IBM May Need a More Robust Classification Solution

August 18, 2011

According to talk around the water cooler, some IBM content and search units are poking around for a classification “solution”. We think the rumor is mostly big company confusion since IBM already has software available to assess and address an organization’s content classification needs through the use of several components. According to the IBM website:

Most unstructured content is either trapped in silos across the organization or entirely unmanaged “content in the wild.” A majority of that unstructured content can be deemed unnecessary – over-retained, irrelevant, or duplicate – and should be either decommissioned or deleted.

As we understand it, one licenses the  Classification Module and/or Content Analytics software to prevent the previously stated problem and to provide content classification.

Sounds great like the ads for IBM mainframes and the promotional information about

But a disturbing question to the ArnoldIT goslings who wear blue IBM logos: What if this stuff costs too much and does not deliver on the fly classification for real time processing of tweets and Google Plus public content?

Maybe an IBM box of parts with an expensive IBM engineering team is not exactly what some outfits require? Perhaps IBM should look around and maybe snap up one of the hot players in the space. IBM has been announcing partnerships with a number of interesting companies. We track  Digital Reasoning and and think its technology looks very promising? IBM is in a good position to have an impact in the data analysis space, but it needs tools that go beyond its in house code and Cognos and SPSS methods in our opinion.

Jasmine Ashton, August 19, 2011

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search

Going Fast and Cheap Online for Information

July 4, 2011

The Web: Fast, Cheap, and Getting Worse by the Minute,” declares InfoWorld. Writer Robert X. Cringely begins with the old adage, “cheap, fast, or good. Pick two.” Mr. Cringely believes that “good” has been left on the table in today’s Web-based journalism.

Fast and good requires a significant financial investment, he insists, like the huge staffs papers used to have but can no longer afford. Good and cheap requires more time, he states, and belongs to the realm of monthly magazine, not daily news sites. Can Internet journalism do anything right?

The author does site his employer as an example of fast and good, but seems concerned that InfoWorld quality may soon fall victim to the specter of budget cuts.

In summary, Cringely asserts,

Web publications are under tremendous pressure to crank out as much material as they can as quickly as possible. More stories equals greater Google juice and more traffic; more traffic equals more ad impressions and clicks, and thus more revenue. That’s the formula. And it’s getting worse.

Is Mr. Cringely throwing some in the writing profession under a bus? I think the columnist has a point, but we have to work with what we’re given. This is just another call to change the world. Not likely to happen.

As the piece acknowledges, the world of journalism has changed dramatically and it won’t be going back to the print model any time soon. Papers that are transitioning online are indeed cutting staff and other expenses. This means less research, less editing, and less fact-checking. I suggest that this puts the onus back on the reader—don’t believe everything you read, and do your own fact checking. Nowadays that doesn’t even require a trip to the library. Just open a new tab and check FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, or even Snopes.com. Right there on the Web.

Maybe neither traditional nor the new media is perfect? I just know there’s no use griping about the current state of affairs. We must adapt, writers and readers alike, for there’s no going back. Consumers should take responsibility for their own intellectual explorations, and confirm with a variety of sources before spreading information. It’s common knowledge, or should be, that you can’t just accept anything you read on the Internet.

Perhaps, in the long run, worrying about the quality of reading material will prove to be a moot point anyway. “Snap in another video, mom. I have to learn how to perform a physics experiment and the book is just too much work.”

Cynthia Murrell July 4, 2011

Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search

Amazon and RIM: Sour Grapes Day and Its Whines

June 30, 2011

Long day for the goose. Most folks heading toward 67 do the golf thing, maybe drink a lunch, or hang out at the mall and check out the walkers. Not me. I was checking out the latest in news and info on the rapidly deteriorating Internet. It is not just the lousy throughput here in Harrod’s Creek, it is the increase in the whine volume. Yep, sour grapes make whine.

