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Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2014

May 6, 2014 /

For the third year, Findwise, an enterprise search system integrator and consulting firm based in Sweden, is doing a global survey of user experiences with content findability tools. Many of us in the field of search technology want to see how enterprises are progressing with their search initiatives. Having a baseline from 2012 is a beginning to see what the continuum looks like but we need more numbers from the user community. That means participation from institutional implementers, funding managers, administrators and end-users with a stake in the outcomes they receive when they use any search technology.

Please do not let this opportunity pass, and sign on to the survey and sign up to get the resulting report later in the year. I especially hope that Findwise gets a good uptick in responses to report at the December Gilbane conference. We need to hear more voices so pass this link along to colleagues in other organizations.

Here is the link: Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2014

Deadline Reminder – Gilbane Conference call for papers

May 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Don’t miss The Gilbane Conference Call for Papers

Proposal deadline is May 9!

The Gilbane Conference on Content and the Digital Experience is designed for marketers, content managers, technologists, and executives responsible for building strategies and implementations for compelling multichannel digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners. Topics are organized into four main tracks:

Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience – Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, growth hackers, content managers, strategists and technologists focused on customers and digital marketing.

Content, Collaboration and Employee Engagement – Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, intranet, portal, knowledge, and backend content applications.

Re-imagining the Future: Technology and the Postdigital Experience – Designed for technology strategists, IT, and executives focused on the future of content and either internal or external digital experiences.

Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media – Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, and business or channel managers focused on the transition to digital products.

If you have not spoken at our conference before please read the Speaker Guidelines.

Content Accessibility in the Enterprise is Really Search

April 29, 2014 /

The Gilbane Conference call for speakers is out and submissions are due in three days, May 2. As one who has been writing about enterprise search topics for over ten years, and engaged in search technology development since 1974, I know it is still a relevant topic.

If you are engaged in any role, in any type of content repository development or use, you know that excellent accessibility is fundamental to making content valuable and useable. You are also probably involved in influencing or trying to influence decisions that will make certain that technology implementations have adequate staffing for content metadata and controlled vocabulary development.

Please take a look at this conference track outline and consider where your involvement can be inserted. Then submit a speaking proposal to share your direct experiences with search or a related topic. Our conference participants love to hear real stories of enterprise initiatives that illustrate: innovative approaches, practical solutions, workarounds to technical and business problems, and just plain scrappy projects that bring value to a group or to the whole enterprise.  In other words, how do you get the job done within the constraints you have faced?

Track E: Content, Collaboration and Employee Engagement

Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, intranet, portal, knowledge, and back-end content applications.

  • Collaboration and the social enterprise
  • Collaboration tools & social platforms
  • Enterprise social metrics
  • Community building & knowledge sharing
  • Content management & intranet strategies
  • Enterprise mobile strategies
  • Content and information integration
  • Enterprise search and information access
  • Semantic technologies
  • Taxonomies, metadata, tagging

Please consider participating in the conference and especially if content findability and accessibility are high on your list of “must have” content solutions. Submit your proposal here. The need for good findability of content has never been higher and your experiences must be heard by vendors, IT managers and content experts together in this forum.

Audio and Video: Metadata, Meta-tags, Meta-Understanding

March 27, 2014 /

2014 opened with a post about findability; that theme continues with some thoughts on what it means to build an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) repository and have it actually deliver findability for audio and video content.

Working on a project for an institution, which has experience using a DAM for image assets, I have become keenly aware of the heavy lift required for a similar system for audio and video files. Heavy lift means human resources with the knowledge to metatag assets manually. This metadata activity is necessary to establish text that describes the “aboutness” of an audio or video file. Search queries in a DAM are done using text and without text, finding an asset will be impossible.

Stephen Arnold raises many critical issues in the article Video Metadata: ripe for innovation in KMWorld, March, 2014. It articulates very well the challenge of indexing a video asset because, if any metadata exists, much of it will be transactional in nature, not descriptive of the content.

