Highly Competitive - software industry insights

One on One Engagement: Mobile Content Marketing

 

Mobile-first is a phrase often heard when discussing web and content design, as well as marketing strategies. The mobile-first focus propels companies into strategies that reflect the amazing growth of mobile usage for business purposes, both on smartphones and tablets. And we are likely to see more vendors move towards mobile-only strategies, as mobile becomes the core customer communications platform for their businesses.

Many reports show that B2C vendors are quickly taking rewarding advantage of marketing and selling through mobile channels. But B2B vendors greatly lag their B2C counterparts, continuing to miss out on a significant opportunity that brings distinct competitive advantage. B2B customers bring with them the positive experiences that B2C vendors give them on mobile – B2B vendors must engage well on mobile if they want to continue to gain and retain these customers.

The average person spends two hours per day looking at a mobile screen. Think about that. Two hours out of every twenty-four – 8% of an entire day – on a mobile device. That's more time than users spend watching TV or using a personal computer. Whether it's at home, at work, or in between, users seem to be inseparable from their mobile devices.   (Source: High Impact Prospecting )

For midsized vendors the message is clear: mobile is wide open right now for smart vendors to reach more customers in very direct and compelling ways – every day. It's time to jump in to create effective mobile marketing strategies and a creative approach to mobile content marketing.

 

Mobile Content Design

Mobile devices offer new ways to create and deliver content which opens up many new possibilities for content marketing teams. Content marketing strategies and content creation have to recognize how different mobile content is from content that is delivered on traditional computing devices. For instance, Google search algorithms are constantly updated to reflect the rising creation of mobile content of all kinds, so it's important for content marketers to develop the right mobile content that aligns with successful semantic search results.

                        

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mobile marketers also have to understand the mobile behavior of target customers: how do they use their mobile devices for different activities? Tablet usage is different from smartphone usage, so marketers need to segment user behavior by device. The available space on a smartphone is obviously premium real estate, while tablets offer a larger canvas for content. The wealth of information that comes from tracking and analyzing how people use mobile devices adds significant intelligence to correctly engaging customers one on one, in ways that they will accept.

Beyond the knowledge about how people use their mobile devices, marketers need to consider what these people are doing when they are consuming mobile content. They could be commuting on a train, plane or bus; in the office; or at home. In different settings, mobile content has to compete with all kinds of distractions. To grab and hold the usually brief attention of the mobile user, content should follow a mobile-smart model:

• Bite-sized content that quickly gets to the point
• High impact "wow" content
• Easy-to-spot actions to take
• Streamlined layouts
• Visual elements instead of text, whenever possible
• Easy-to-read fonts
• Vibrant colors for overall content

There are vendors experimenting with longer form content for mobile engagement. Instead of longer content as the initial view, it may be more effective to offer links to that longer content or to videos. This approach gives control to the mobile user who can then decide when to view additional content that can be time and resource consuming. Vendors can then track click through and conversion metrics to determine the success of longer form content approaches to learn more about customer desires and attention span, and to fine tune marketing efforts.

 

Mobile Content Marketing Strategies

Mobile content marketing is a component of overall content marketing strategies. It should fit well into a unified and consistent experience for customers, no matter what device / channel is used for engagement. And for some companies, mobile is becoming the dominant component, so content marketing strategies must reflect the growing significance of mobile for marketing and selling.

81% of mobile leaders say that mobile fundamentally changed their businesses    (Source: IBM )

Many midsized businesses lack any sort of mobile strategy, let alone planning for effective mobile content marketing. These businesses are missing tremendous opportunities to reach more customers and are likely giving away competitive advantage to other vendors.

  

Image source: Content Marketing Institute

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

  

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Social Re-Connects Enterprise Search

                                                            Originally published in CMSWire October 23, 2012

 

Enterprise Search continues to go through transformations to improve its usefulness for all employees, since information is common currency for practically everyone in every organization. To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and other kinds of analytics. And for it to work well, people need to be able to make use of these layers of disparate search technologies through a single point of access.

It is critical that all employees have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration – bringing us into Social constructs.

