Enterprise Search Summit 2010 Notes: Search and Discovery Patterns

May 17, 2010 at 4:00 am · Filed under Search

I recently attended the 2010 Enterprise Search Summit.  Here are my notes from the session, Search and Discovery Patterns, was lead by Peter Morville, President, Semantic Studios. Here is the session overview. My notes follow.

“Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe.  It’s also a radically multidisciplinary, creative challenge. In this talk, Morville defines a pattern language for search and discovery that embraces user psychology and behavior, cross-channel information architecture, multisensory interaction, and emerging technology. He identifies design principles that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time. He explains how future methods and user experience deliverables can help us to create better search interfaces and applications today and invent the improbable discovery tools of tomorrow.”

Peter said that whenever he comes into organizations he finds unfinished structures for search with no blue prints. Browsing does not scale in these environments. Search is the most disruptive technology of our time. It has major impacts and investing has huge rewards. It demands attention to detail and is more than just putting in a few key words.

Feedback is essential and users need to have confidence in their actions. Design for the context of use (e.g. desktop vs. mobile vs. kiosks).  Real time search should keep giving results as they appear.  Browsing and navigation should align with search but remember that browsing does not scale.

Peter referred to the work of Christopher Alexander, an architect noted for his theories about design.

In Search Patterns Peter looked at behavior patterns such as narrowing. How do you clarify what you are looking for? In some other contexts, broadening is required.  Sometimes people get stuck in their behavior patterns even when it results in a dead end and we need to help people get unstuck.

He also wrote about Design Patterns for search.  He looked at how to help users before getting to results by offering suggestions. Yahoo has auto-complete and auto-suggestion. Sometimes the auto-suggest does not use the original key words but goes beyond them.

Google tries to offer the best first in their design. People often do not go beyond the first few returns. It is also fast, another key to its success. We cannot take slow for search returns.

Flickr looks at interestingness like Google does Page Rank. It looks at social data.

Federated search is a good solution. Other times it is a symptom of a deeper problem.  People do not know what sources to look in. Peter is working with the Library of Congress on this issue. People do not know which database to go to. So they offer a federated search as a band aid for now.

Facted navigation is one of his favorite design patterns.  It allows people to start simple and see the facets or filters that they can use as a next step to clarify.  You can do testing and refinement of the facets and the interface where they are placed. You can also make use of user generated tagging to refine facets.  Amazon is looking at how to apply facted navigation on mobile devices.

Actionable results is another design pattern found in song results. You can do multiple things with the results including sharing and playing.

We can rethink search by asking questions like Wolfram Alpha.  We can try to help people make the right questions like Hunch does.

Peter asked: how can we help people find the unknown unknowns? I like this question, as it is a goal of Darwin.

Ambient Findability is another book from Peter. It covers the degree to which an object can make itself findable. He said the world was not ready for it when he wrote the book in 2005. Now the world is more ripe for the concept.  Some of the ideas are becoming more possible. You can make your iPhone into a bar code reader to find things. Amazon allows you to scan stuff to see if they can sell it to you.

There are new ways to forge connections between physical and digital stuff. He describes a plant that tweets and asks for water when it needs it. His local library has a digital hold shelf for physical books he orders. People are starting to talk about these connections more such as Kuniavsky’s upcoming book on smart objects.

We need to design new maps to better understand the choices people have from a user’s perspective.  Peter likes search because it is wicked cross-disciplinary problem with many inter-dependencies.  It is a problem that requires on-going attention and is never fully solved.

He closed with three ways to move forward: focus on details, see the big picture, and see the problem form different perspectives.  Great session. Here is Peter’s blog.

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Interview with Marty St. George, CMO at JetBlue

May 14, 2010 at 10:47 am · Filed under Webinars

Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure to interview Marty St.George, the CMO at JetBlue.

We started the conversation by focusing on what it takes to achieve one of JetBlue’s original goals – bringing humanity back to the airline industry. Many companies try to embrace humanity or talk about humanizing their brands, but very few achieve that goal the way JetBlue has. Most end up with pockets of humanity or episodic programs that makes them seem human for a little period of time. JetBlue was able to scale it to the point where it has become part of the fabric of the company.

The secret?

