“The search engine sucks!” is one of the most common complaints I come across. Naturally, most organizations immediately blame the search engine. They should point the finger at themselves.

Five years ago I wrote the article The search isn't broken, we're broken  (Part I : Search success depends on people and rules). Five years later, not much has changed.

While the search technology itself sometimes is the problem, this is rarely the issue. Search technology has advanced impressively in recent years and yet inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries.

Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information.  “People are lazy,” Cory Doctorow, a   technologist who maintains the popular weblog Boing Boing, told me when I first talked to him 5 years ago. “People are remarkably cavalier about their information and how it is stored. This laziness is bottomless…”

One way of capitalizing on the potential of the search function to insert keywords as meta tags within the actual content pages. But this requires rules and a rulebook, otherwise known as the corporate taxonomy. A taxonomy is a set of rules, or dictionary, for classifying or cataloguing information – whether on the Internet, intranet or shared drives via a LAN or WAN (see Don’t forget to add the tax(onomy).

Meta tags, simply put, are the tags or data that describe the information contained on a page or site. Think of a meta tag as the tag on your shirt collar – it identifies the type of shirt and describes it with information about the materials and the manufacturer. Meta tags can be used to describe the type of data in terms of keywords, description, department, date, author, etc.

However, searching the intranet is fundamentally different than searching the Web:

·         Employee intranet queries are generally far more precise in nature than the average consumer Web search

·         Employees have to find information quickly to do their jobs – not finding the right information is not an option

·         The Internet doesn’t have a taxonomy; the intranet requires one

Autonomy has released an interesting ‘white paper’ (brochure) on 5 Differences Between Business Search and Consumer Search. Most of the paper is designed to get you to buy the Autonomy engine (Ultraseek) and therefore this paper requires a ‘grain of salt.’ Nonetheless, the Autonomy list of 5 differences underlines some important points:

1)     Return Role-based Results - The tasks for which employees use information vary widely, depending on their department and their role within their company.

2)     Provide Multiple Methods of Searching - Standards for search relevance is higher in business. Employees want a single, correct answer to their information request.

3)     Search All Corporate Information Repositories - Corporate information is spread across a host of specialized secure business applications, databases, content management repositories, email systems and Web servers—all of which require special interfaces.

4)     Support Multiple Languages and File Formats - Employees need to access business documents in any language and from a dizzying array of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphic, multimedia, compression and encoding formats.

5)     Enforce Corporate Security Models and Compliance Policies - Access to corporate content must be securely managed in the face of a new matrix of government regulatory mandates and privacy concerns.

The last time I saw Autonomy at work I was impressed; but its expensive and not the answer to every organization’s problems. To underscore my earlier point, search is more than technology. Effective information retrieval and knowledge management principally requires:

• rules and defined processes (taxonomy and meta tagging)
• employees who are not only willing to follow the rules but actively participate in sharing information and knowledge
• effective supporting technology (search, content management, etc.)

Therefore, like most enterprise challenges, there is no silver bullet – and it certainly doesn’t come off the shelf.

--

One thing I do like about Autonomy (no I don’t own any shares) and other similar products is their relevance ‘tuning’…. “Ultraseek’s search results can be tuned to match information structure and end-user needs with relevance tuning options that deliver comprehensive control over the relative weighting of metadata fields. In addition, Ultraseek’s exclusive Quick Links feature provides editorial control over search results, allowing keywords to be manually associated with specific URLs that are returned above normal search results.” Cool.

RELATED READING:

Intranet vs Internet Search  

The search isn't broken, we're broken - Part II : Intranet Search & Taxonomy

Well Beyond the Search Box

Next generation inference engines

The lost meaning of knowledge management

  Digg this         Post to del.icio.us       Post to Slashdot   
 

  Add to Technorati Faves

Technorati Profile

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Most organizations are creating information and data faster than they can retrieve and use it effectively. Therefore organizing the information in a way that is easy to retrieve and use is tantamount to effective knowledge management. Easier said than done….

