Social Glass

I’ve just come back from an interesting Enterprise 2.0 conference hosted by Dow Jones in Melbourne, Australia. Dow Jones has a product called Factiva, which they’ve recently relaunched as “Factiva 2.0″. The goal of the conference was to give an overview of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0, then dive into Factiva. I wanted to share some great quotes from Greg Merkle (he’s also a guitarist), Vice President and Creative Director of Dow Jones, on the topic of Enterprise 2.0:

The corporate intranet is where content goes to die.

Workers have adapted their habits to work the way systems work, instead of systems adapting to work the way workers work.

Collective Intelligence - No one knows everything. Everyone knows something.

I wouldn’t have picked Dow Jones as being innovative in this space, but they seem to have a lot of great ideas.

Over at the FASTForwardBlog, Bill Ives highlights the value of combining enterprise search with social bookmarking.  Tom Mandel recently commented on my blog about this as well, and I’ve written about this topic a few times before.

I’ve recently posted a position paper about the business value of fusing search and social bookmarking, borrowing ideas from Andrew McAfee’s post on weak ties.  You can read it over at mike2.openmethodology.org by clicking here.

I wanted to share a great quote from a Gartner Analyst responding to CIO criticism of Web 2.0:

“Security is not about zero risk it is about managed risk. Accept there will be a few security failures.

“No risk means no reward. Stop talking about all the bad things that can happen and talk about what these technologies enable”…

“Relax, innovate. The goal is managed risk.”

Read more at computerworld.com.au.

Enterprise Search (the first “S” in SLATES) has long been heralded as the mechanism companies can use as a gateway to discover knowledge assets buried across the organization. I’ve discussed this topic a few times on this blog. Most enterprise search solutions integrate (at the API level) to line of business and reporting systems, meaning users can benefit from these systems without having to actually access them (try searching for “GOOG” on google.com to see how this works). Users who may not have known these systems exist now benefit from them.

But what of the other useful statistics enterprise search solutions can offer? Below I cover a few ways in which search solutions can enrich the Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management experience.

Trends

What’s hot? What are people within the organization interested in? What documents are viewed the most? These types of statistics help showcase the collective intelligence of the enterprise and provide valuable insight into what information assets are deemed valuable, or at least interesting, by the knowledge worker base. I can see an enterprise-ready application like Google Trends (see graph above) being used to analyze and provide this kind of business intelligence.

Correlation to Taxonomies

I discussed automated content tagging a few months ago, and search engines are certainly optimized to do this. They associate keywords (tags) to documents, and this inherently creates relationships between documents. So, from a knowledge management perspective, I can see tremendous value in enterprise search solutions providing business intelligence on the richness of information assets related to a corporate taxonomy (with an element in the taxonomy being treated as a keyword by the search engine). With such a solution an organization could automatically determine that, within its Information Management group, it has 1,745 knowledge assets across 7 business units and 6 countries pertaining to “metadata management”, for example.

Information Asset Age

Enterprise search solutions also store information about when a document was created or last modified. When combined with the correlation capability, this can be valuable information for a knowledge manager. For example, if an inquiry into information assets related to “web 2.0″ revealed that 75% of those assets were more than one year old, he’d know he’s in need of an update of knowledge about web 2.0.

Conclusion

Enterprise search vendors should take a serious look at packaging enriching business intelligence capabilities into their solutions.  Search engines have a wealth of information not only about information assets but also user patterns.  Why not expose this information?

The semantic web is often heralded as the next evolution of the internet, Web 3.0. Wikipedia describes the semantic web as an:

evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

Indeed the semantic web promises to make entities like “address”, “contact info.”, etc. which appear within unstructured text on web pages, to be machine parsable through the use of microformats. Other semantic web standards, such as OWL, aim to define the relationships between objects and attributes within a pre-determined ontology.

Behind the firewall, an intranet marked up according to these standards would be information Garden of Eden with relationships between knowledge and metadata about content items being deeply embedded. The Discovery process on such an intranet would certainly be very rewarding given this abundance of “information about information”.

All of this works if content is published using the structural components the semantic web requires. And herein lies the problem - structure.

Within the context of Enterprise 2.0 we often talk about wikis and blogs being emergent - meaning they adapt to the needs and requirements of the knowledge worker. We want knowledge workers to impose their own structures, perhaps with minimal guidance through the use of patterns like scaffolding.

So how are we going to enforce the use of, say, microformats every time a knowledge worker writes an address or somebody’s contact information? Personally, I can’t think of a way without imposing structure. And I’d hate to see said structure reduce participation.

I believe in the value proposition of the semantic web, but to maintain current emergence capabilities, wiki and blog technology will have to be significantly enhanced to automatically mark up content when published. I think we’re a long way off from that being possible.