Interview: John Markus Lervik

December 28, 2006 at 12:38 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In this second installment from our discussion with John Markus Lervik we discuss the challenges of enterprise search, search as an integration layer, and where it’s all headed (click here to read the first installment). Also, stay tuned for other interviews we’ll be posting and conducting with speakers from the upcoming FASTforward conference.

On the consumer Web side of things you’ve got a near-infinite amount of data scattered haphazardly around the internet. But within the enterprise you’ve got a more controlled environment – more structured data, richer data sets, etc. – which in theory could make for a better search environment. But what are the challenges of analyzing and managing that data?

JML: In some ways it looks harder on the Internet because it’s more unstructured. But in other ways it’s easier in that there are mechanisms such as links that can be leveraged. And so one of the problems within companies is that though there are fewer amount of documents, i.e. hundreds or thousands rather than millions or billions, they often don’t have links.

In addition you have so many different types of data, e.g. different applications with different security entitlements, that make it difficult. The challenge too is that on one’s intranet or closed system one’s not looking for just any related document. Often what you’re looking for within a company is *the* document. For instance, on the Internet when one’s looking for a document, when one’s using Google or MSN for a query to find that one single document, it almost never works. So you have much higher requirements when one’s searching for a document within a company. And that makes finding something much harder when one’s contending with very different types of data and very different types of content structures. And of course that’s also a reflection of the different types of software being employed within companies – from ERP systems to large information integration applications. It’s not as easy as just putting text into a searchable index.

Andrew McAfee said in a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review that “Enterprise 2.0″ is an appealing reality for companies now. And a recent McKinsey/Sand Hill Group report claimed: “The software industry is in the midst of a quiet but dramatic revolution. The implications of this revolution – increased innovation, new business models, technology discontinuities, and global capacity shifts – could be even more profound than previous industry transitions.” Are we at a turning or tipping point in the way enterprises develop, implement and integrate enterprise software. Is this true in the search market?

JML: It is most definitely a turning point. I’m travelling all the time – 200 days this year – and I’m sensing in recent months a real change in the ways companies think about search. We started seeing and talking about search as a platform, search not just as about text but also about structured data, about five years ago. But it’s really only in the last 3-6 months that we’re really beginning to see people turned on and getting it. It’s really accelerating now.

Can you talk about how companies are integrating search into their companies at an operational level?

JML: We’re seeing companies now hiring individuals to lead their search initiatives – search experts are being hired at the executive and management level which indicates that search is now a key part of their businesses, a key part of their internal architectures. For example, Reuters or Reed Elsiver – these huge information businesses now make a point of hiring high-level people to head up their search functions.

Companies are also realizing how these capabilities and people can help them solve issues in more efficient ways. They’re working on large integration projects, projects which in the past cost tens of millions of dollars – they can now create an informational access layer which costs a fraction of that and which helps them move much faster to market and more quickly develop applications.

Essentially, you have two key functions: you have the transactional model where you want to store and organize data and then you have the retrieval model where you want to be able to retrieve business intelligence. All of the latter, all of it, is going to be powered by search. So Business Intelligence is going to be entirely driven by search, allowing you to pull analytics or pull data out of internal systems – it’s also going to be a subset of what search is in five years.

Can you point to particularly interesting apps being developed by your partners or customers?

JML: There are a lot of interesting external apps being developed – from searching yellow page-like sites, or for local search, or vertical search, as well, of course, as for B-to-C and B-to-B sites as well as mobile devices.

As for internal applications, some of the banks are doing some interesting things. Merrill Lynch is really getting it, using search as an information access platform in building business applications on top of our platform. They’re using FAST to integrate their data and then turning that around into informational portals – they are, after all, an information business and they’re using all that data and content and analytics from different parts of the company to provide contextual data to whomever needs it, be they brokers, analysts, support teams or customers. One of bank’s main purposes, of course, is to help their customers, help them get the right information, whether it’s a consumer trying to get information about their account, or a professional fund manager – it’s about providing the right information at the right time. And that’s all about search.

And on the mobile front, one of the largest Internet companies in Japan – Rakuten – has recently launched a mobile service in concert with DoCoMo that employs a FAST search solution. It is seeing its traffic rocket – they’re already at 200-300 queries per second – that’s millions of searches a day. That’s amazing.

You talk about how search must go beyond the search box. What does that mean?

JML: It’s about connecting people to content. But not just to information but also to other people, to other services, to other applications.