In Don’t forget to add the Tax(onomy) Cathy McKnight explains why taxonomies are so important and the difference between taxonomy and information architecture.

“What do I need a taxonomy for?” In a word – savings – savings of time, money and effort. These savings were shown at a conference where Microsoft’s Knowledge Architect Manager stated that even at the early stages of a taxonomy project the company saw a 62 percent reduction in the number of clicks, an average of 16 seconds saved per task and an 11 per cent increase in task success rate. That translates into a lot of time that can be allocated to other tasks … revenue generating tasks.

RELATED READING:

The Taxonomy Guide

Social bookmarking the intranet

The lost meaning of knowledge management

No Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management

With some rare exceptions, the answer is likely “very few”. According to a new Forrester research study podcasting is more hype than reality. The report Podcasting Hits the Charts reveals that only 1% of U.S. households regularly listen to podcsts.

Anecdotally, I have to tell you, I don’t know a single person that listens to podcasts except for one or two people – and they’re hard core tech nerds that have their own podcasts. And I know and meet a lot of like-minded people who are hardly luddites. They’re technology savvy and have iPods. But they have no interest in listening to an amateur broadcaster talk about their favorite (fill-in-the-blank).

Read more... If you podcast, will anyone hear it?

Securing your intranet requires more than just technology. In fact, employees represent your highest risk and point of breach.

CMPnet.com’s David Joachim covers the top 10 worst security practices in Lethal lapses:

1. If you find a security hole, buy a product to fix it.
2. Ignore the human element.
3. "Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" is our motto.
4. To run a tight ship, take an authoritarian approach.
5. Make access privileges an all or nothing proposition.
6. Treat all data as equal.
7. Back up everything, every night.
8. Perform audits and penetration tests infrequently, and in-house.
9. Endpoints for everyone.
10. Make sure security is highly visible, even intrusive.

“Most of these observations are about process and behavior rather than technology,” writes Joachim “That's not to say technology isn't important. But security pros generally have a mastery of bits and bytes and how to protect them. What's often missing is a sense of the big picture and how each separate alteration to the network affects the whole.”

RELATED READING:

Assessing your security risk

Best practices: securing your intranet

Email and intranet are biggest wireless threats

Securing your intranet from the inside

I’ve spent much of the week highlighting what I refer to the immaturity and ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the CMS market (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market). Of course, don’t take my word for it. Ask Tony Byrne, the founder and editor of CMSWatch.com, who wrote a very timely and bang-on piece on the industry, Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors

“Most CMS salespeople I know are good educators, but they also have quotas to meet,” writes Byrne. “Under these circumstances, vendors will sometimes short-cut important discussions about functionality and pricing with simple -- but not always completely truthful -- answers.”

Byrne lists his top 10 most common myths you might hear from a CMS salesperson (and they are all too accurate - in green below):

MYTH: "Our interface will sell itself" (This is the sex part)

As I have noted in the past, everyone says they have a WSIWYG editor. Few actually have one.

MYTH: "You only need XY thousand to get started"

It always costs more than they say. Licensing is often a fraction of the cost – implementation is where it adds up.

MYTH: "You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"

Only in some rare organizations does a CMS mean saving headcount.

MYTH: "Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" & "Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"

Open-source has the same implementation story – and it needs support too. Commercial solutions require paid support and they rarely have open communities of support (discussion boards, shared code, etc.).

MYTH: "Access to the source code protects you in an uncertain marketplace"

“Source-code escrow or open-source licensing is nice, but having to muck with source code is faint solace if your vendor expires,” writes Byrne.

MYTH: "No requirements? No problem! Our business analysts can get you started"

Content management requires three major components: technology, people and process. Technology is the often the least problematic. Defining a plan and all requirements requires experience and skill – and time. CMS vendors rarely focus much beyond the technology.

MYTH: "Most enterprises deploy our solution within 4-6 weeks" 

Ha, ha, ha! Sure it is possible… in smaller, extremely well organized companies.

