IDC: Knowledge Managemment and Knowledge Quotients
June 2, 2015
IDC tried to sell some of my work on Amazon without my permission. Much lawyering ensued, and IDC removed the $3,500 eight page heavily edited report about Attivio. I suppose that is a form of my knowledge management expertise: But $3,500 for eight pages without my caveats about Attivio? Goodness gracious. $3,500 for eight pages on Amazon, a company I describe as a digital WalMart..
I then wrote a humorous (to me) analysis of an IDC report about something called a knowledge quotient. You can read that Swiftian write up at this link: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/ . I write a column about knowledge management, and I found the notion of the KQ intellectually one of the lighter, almost diaphonous, IDC information molecules.
An I too harsh? No because now there is more evidence for my tough love approach to IDC and its KQ content marketing jingoism.
Navigate to “Where to for Knowledge Management in 2015: IDM Reader Survey.” The survey may or may not be spot on. Some of the data undermine the IDC KQ argument and raise important questions about those who would “manage knowledge.” Also, I had to read the title a couple of times to figure out what IDC’s expert was trying to communicate. The where to for is particularly clumsy to me.
I noted this passage:
“The challenge is for staff being able to find the time to contribute and leverage the knowledge/information repositories and having technology systems that are intuitive putting the right information that their fingertips, instead of having to wade through the sea of information spam.”
Ah, ha. KM is about search.
Wait. Not so fast. I highlighted this statement:
Technology is making it easier to integrate systems and connect across traditional boundaries, and social media has boosted people’s expectations for interaction and feedback. The result is that collaboration across the extended value chain is becoming the new normal.
Yikes. A revelation. KM is about social collaboration.
No, no. Another speed bump. I marked this insight too:
“There is also a fair gap between knowledge of the theoretical and knowledge of how things actually work. It is easy to say we should assign metadata to information to increase its discovery but if that metadata should really be more of a folksonomy, some systems and approaches are far too restrictive to enable this. Semantics is also a big issue.”
Finally. KM is about indexing and semantics. Yes, the info I needed.
Wrong again. I circled this brilliant gem:
“Knowledge management has probably lost it momentum as the so-called measurement tools are really measuring best practice which in turn is an average. Perhaps the approach should be along the lines of “Communities of Process” where there is a common objective but various degrees and level of participation but collectively provide a knowledge pool,” he [survey participant]observed.
The write continues along this rocky road of generalizations and buzzwords.
The survey data make three things clear to me:
- The knowledge quotient jargon is essentially a scoop of sales Jello, Jack Benny’s long suffering sponsor
- Knowledge is so broad IDC’s attempt to clarify gave me the giggles
- Workers know that knowledge has value, so workers protect it with silos.
I assume that experts cooked up the knowledge quotient notion. The pros running the survey reported data which suggests that knowledge management is a bit of a challenge.
Perhaps IDC experts will coordinate their messaging in the future? In my opinion, two slabs of spam do not transmogrify into prime rib.
Little wonder IDC contracts is unable to function, one of its officers (Dave Schubmehl) resells my research on Amazon without my permission at $3,500 per eight pages edited to remove the considerations Attivio warranted from my team. Then an IDC research unit provides data which strike me as turning the silly KQ thing into search engine optimization corn husks.
Is IDC able to manage its own knowledge processes using its own theories and data? Perhaps IDC should drop down a level and focus on basic business processes? Yet IDC’s silos appear before me, gentle reader. and the silos are built from hefty portions of a mystery substance. Could it be consulting spam, to use IDC’s own terminology?
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2015
JackBe May Have a New Owner
June 2, 2015
Jack Be, a Maryland based intelligence software company, sold to Software AG in late 2013. If the information in “Aurea Software with Renewed Offer to Acquire All Update Software AG Shares” is accurate, the major shareholder of Software AG may acquire the German firm. The buyer could be Aurea Software. According the firm’s Web site:
At Aurea, we constantly challenge ourselves to identify and engineer truly transformative customer experiences, and we look for innovative ways that software and processes can transform an average experience for your customers into a great one. Our customer experience platform helps over 1,500 companies worldwide build, execute, monitor and optimize the end-to-end customer journey for a diverse range of industries including Energy, Retail, Insurance, Travel & Hospitality and Life Sciences.