 

Social Search Tuning for Enterprise Search

Many attributes of Social Search can help Enterprise Search work better – but Social Search alone isn't enough to replace Enterprise Search. Too many capabilities are needed to deliver what employees need from comprehensive search inside the firewall. But Social can serve to fine-tune or filter search by leveraging additional information about the Searcher, as a valuable enhancement.

Social also aligns well with one of the key success factors for Enterprise Search: Context. Many have advocated role-based context as a particularly powerful filter for effective search results. Contextual factors are usually the over-arching driver for a particular search by a particular person. As such, search needs to engender the right user experience to return the best results.

Enterprise search can tap into employee profiles, internal networks, other work-related interactions, and systems usage to personalize search and extend context in order to return the most relevant results. Beyond the usual 'systems of record', social networks and activities provide a great deal of contextual information, especially in terms of topics. The composite of all of these attributes can indicate each person's professional purview and work focus, which can better connect that person to the right information.

Social helps Enterprise Search through:

• Social Networks – people who know stuff, connections to other people who know stuff
• Social Artifacts – opinions about information, expressed through ratings / rankings, reviews / comments, tagging

 

Social Learning

Concepts from Harold Jarche for Network Learning provide lessons for the social aspects of enterprise search, both through inter-dependent connections and collaboration, and through independent pathways via technology (tools) and the information itself:

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to "pull" information, but also have it "pushed" to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

 

Also of importance is the serendipitous or accidental acquisition of information or knowledge, very much an affect of social interactions.

 

Social Networks: Information Acquisition

Software vendor IBM Vivismo (the Velocity Information Optimization Platform) provides an interesting story from 2009 describing how the U.S. Air Force has used social capabilities to improve enterprise search. The USAF information system is called Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) and has been around for several years in various iterations.

Organized into thousands of "Communities of Practice", Airmen share their expertise in postings that range from F-16 tactics to procurement regulations.  AFKN was launched in 2002 and now rivals the largest corporate intranets.  Open to anyone with a .mil email address, AFKN has nearly 300,000 registered users who view 10 million pages per month.  AFKN supports about 170,000 searches a month, but Adkins expects that to double with implementation of the new features (based on Vivisimo's platform).

"We want the tags and ratings to make the system smarter as a result of hundreds of thousands of people interacting," says Adkins. "The secret to success is it has to be easy for folks to use, or they won't use it."

AFKN aims to provide quick, easy access to millions of pages of content.  Social search adds two elements that improve relevancy of results.  First, keyword tags, ratings and comments add new navigation aids to AFKN users, speeding access to results they need. Second, social search tools make it easy for users to contribute their insights and experience to AFKN.  When these insights become part of the search index, search relevancy is improved for the next user.

 

Social Networks: Relationships as Search Filters

Sociology in the workplace provides insight into the value of social networks for improving enterprise search. In environments where collaboration is encouraged and communication across the enterprise is effective, the natural way to search is to ask colleagues for ideas on how to find what's needed, to share information, to brainstorm on how to refine search results, and to figure what's missing (leading to more searches). Obviously search relative to social networks is collaborative.

The social network as a construct doesn't engender successful search activities. It's how individuals connect to and work with people in the network for finding information that make social networks useful for search. Gartner's Larry Cannell examines "the synergy between search and enterprise social network sites":

As enterprise social network sites integrate with more business applications, the similarities between enterprise social network sites and search will become evident from two perspectives. First, from the point of view of how workers will expect to interact with business application information via a social network site. Second, there are significant similarities between how business application information is aggregated into a social network site with how the same is done with search-based applications.

In addition, these integrations (business applications and social networks) offer longer-term opportunities to build the enterprise social network into a powerful knowledgebase that consolidates information across business applications; much like the role enterprise search can play today.

 

There are also obstacles to finding the right information through social networks:

As multiple business applications become integrated with a social network site, a significant challenge will be the normalization of business entities across applications. For example, aligning a customer record in a CRM system with the same customer record in a warranty claims system. Without this alignment, cross-business application relationships cannot be captured within the site's social graph and workers participating in the network will see duplicate customer profiles (one from the CRM system, the other from the warranty claims system).

