Archive for February, 2008
by Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under
Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution, barriers
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
by Bill Ives
February 25, 2008 at 2:57 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I received a useful report from Awareness on adoption trends for web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. In an email survey they found that 54% of organizations with over 500 employees are using web 2.0 tools and 74% of those with under 500 employees. The majority of these use a both internal and external facing web tools. Blogs are the most used web 2.0 technology (87%) followed by communities, wikis, RSS feeds, and social networking. The vast majority (96%) report that the use of web 2.0 tools haven been successful. The biggest obstacle to deploying web 2.0 tools in the limited availability of internal resources to support their deployment. Security is also a concern. The results were obtained by Equation research in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The recent date might explain why these results are a bit higher than some others such as reported in Some Initial Web 2.0 Enterprise Research. However, the desire for web 2.0 in the enterprise has been building for some time. A University of Massachusetts survey done in late 2006 found that a majority of business respondents (66%) felt that social media were important to the firm’s business strategy. Another 2006 study by Watson Wyatt found that nearly 50% of the employee population prefers – and expects – collaborative and interactive methods of communication fund on the consumer web.
I was especially interested in how these tools were helping organizations both inside and outside the enterprise. Here is a summary:
Positive impacts for internal facing social media
Improving communication and collaboration - 91%
Finding experts inside the company - 81%
Improving knowledge management - 78%
Positive impacts for external facing social media
Increasing customer engagement - 68%
Increasing brand awareness & loyalty - 64%
Providing market research - 58%
Generating revenue - 39%
The Awareness research found that going forward 28% of organizations with over 500 employees have budgets greater than $50,000 for web 2.0 tools or social media. The top tools planned are blogs and wikis (56%) but many are also planning to deploy online communities.
Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness told me, “It’s clear from the report that two trends exist. First, enterprises are very interested in taking advantage of social media for business purposes. Second, many of them are stalled by two factors: concerns about security, moderation, and control; and the fact that they have limited resources and understanding to drive a successful Web 2.0 project. As you know at Awareness, we are putting a lot of energy into addressing both of the concerns. We’ve built a platform that specifically addresses the issues of security, moderation, and control, and because we do the work and host the communities for people we can help them overcome the obstacles of not having enough resources.”
Thanks to Awareness for sharing this work. Future studies should include a new category of web 2.0 tool, workspace or collaborative platforms, such as what Awareness offers. You can download the report from their web site.
by Tom Matrullo
February 25, 2008 at 12:50 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Does anyone recall, in the Wednesday session with Jørn Ellefsen, CEO, Comperio, which song of Elvis Costello’s was used in the music search demo? Thanks.
by Paula Thornton
February 25, 2008 at 1:28 am · Filed under
3.0, FASTForward '08, intent, interaction, metadata, semantic
Not to diminish my colleague Joe’s efforts to report on John Hagel’s comments, the true potential is not in the Attention Economy but in the Attraction Economy (not to be limited to emotional connection, see also video [7:21] — emotion is one dimension in a personal economic model of decisions, and is relevant but not a priority in enterprise interactions).
Attention is the goal; attraction is the most effective means to achieve the goal: moving from reactive to interactive. The new ROI is Return on Interaction.
Hagel misses the real potential when he recommends moving from “push” to “pull” to optimize resources. Basic laws of physics suggest that the level of energy (effort) expended is the same for either push or pull – there is no net gain. The only way to capitalize beyond push or pull models is to leverage existing energy (effort for free) – by tapping the ‘draw’, the natural forces of attraction between: the customer and the company, the employer and the company, any combination of resources seeking each other.
Several different speakers illustrated how this attraction can be facilitated: zero-term search, liberal use of personal metadata and related metadata to build inference.
Ok, so if we’re going to talk inference then we’re really pushing toward 3.0. But the true innovative stories were leaning in that direction.
Gerry Campbell of Reuters, spoke of the significance of context — the need to create an ecosystem (infrastructure) that provides capabilities beyond core business operations. To move themselves and their customers toward such a reality, Reuters purchased a technology upon which they built Calais to enrich content with semantic metadata. Over time, user-generated context also needs to be fed back into the system. Such efforts move toward a big “tent” revival, where Michael Cleary of Reuters suggests that con-tent is brought together seamlessly with in-tent.
by Jon Husband
February 24, 2008 at 9:03 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, podcasts
I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.
David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work. This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.
As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information
Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:
.
" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing", and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."
and later
"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."
.
Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.
It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.
I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work. Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management.
Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.
Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away. Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.
Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0" - (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners. I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.
I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years. It will never be left to be completely organic - free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent. Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better. They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable.