The first example is the anonymous letter about the management woes at Research in Motion. Based in Waterloo, the BlackBerry whine maker criticized policies, procedures, innovation, and the furniture. Yep, griping about the office decorations will fix up the BlackBerry orchard in a nonce. You will want to read “Open Letter to BlackBerry Bosses: Senior RIM Exec Tells All as Company Crumbles around Him.” There are some great lines in the letter. The passage I found most amusing was:

Let’s obsess about what is best for the end user. We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care. We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months. These people aren’t hypnotized zombies, they simply love beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work. Android has a major weakness — it will always lack the simplicity and elegance that comes with end-to-end device software, middleware and hardware control. We really have a great opportunity to build something new and “uniquely BlackBerry” with the QNX platform. Let’s start an internal innovation revival with teams focused on what users will love instead of chasing “feature parity” and feature differentiation for no good reason (Adobe Flash being a major example). When was the last time we pushed out a significant new experience or feature that wasn’t already on other platforms? Rather than constantly mocking iPhone and Android, we should encourage key decision makers across the board to use these products as their primary device for a week or so at a time — yes, on Exchange! This way we can understand why our users are switching and get inspiration as to how we can build our next-gen products even better! It’s incomprehensible that our top software engineers and executives aren’t using or deeply familiar with our competitor’s products.

The snippet has some interesting assertions. Let me squeeze those grapes:

  1. RIM takes guidance from partners and lawyers. Hey, partners and lawyers know what to do. Partners resell and lawyers bill by the hour. A sharp outfit like RIM not be able to climb much higher up the innovation jungle gym unless it pays more attention to partners and lawyers. RIM is on the right track.
  2. Android has “a weakness.” That is one reason why the whiner is not working at Google. Google is the top dog.  Android. Weakness. Oxymoron.
  3. Features. Look. Features made Microsoft Word the outstanding product it is. I find the intelligent reformatting, the wonderful numbering function, the intuitive placement of images, and the lightning fast response regardless of computing platform nearly perfect. RIM needs to work harder to add complex functionality. Stop whining and starting adding more icons, earthworm menus, and ever-so-precise trackball ALT key thingies.

Now read “An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos On Terminating The Amazon Affiliate Program In California.” Like the high pitched scree of the RIM letter,  this epistle makes my ear drums bleed and my frontal lobes throb throb throb. The issue is that a high traffic Web site gets a piece of the action, a commission, a kick back, a bounty, a beak dip, or a cut of what ever a visitor to an affiliate site spends on Amazon.  The world’s smartest man  may struggle with uptime for its blend of open source and proprietary software for webby services things, but TWSM, aka Jeff Bezos, knows how to make money. Here’s a passage I found amusing:

Not only are you [The World’s Smartest Man] sucking purchases (and thus potentially jobs) out of my state and undermining those retailers, but you’re also not letting the state earn off the sales tax like those retailers who actually are based here do. That makes me feel really good as a Californian.

Why should Amazon pay sales tax?

Amazon is a sort of virtual company. It does not drive on the roads of California too often. It does not use the California school or sewer systems all that much, and it does not provide fire protection for TWSM’s Seattle area properties. Why pay for what you do not use, do not need, and do not acknowledge as being relevant to the Amazon implementation of the Walton retail vision built of bits, not bricks?

So what’s with the whining about Amazon’s doing what a company is supposed to do in post crash America? Any nibbling at the edges of Amazon’s  revenue is bad. What is bad for  Amazon is bad for Mr. Bezos. Mr. Bezos wants his way in a manner similar to other  tech titans’ perception of right and proper behavior. This whiner wants an entity in America to be fair. Get with the program. Join Prime. Suck it up and get back to search engine optimization, a field of great value and promise.

So there you have it. Two whines. If I drank, I suppose I could slurp some whine too. I am more of a  commenter and from a goose pond at that. These two whiners are muddying the waters of the way business is conducted in the US today. Get with the program and put a stopper in the whine bottle, please. Honk.

Stephen E Arnold, July 1, 2011

Stephen  E Arnold, described by super real news person Ken Auletta as gruff is the author of the New Landscape of Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway. The monograph is not available for the BlackBerry (I cannot read my screen’s type. Too small.) and not available through Amazon either. I often wonder why I bother to write candid and objective analyses of enterprise search systems. Whining is where it is at for today.

The Wages of SEO: Content Free Content

June 28, 2011

In the last two weeks, I have participated in a number of calls about the wrath of Panda. The idea is that sites which produce questionable content like Beyond Search suck. I agree that Beyond Search sucks. The site provides me with a running diary of what I find important in search and content processing. Some search vendors have complained that I cover Autonomy and not other engines. I find Autonomy interesting. It held an IPO, buys companies, manages reasonably well, and is close to generating an annual turnover of $1.0. I don’t pay much attention to Dieselpoint and a number of other vendors because these companies do not strike me as disruptive or interesting.