 

Social networks and collaborative processes are growing in many enterprises, as effective conduits for helping employees work better and more efficiently. It's now falling to the enterprise search platform to orchestrate alignment of the knowledge held by social networks with current information repositories. Part of that integration is to incorporate search capabilities already provided by social applications into the enterprise search platform. Since social venues enable real-time collaboration, enterprise search may need to change from displaying results to becoming a sort of a command center that allows actions to take place directly from search results, such as adding a comment to a blog post.

 

Activity Streams: Topics as Filters

Activity streams are another social venue that has been gaining increased enterprise adoption. Streams can be personalized for individual need, subscribing to an array of topics that tie to work activities. These streams are more about real-time information as it is created and shared, but are rapidly becoming large information archives as real-time continuously becomes 'yesterday'. And a new challenge, and opportunity, emerges for enterprise search bolstered by analytics, since most of the information resides in multi-structured content.

While it is not meant to be an enterprise search tool, Tibco's tibbr offers activity stream collaboration driven by a topic-oriented approach that is designed to find the people who need particular information items. The focus on topics is meant to cull out irrelevant information – employees subscribe to the topics that matter to them. Topics can be information, colleagues, software systems, and business processes. The business process is of particular importance, since the tibbr approach, coupled with Tibco technology, ties information acquisition to the work being done by employees.

In activity streams, topics are context and the streams capture continuous collaborative 'conversations'. In the Forrester Wave for Activities Streams, Rob Koplowitz comments:

Social activities streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision. They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers.

 

The Evolving Workplace

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

 

 

Related Links

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

  

Here we go again: another significant enterprise problem that isn't being solved, a problem that has been around for most of the digital era. Is it because the problem isn't cool enough to capture the attention of upper management? -- so it's seen as 'somebody' else's problem, instead of recognizing that real costs, productivity and value are being squandered because this problem isn't being solved

There are good technologies that could help with the problem now. But strategies are missing regarding how these technologies should be used. Newer technologies are coming along that will make the job easier, but there are no strategies for adopting them either.

 The problem? Enterprise Search and Findability

Obviously an enormous amount of digital items are created every day – but inexplicably there is an equally enormous vacuum for how to find the right stuff. There is a debilitating disconnect between the proliferation of electronic information and the constant need to quickly and accurately find all of the information and expertise that is essential for work every day. From top to bottom, enterprises have failed to take seriously the high cost of being grossly inadequate at finding information, data, documents, experts. Instead they have settled for low performance, low-return techniques to… sort of handle Search.

  

Surprise! Lack of Strategies

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that enterprise search and findability have direct impact on the success of organizations:

The growth of information and data makes findability increasingly more critical in order to get the right information to the right person at the right time.

Gartner states that "by 2015 organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%".¹

(But) solving the problem of finding the right information is not a priority according to this survey (The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012):

Most organisations do not have a strategy for search, neither a budget, nor any resources.

 ¹ A Framework for Creating Value From Information Assets: The Key to Information Management Success", Gartner Symposium Nov 2011, Ted Friedman and Regina Casonato

 

But enterprise search continues to elude C-level managers as a strategic imperative for building a "culture of success" within the enterprise. The multitude of studies that have been done to show the high cost of manual processes for locating the right information seems to have made no impact on upper management when it comes to creating a strategic approach and implementing right-fit search technologies and practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: IDC report – Information Access in Tomorrow's Enterprise - 2009

 

Undoubtedly upper management at most companies view enterprise search as an IT project, as a nice-to-have, as something so unglamorous that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the competitive DNA of the company, let alone innovation and responsive change. Upper management is failing to lead the enterprise into the 21^st century by building strategies, engendering culture and selecting technologies to energize how information can be continuously found by everyone in the enterprise.

Here's the flaw that plague most organizations when introducing enterprise search: a search technology is established within a silo – a business unit, group or function – without a strategic plan in place, without a view to fanning out the particular search technology for the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, other business units may bring in silo'd search functions. A loosely stitched patchwork emerges. No focus, no big picture, no notion of a search platform that governs one or more approaches to search, as needed by the enterprise. Instead search is implemented as too tactical, too dependent on IT as the driving force.