According to a BusinessWeek profile, Aurea is the new positioning of Progress Software. BusinessWeek says:
Aurea Software was formerly known as Progress Software Corp., Sonic, Savvion, Actional and DXSI. As a result of the acquisition of Progress Software Corp., Sonic, Savvion, Actional and DXSI by Trilogy Enterprises, Inc, Progress Software Corp., Sonic, Savvion, Actional and DXSI’s name was changed. Progress Software Corp., Sonic, Savvion, Actional and DXSI comprises four progress software businesses.
A document attributed to Progress Software provides an interesting profile of Aurea. You can find this document as of June 1, 2015, at this link. My recollection is that Progress (now Aurea) used to own the EasyAsk search technology. In May 2015, Aurea acquired Lyris. According to the Aurea-Lyris news release:
Lyris is a global leader of innovative email and digital marketing solutions that help companies reach customers at scale and create personalized value at every touch point. Lyris’ products and services empower marketers to design, automate, and optimize experiences that facilitate superior engagement, increase conversions, and deliver measurable business value.
Jack Be’s screen scraping technology can be used to figure out what customers’ are saying on the Internet and on a licensee’s help desk system. Jack Be did include query tools. If the Reuters’ story is off base, we will update this post. One assumes that the new Progress will “empower” some significant progress.
Stephen E Arnold, June 2, 2015
SharePoint Grasps for Relevancy in the Realm of Social
June 2, 2015
Ever since the rise of social platforms, SharePoint has attempted to keep up. While many users would say that these attempts were struggled behind the majority of social technology, Microsoft was making an effort to keep their enterprise heading in the social direction. The battle has been long and hard and Redmond Magazine gives the latest update in its article, “Microsoft Looks To Bring Social Back to SharePoint with Office Graph.”
The article describes how Microsoft is more or less stuck between a rock and a hard place in their game of social “keep-up”:
“Not that an enterprise-class team and document collaboration vendor should try to match the capabilities of what are, more often than not, a collection of unsecure, noncompliant, sometimes untested tools . . . But here’s the rub: if you don’t offer end users the tools they want, and make key features available on the mobile devices (and operating systems) they want to use, all of those security, auditing, compliance, and reporting standards will become irrelevant because people won’t use your platform.”
So Microsoft continues to battle for relevancy. Its latest move is Office Graph, and analysts are optimistic that this social layer may finally be a way for Microsoft to deliver on its promise of personalized and intelligent social solutions. To stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the social world of SharePoint, keep an eye on ArnoldIT.com, in particular his SharePoint feed. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and follower of SharePoint. His reporting offers a succinct insight into the developments that affect productivity and user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Prepare To Update Your Cassandra
June 2, 2015
It is time for an update to Apache’s headlining, open source, enterprise search software! The San Diego Times let us know that “DataStax Enterprise 4.7 Released” and it has a slew of updates set to make open source search enthusiasts drool. DataStax is a company that built itself around the open source Apache Cassandra software. The company specializes in enterprise applications for search and analytics.
The newest release of DataStax Enterprise 4.7 includes several updates to improve a user’s enterprise experience:
“…includes a production-certified version of Cassandra 2.1, and it adds enhanced enterprise search, analytics, security, in-memory, and database monitoring capabilities. These include a new certified version of Apache Solr and Live Indexing, a new DSE feature that makes data immediately available for search by leveraging Cassandra’s native ability to run across multiple data centers.”
The update also includes DataStax’s OpCenter 5.2 for enhanced security and encryption. It can be used to store encryption keys on servers and to manage admin security.
The enhanced search capabilities are the real bragging points: fault-tolerant search operations-used to customize failed search responses, intelligent search query routing-queries are routed to the fastest machines in a cluster for the quickest response times, and extended search analytics-using Solr search syntax and Apache Spark research and analytics tasks can run simultaneously.
DataStax Enterprise 4.7 improves enterprise search applications. It will probably pull in users trying to improve their big data plans. Has DataStax considered how its enterprise platform could be used for the cloud or on mobile computing?