So how far do you go with that?

JML: For an example, we see more and more that people within companies are searching within their own organizations for experts on certain topics. But you can always further improve, further develop the results and relevance of those searches. The biggest challenge right now is to open the eyes of people to what search can be – it’s so much more than just a search box. We’re just at the very beginning of this.

A general and broad question: what’s your grand ambition for search?

I’ve been in this space for ten years and it’s incredible how much i learn every day about the potential for search, about the new opportunities in search. It’s mind-boggling and much bigger than people think. Even for me for whom it’s a passion, it’s much bigger than I thought a year ago and a year from now I’m sure I’ll feel the same way.

I think everything we do online will be driven by search. We may not think of it as search as we won’t necessarily see a query box. But it’s about matching, about connecting the dots: matching me as a person to another person and matching me to some interest I have. All those things are going to be queries. All those things will trigger a contextual query that will tap into a search engine that tries to match you with the data you’re after, be it a link to another person, to content, to other services. It’s going to be the fundamental foundation of communities and communication. To provide just one, simple example: when you call me that’s going to trigger a message from my cell phone that will call up emails you’ve sent me or any other data that’s relevant to you calling me, i.e. all these things will be triggering queries.

And going forward, internet portals, web portals, mobile portals – all will basically be search engines with graphic interfaces laid over them. The portals aren’t going to change the way they look. But they are going to change the way they’re generated – they’ll be generated through a search layer rather than a static database. Search will increasingly become an intelligent layer, an access layer that virtually sits there as an integration layer and one that can present things appropriately and contextually for each user – there will be no need to have all the hardwiring. And in this case we will use a search engine to understand what a user wants and present it and that may not be in a search result list. It may present information as graphs, as tags, as a summary of a news article, as other types of content – however you want to present it.

And I think the main thing for us, the good thing for FAST is that we’ve seen this coming for six years. Our technology is built not just around text but also around structured data. We’ve been prepraring for this ability to scale, for analyzing streaming data, not just static data, and we’ve thought about search as a horizontal application. That’s why we are very confident that as we continue our innovation, together with our biggest customers around the world, that we’re going to be in the lead. We believe search is going to be as big as databases in a couple years – the capabilities and the market. And if we play our cards right we’re going to have a fair share of a very significant market opportunity. Of course our customers will be B-to-C companies, consumer companies, ecommerce companies, and online media companies, but they’ll also be B-to-B, or banks or pharmas or government so we’re focusing on the largest opportunities.

Comments

Introduction

December 27, 2006 at 4:50 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

We were asked to introduce ourselves so here goes. I first learned about blogs when I left a large consulting company in March 2004. Blogs had been under my radar screen up until then. I had been involved with implementing enterprise knowledge management systems and portals for large organizations since the early 90s. Prior to that I was involved in technology-based learning systems beginning in the early 80s. In the 70s I was an academic, a psychologist who did research on the effects of media on cognition and learning. Now in March 04 I found the possibilities for blogs, as a part of the next wave of knowledge management and learning systems, very exciting to me. Actually, the reverse has become true, as blogs are now much bigger than KM and Enterprise 2.0 could totally transform KM.

I started my blog, Portals and KM, in May 04 as part of background for an article on blogs for Portals Magazine. I live in Cambridge, MA and joined the Thursday blog discussions initially led by Dave Winer at the Berkman Center. I am became hooked and wrote a book on business uses of blogs with Amanda Watlington. I started interviewing business bloggers for the book and kept going until my co-author said it was time to stop at 70. The conversations were great and it was too addictive. Jim McGee and Kathleen Gilroy in our FAST Forward blogging group were part of this, as were an artist, a winery owner, a restaurant owner, a maker of wooden signs, and many other businesses and non-profits.

In the beginning, my blog covered knowledge management and multiple uses of blogs and now it also looks at web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, primarily but not exclusively, from a business perspective. I can see the writing has evolved from blogs as novelty to blogs as mainstream. Writing the blog has become part of my routine and many new relationships have come through it. For the last two years I have felt the need to have a post every day, or should I say the compulsion, but advance posting helps. It has also changed my professional orientation and I speak a lot on blogs, and now web 2.0, to a diverse variety of groups and find this energizing. I also consult with clients on these topics through several partnerships

I started writing about music and food in my blog on the weekends, and now art. This has opened up a new set of people to meet through my blog. Then I added blogging about my friends’ favorite places to eat in their cities to my weekend writing, and added some of my own. I was once asked why do this when there are so many food sites. Here is my response, Restaurant Reviews – Why I Blog Them. It is part of my feeling toward the blog as a personal knowledge management. Almost anything I really want to remember, and possibly share, on the work side or the entertainment side goes into my blog. Recently, I reengaged in creating art, mostly charcoal and ink drawings for now, and plan to start an art blog in 07.