For search to be strategic, the push must come from upper management with purposeful collaboration with end users (who understand the business needs). Search must be tied to real outcomes and impact on the business, to help the enterprise leverage insight to best advantage.

 

Hierarchy of strategies

Too often organizations don't understand that centralized functions that impact most of the enterprise can only succeed based on a hierarchy of strategies. There has to be than an over-arching C-Level strategy, not just a silo'd "strategy" that only benefits a small group. Strategies for Search have to include more than "information and knowledge management pros". Collaboration with all users must occur – strategy cannot be something dictated without understanding how people in the enterprise work (this parallels the failures when IT only decides on the selection of software systems – of course, with the approval of upper management).

A hierarchy of strategies means that lower level strategy has to meet the needs at the business unit or group level -- but also align with desired business outcomes. Lower levels map back into the over-arching corporate strategy that is tied to high level goals and objectives. The result is an approach to search and findability that makes sense, can be measured and is an essential platform that is greater than the sum of the parts.

As with many other strategic initiatives, those enterprises that purposefully dedicate time, money and people to supporting enterprise search find the best results and real impact on the business:

Thus addressing those deficiencies in how an organisation manages search can deliver great returns for a relatively small investment, preferably in personnel. The survey reveals that:

Amongst the organisations that are very satisfied with their search, they have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.  

Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration

 

Quantitative and Qualitative Value Metrics

For Search technology and processes, qualitative value is as equally important as looking for quantifiable returns. Each enterprise will need to select the attributes to be measured, hard and soft, and how they will be measured. For each enterprise, the "right" metrics are the ones that measure the actions and outcomes that relate to key business context and goals. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it's likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness.  

A leading Canadian IT consulting firm, NLC, recently tackled the (metrics) question head on in their 'Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search' whitepaper last week. While maintaining that a formal analysis 'misses' the real value of Enterprise Search, the paper does go on to provide a formal approach based on the IDC report, The Hidden Costs of Information Work (May 2009).  

The proposed formula boils down to measuring:

Search Cost Today = # of knowledge workers X avg. salary (incl. benefits) X % of time spent searching

Potential Annual Benefit = Search Cost Today X The Search Lift Ratio (%)  

Once deployed, estimates around 'The Search Lift Ratio' can easily be quantified through a combination of A/B testing…'accurate' time-on-page measurements and traditional survey/feedback polls.

 

For many enterprises the qualitative value of search may be the more significant set of metrics for determining what has been gained:

With enterprise search capabilities expanding and more companies looking to how search can help their business, the question now is what the true benefits of enterprise search are. According to Glotzbach, the biggest opportunity offered by a good enterprise search tool is a phrase he calls "information velocity", which basically refers to the notion of businesses trying to move faster and more efficiently. It means different things to different businesses. For a business with a large customer support team, being able to find the right answer for a customer faster would translate to hard-dollar benefits around operational efficiency, shorter call times, etc., and then soft-dollar benefits around improved customer experience. For a technology or engineering-driven company, it means being able to quickly assemble a team's collective wisdom for improved decision-making.

Another overarching benefit of enterprise search that applies to all companies is improved collaboration. “We see search as a key component of collaboration, especially in today’s global economy,” Glotzbach says. “It’s not uncommon for even midsize companies to have offices located throughout the world. Unfortunately, with that geographic dispersion, the left hand doesn’t necessarily know what the right hand is doing.” Search can thus become the glue that helps to connect teams with all the same information, so everyone is working on the same page and sharing the same insights.

 

Qualitative benefits of enterprise search and findability can contribute a significant financial punch:

• Continuity – knowledge available after employees leave
• Productivity – working smarter, more efficiently, less "reinventing of the wheel"
• Consistency – similar practices and processes to make sure all employees benefit from optimal search guidelines for faster and more successful results
• Reducing Risk – this has big impact: ensuring that the right information is being used for all sorts of work needs, including decision-making, innovation, customer service, risk management

 

Obstacles to Finding the Right Information

In too many enterprises, people at all levels spend too much time in manual processes and poor search techniques to acquire information, usually stored in multiple repositories and in disparate formats.

