get an edge. Why are large international banks paying some hefty fines? Humans, I believe, not algorithms.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2014
Google and Findability without the Complexity
July 28, 2014
Shortly after writing the first draft of Google: The Digital Gutenberg, “Enterprise Findability without the Complexity” became available on the Google Web site. You can find this eight page polemic at http://bit.ly/1rKwyhd or you can search for the title on—what else?—Google.com.
Six years after the document became available, Google’s anonymous marketer/writer raised several interesting points about enterprise search. The document appeared just as the enterprise search sector was undergoing another major transformation. Fast Search & Transfer struggled to deliver robust revenues and a few months before the Google document became available, Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for what was another enterprise search flame out. As you may recall, in 2008, Convera was essentially non operational as an enterprise search vendor. In 2005, Autonomy bought the once high flying Verity and was exerting its considerable management talent to become the first enterprise search vendor to top $500 million in revenues. Endeca was flush with Intel and SAP cash, passing on other types of financial instruments due to the economic downturn. Endeca lagged behind Autonomy in revenues and there was little hope that Endeca could close the gap between it and Autonomy.
Secondary enterprise search companies were struggling to generate robust top line revenues. Enterprise search was not a popular term. Companies from Coveo to Sphinx sought to describe their information retrieval systems in terms of functions like customer support or database access to content stored in MySQL. Vivisimo donned a variety of descriptions, culminating in its “reinvention” as a Big Data tool, not a metasearch system with a nifty on the fly clustering algorithm. IBM was becoming more infatuated with open source search as a way to shift development an bug fixes to a “community” working for the benefit of other like minded developers.
Google’s depiction of the complexity of traditional enterprise search solutions. The GSA is, of course, less complex—at least on the surface exposed to an administrator.
Google’s Findability document identified a number of important problems associated with traditional enterprise search solutions. To Google’s credit, the company did not point out that the majority of enterprise search vendors (regardless of the verbal plumage used to describe information retrieval) were either losing money or engaged in a somewhat frantic quest for financing and sales).
Here are the issues Google highlighted:
- User of search systems are frustrated
- Enterprise search is complex. Google used the word “daunting”, which was and still is accurate
- Few systems handle file shares, Intranets, databases, content management systems, and real time business applications with aplomb. Of course, the Google enterprise search solution does deliver on these points, asserted Google.
Furthermore, Google provides integrated search results. The idea is that structured and unstructured information from different sources are presented in a form that Google called “integrated search results.”
Google also emphasized a personalized experience. Due to the marketing nature of the Findability document, Google did not point out that personalization was a feature of information retrieval systems lashed to an alert and work flow component. Fulcrum Technologies offered a clumsy option for personalization. iPhrase improved on the approach. Even Endeca supported roles, important for the company’s work at Fidelity Investments in the UK. But for Google, most enterprise search systems were not personalizing with Google aplomb.
Google then trotted out the old chestnuts gleaned from a lunch discussion with other Googlers and sifting competitors’ assertions, consultants’ pronouncements, and beliefs about search that seemed to be self-evident truths; for example:
- Improved customer service
- Speeding innovation
- Reducing information technology costs
- Accelerating adoption of search by employees who don’t get with the program.
Google concluded the Findability document with what has become a touchstone for the value of the Google Search Appliance. Kimberly Clark, “a global health and hygiene company,” reduced administrative costs for indexing 22 million documents. The costs of the Google Search Appliance, the consultant fees, and the extras like GSA fail over provisions were not mentioned. Hard numbers, even for Google, are not part of the important stuff about enterprise search.
One interesting semantic feature caught my attention. Google does not use the word knowledge in this 2008 document.
Several questions:
- Was Google unaware of the fusion of information retrieval and knowledge?
- Does the Google Search Appliance deliver a laundry list of results, not knowledge? (A GSA user has to scan the results, click on links, and figure out what’s important to the matter at hand, so the word “knowledge” is inappropriate.)
- Why did Google sidestep providing concrete information about costs, productivity, and the value of indexing more content that is allegedly germane to a “personalized” search experience? Are there data to support the implicit assertion “more is better.” Returning more results may mean that the poor user has to do more digging to find useful information. What about a few, on point results? Well, that’s not what today’s technology delivers. It is a fiction about which vendors and customers seem to suspend disbelief.