FASTForward 08 made that clear.
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by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory
John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.
As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”
Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.
“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.
Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:
“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”
So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.
John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”
These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.
To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.
by Jevon MacDonald
February 23, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is my favorite sign from FASTForward. I think it says a lot about the company and the idea that creating new things and being a step ahead is more important than protecting old ideas.
I found it on a blog but now I can’t remember which blog it was. (I didn’t have a camera to take a picture myself at the conference). If you took this, let me know and I will link through to you.
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 22, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Interviews
Yesterday (Day Three), we posted the last round of video interviews from FASTforward 08. We encourage you to find the time to listen in - those interviewed had many insightful things to say, as did Jerry Michalski, our excellent host for the series, about Enterprise 2.0, the user revolution, search, and much, much more.
Day Three
Day Two
- Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
- Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST
- Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
- Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
- Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
- Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
- Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
- Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
- Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
- Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
- Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
- Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
- Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
- Tim Stay: Perfect Search
- Liv Brahin: UBS
- Michael Cleary: Reuters
Day One
- John Hagel - consultant, author
- Joe McKendrick - analyst, blogger
- Bob Coxe - chief information officer for Criterion Systems
- Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
- Clare Hart - EVP, Dow Jones & Company
- David Sutija - SVP of enterprise products, FAST
- David Weinberger - speaker, consultant, author
- Tom Davenport - consultant, author
- Jorn Ellefsen - CEO of Comperio
- Charles Fiesel - Roundarch
- Don Tapscott - strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
- Sue Feldman - research vice president, content technologies group, IDC
Keynotes:
- John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
- David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It
by Paula Thornton
February 22, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, FASTForward '08, Microblogging, Twitter
As I commented to my colleagues as we were wrapping up on Wednesday, we truly experienced Conference 2.0. What we accomplished and how we participated in FASTforward ’08 embodied key elements of 2.0. Moreso, what we experienced/achieved via the conference could/should be a repeatable model for other conferences (not just FASTforward ones).
Some of the elements:
- The blog itself. With Sandy being quite prolific, she had posts up faster than most of us could take notes, let alone synthesize and edit them into pieces (and as Rob mentioned in his interview, there are others of us who need time to digest it all).
- The myff08.com. While we struggled with some of the interaction elements, one high-value deliverable was having the pdfs of the keynote presentations available the same day. Someone’s checking on more ‘public’ availability of these.
- Video interviews that were available the same day. While they are a bit large I immediately noticed a huge difference in both the audio and video quality over last year. Not to mention Jerry’s impeccable skill as an MC (not to diminish David’s efforts last year). Jerry effortlessly made us all look/sound better. [Not to forget, although I did, the tireless effort of behind-the-scenes work for videography/lighting/sound, scheduling and editing.]
- Microblogging (Twitter) and photojournaling. The latter could have used a little collaborative instigation by requesting photos from the at-large crowd and suggesting a tag to post on Flickr (and I obviously need a larger memory chip in my camera). We’re also looking to get an account (or syndication) to flow related tweets through the FASTforward blog space.
- [On a negative note, the tracking devices were nearly useless – I would not recommend the effort to do that again…the bloggers had some pretty strong offline commentary about them.]
Having wireless available makes a huge difference, as does not having it when trying to facilitate near-instantaneous sharing. I had to laugh at myself as I was trying to tweet on my phone, drop it to take a photo, start typing some notes in Word when I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone and/or grabbed a pen and threw a note on paper (my thanks to facilities planning for putting power strips on the front tables of every room). If I’d continued as I had in the first session and also had my audio stick running I would have been trying to operate on 5 channels simultaneously. I can tell you – it doesn’t work. But they were all just my experiment – not something I’d been specifically asked to do. They were my way of being engaged and contributing.
The critical point here is, while we had shared a couple of ‘blogger’ calls among ourselves before the event, they were mostly about the logistics of the event. Not much more. We did not have specific assignments or even any charters – it just evolved.
Even slightly more ‘formal’ actions evolved. For a panel luncheon on Wednesday, the panelist list was firmed up that morning. The ‘intended’ blogger participants ended up with schedule conflicts and new resources were put in place.
As I had stepped up to ‘facilitate’ (a format I simply recommended and was adopted), I felt some onus to check on the room early (not asked, not planed, just seemed reasonable). The room was found to not be staged for a panel at all. Kudos to FAST, the travel group they engaged for event logistics and to the hotel staff for quickly pulling together a SWAT team to reconfigure the room in 20 minutes. For some, all of these elements stacked together, let alone any one of them, could have turned into a nervous mess or frantic disaster. Everyone simply stepped up and gave it their ‘get it done’ best and no one else noticed. [Although in the frantic mess, I did leave my cell phone in the podium afterward, and yet 3 hours later it was safely found at the Registration Desk – exactly where an event logistics person suggested I might look first.]