Organizations encounter the same issues over and over for enterprise search:

• Trying to find all of the right information quickly
• Implementing meaning-based search: Ensuring relevance and context as essential attributes of the right information
• Requirements for tagging and taxonomy in traditional document and content management systems are unrealistic for most enterprises – these processes are hard to implement and are usually abandoned – most employees don't have the mindset, nor the time, for this type of classification
• Extensive variety of information and content types, extensive array of locations >> need for multiple search approaches – how to manage this and make it easy for most people in the enterprise

Further hampering enterprise search strategies is the employee desire for the experience to be just like using Google. But there are vast differences between Internet search and internal enterprise search – this 'conflict of interest' must be reconciled to choose the right search / findability technologies, and for how employees view search itself.

Google-type search requires knowledge of keywords for the topic in question. The searches cover web content that has been optimized to be found. Google results are ranked by popularity and somewhat by relevancy to keywords and to who you are as a searcher. Now false expectations have been created that the 'Google way' applied to the internal enterprise will yield everything that is needed.

Enterprise search is more complex and subtle. It requires multiple distinct search technologies to cover all use cases. Within the enterprise, different groups and software systems are creating digital items within silos that are frequently searched solely with proprietary technologies. Enterprise Search needs to take place across multiple disparate repositories, navigating security and permissions – where none of the content has been optimized to be found, except in instances where taxonomies have been created (which is often not done). Often the goal for enterprise search is to uncover an array of data and information that then has to be read and analyzed to determine relevancy to projects and decision making. So "popularity" of content is rarely the right attribute for determining meaningful information for enterprise tasks.

 

                 

  Source: The Future of Enterprise Search and Information Access

 

Determining the Platform Mix

It is critical that enterprise staff have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. At this point for any enterprise, search and findability should be considered mission critical, especially with the continuous creation of digital items, now at critical mass.

A well-structured approach to determining the right search platform should include:

• Thorough analysis and understanding of all search requirements and needs, from simple to complex – aligned with enterprise groups and business activities  
• Segmentation of information, data and content types
• Segmented user roles - analyze the kind of user experience expected by different enterprise roles – impacts the kind of UI needed to improve search productivity  
• Mapping search requirements to different kinds of search capabilities and solutions: full-text, structured data, e-discovery and so on  
• Setting right expectations for employees to understand why enterprise search is different – why this is better for what employees need (not popular pages à la Google, but the right information contextual to the needs and objectives of the organization…)

Include processes to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of different search solutions – then act on results to continuously improve, plus recommend changes for how information is stored, what business needs are not being met, and so on.

To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and several kinds of analytics. Analytics right now can be limited by 'artificial' filters that may lead to failures to include or even recognize the right data. A lot of enterprise information is in content / document form, but content, text and semantic analytics are still not where they should be and can be quite pricey. Parallel efforts in BI search may end up the Next Gen findability intelligence tool that enterprises need.

 

One More Processing Tool

Too often upper management fails to understand that the means to competitiveness, innovation, and agile change exists within the organization with the right processes and technologies – and enterprise search can be one such means. The right search platform can be fully available to the enterprise, if upper management understands the strategic importance of connecting everyone in the enterprise to the information that is so important to key decision-making, project work, customer support, and for moving the organization forward.

Enterprise search is more than search or findability – it is a conduit for bringing together seemingly disparate items of information and knowledge to be analyzed by one of the best tools people have – the human brain. Frequently the human brain can identify salient points in unlikely places, consider and weigh the importance or non-usefulness of all kinds of information, intuitively discerning significant patterns that may not be entirely logical but nonetheless important for arriving at insight and intelligence.

 

Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

   

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

Google and Search are now infamously synonymous for successfully looking for almost anything out there on the worldwide web (regardless of recent speculation about Google Search losing some of its edge). Unfortunately, inside the firewall, it’s a different story. Many organizations have increasing explosions of content, intelligence sources, data, and internal collaboration sites: all of which contain information that the staff of these organizations need to do their jobs.

It’s very clear that there is an “information overload” and also quite clear that people in enterprises aren’t connecting to the information that they need. This is despite the advent of intranets with search built in, desktop search, cross-enterprise search, knowledge management initiatives, content and document management platforms, and other technologies.

One symptom of information overload is the inability to get the right information to workers at the right time; 40% of those surveyed said they had the information they needed less than 75% of the time.