With a few minor edits—for example, a genuflection to “knowledge—this 2008 Findability essay is as fresh today as it was when Google output its PDF version.
Several observations:
First, the freshness of the Findability paper underscores the staleness and stasis of enterprise search in the past six years. If you scan the free search vendor profiles at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles, explanations of the benefits and functions of search from the 1980s are also applicable today. Search, the enterprise variety, seems to be like a Grecian urn which “time cannot wither.”
Second, the assertions about the strengths and weaknesses of search were and still are presented without supporting facts. Everyone in the enterprise search business recycles the same cant. The approach reminds me of my experience questioning a member of a sect. The answer “It just is…” is simply not good enough.
Third, the Google Search Appliance has become a solution that costs as much, if not more, than other big dollar systems. Just run a query for the Google Search Appliance on www.gsaadvantage.gov and check out the options and pricing. Little wonder than low cost solutions—whether they are better or worse than expensive systems—are in vogue. Elasticsearch and Searchdaimon can be downloaded without charge. A hosted version is available from Qbox.com and is relatively free of headaches and seven figure charges.
Net net: Enterprise search is going to have to come up with some compelling arguments to gain momentum in a world of Big Data, open source, and once burned twice shy buyers. I wonder why venture / investment firms continue to pump money into what is same old search packaged with decades old lingo.
I suppose the idea that a venture funded operation like Attivio, BA Insight, Coveo, or any other company pitching information access will become the next Google is powerful. The problem is that Google does not seem capable of making its own enterprise search solution into another Google.
This is indeed interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2014
Surprising Sponsored Search Report and Content Marketing
July 28, 2014
Content marketing hath embraced the mid tier consulting firms. IDC, an outfit that used my information without my permission from 2012 until July 2014, has published a study about “knowledge.” I was not able to view the entire report, but the executive summary was available for download at http://bit.ly/1l10sGH. (Verified at 11 am, July 25, 2014) If you have some extra money, you may want to pay an IDC scale fee to learned about “the knowledge quotient.”
I am looking forward to the full IDC report, which promises to be as amusing as a recent Gartner report about search. The idea of rigorous, original research and an endorsement from a company like McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group is a Holy Grail of marketing. McKinsey and BCG (what I call blue chip firms), while not perfect, are produce client smiles for most of their engagements.
Consulting, however, does not have an American Bar Association or other certification process to “certify” a professional’s capabilities. In fact, at Booz, Allen I learned that Halliburton NUS, a nuclear consulting and services shop, was in the eyes of Booz, Allen a “grateful C.” Booz, Allen, like Bain and SRI, were grade A firms. I figured if I were hired at Booz, Allen I could pick up some A-level attributes. Consultants not trained by one of the blue chip firms had to work harder, smarter, and more effectively. Slack off and the consulting firms lower on the totem pole were unlikely to claw their way to the top. When a consulting firm has been a grade C for decades, it is highly unlikely that the blue chip outfits will worry too much about these competitors.
This IDC particular report 249643ES is funded by whom? The fact that I was able to download the report from one of the companies listed as a “sponsor” suggests that Smartlogic and nine other companies were underwriting the rigorous research. You can download the report (verified at 2 30 pm, July 25, 2014) at this link. Hasten to do it, please.
In the consulting arena, multi-client studies come in different flavors or variants. At Booz, Allen & Hamilton, the 1976 Study of World Economic Change was paid for by a number of large banks. We did not write about these banks. We delivered previously uncollected information in a Booz, Allen package. The boss was William Simon, former secretary of the US treasury. He brought a certain mindset and credibility to our project.
The authors of the IDC report are Dave Schubmehl and Dan Vesset. Frankly I don’t known enough about these “experts” to compare them to William Simon. My hunch is that Mr. Simon’s credentials might have had a bit more credibility. We supplemented the Booz, Allen team with specialists from Claremont College, where Peter Drucker was grooming some quite bright business analysts. In short, the high caliber Booz, Allen professionals, the Claremont College whiz kids, and William Simon combined to generate a report with a substantive information payload.