I had earlier shared my observations (to someone who suggested they hadn’t noticed) as to FAST’s careful staging of the ‘welcome’ experience with the:
- Wash of orange color through the grand hallway
- Greeting attendees with refreshments, served graciously and enthusiastically before reaching the registration desk
- Lively visual impressions of the drinks in the neon orange tumblers with the FAST logo on the side
- Careful positioning of the vendor booths within the normal traffic flow (although for all of that careful staging, I still didn’t find time to get to more than 1 booth the whole time).
And where did I miss the whole contest for a car? Having that on the floor with the winner’s name on the roof, was a very STRONG association to the benefits of registering early. What were those rules, terms & conditions?
I’m sure there are other conferences we could take some leads from, but this one did just nicely, thank you.
Any other 2.0 experiences/observations to report?
Postscript: See related microblogging reference.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 6:20 pm · Filed under
Change, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
J.P. shares advice for leaders on how to create the cultural change required to become Enterprise 2.0 organizations.
Bio: J.P. Rangaswami is CIO of British Telecom’s (BT) Global Services group, which works in 170 countries and is the fastest growing division with BT Group, supporting large businesses and organizations across the globe. Regarded as something of a maverick and an innovator, J.P. is is an outspoken advocate of open source and using emerging and disruptive technologies to improve information sharing, education and collaboration. He was also CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort. J.P. was named to silicon.coms “Agenda Setters for 2007″ and has been awarded UK-based Waters Magazine’s “CIO of the Year” award.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast, Search
Jerry asks John how it feels to see his small Norwegian company grow into a global company — and what the Microsoft deal means.
Bio: John Markus Lervik, Ph.D., is CEO and a co-founder of FAST. Dr. Lervik earlier served as the company’s CTO, and holds a Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
John Markus Lervik:
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by Sara Clark
February 21, 2008 at 4:55 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Fast
Nate reviews the criteria for the Innovation Awards.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:45 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08
Jevon on the user experience, Enterprise 2.0, flexible software, inflows, outflows, and “interflows” of information, content curation and more.
Jevon MacDonald:
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by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Kiyoshi Kurihara on Japan as a culture of experimentation and the irony of Japan being behind on Enterprise 2.0 while they are ahead on new gadget ideas.
Kiyoshi Kurihara Jerry Michalski:
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by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:26 pm · Filed under
FASTForward '08, Fast, Financial services
Brooks talks with Jerry about the new strategic importance of search for financial services companies in creating a consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints.
Brooks Gibbins has worldwide responsibility for the securities, retail banking, insurance and financial information sectors at FAST. He has over 12 years of experience in enterprise software and hosted solutions in the financial services market. Prior to joining FAST, he was a key executive with Multex.com, a financial information and global research portals company. He oversaw the build out of the European business, co-led global sales, and headed up the firm’s investment management solutions business. He began his career with Price Waterhouse in their SAP technology consulting practice.
by Jerry Michalski
February 21, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under
Computerworld, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08
Kyoko talks with Jerry about how the conference — her first FASTforward — has given her a rich range of new insights and stories to share with her readers in Japan.
Kyoko Suzuki is a member of the editorial staff at Computerworld Japan, part of IDG, Inc. Japan.
by Tom Matrullo
February 20, 2008 at 11:00 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There was a ton of insight, energy, considered argument, and enthusiasm at FASTForward08, and it will take me a while to take it in. Let me start by offering an observation that struck me with some force, possibly because I spent about a decade in print journalism writing breaking news and longer pieces for a daily newspaper:
In his rich presentation this morning, Safa Rashtchy mentioned that the importance of being found high in Google searches was so high that reporters at the Times of London were being trained to write “in a way that that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.”
In view of the hugely more complex and rich visions of search on offer at FASTForward08, this bit of journalistic “practice” seems – at least to me – less than wholly promising.
What the conference revealed — through speakers, detailed discussions, and vendor conversations — were more sophisticated models of search involving matches of user and content, textual analysis and the sensibility of the searcher: a multi-faceted approach using contextual depth and mirrored value to connect to various readers seeking the news.