Technology is seen as one clear way to address the information overload/clutter problem, with 35% of the total sample – and 70% at companies that manage their information well – rating technology as very helpful (8-10 on a 10 point scale).

                 Xerox study

 

There is a mismatch between the needs of the staffers of enterprises, and search methods and technologies to find relevant information quickly. Classic search and search optimization of information and content do not organize into role-based approaches to locating what workers are seeking. Enterprise staffers are rarely trained to be knowledge or information workers, both in terms of generating content that can be easily found by others and how to effectively find content, documents, data and information.

 

 
Source: Google

 

I’m not very fond of the terms ‘knowledge worker’ and ‘information worker’, as they seem to serve to reduce people to drones instead of recognizing that these enterprise workers are: thinkers, analyzers, innovators, problem-solvers, communicators – not repetitive ‘bots. Improving productivity means working smarter, not necessarily faster, and enterprises should be doing everything to remove obstacles for staff to work smarter. Besides, almost everyone is an ‘information worker’ anymore, regardless of profession or job title – we all have oodles to deal with in terms of data, content, information, intelligence reports, dashboards, mashups, ad infinitum. 

  

Conceptual Shift: From Search To Findability

The Internet search paradigm is predicated on already knowing which key words will likely produce relevant content/information results, and then hoping that everything that matters will show up in the returned results. Internet search has also been classically performed with a lack of context, where the search is independent of professional roles, work goals, context, or business processes relative to the content resources provided in results.

Inside the firewall, locating content and people with answers is better served by ‘findability’. A lot of definitions for ‘findability’ are rather circular; I think a good definition for enterprise findability comprises: ease in locating information and resources for specific worker needs while reflecting relevant aspects of content attributes, context, worker roles, people/social resources, and business processes.

I see findability for internal content and information akin to usability aspects of software solutions: it doesn’t matter how great the information or content is if the people who need it can’t figure out how to get to it. And findability can be the most useful if it functions the way people work in the enterprise.

 Workers need processes and technologies that … 

INCREASE

• collaboration with each other
• connections and relationships to get insight from others
• creative efficiency to produce new knowledge and product
• transparency of existing documents to build upon

DECREASE time spent:

• duplicating work
• searching for documents
• locating others they need to talk to
• finding knowledge that will help them
• re-building something when a template already exists

 

 Bob Mixon is a solution architect and Microsoft MVP techie for SharePoint solutions who writes and teaches extensively. In a seminar, Mixon discussed findability for intranets: 

Mixon defines findability as "the art and science of making information available to users," noting emphatically that this means "it's not just search."  In addition to search, the key components of findability were identified as being: governance, architecture, design, and navigation.  Mixon noted that most users tend to search on the internet, but resort to browsing (i.e., point and click) on intranets.  Once thousands of sites/documents exist within an intranet, however, search becomes essential in that environment as well.

  

Content Optimization -- Enterprise Search: Complex Solutions and Frameworks

Many enterprises have built out solutions based on enterprise content management, document and records management, enterprise search, with content lifecycle management and governance. Enterprises also adopt optimization initiatives using information architecture, as well as functional work with taxonomies, tagging/favorites, semantic search, text analytics, data dictionaries, and so on.

The various content-related solutions offer enterprises frameworks to create, store, publish, and archive content across all channels inside the firewall. And these enterprises can set up good processes and practices for the above activities. However, most content management solutions equate the ‘findability’ of content and information to Search. Unfortunately most search functions that are built into CM solutions are inadequate.

There are various approaches to making content management more effective for findability including combining knowledge management practices and processes with CM frameworks. But this introduces more implementation, maintenance and governance layers, as well as added costs and resource requirements.

A good many practitioners provide guidelines for optimizing content to be more findable: Bob Boeri of Guident presented on elements of findability at the Enterprise Search Summit May 2010 where he made this statement:

Documents constitutes 80% of our business knowledge assets.

Databases etc. the other 20%.

Boeri lays out a comprehensive program for enhancing content and information findability along with lifecycle management, and his presentation includes a number of useful data points on the huge proliferation of content in enterprises. Further ideas for making enterprise content findable come from the recommendations of Ephraim Julius Freed and Bas Zurburg in their respective blogs.