Based on my review of the Executive Summary of “The Knowledge Quotient,” direct comparisons with the Booz, Allen report or even reports from some of the mid tier firms’ analyses in my files are difficult to make. I can, however, highlight a handful of issues that warrant further consideration. Let’s look at three areas where the information highway may be melting in the summer heat.
1. A Focus on Knowledge and the Notion of a Quotient
I do a for fee column for Knowledge Management Magazine. I want to be candid. I am not sure that I have a solid understanding of what the heck “knowledge” is. I know that a quotient is the result obtained by dividing one number by another number. I am not able to accept that an intangible like “knowledge” can be converted to a numeric output. Lard on some other abstractions like “value” and the entire premise of the report is difficult to take seriously.
Well, quite a few companies did take the idea seriously, and we need to look at the IDC material to get a feel for the results based on a survey of 2,155 organizations and in depth interviews with 11 organizations “discovered.” The fact that there are 11 sponsors and 11 in depth interviews suggests that the sample is not an objective one as far as the interviews are concerned. But I may be wrong. Is that a signal that this IDC report is a marketing exercise dressed up as an objective report?
2. The Old Chestnut Makes an Appearance
A second clue is the inclusion of a matrix that reminded me of an unimaginative variation on the 1970 Boston Consulting Group’s tool. The BCG approach used market share or similar “hard” data about products and business units. A version of the BCG quadrant appears below:
IDC’s “experts” may be able to apply numbers to nebulous concepts. I would not want to try and pull off this legerdemain. The Schubmehl and Vesset version for IDC strikes me a somewhat spongy; for example, how does one create a quotient for knowledge when parameterizing “socialization” or “culture.” Is the association with New Age and pop culture intentional?
3. The Sponsors: An Eclectic Group United by Sponsoring IDC?
The third tip off to the focus of the report are the sponsors themselves. The 11 companies are an eclectic group, including a giant computer services firm (IBM) a handful of small companies with little or no corporate profile, and an indexing company that delivers training, services, and advice.
4. A Glimpse of the Takeaways
Fourth, the Executive Summary highlights what appear to be important takeaways from the year long research effort. For example, KQ leaders have their expectations exceeded presumably because these KQ savvy outfits have licensed one or more of the study sponsors’ products. The Executive Summary references a number of case studies. As you may know, positive case studies about search and content processing are not readily available. IDC promises a clutch of cases.
And IDC on pages iv and v of the Executive Summary uses a bullet list and some jargon to give a glimpse of high KQ outfits’ best practices. The idea is that if content is indexed and searchable, there are some benefits to the companies.
After 50 years, I assume IDC has this type of work nailed. I would point out that IDC used my information in its for fee reports from August 2012 until July 2014. My attorney was successful in getting IDC to stop connecting my name and that of my researchers with one of IDC’s top billing analysts. I find surfing on my content and name untoward. But again there are substantive differences between blue chip consulting firms and those lower on the for fee services totem pole.
I wonder if the full report will contain positive profiles of the sponsoring organizations. Be prepared to pay a lot for this “knowledge quotient” report. On the other hand, some of the sponsors may provide you with a copy if you have a gnawing curiosity about the buzzwords and jargon the report embraces; for example, analytics,
Some potential reader will have to write a big check. For example, to get one of the IDC reports with my name on it from 2012 to July 2014, the per report price was $3,500. I would not be surprised if the sticker for this KQ report is even higher. Based on the Executive Summary, KQ looks like a content marketing play. The “inclusions” are the profiles of the sponsors.
I will scout around for the Full Monty, and I hope it is fully clothed and buttoned up. Does IDC have a William Simon to ride herd on its “experts”? From my experience, IDC’s rigorousness is quite different. For example, IDC’s Dave Schubmehl used my information and attached himself to my name. Is this the behavior of a blue chip?
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2014
Pre Oracle InQuira: A Leader in Knowledge Assessment?
July 28, 2014
Oracle purchased InQuira in 2011. One of the writers for Beyond Search reminded me that Beyond Search covered the InQuira knowledge assessment marketing ploy in 2009. You can find that original article at http://bit.ly/WYYvF7.