Whitney Grace, June 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Flaws in the Peer Review System
June 2, 2015
The article titled Does Peer Review Do More Harm Than Good? on Maclean’s explores the issues facing today’s peer review system. Peer review is the process of an expert looking over a scientific paper before it is published in order to double check the findings. It is typically unpaid and as a result, can take a long time. In an effort to solve the wait time problem, some journals started offering “fast tracking” or a hefty fee that would guarantee a quick turnaround for peer review. The article quotes Professor Alex Holcombe on the subject,
“It ran contrary to many of the scientific values that I hold dear,” says Holcombe, “which is: What appears in scientific journals is determined not by money, but rather the merit of the actual science.” He says fast-tracking is a formula for taking shortcuts—such tight timelines may force reviewers and editors to make decisions without proper scrutiny—and worries it will jeopardize reviewers’ neutrality.”
The article goes on to compare peer review to democracy- the best of all evils. But now predatory journals are posing as legitimate academic journals in an attempt to get money out of desperate-to-publish scientists. Not only is this exploitative, it also leads to bad science getting published. For scientists, the discrepancies may be obvious, but the article points out that journalists and politicians might not know the difference, leading to the spread of “crackpot views” without a base in science.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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Short Honk: Burying Stories? Impossible or Not?
June 1, 2015
Short honk: I read this item: “Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned SourceForge.” The idea is that publications have to have an editorial policy. In this article, it seems that one popular next generation news aggregator is making some interesting choices. According to the article,
If you’ve followed any tech news aggregator in the past week, you’ve probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a long history of adware laden installers, but they used to be opt-in. It appears that the process is now mandatory for many projects.
The write up concludes:
In that vein, it’s funny to see Slashdot (which is owned by the same company as SourceForge) also attempting to destroy their own brand. They’re the only major tech news aggregator which hasn’t had a story on this, and that’s because they’ve buried every story that someone submits. This has prompted people to start submitting comments about this on other stories.
If accurate, filtering happens at publications large and small. It even happens at Beyond Search. We don’t report some of the crazier assertions made by search and content processing companies. Example: a “new” search system that displays results at page thumbnails or “breakthroughs” in natural language processing. Sorry.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015
Legal Aquisition Ahead? For Sure, for Sure
June 1, 2015
I read, along with Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters executives, the article with this click attractive title: “Westlaw and Lexis Nexis: Are Your Days Numbered Yet?” The answer is, “Nope.” Legal eagles, the government, and Trump-wealthy online surfers will continue to use LexisNexis and Westlaw for a while.
The article references new online services which are trying to offer alternatives at a lower cost. mentioned in the write up is Casetext at https://casetext.com. I expected to see a reference to Fastcase at http://www.fastcase.com and maybe a pointer to Fastcase buying LexisNexis’ Collier TopForm & File.
My hunch is that legal information is getting more difficult to locate. Verify this by looking for information related to the MIC, RAC, and ZPIC matters in US government Web sites like www.usa.gov and in the commercial legal information services. I found this research a challenge.
If Casetext has some oomph, I assume Reed and Thomson will acquire the company. Online legal research has a certain predictability inherent it its business model.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015
Semantic Search Failure Rate: 50% and There Is Another Watson Search System
June 1, 2015
The challenge of creating a semantic search system is a mini Mt. Everest during an avalanche. One of the highest profile semantic search systems was Siderean Software. The company quietly went quiet several years ago. I thought about Siderean when I followed up on a suggestion made by one of the stalwarts who read Beyond Search.
That reader sent me a link to a list of search systems. The list appeared on AI3. I could not determine when the list was compiled. To check the sticking power of the companies/organizations on the list, we looked up each vendor.
The results were interesting. Half of the listed companies were no longer in the search business.