 

Other enterprise platforms and applications often have search functions, but again, the search usually does not work very well (compared to optimal Google standards). So not only are content and information spread across different silos, but search is also silo’d, since individual app-based search capabilities do not function across all enterprise repositories. Uber-search inside the firewall, dubbed ‘Enterprise Search”, does perform cross-silo functions but can be an expensive investment. And again, content and information must be optimized to support better results in enterprise search.

In a recent blog post, Coveo VP Diane Berry speaks about Enterprise Search 2.0:  

Enterprise Search has evolved from its repository-centric start to today’s ever-changing landscape where Enterprise Search 2.0 powers and supports critical business processes. In fact, often Enterprise Search 2.0 doesn’t even look much like search, because the search – of virtually any and all enterprise systems – is conducted in the background, the information is housed in an always-on index, and it is presented in composite information mashups for high value decision support.

 
Source: Coveo

  

Enterprise Findability 2.0 – Goal-, Role- and Process-Focused

We are already seeing traditional Enterprise Search evolving into the findability paradigm where enterprise information is more integrated with context and business processes.  There are other software technology solutions that are evolving to provide findability of information in new ways.

 

  >> Adaptive Content Delivery

Baynote has evolved its recommendations and personalization capabilities for websites to what the firm is calling ‘adaptive web experience’:

The Adaptive Web dynamically maps the user’s intent, then adapts in real-time – based on the engage­ment patterns of like-minded peers.

The Adaptive Web is intent-driven. It uses past histories, but isn’t beholden to them; what’s most important is what’s happening right now.

Since Baynote technology can be used on intranets, it is worthwhile to consider what Baynote-style technology might offer for improving findability across an enterprise, should that become an extension of adaptive content retrieval.

Real relevance requires knowing what your customers want (their intent), knowing which of your content best matches that intent (most engaging), and giving them that content in real-time (adapting)

 

>> Findability As ad hoc / Adaptive Process: Adaptive Case Management

Tangential to business process management (BPM), adaptive case management is an emerging solution that pulls together information in the context of ad hoc business processes while focusing on business goals, worker roles, and knowledge domain context. ACM also taps into the increased use of collaboration and social media to support unstructured business processes. So information is surfaced to workers when needed for particular situations. Behind the scenes, a great deal has been set up via ACM software and practices to sustain robust ad hoc business processes as they occur.

Although discussing the need for the Social Intranet, Oscar Berg could also be referencing ACM:

Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work – which is information and knowledge – vary from time to time, from situation to situation. So does the purpose, activities, roles and resources involved in knowledge work. Knowledge work is also less structured and the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work proceeds.

The unpredictable nature of knowledge work is why we need to give knowledge workers access to all information that exists and that might be relevant. Since we don’t know what might be relevant until a certain need arises (which we never might be aware of until we discover certain information), we can’t really put the relevant information in one “for keeps” pile and all other information in another “to be trashed” pile. 

  

Max Pucher, Isis Papyrus Founder and Chief Architect:

ACM allows the business to empower selectively and securely all the people that do things and those for whom things are being done. ACM is about communication and process as ONE! ACM leaves the automation of the low-value, highly repetitive administration tasks to BPM, but it provides the platform for the high-value, unique and skill or knowledge intensive processes.

ACM may evolve beyond its ‘roots’ in business process management to become a much-needed internal platform of technology and practices to more relevantly and immediately surface the most-needed information, content, and data, wherever it exists in the enterprise, all in the context of immediate situational business process for a particular worker’s responsibilities.

  

>> Findability of Structured Data: BI and Analytics That Surface Data and “Intelligence”

In a previous article, I detailed a number of interesting trends for BI and Analytics that may result in better intelligence results for businesses. BI and Analytics present information in specialized formats in support of “knowledge workers” and to help businesses make better decisions. As collaboration processes are married to BI and analytics, unstructured content will have a place along with traditional structured data, contributing to the findability of a greater breadth of relevant information.