Comments

Worksites

December 27, 2006 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Maggie Fox writes one of my favourite new blogs. Social Media Group.

Recently, she asked “how long before social media is recognized as the new email”?
Part of the reason why Blogging and Wikis have not gone mainstream within the enterprise is that people keep talking about them as a market conversation or as “social software”, rather than as solutions to basic business problems.

What if we call them “Worksites?”. A Worksite makes your Intranet both readable and writable. Worksites are designed to do at least 6 things:

1 – Increase profits by improving lateral communication within the organization. As people within silos start to communicate, many benefits follow. Banks, for example, will see increased cross-sell of products to their corporate clients and wealthy clients. Consulting firms with multiple teams will use the Worksites make sure they provide integrated and coordinated solutions for clients. Any company that builds anything (cars, software, couches) will use Worksites to make sure marketing, design, sales and manufacturing / development communicate those critical issues that differentiate an iPod from all the other mp3 players.

2 – Reduce risk by improving control through audit trails and access control. There is no real audit trails with MS Office files flying back and forth using email, IM and jump-drives. And there is no real, centralized, single sign on access control. Intranet Worksites fix those problems. You can see who wrote what when, who read it, what comments they left and there is an audit trail for every single change made in the system.

3 – Radically reduce email. Read/write intranet tools have been shown to reduce internal email on projects by 75%. What more do you want?

4 – Increase the pace of innovation. I wrote a paper on this back in late 2005 called Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators. The summary is as follows:

• Constant innovation is required to succeed into today’s hyper competitive environment.
• Successful innovation is not about the ideas or inventions; it’s about the people.
• If you want innovation, you have to enable your innovation creators.

The paper discusses new approaches to managing for constant innovation and new tools for fostering innovation.

5 – Highlight the deadwood within your organization. Today, some mid level managers maintain their power within an organization not by contributing, but instead by limiting access to information, and obfuscation. There is less room to hide for these types of people to hide as Intranet Worksites increase internal transparency and thus highlight who adds value.

6 – Reduce costs by reducing repeated effort. Today, employees of large organizations spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. They are forced to do this because they have no efficient way to tap into the organization’s collective know how. This was the holy grail of “knowledge management”, but knowledge management focused on the wrong thing. It focused on “knowledge”, which meant that it was implemented as a tax on the organization. After people completed work, they had to go back and document what they had learned. The concept of Worksites are based on communication tools that have proven successful on the Internet. People use them to get work done and to communicate. “Knowledge capture” falls out as a positive externality. Further, there is no need to “manage” the knowledge as these Internet tools are self organizing. There is no hierarchy that organizes the Internet, yet Google followed by Wikipedia are the two most efficient knowledge discovery tools in the world.

Note, however, that this does not mean you should fire your Chief Knowledge Officer. Instead, change her title to Chief Internal Communications Officer. As Harvard’s Dr. Andrew McAfee has said many times, to get the full benefit of a Read/Write Intranet, you need support from management. The CICO’s job is to get the right communication tools in place and then foster the right management environment to encourage the use of those tools.

Nothing in the list above is about blogs, wikis, RSS. Nor is it about external blogging for marketing purposes. Banks, Hospitals, and Hedge Funds do not need or want their employees to be blogging about work on the open Internet. “Mr. Boothby deposited $478.23 today” is not useful. In a Bank with 100,000 employees there might be room for only a few external blogs. However, there are plenty of reasons why the Bank would want to have far more than 100,000 internal blogs. To begin with, the Bank might want to have each employee create a People Page about what they do and what skills they bring to the table. The Bank might then want to create a Project Worksite for each of the major internal projects going on, including new product roll-outs, new system development, new marketing campaigns, etc. For major commercial clients, internal Client Worksites could help internal teams that are spread across geographies and departmental silos to improve coordination, better serve the client’s needs and sell the client more products. Finally, Product Worksites could help the bank keep its own employees up to date on the latest developments with each of the complex financial products they sell.