First, they created a culture based on embracing humanity – they did not just try to make humanity an add-on to a more traditional airline business culture. Where most other airlines consider themselves in the airline operating business, seeing their jobs as flying airplanes around, JetBlue considers itself in the customer service business, and they happen to fly airplanes as part of that. Second, and in order to scale “embracing humanity” as their company grew, they built a set of 5 core values by which they hire, train, and lead their people – Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun. They also realize that the company does not own the culture, nor the brand – the employees do, and every crew member is an equal owner in the culture and the brand. Subtle nuances to some traditional business thinkers, but possibly the single most important difference between a company who can truly claim to have a human face and one that is just giving it lip service.

We then talked about the importance of leadership in maintaining such a culture, and how JetBlue University is an integral part of coaching and training new leaders from within. They also have a very different concept of teaming than most traditional companies – making sure that no silos form within their organizational structure, and being very collaborative in nature. Being able to have a true collaborative culture is another byproduct of being based on a shared mission and core values.

The 2nd part of the conversation was focused primarily on JetBlue’s embrace of Social Media. For JetBlue, Social Media is the antithesis of media – it is a direct connection/two way conversation between the customer and the brand. While they started with social media as an experiment, they now have truly made it part of the fabric of their company. Like Dell, they realize that you cannot just play by putting a toe in the water – at some point you need to go all out. And when you do it right, people do not just talk with you, they talk with one another about you – providing you with the richest learning environment.

We also touched on the messy side of embracing humanity – including how to deal with people who unfairly voice their anger and frustration in public, and how to avoid being taken hostage by others who have big social media megaphones.

Other things we talked about include:

• The importance of senior leadership involvement in onboarding new employees
• How your front line employees are your brand
• The need to keep a small business feel as your company grows
• The role of passion in the workplace and the importance of communications as part of that
• The importance of praise in embracing humanity
• How to keep the balance between being hi-tech vs. hi-touch and still be able to claim that your brand embraces humanity
• How twitter scales as a customer service channel
• The importance of trials in airline marketing

You can listen to the podcast over at the FASTforward Blog.

 

 Marty St.george [55:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (880)

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Have books been bad for us?

May 12, 2010 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Community, Culture, Innovation, KM, Network Effect, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Wikinomics, Wikipedia, Wisdom of Crowds

A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?

Is this better?

If so – why?

If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?

So what’s my argument?

Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.

I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.

So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.

I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.

How did this occur?

My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.

How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….

There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!

But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.

Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.

For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.

But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.

Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.

But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.

What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.

As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……

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(Un)Reality Check …

May 9, 2010 at 12:47 pm · Filed under Adoption, Change, Connected Enterprise, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking

The question that kicks off this short four-minute video:

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Is Social Media a Fad ?  Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution ?

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Thanks to Euan Semple for surfacing this recently-updated (current statistics) view of the spread and penetration of social media into our daily human activities.

It’s not hard to imagine similar patterns to the growth of social computing and informal, socially-driven learning for the average organization 5 or 10 years down the road.

Organizations everywhere will have to come to terms with the ubiquity of social tools, the fundamental necessity of personal knowledge management as a core element of productivity, and more useful-and-easier ways to create effective business processes in a networked environment, whether Barely Repeatable or Easily Repeatable.
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Social Software Gaining Greater Traction with the Enterprise

May 7, 2010 at 3:28 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing

Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz writes that 2010 will be a defining year for enterprise 2.0 in his report, Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview. He goes on the writes that “a very broad and rich landscape of technology vendors will differentiate to stay relevant in this crowded market. With enterprise social technologies, buyers must now assess vendors pursuing three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integration with adjacent technologies.” I would add that vendors are creating very feature rich tools as the many of the more pure play offerings are now adding such additions as micro-blogging within their suite.

I was especially interested in his data on social media adoption through a survey of US and European KM decision makers. Rob found that in 2010 nearly one-third of enterprises will officially support internal and or external social networking.  In addition, wiki adoption will approach 50% in 2010 and they are the most popular tool. He found that the wikipedia model can enable a broad community to generate and maintain content. Another popular use case for wikis is as “a lightweight workspace and project management tool where teams can author content or coordinate activities and tasks with confidence that the information is up to date.”

The use cases for collaborative platforms were interesting. Collaboration on content (such as office documents was the top instance at 51%. Next was using a collaboration platform as a network fileshare at 48%. Then 39% of the respondents said they were integrating our collaboration platform’s calendaring, scheduling, and task management features with their email messaging system and 28% said they were using a collaboration platform’s Web 2.0 features such as blogs, Wikis, and RSS feeds, Finally 28% said they are using a collaboration platform to facilitate sharing of documents and other content with their external partners and customer and 20% are not using a collaborative platform.

The report goes on to document how the vendors are responding to these trends and can be found on the Forrester web site.

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