I paddle away in Harrod’s Creek, oblivious to the machinations of “content farms.” I have some people helping me because I have a number of projects underway, and once I find an article I want to capture, I enlist the help of librarians and other specialists. Other folks are doing similar things, but rely on ads for revenue which I do not do. I have some Google ads, but these allow me to look at Google reports and keep tabs o n various Googley functions. The money buys a tank of gas every month. Yippy.

I read “Google’s War on Nonsense.” You should too while I go out to clean the pasture spring. The main point is that a number of outfits pay people to write content that is of questionable value. No big surprise. I noted this passage in the write up:

The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information. A few months ago, tired of coming across creepy, commodified content where I expected ordinary language, I resolved to turn to mobile apps for e-books, social media, ecommerce and news, and use the open Web only sparingly. I had grown confused by the weird articles I often stumbled on. These prose-widgets are not hammered out by robots, surprisingly. But they are written by writers who work like robots. As recent accounts of life in these words-are-money mills make clear, some content-farm writers have deadlines as frequently as every 25 minutes. Others are expected to turn around reported pieces, containing interviews with several experts, in an hour. Some compose, edit, format and publish 10 articles in a single shift. Many with decades of experience in journalism work 70-hour weeks for salaries of $40,000 with no vacation time. The content farms have taken journalism hackwork to a whole new level.

My take on this approach to information—what I call content  free content—is that we are in the midst of a casserole created by Google and its  search engine optimization zealots. Each time Google closes a loophole for metatag stuffing or putting white text on a white background, another corner cutter cooks up some other way to confuse and dilute Google’s relevance recipe.

The content free content revolution has been with us for a long time.  A  Web searcher’s ability to recognize baloney is roughly in line with the Web searcher’s ability to invest the time and effort to fact check, ferret out the provenance of a source, and think critically. Google makes this flaw in its ad machine’s approach with its emphasis on “speed” and “predictive methods.” Speed means that Google is not doing much, if any, old fashioned index look up. The popular stuff is cached and updated when it suits the Google. No search required, thank you. Speed, just like original NASCAR drivers, is a trick. And that trick works. Maybe not for queries like mine, but I don’t count literally. Predictive means that Google uses inputs to create a query, generate good enough results, and have them ready or pushed to the user. Look its magic. Just not to me.

With short cuts in evidence at Google and in the world of search engine optimization, with Web users who are in a hurry and unwilling or unable to check facts, with ad revenue and client billing more important than meeting user needs—we have entered the era of content free content. As lousy as Beyond Search is, at least I use the information in my for fee articles, my client reports, and my monographs.

The problem, however, is that for many people what looks authoritative is authoritative. A Google page that puts a particular company or item at the top of the results list is the equivalent of a Harvard PhD  for some. Unfortunately the Math Club folks are not too good with content. Algorithms are flawless, particularly when algorithms generate big ad revenue.

Can we roll back the clock on relevance, reading skills, critical thinking, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake? Nope, search is knowledge. SEO is the into content free content. In my opinion, Google likes this situation just fine.

Stephen E Arnold, June 28, 2011

You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.

Google Begins the Path of Penance: A Page Is Turned

June 24, 2011

Countries can be so annoying. The purpose of 21st century American business is to generate revenue. The other ideas about what business is about are like scabby knaves. One sleeping policeman in America are elected officials, hired aides, and assorted hangers on.

I read in my hard copy of the Wall Street Journal, which actually arrived dry and early this morning, the story “FTC to Serve Google with Subpoenas in Broad Antitrust Probe.” For a short time, you may be able to read this lengthy write up online. Wait too long, and you will either have to pay to access the story or schlep to the local library to see if it has sufficient funds in the post Google world to have a subscription to Mr. Murdoch’s version of the New York Times. One interesting passage in my opinion is:

Google is quickly expanding its array of services that seek to directly answer users’ queries, departing from its original strategy of sending them quickly to the most relevant site. Since 2009, for example, Google has directed people who search for mortgages or credit cards to its own marketplace for such offers.