In any institution with limited content editorial or curatorial resources to catalog internally produced audio and video files, it will fall to the creator to describe with metadata what the essential elements are. Those elements might include, who is in the video, who is performing in an audio file, where did a performance take place, what are the major themes, what instruments were being featured, and so on. Software applications exist that can extract words from spoken or sung language, or from text images that are visible in a video. But when it comes to the “aboutness” or major themes being demonstrated, only the creator or creator’s surrogate will have the required meta-understanding.

Enterprises with a public face or commercial aspect will employ a metadata creation staff for images or files that go into their public web sites. However, justifying staffing to make audio and video a valuable asset for internal sharing and consumption is a tough sell. Commitment to building up an internal DAM that will be used and useful because its assets are easily found takes faith and almost religious fervor on the part of participating contributors. Technology can only go so far in making those assets findable. Attribute possibilities are voluminous and not easily codified.

On the arts frontier of searchability, one only has to look at the gold standard for controlled vocabulary, the Getty Museum, to see the breadth and depth of categories of their thesauri covering paintings, sculpture, drawing, crafts, woodworking, etc. In non-classical musicology no such universal standard of terminologies exists for public consumption. In the musical arts getting musicians to agree on how to label innovative and evolving genres will be a herculean human effort.

Building a DAM for internal audio and videos files is not to be undertaken without answering these questions:

  • How will findability be defined?
  • What is the audience?
  • Who is going to create the metadata for uploaded assets, particularly “locally created” content?
  • What are the technology tools that can index and search the assets?
  • What are the resources for establishing, modifying, and perpetually expanding taxonomies/controlled terminology?
  • When assets are found, how will they be displayed or played?
  • What is the on-going process for sustaining the repository, curating and expanding its scope?

This is a new frontier in content management. With so much investment in audio and video engineering, and the entertainment industry, it is time to innovate on the “findability” front, as well. In the meantime, a wise process for adoption is to start small and simple with the metadata development effort. Then hope that technology innovation will emerge to help your process before you retire.

A New Brand of Marketing – a must read for executives

March 11, 2014 / / 0 Comments

A New Brand of Marketing
Those of you who appreciated Scott Brinker’s Gilbane Conference keynote What is a Marketing Technologist?, and even more importantly those who missed it, should check out Scott’s short new book, A New Brand of Marketing – The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline. The book is free to download and share and doesn’t require registration.

A New Brand of Marketing “… frames the epic collaboration underway between marketers and technologists…” – note the use of ‘collaboration’ rather than ‘battle’. Scott is not only a supreme example of a marketing technologist who knows the details, but may be the most facile communicator (and diplomat, in the most positive sense) of the marketing technology big picture.

A New Brand of Marketing is a must read for CMOs and CIOs, but all senior executives should read it to understand the dramatic changes underway in marketing or to get some pointers on how to communicate the changes to colleagues.

Just a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

Fact: everything digital is powered by software.

Companies don’t just compete for who can provide the most helpful content. They compete for who can provide the most helpful services.

When you’re skydiving, you should know how to pull your parachute.

Multichannel content management

February 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Meg Walsh at Gilbane 2013In Marketing technology landscape explosion and CMS evolution we looked at two of the major themes of December’s Gilbane Conference. The third major theme that we asked speakers to respond to in our spotlight series was the challenge of multichannel delivery:

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge? Development and maintenance cost? Content control? Brand management? Technology expertise?

The best overall strategy and the biggest challenge are the same: creating and managing content that can be optimized for each channel and device including those not anticipated. In short, true Multichannel Content Management, or MCM if we can deal with yet another acronym (Yaa!). Of course the “multichannel” is only necessary for emphasis because “web” content management has been dominant for a few years, and “enterprise” content management was hijacked by the document management interests early on. Perhaps soon, “multichannel” will be redundant and just plain old “content management” will suffice.

Multichannel content management is really hard. Organizations have been implementing such “single source publishing” or “create once, publish everywhere” systems for many years, but the difficulty and cost prevented most from taking it on and forced others to give up even knowing it was the right thing to do.

Multichannel content management is still hard, but it was one thing to hesitate when there was only one extra channel – now there are n+1 channels, the cost equation has changed, and you can’t build a sustainable digital experience without solving this problem.