MYTH: "Our migration scripts will take care of your existing content"

Bad content is still bad content on a content management system – regardless of the migration system.

MYTH: "Our product is better than Vignette, for a fraction of the cost"

Yes, Vignette is expensive, but there’s a reason why Vignette is the market leader for enterprise content management. There’s a reason why there are thousands of CMS vendors with very few name client implementations. I’d recommend Vignette for very few organizations, but there are a lot of CMS vendors I’d never recommend to any.

MYTH: "We're the only product with..."

Sure. There are thousands of vendors… what are the chances that someone else has a polling feature too?

--

Oh speaking of sex, lies and CMS vendors… since uninviting me to their wine tasting and CMS event (sex), Ziff Davis has sent me the same spam invite four additional times (lies)!!! Since the event organizers never responded to my email or my article (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market), I wrote Ziff Davis’s PR director about their PR mess…. surprise, surprise – no response!!! Outstanding PR (can you hear the tongue boring a hole in my cheek?)

ADDITIONAL READING:

CMS Blueprint ©2009

© 2006-2009 Toby Ward 

The world’s largest and most troubled intranet is moving forward with a $3.1 billion program extension. The U.S. Navy-Marine Corps. Intranet (NMCI) has been managed and steered by EDS since its inception in 2000. Under a new contract extension EDS will continue to build out the network through 2010.

The consolidated voice, video and data network links hundreds of thousands of military and at its peak will connect more than 500,000 sailors and Marines at about 1,000 locations across the planet.

The project has been greatly troubled but with both EDS and the Pentagon at odds over costs. According to GCN.com (Navy, EDS avert NMCI divorce at least for now), both parties “recently resolved long-standing claims over the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet program, with the Navy agreeing to fork over $100 million to settle the contract dispute.”

EDS purportedly has lost a lot of money on the multi-billion dollar project and was said to have been seeking more than $780 million from the Navy in additional costs. Mainly “what it lost on the Pentagon IT reconstitution after Sept. 11, 2001, and the expenses associated with reducing legacy applications and maintaining dual desktops,” according to Lt. John Gay, a Navy spokesman quoted on GCN.com.

One U.S. congressman is openly protesting the contract extension. Representative Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), a Navy Reserve officer, was quoted on InsideDefense NewsStand as saying:  

“(NMCI) is one of the most customer-unfriendly operations that I think I’ve ever seen.”

He said he had heard “horror stories” about the system. NMCI is “fundamentally hostile” to letting people communicate, he argued, adding the Navy is wasting money trying to fix and implement the system.

“It’s designed to provide such a security in inter-Navy e-mail that no one is communicating,” Kirk said. He said there is a “parallel Navy” running on civilian e-mail accounts.

(Thanks to The Fourth Rail and Bill Roggio).

--

Meanwhile the Navy is adding now audio alternatives for feature articles on its Lifelines intranet (Navy adds audio to Lifelines intranet). As reported on CGN.com, the Navy is using Newfoundland based Goldwave to deliver these audio stories:  

Since March, two former Navy officers with backgrounds in broadcast journalism who now work on the Lifelines Services Network site at http://www.lifelines.navy.mil have lent their voices to narrate articles that can be downloaded to MP3 players and iPods.

“We started noticing at the Washington Navy Yard and other bases all of the young sailors going around with iPods and MP3 players, and we said why don’t we start recording these things,” said retired Navy Capt. William Hendrix, director of the Lifelines portal.
To accomplish the podcast-like feature, the site uses digital audio software designed by GoldWave Inc. of Canada.

The Navy established the LifeLines portal in January 1999 as an intranet to improve the quality of life for sailors. Among its offerings, the portal provides self-help information, education services and crisis assistance.

RELATED ITEMS:

Good news and good news for world’s largest and most troubled intranet

$9 Billion Bugs for U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Intranet

World’s Biggest Intranet

Scandal rocks world’s biggest intranet

EDS – king of intranet pain