The key point in the write up was that some folks seem to think that Google fiddles search results intentionally or unintentionally to make its one trick pony leap through a ring of fire and walk backwards. Allegations are these. News aggregators are overflowing with comments from hither and yon. On one hand, there are other media giants to the search engine optimization crowd.

I have written three monographs about Google, posts in this blog, columns in KMWorld and Enterprise Technology Management, and referenced Google in my lectures. I declined to be interviewed by Ken Auletta, which earned me the accolade “gruff”. I played word games with the Viacom’s legal eagles until the top dog figured out I wasn’t going to talk about the GOOG.

I will stick to my policy but I can offer three observations which you are free to ignore, consider, or comment upon in the comments section of this blog.

First, other than creating a distraction from significant economic challenges in the US and global issues in more than 60 countries, will the “investigation” deliver something other than:

  • A news moment
  • A fee fest for attorneys and advisors
  • Endless explanations to our elected officials who use Google daily to find out what’s happening without understanding without understanding how Google works?

My view is, “Nope.”

Second, will those who allege Google is like one of those crooked card dealers in 1950s’ westerns get their traffic back, generate more revenue from Google Adwords, or rise shine more brightly in the SEO firmament.

My view is, “Nope.”

Third, will Google reveal its systems and methods, explain how sites that stumble through an algorithmic tripwire, or point out how a “janitor” tidies certain values in a table for a Google process?

My view is, “Nope.”

Google, like any corporate entity, has a life cycle. Google is at the rite of passage for young warrior companies. The firm and its youthful chief must endure the Months of Interrogation followed by the Path of Penance.

At the end of the journey, the youthful chief will emerge stronger and wiser. And what about the aggrieved Webmasters, SEO charlatans, and legal eagles? Pretty much the same.

Stephen E Arnold, June 24, 2011

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion

Search and Deceive: A Fast Cycle Adventure

May 23, 2011

Here’s how I learn about rumors. Some asks me, “Did you know, Mr. Anonymous, the chief technology office of Big Dreamer Inc. resigned?” I have documented some of these follies in Mysteries of Online.

“Nope, I say.” I am not too curious because in the last couple of months, I have grown weary of the revolving door at search and content processing companies changing executives at a pace more sprightly than Max, the Wonder Boxer can chase squirrels in Harrod’s Creek. The “revolving door syndrome” does not interest me.

A search mistake. Source: www.funnyjunksite.com

The investors and the families win a chance to get tough in life’s lotto. Lives of well meaning, but often search challenged executives, are temporarily disrupted. It is easy to become an expert in search and get into the search consulting pool. Just whip up a LinkedIn page and start selling yourself as an expert in taxonomy, SharePoint, metatagging, business intelligence, big data, open source, visualization, or what ever strikes one’s fantasy. A faux consultant who knows a conference organizer can give a dozen or more talks in an effort to Hoover in as many engagements as possible. Isn’t the modern information economy special.

The whine of the revolving door presages yet another repositioning move by the new management team. You probably have picked up on the “search to business intelligence” or “search to sentiment” type of plays. I would mention search to customer support, but that sector has managed to make “customer support” synonymous with “we don’t want to have any interaction with customers.” So I pay modest attention to that segment’s thrashing like a catfish in the bottom of my neighbor’s bass boat.

So back to search and deceive.

Often, at a remove of a few days or weeks, I hear something along the lines: “Did you know that Big Dreamer Inc. is hiring the Super Competent Analysis Management (SCAM) firm to procure another search system?”

My response is usually, “What vendor was the incumbent?” and “Who handled the installation, integration, optimization, and roll out?”

Most  Fortune 1000 firms go after big fish vendors. After a search system is in place or at a very advanced stage, the management panic and throw the floundering search vendor back into the water really fast. (Please, do not conflate this “fast” which means quickly with a very, very popular enterprise search, content management, collaboration, and business intelligence solution.)

The intersection of nuking a CTO on whose watch an enterprise search system was licensed is one tell. The other is the hiring of the SCAM firm to procure a solution to repair the broken information access problem. Unfortunately, the problem not as simple as dumping one search vendor and signing up with another.