What this suggests to me is that a news story that begins by setting a scene — offering some sense of place and time and narrative interest — could fare better in the sophisticated searches now being developed (we saw the example of Reuters), involving metatagging strategies that go well beyond basic search hooks of who what when and where. Not that these basic factoids are not important – but it’s nice to hope we are looking at a future in which every single news story will not mandatorily begin with a tedious recitation of search terms in which all values of style, intrigue, and narrative skill have been pared away.
by Jevon MacDonald
February 20, 2008 at 8:53 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the biggest changes I have seen in the discussion at FASTForward from last year to this year has been in the framing of the conversation that went on at the conference.
FAST and other search companies have some of the best assets available to them to create predictive software tools and platform that can create new experiences for the user.
The question that I am left banging around inside my head is If we didn’t have search, how else would we expect the world to wade through all the information on the web.
Social filters, predictive interfaces and context-sensitive information delivery become much more important, but the principals behind them remain very similar to search. I haven’t been able to figure out what FAST and other search companies are doing in this space, but it seems like a squandered asset if they aren’t doing anything about it.
How about you? What can you imagine as the most compelling way to take the huge data sets that a company like FAST would have, and what creative ways could they be exposed to the user?
Me? I would like to see a page that is auto-built using my emails (the tool would access my email) that compiles all relevant enterprise content based on the text of my emails and and it would create a page for each email thread with the proper links. I could then easily share that content (if it is allowed) with the people in the email thread.
by Hylton Jolliffe
February 20, 2008 at 5:39 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
We’ve heard from some of you that those tuning in to the site via RSS are not being signaled that there are videos attached to the posts. We’re working to fix but in the meantime we’ll point you again to the many excellent interviews that took place today.
- Gerry Campbell: president, search and content technologies, Reuters
- Zia Zaman: executive vice president, global marketing, FAST
- Safa Rashtchy: speaker at FASTForward’08
- Jan Paul Raven: Knowledge Concepts
- Jared Spataro: group product manager, Microsoft
- Benjamin Rudolph: Search Discovery
- Jim McGee: consultant, author, blogger
- Mark Pfeiffer: SAILLABS
- Bill Ives: consultant, blogger
- Jon Husband: author, blogger, consultant
- Paula Thornton: experience design strategist
- Bjørn Olstad: CTO of FAST
- Sandy Kemsley: consultant and blogger
- Tim Stay: Perfect Search
- Liv Brahin: UBS
- Michael Cleary: Reuters
Keynotes:
- John Hagel: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization
- David Weinberger: The Information Mess – And Why You Should Love It
by Sandy Kemsley
February 20, 2008 at 5:01 pm · Filed under
FASTforward08
Final session of the conference, and I’m in the financial services breakout track to hear Lee Atkinson, SVP at iDNA, and Marc Hebert, CMO of Virtusa, discuss a real-world example of using enterprise search to build a true 360-degree customer view. They started with some background on the problems with enterprise applications and how dynamic business applications (Forrester’s term for composite applications; he’s quoting from a Forrester report) are starting to take on some of the functionality. Enterprise search applications provide a layer on top of the enterprise applications, files and databases to create search solutions such as corporate search or intelligence solutions. They see enterprise search as a key enabler of dynamic business applications in order to provide both speed and agility of those applications.
The case study that they presented is the implementation of enterprise search in a top ten global bank, providing fast retrieval of structured and unstructured data, and integration with business process management (not a term that I expected to hear at this conference!) to manage events being generated by the system. Their technology platform included enterprise search, BPM, SOA and enterprise portals, and they addressed the 360-degree customer view and a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) event management system. They didn’t use search because of its inherent properties — in fact, the users don’t even see this as a search application, and the applications look like standard structured data extracted from operational systems — they use it to extract information quickly from heterogeneous data sources. Prior to this, the bank had point solutions, multiple data warehouses, and no commonality between systems and databases to provide any sort of consolidated customer view. They needed to integrate data from multiple sources, and also meet their compliance regulations.
They started by providing a compliance and risk view, plus product and customer profiling, in 2005, then expanded to include event-driven business processes and exception management in 2006. In 2007, they brought in the single customer view and more advanced business processes and analysis. Of course, there is no such thing as a single view of a customer in a large organization: different business areas (compliance, operations) have different needs, and each user type’s customized view of a customer is actually a subset of the entire customer model, with other supplementary information pulled in and additional analysis added appropriate to the task at hand. The result is a number of different end-to-end processes, such as know-your-client, anti-money laundering and sanction lists in account opening.
For them, search technology is a way to integrate legacy systems — not an application that I thought of when I considered search — although it requires a deep knowledge of the business domain and the nature of the underlying data. Once the core integration structure has been created, additional data sets and applications can be added quickly and at a fairly low cost. The focus on event-driven business applications based on search results is where search really contributes value to their applications.
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