Here’s the full list and the Beyond Search researcher’s annotations:
| Search System | Type |
| Antidot Finder Suite | Commercial vendor |
| BAAGZ | Not available |
| Beagle++ | Not available |
| BuddyFinder (CORDER) | Search buddyspace and Jabber |
| CognitionSearch | Emphasis on monitoring |
| ConWeaver | Customer support |
| DOAPspace | Search not a focus of the site |
| EntityCube | Displays a page with a handful of ideographs |
| Falcons | Search system from Nanjing University |
| Ferret | Open source search library |
| Flamenco | A Marti Hearst search interface framework |
| HyperTwitter | Does not search current Twitter stream |
| LARQ | Redirects to Apache Jena, an open source Java framework for building Semantic Web and Linked Data applications |
| Lucene | Apache Lucene Core |
| Lucene-skos | Deprecated; points visitor to Lucene |
| LuMriX | Medical search |
| Lupedia | 404 error |
| OntoFrame | Redirect due to 404 error |
| Ontogator | Link to generic view based RDF search engine |
| OntoSearch | 404 error |
| Opossum | Page content not related to search |
| Picky | Search engine in Ruby script |
| Searchy | A metasearch engine performing a semantic translation into RDF; page updated in 2006 |
| Semantic Search | 404 |
| Semplore | 404 |
| SemSearch | Keyword based semantic search. Link points to defunct Google Code service |
| Sindice | 404 |
| SIREn | 404 |
| SnakeT | Page renders; service 404s |
| Swangler | Displays SemWebCentral.org; last update 2005 |
| Swoogle | Search over 10,000 ontologies |
| SWSE | 404 |
| TrueKnowledge | 404 |
| Watson | Not IBM; searches semantic documents |
| Zebra | General purpose open source structured text indexing and retrieval engine |
| ZoomInfo | Commercial people search system |
The most interesting entry in the list is the Watson system which seems to be operating as part of an educational institution.
Here’s what the Open.ac.uk Watson looks like:
IBM’s attorneys may want to see who owns what rights to the name “Watson.” But for IBM’s working on a Watson cookbook, this errant Watson may have been investigated, eh, Sherlock.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015
Loon Balloon: Ups and Downs
June 1, 2015
I think the idea of a search vendor creating balloons to extend Internet access is a swell idea. I would prefer a bit more effort on relevance, precision, and recall, but balloons are good. Two items snagged my semi buoyant attention while catching up on my reading yesterday.
The first concerns an alleged Loon dégonfle as reported in “Google’s Solar-Powered Internet Drone Crashes During Test Flight.” The write up states:
Google has confirmed that a prototype solar-powered drone intended to one day provide Internet access from way up in the sky crashed earlier this month during a test flight in New Mexico. The unmanned Solara 50 built by Titan Aerospace, the company Google bought last year, crashed on May 1 shortly after takeoff at a test field east of Albuquerque. The incident was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed Friday by Google.
Google i/o was history when I first noticed the story.
The second Loon item I noted was “Google Details New Project Loon Tech to Keep Its Internet Balloons Afloat.” The article highlights two improvements in the Loon balloons:
First, balloons will be autolaunched. Coming down, at this time, may be automatic.
Second, Google engineers “have devised a way to pass high-frequency Internet signals from balloon to balloon in midair, which allows individual balloons to roam 400 kilometers to 800 kilometers away from a ground station.”
Yep, balloons, as I recall from my callow youth, drift.
I highlighted this passage, which does not suggest relevance will be improved with the launch of balloons:
By the end of the year, Cassidy [a Google wizard] hopes to be able to provide a few days of continuous service in its tests. So far during trials in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Brazil, and other countries, Google has succeeded only in providing intermittent access before the wind carries a balloon off. If it can overcome the remaining challenges, Cassidy is hoping to roll out the service more widely by the end of 2016 and is looking at underserved Internet markets such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia as the best places to start.
No mention of improved search results, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015
Google’s Corporate Sovereignty Is Not Confined to US
June 1, 2015
The article on The Daily Dot titled The United States of Google reacts to the information that Google now spends more on lobbying than any other company. This may not come as a huge surprise, but it does carry heavy implications about the power and affluence of the country- er, company. This explains a great deal of the tension that Google faces in Europe, where competition is more favorable than monopoly. The article refers to the event in 2010 of Google leaving its partnership with China after controversy over censorship. The article explains,
In one sense, this was a righteous step for Google, demonstrating that they knew how to put its foot down in the face of toxic regimes. But in another sense, it was a scary moment, too. After all, do we really want Google to be more effective than the U.S. itself when it comes to dealing with tyrants?… “Does Google have more direct impact on human rights and freedoms in China than the Obama Administration?”
The article goes on to discuss what “Googlestan” might look like in a very lighthearted yet ominous tone. The ubiquity of Google is at the center of the concern- who can get through a day without relying on some aspect of Google’s services, from Gmail to Chrome to search? By becoming so dependent on a company as individuals, a nation and perhaps even a world, have we created a monster?
Chelsea Kerwin, June 1, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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