This type of firing, hiring, and procuring cycle suggests to me:

  1. A failure within the management of the licensing customer
  2. A flawed requirements statement and then a lousy procurement process
  3. Inadequate resources such as time, know how, money, and infrastructure
  4. Over reliance on “friends”, in house technical staff, and one’s own confidence in one’s ability to solve any problem.

The most recent rumor concerns Microsoft’s search system, a certain commercial database vendor, and a manager with a new associate of arts degree from the School of Hard Knocks. Today is May 21, 2011. More information as it becomes available to me. Since we don’t do news, I will wait until an open source document becomes available.

Exciting, exciting. Anticipating, anticipating.

Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2011

Freebie unlike the cost of an education from the School of Hard Knocks

Search: An Information Retrieval Fukushima?

May 18, 2011

Information about the scale of the horrific nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is now becoming more widely known.

Expertise and Smoothing

My interest in the event is the engineering of a necklace of old-style reactors and the problems the LOCA (loss of coolant accident) triggered. The nagging thought I had was that today’s nuclear engineers understood the issues with the reactor design, the placement of the spent fuel pool, and the risks posed by an earthquake. After my years in the nuclear industry, I am quite confident that engineers articulated these issues. However, the technical information gets “smoothed” and simplified. The complexities of nuclear power generation are well known at least in engineering schools. The nuclear engineers are often viewed as odd ducks by the civil engineers and mechanical engineers. A nuclear engineer has to do the regular engineering stuff of calculating loads and looking up data in hefty tomes. But the nukes need grounding in chemistry, physics, and math, lots of math. Then the engineer who wants to become a certified, professional nuclear engineer has some other hoops to jump through. I won’t bore you with the details, but the end result of the process produces people who can explain clearly a particular process and its impacts.

image

Does your search experience emit signs of troubles within?

The problem is that art history majors, journalists, failed Web masters, and even Harvard and Wharton MBAs get bored quickly. The details of a particular nuclear process makes zero sense to someone more comfortable commenting about the color of Mona Lisa’s gown. So “smoothing” takes place. The ridges and outcrops of scientific and statistical knowledge get simplified. Once a complex situation has been smoothed, the need for hard expertise is diminished. With these simplifications, the liberal arts crowd can “reason” about risks, costs, upsides, and downsides.

image

A nuclear fall out map. The effect of a search meltdown extends far beyond the boundaries of a single user’s actions. Flawed search and retrieval has major consequences, many of which cannot be predicted with high confidence.

Everything works in an acceptable or okay manner until there is a LOCA or some other problem like a stuck valve or a crack in a pipe in a radioactive area of the reactor. Quickly the complexities, risks, and costs of the “smoothed problem” reveal the fissures and crags of reality.

Web search and enterprise search are now experiencing what I call a Fukushima event. After years of contentment with finding information, suddenly the dashboards are blinking yellow and red. Users are unable to find the information needed to do their job or something as basic as locate a colleague’s telephone number or office location. I have separated Web search and enterprise search in my professional work.

I want to depart for a moment and consider the two “species” of search as a single process before the ideas slip away from me. I know that Web search processes publicly accessible content, has the luxury of ignoring servers with high latency, and filtering content to create an index that meets the vendors’ needs, not the users’ needs. I know that enterprise search must handle diverse content types, must cope with security and access controls, and perform more functions that one of those two inch wide Swiss Army knives on sale at the airport in Geneva. I understand. My concern is broader is this write up. Please, bear with me.

Read more

Tracking: Does It Matter?

May 11, 2011

A news story broke this week that was more difficult for many to ignore; it seems our beloved iPhones and iPads are paying us the same attention we lavish on them. It turns out these Apple devices keep an internal log of every cell tower or hot spot they connect to, in essence creating a map of the user’s movements for as long as ten months. It gets better. The log file is highly visible and unencrypted, making it accessible to anyone with your device in their hands.

image

Getting the scent. Source: http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2011/feb/07/wsweat01-beagle-found-in-a-jiffy-by-tracking-dogs-ar-760887/

This news stems from a couple of British programmers who stumbled upon said “secret” location file. In the midst of the melee that ensued from outraged consumers and lawmakers alike, I was directed to a Bloomberg article titled “Researcher: iPhone Location Data Already Used By Cops”.

