Tag Knowledge Management

Entries 2 Total

The Need For Innovation In Corporate Web Site Search

Jun 24, ’09 10:18 PM

As IT leaders we often see opportunities for innovation in the technology assets developed and managed within our organizations. Such is the case for the following proposition around corporate web site search, which may be relevant considering the recent introductions of Bing, WolframAlpha and the word “semantic” back in the news again.

The magnitude of the Internet’s success is now matched by user frustration in sifting through endless unstructured web sites and billions of web pages for immediately relevant information. Whether it’s a large company site or a small political Blog, users are presented with a rising sea of information and are increasingly challenged to get to a specific answer or fact.

The large general-purpose search engines have been of significant benefit for several years, in that they could find a million “needles” in the Internet “haystack” in less than a second. The problem is, eventually consumers will want to stop wading through all those needles and get a relevant answer back. The user will expect to interact with a system that can better understand the information and meaning contained in those millions of web pages. Some believe the days of keyword searches presenting millions of results back to a consumer are numbered.

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Its Always Easier to Critique

Mar 30, ’09 1:13 PM

As you sit in endless project or status meetings, ask yourself:  How many people around this table are producing content, and how many others are reviewing their work?  Especially in large organizations with matrixed teams, you may find that the ratio is 90% for the review role.

Here are two examples:

  1. Business Requirements are written up by (1) hard-working Business Analyst after consultation with business partners, then reviewed (and pulled apart) by other analysts, architects, UI staff, PMs, systems analysts, development staff and quality assurance.
  2. A proposed Architecture Standard is presented by an excited team member after a month of quality research, then shot to pieces by a dozen other formal (or would-be) architects.

While the peer review role is a critical one, for many organizations the actual content creation process has turned into a thankless job, where it is all too easy for others to show up and pick apart the work.  No preparation is needed for this sport – there is always something to find wrong with another’s work if given a few minutes.

Are you promoting the effort involved in content creation within your organization? How many team members never need to produce content of their own? What is the role of collaboration within your organization for major deliverables – are there incentives in place to gather multiple authors so that many have skin in the game?

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