Organizations who successfully built multichannel content management systems in the past were largely those with direct access to technologists, for example technical documentation, product support, engineering, and R&D. Marketing organizations, aside from a few with large global presences and big brand asset management problems, mostly stayed away – technology and cost were fearsome, and organizational structures and agency dependencies also created barriers. Staying away is no longer an option. Reaching today’s consumers requires an n+1 distribution strategy.

In her keynote presentation, Marriott’s Meg Walsh inspired the audience with her discussion of their distribution and scale challenges and the necessity for a strategy based on adaptive content that is device agnostic – in other words, a multichannel content management capability. She shared a wonderful quote from Jonathan Perelman, VP, Agency Strategy @Buzzfeed, “Content is King, but Distribution is Queen, and She wears the pants.”

Note that Meg’s role is very much that of a marketing technologist. She ran the content management practice in Marriott’s sales and marketing group before moving to Marriott’s IT organization to take responsibility for technology platforms to support the sales and marketing activity.

We’ll be covering much more of what one attendee called “Real Multichannel Content Management and publishing” at this year’s conference, and would love to hear from more marketing organizations that are making the Distribution Queen happy.

Marketing strategy versus technology – should be a virtuous circle

January 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Scott Brinker has another must-read post. I excerpt parts of his post below so I can expand on it a bit but you should read his full post along with the comments.

In his post Scott explains he is responding to statements made in a podcast by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. After linking to the podcast and agreeing with much of what they say Scott makes three points:

  1. “Marketing technology is not just about efficiency — it’s about experiences.
  2. The relationship between strategy and technology is circular, not linear.
  3. Marketers cannot abdicate their responsibility to understand technology.”

and mentions the one quote he really disagrees with (emphasis is Scott’s):

“Figure out your process first. And then get aligned with your internal IT guys to figure out what it is you exactly need to facilitate. Because that’s the only thing that technology will ever, ever do. The only thing technology will ever do is facilitate a process that you have more efficiently. That’s all it’s ever going to do.”

That is a pretty strong recommendation for option A in Scott’s illustration below.

strategy technology circular

I want to make three points:

The fact that the relationship between technology and strategy is circular – that they have to inform, influence, and advance with each other – is true of all enterprise applications and for all functions and has always been true.

  • If you replace “technology” with “data” or “big data” or “analytics” the points that Scott makes are equally valid. (For a different take on this see Big data and decision making: data vs intuition.)
  • Technology is not just a set of product features. The features are possible because of creative combinations of underlying software concepts, programming languages, data structures, and architectures. Without some understanding of the underlying fundamentals it is natural to think product features define software capabilities and thus to limit insight into strategy possibilities. Marketers (or other professionals) with little to no technical background can compare feature sets and build strategies that match, or build strategies and look for the set of already existing product features to match.
  • Each of these illustrate what we might call the bad kind of circularity (as we mean when we call an argument circular) and they handicap innovation. The good kind of circularity is a strategy/technology dialog of what ifs, informed by what might be possible, not by what is already known.

It is both natural and common for consultants to overemphasize option A, because way too often option B is overemphasized at the expense of option A by both their customers and technology vendors. Good consultants spend a lot of time and effort helping customers overcome an under-appreciation or political deprecation of the importance of strategy. But all of us need to be careful not to suggest either linear false choice.

Enterprise Search Europe special discount

January 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Last May I was delighted to participate in Enterprise Search Europe in London. There I found a committed contingent from companies seeking search solutions, entrepreneurs, and search technology integrators. They were there to share common enterprise experiences with search technologies and implementation issues. Usability, specialized business use cases and leveraging search results in business intelligence were the three areas I found most engaging. Missing from the audience was a group that belongs at this meeting: content managers. Among them should be expert taxonomists, metadata specialists, and information architects responsible for the many repositories that go into quality enterprise search deployments. Take advantage of the opportunity to pick up the great expertise that you will have access to at this meeting. I am happy to extend a 20% discount code to the meeting, so please consider using it. Apply MOULTON20 in the priority code field at online registration, which you can find at the conference site: http://www.enterprisesearcheurope.com/2014/.

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