Interestingly enough, a rendition of this same story has been covered by the press months ago, only featured in a different light courtesy of an individual studying forensic computing. Per the write-up: “In a post on his blog, he explains that the existence of the location database—which tracks the cell phone towers your phone has connected to—has been public in security circles for some time.

While it’s not widely known, that’s not the same as not being known at all. In fact, he has written and presented several papers on the subject and even contributed a chapter on the location data in a book that covers forensic analysis of the iPhone.”

Read more

Libraries Like the Snow Leopard May Be Endangered

April 29, 2011

We should have known this day would come. At silicon.com, Peter Cochrane blogs the question: is it “Time Libraries Were Shelved?” He asserts:

“Does it matter anyway? The debate goes on but I must admit that I cannot remember the last time I visited a physical library. I give away far more books than I read.”

Humph.

His questions were prompted by cuts to public libraries in the U.K. That story is already in progress here in the U.S. Are we about to become an illiterate society?

Budget woes pushed the trend, of course, but perhaps it was inevitable. Many feel that books are simply an outdated technology. I see their point but, at the risk of sounding outdated myself, there’s just no substitute for a real book in my real hands.

Sure, I can curl up in my comfy chair with an eReader, but it’s just not the same. I enjoy the different weights of different books, the feel of turning a real page, even the smell of ink and paper. And those sensations are part of what enticed me to become a reader in the first place! I can’t be the only one.

Besides, without libraries, how will folks get free access to knowledge? Ben Franklin would be very disappointed. Online is useful, but it does not answer * every * question a research may have.

Cynthia Murrell April 29, 2011

Freebie

Deloitte on Top Tech Trends: Where Is Search?

April 27, 2011

Editor’s Note: We want to feature an editorial comment from one of the leaders in search technology consulting and engineering. The author is Iain Fletcher, a vice president at Search Technologies. If you want to comment on this editorial, use the comments section below the article.

My colleagues and I were in a client meeting and had a break. One of the documents available to us was Deloitte’s report “Technology Trends 2011. The Natural Convergence of Business and IT.” The report looked interesting and we were able to download a copy of this report from the Deloitte Web site without a fee and without registering.

We found this passage particularly interesting:

… important developments are underway this year, adding compelling new dimensions to the decision process. We recommend taking a fresh look at each (Re)Emerging Enabler to see how it can apply to you in the near term, and whether new investments make sense. Disruptive Deployments require a more creative lens.

We thought the Deloitte approach of identifying enablers such as visualization and security was useful. The report then put the future in perspective by describing disruptive technologies. Among these were analytics, social computing, and mobile solutions. What struck us as interesting was the peppering of “search” throughout the book. There was no pivot point for findability. In our work, we have learned that there is an urgent need to process structured and unstructured information, making it easy for employees to locate needed

information in an efficient way, and coping with the problems of “big data”.

I spoke with my colleagues at Search Technologies, which is one of the largest independent search application implementation companies. We agree with most of the Deloitte trends. My take away from our discussion was that unstructured data quality was a key issue for both search across an enterprise and for the identified emerging trend of information visualization. Visualization  is an increasingly important part of business intelligence and relies on the quality of the input data. Poor data in means ill-informed decision out, whether via search or any other means.

In today’s financial climate, organizations need to reduce costs. In our experience, employees hunting for information is expensive and inefficient. The cost control is important. As important is the need to improve the efficiency of information retrieval. With search and content processing embedded in work flows, we see search and content processing as a foundation, not an add on or a spice in a consulting engagement.

Second, the merger of business processes and information access extends to the integration of different software systems. There are many buzzwords in use to describe what most senior managers intuitively know; namely, it is easier to make sense of disparate data if the information is presented in a context. Visualization, as Deloitte noted, is an enabler. However, the plumbing and the configuration of the output systems are as important as the attractive graphics. Third, young university graduates do not understand why “silos” of

information force them to use multiple enterprise systems and findability solutions. Deloitte did not emphasize the generational divide that we find in many of our engagements. As today’s recent college graduates move upwards and outwards in their careers, their impact will be significant. For more information about Search Technologies’ approach to technical, engineering, and business consulting, visit www.searchtechnologiess.com

Iain Fletcher, April 27, 2011

Search Technologies

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