Enterprise search meets BI:  Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine is an example of unified information discovery and analysis across the enterprise. Somewhat like the ease-of-use of Google search combined with context-savvy and relevance-focused analytic technology to help find much more than non-contextual bits of information. BI Search also allows findability of unstructured content as well as the traditional BI sources in structured data repositories. Hopefully BI Search will help workers find related information and content, as well as unexpected but highly relevant information sources.

 

 

 

Information Mashups and Situational Awareness:  For information delivery primarily from structured data sources, software vendor JackBe can, on demand, pull data ‘as is’ to build out information mashups from multiple pre-prepped sources. Harkening back to the thinking behind ad hoc processes and ACM, JackBe’s Presto mashup platform has been drafted into providing intelligence for situational awareness needs, where there has been no specific anticipation of the situation, and where the situation may be gone after a day. For properly utilizing information revealed for situational awareness, it is essential that the users of the Presto platform possess significant subject matter expertise to understand whether the JackBe mashups are accurate, meaningful, and useful -- or not. However, again we have another approach to finding information needed by workers, somewhat in context to their roles and responsibilities.

 

Content analytics and Content Intelligence: Seth Grimes explains findability as it relates to analyzing content to bring its value into intelligence processes:

"Content analytics" can be seen as business intelligence (BI) for/from content, as text (rather than number) crunching that generates insights to improve business outcomes. The two practices, content analytics and BI, certainly share motivations. If you don't analyze your content/data, you may be missing opportunities and running risks.

Analytics also boosts value for users. Semantic search, faceted navigation, and content annotation/enrichment create findability and improve user experience and value for users. They also let users treat content like data. Call the goal "content intelligence," enabled by "smart content."

Although Grimes is talking about content for external-facing websites, the applicability to internal enterprise content is obvious.

  

>> ‘Now, The Information Finds You’

TIBCO Software recently announced a new release of tibbr with the above tag line, fully remade from its 2009 debut as an internal microblogging tool. In this new incarnation, tibbr still benefits from the TIBCO sophisticated backbone of enterprise infrastructure management, including data integration, messaging and process management, and, as such, is infrastructure-agnostic. Or as Ram Menon, TIBCO CMO, puts it:

We’re leveraging a billion dollars of integration technology investment to offer customers the ability to get at the information they need, in real time, if they choose

While tibbr is built more for real-time information streams than archives of content and information, tibbr and Tibco have created a platform with a lot of potential for improving overall information findability that adheres to context and worker roles.  It connects to process, people/workers, collaboration venues, data and information streams, centralizing all event streams into one dashboard. Information can be organized by subject or topic, rather than by people. tibbr enables users to create, contribute to, and subscribe to the real-time event streams that matter most to them.

Dennis Howlett provides this description of tibbr:

It intelligently marries people, process and context, delivering information the way people want to consume

tibbr provides flexibility in the delivery and consumption of information by allowing users to select the form, frequency and manner in which they want to receive updates. Updates are delivered at the requested time, to the device or interface of choice, with the appropriate context. With its integration capabilities and bi-directional feeds in and out of business applications from vendors like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com, Tibco connects tibbr to business processes and event-triggering that are then exposed in tibbr for taking action.

Since tibbr has a customizable subject / classification structure, companies can build an information model that works best for them. With that in mind, will tibbr also call for Information Architecture and governance capabilities to ensure the findability of information as it is handled by tibbr dashboards?

 

Convergence or Patchwork?

Lots of different technologies are available for both search and findability in the enterprise, and new ones are emerging. Right now, all of these technologies somewhat resemble a patchwork of possibilities, but with some very significant overlaps of capabilities and solution strategy. Realistically, for many enterprises, multiple options may be what are needed to achieve overall findability for all worker roles. And this a case where tech really matters to help enterprise workers find exactly the information and intelligence that they need as quickly as possible.

It is also likely that large enterprises will continue to benefit from rigorous content-generation strategies, Information Architecture, and governance systems to enhance whatever methods are used to find information in context. Sophisticated solutions for findability will require diligence and consistent oversight to ensure the best results for workers.

What interests me a great deal are a couple of things: how the newer solutions evolve, and what sort of convergence will occur from solution spaces that started off quite separate from one another.

 

Related Links

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt is not affiliated with any of the vendors in this article.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services