InQuira’s technology is an option in the Oracle RightNow customer support system. RightNow was purchased by Oracle in 2001. For those who are the baseball card collectors of enterprise search, you know that RightNow purchased Q-Go technology to make its customer support system more intuitive, intelligent, and easier to use. (Information about Q-Go is at http://bit.ly/1nvyW8G.)
InQuira’s technology is not cut from a single chunk of Styrofoam. InQuira was formed in 2002 by fusing the Answerfriend, Inc. and Electric Knowledge, Inc. systems. InQuira was positioned as a question answering system. For years, Yahoo relied on InQuira to deliver answers to Yahooligans seeking help with Yahoo’s services. InQuira also provided the plumbing to www.honda.com. InQuira hopped on the natural language processing bandwagon and beat the drum until it layered on “knowledge” as a core functionality. The InQuira technology was packaged as a “semantic processing engine.”
InQuira used its somewhat ponderous technology along with AskJeeves’ type short cuts to improve the performance of its system. The company narrowed its focus from “boil the ocean search” to a niche focus. InQuira wanted to become the go to system for help desk applications.
InQuira’s approach involved vocabularies. These were similar to the “knowledge bases” included with some versions of Convera. InQuira, according to my files, used the phrase “loop of incompetence.” I think the idea was that traditional search systems did not allow a customer support professional to provide an answer that would make customers happy the majority of the time. InQuira before Oracle emphasized that its system would provide answers, not a list of Google style hits.
The InQuira system can be set up to display a page of answers in the form of sentences snipped from relevant documents. The idea is that the InQuira system eliminates the need for a user to review a laundry list of links.
The word lists and knowledge bases require maintenance. Some tasks can be turned over to scripts, but other tasks require the ministrations of a human who is a subject matter expert or a trained indexer. The InQuira concept knowledge bases also requires care and feeding to deliver on point results. I would point out that this type of knowledge care is more expensive than a nursing home for a 90 year old parent. A failure to maintain the knowledge bases usually results in indexing drift and frustrated users. In short, the systems are perceived as not working “like Google.”
Why is this nitty gritty important? InQuira shifted from fancy buzzwords as the sharp end of its marketing spear to the more fuzzy notion of knowledge. The company, beginning in late 2008, put knowledge first and the complex, somewhat baffling technology second. To generate sales leads, InQuira’s marketers hit on the idea of a “knowledge assessment.”
The outcome of the knowledge marketing effort was the sale of the company to Oracle in mid 2011. At the time of the sale, InQuira had an adaptor for Oracle Siebel. Oracle appears to have had a grand plan to acquire key customer support search and retrieval functionality. Armed with technology that was arguably better than the ageing Oracle SES system, Oracle could create a slam dunk solution for customer support applications.
Since the application, many search vendors have realized that some companies were not ready to write a Moby Dick sized check for customer support search. Search vendors adopted the lingo of InQuira and set out to make sales to organizations eager to reduce the cost of customer support and avoid the hefty license fees some vendors levied.
What I find important about InQuira are:
- It is one of the first search engines to be created by fusing two companies that were individually not able to generate sustainable revenue
- InQuira’s tactic to focus on customer support and then add other niche markets brought more discipline to the company’s message than the “one size fits all” that was popular with Autonomy and Fast Search.
- InQuira figured out that search was not a magnetic concept. The company was one of the first to explain its technology, benefits, and approach in terms of a nebulous concept; that is, knowledge. Who knows what knowledge is, but it does seem important, right?
- The outcome of InQuira’s efforts made it possible for stakeholders to sell the company to Oracle. Presumably this exist was a “success” for those who divided up Oracle’s money.
Net net: Shifting search and content processing to knowledge is a marketing tactic. Will it work in 2014 when search means Google? Some search vendors who have sold their soul to venture capitalists in exchange for millions of jump start dollars hope so.
My thought is that knowledge won’t sell information retrieval. Once a company installs a search systems, users can find what they need or not. Fuzzy does not cut it when users refuse to use a system, scream for a Google Search Appliance, or create a work around for a doggy system.
Stephen E Arnold, July 28, 2014
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