100,000 people + 10,000 projects + 30,000 major clients + 1,000 products.

It is only when companies start to realize how they can use these tools that we will see social media as the new email.

Comments (7)

Five Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007

December 26, 2006 at 4:46 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

One prediction you can take to the bank is that at the end of the year every “expert” in every industry will make predictions for the coming year.  It’s a generally harmless exercise and, fortunately, readers have short memories.  In that spirit, here are my predictions for Enterprise 2.0/social media for the coming year:

1.  Social networking will go vertical.  The big general interest sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com will continue to grow, but at a slower pace. Smaller sites targeted at users with shared interests will boom.  Niche-oriented networks aimed at people who are passionate about a particular topic may not attract millions of users but many will become significant and sustainable businesses.  Companies to watch:  Sermo.com, an online community for doctors, CarSpace, a site for car enthusiasts; Classical Lounge; a site for composers and musicians; Dogster and Catster, (take a guess).    

2.  Multi-purpose collaboration platforms that deliver applications for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework while allowing easy content and permissions management will easily capture the corporate market for social software.  Big winner:  Blogtronix, the Swiss Army knife of collaboration platforms.  Socialtext has made some important alliances and will continue to be a top contender.  So will Confluence.  Big loser:  Six Apart.  Blogging platforms are so last week.  Next must-have function:  Interactive video.

3.  The Empire will strike back.  IBM and Microsoft will jump on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon in a big way but in their usual top-heavy style that aims to please IT by building in a lot of expensive control functions that frustrate end users and ensures that social software experiments are likely to fail in large organizations.  They will probably do very well.

4. The Anti-Empire will emerge.  A new breed of company–call it the anti-IBM and anti-Microsoft–will emerge that aims to make life for knowledge workers easier and more fun by “consumerizing” the experience of endless toggling between desktop and web apps.  Write this down somewhere:  Serendipity Technologies. 

5.  User-generated applications will become the next hot thing.  If Web 1.0 was “read only” and Web 2.0 is “read/write,” the next logical growth phase will be “read/write/execute.”  User generated applications will emerge that allow users to tie together web services to dynamically create custom functionality without having to know anything about programming or development.  Big winner:  Teqlo.

Comments (4)

DIY KM and Recruitment

December 22, 2006 at 11:04 am · Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0

The Boston Globe recently had a review of the music CDs for 2006. It started like this, “2006 was a DIY year in music, and we’re not talking about a glut of homemade albums. The do-it-yourselfers were the fans, not the artists. We read each other’s blogs, listened to millions of songs online, shared our discoveries, and bought the music we liked rather than the music the suits tried to sell us.” There are many emerging web 2.0 tools to support this interest. I was approached recently by a site, uPlayMe, that is “a free social networking application designed to link people with similar tastes in musical artists, songs or genres.”

What happens when these people go to work and find the suits are in charge? How can we bring this same level of participation and engagement inside the enterprise? I think you know where this is going, another promo for Enterprise 2.0. It is such a great opportunity to engage the most recent generation in the workforce and counter all these negative employee surveys I have heard about. Enterprise 2.0 is also a way for smart companies to attract the right people as the employee shortage that has been predicted starts to take hold. For example, there are many tools and ways that can link people with similar business (or even music) interests inside the enterprise.

I really liked Euan Semple’s, Ten questions companies SHOULD be asking themselves about Enterprise 2.0. They were the questions that would be asked by the same people who participated in the Web music scene of 2006. How do we get them to do the same thing inside their workplace? Euan also addressed the issue in Business as Usual. One result will be DIY KM as their activities create an accessible archive of their activities or interactions. McKinsey did a report, The Next Revolution in Interactions, on the importance of interactions in adding value and the need to support them with the proper IT investments. If done right it could be the same level of engaged interactions as described in the Globe except that they would now be covering matters of the enterprise and they would be accessible for future use. Jevon MacDonald wrote on some of the issues in From Inside to Outside: How do new organizations work? and referred to a book with right title, Trusted Space, with Robert Patterson.

Indus Khaitan commented on my post on the change management issues in enterprise 2.0 , “The aspects are definitely human; it requires evangelization in from of the CIO, or the Knowledge Officer. In corporations we’re still seeing initiatives around traditional Content Management System which give us nothing more than a “static intranet”. This is because the executive leadership does not see a visible ROI around “Writable Intranet”. Employee recruitment and retention could become one motivator and one very significant ROI.

Comments