AIIM

Former AIIM execs launch consultancy

Ron Miller — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:18:47 -0500

AIIM lost two key executives this week when Carl Frappaolo, former VP of Market Intelligence, and Dan Keldsen, former director of market intelligence, both left the organization to form their own consulting firm called Information Architected, Inc. The new company looks at the intelligent use of content, knowledge and business processes. The company offers a range of services including education, strategic consulting, ROI studies and market research. See the company's website for more information.

One on One with Nitin Mangtani of Google Search Appliance

Ron Miller — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:28:20 -0500

Nitin Mangtani is the lead product manager for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). In this role, Nitin focuses on defining enterprise search strategy, establishing the product road map and defining new releases for the GSA. There have been several pieces, published in this space, on the difficulty of enterprise search and what happens when you move consumer-style Google search to the enterprise.

Recently, Mangtani surprised a few people when he published an SAP-sponsored editorial on Forbes.com in which he basically defended Google enterprise search against critics. It was a bold move. It prompted me to write to him and ask some questions of my own about his reason for publishing the Forbes piece and his rebuttal to Google Search Appliance critics.

FCM: You gave a spirited defense of your product in Forbes. What prompted you to react in that forum in that fashion?

NM: Our words are a reflection of our commitment to enterprise search. At Google, we are constantly innovating to ensure that our search solutions for the enterprise are as powerful and easy to use as Google.com. It's important to us that everyone--from CIOs to IT admins to employees--hear how we're taking our online search expertise, and tailoring that experience to meet the specific needs of businesses large and small.

FCM: Google's PageRank is the frequently touted "secret sauce" for the web-based search experience. Yet the majority of content in enterprise is not web-native content. How does Google adjust the search relevancy strategy for a non-hyperlinked body of content?

NM: Google has made a name for serving the most relevant results. In the workplace, the more relevant your results, the easier and faster you can get your job done. Speed and relevance are the twin pillars of a successful search, and are our primary focus in delivering search solutions for enterprise customers.

It's important to understand that PageRank is just one of the many signals we use to determine relevancy for Google.com. Similarly, in the enterprise, there's no one signal we rely on to deliver results. The Google Search Appliance leverages the technology tested daily by millions of users at Google.com, but also incorporates algorithms and models that we develop exclusively to suit the challenges of an enterprise search environment.

To meet these challenges, we have some of the best and brightest engineers in the world working on enterprise search. Our dedicated team is made up of experts in information retrieval, putting the power of PhDs and years of experience to work for our customers. If there's any secret to our strategy, it's simply that we don't let our recipe for search get cold. Our secret sauce is a team committed to innovation, and delivering the truly useful results that allow businesses to focus on business goals.

FCM: Along the same lines, I think Google loses its advantage inside the enterprise where there are fewer likely correct choices. As one analyst puts it, it's far easier to find a correct document among many correct answers, more difficult when there are only one or two correct ones. How does Google compensate for this difference?

NM: We find that end users in the enterprise often need to perform both functions, whether it's finding a specific document, or more general information discovery. Our goal is to make sure they can tackle both of these tasks with ease.

In both instances, relevance is key--and our ability to deliver relevant results is unmatched. One way we achieve relevance is through the personalization of search results. With the Google Search Appliance, administrators can adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function. This means engineers see code and design documents at the top of their search results, while employees in marketing department see market analysis and white papers at the top of search results for the same query.

For the employee who doesn't know exactly what they're looking for, we also dynamically cluster results, which allows users to drill down on information through automatically generated categories. This allows employees to pull information from related areas and projects, often leading to the discovery new information they didn't know existed.

And for those looking for information residing in enterprise applications, like SAP or an employee directory, we provide an Enterprise OneBox that pulls information directly from across a business' enterprise applications. That way employees looking for the Q4 sales report or the status of a purchase order can find it all from the convenience of their search box.

Providing the best search possible isn't just about returning results. It's about understanding the nature of the search query and the searcher. Our search solutions are designed to take both into account, and to get better over time by learning the types of results that are most useful to you.

FCM: Carl Frappaolo of AIIM has said that what makes enterprise search so difficult is what he calls the "digital landfill" of information, data that is spread out across repositories in the enterprise. How does Google enterprise search get at this type of information locked away in a variety of repositories?

NM: This is one area where our experience online has taught us an important lesson. Whether searching online at home, or behind the firewall at work, employees want to have all their results accessible through one search box.

We call this universal search. In the same way we pull together web pages, news, blogs, financial quotes and more online, we've designed our enterprise search to pull results from across business infrastructure, including intranets, databases, portal servers, fileshares and content management systems, like Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Livelink and Microsoft Sharepoint. We provide native connectors that allow businesses to index data from their various repositories, and our built-in Content Connector Framework gives businesses the flexibility to build the custom connections they may need.

Pulling all this information together certainly isn't easy, but its our job to ensure that from a user's perspective, everything they need is at their fingertips. Our universal search ensures that employees can find information, no matter where or how it's stored, while our expertise delivering fast, relevant results ensures they can act on the information they uncover.

FCM: In my view, based on my conversations with industry experts over the years, the Google Appliance is an excellent choice for a department, but not so great for an enterprise-wide search tool that crosses departments, repositories and data types. Why do you think I'm wrong about this conclusion?

NM: I think the best way to answer this is with the response we've gotten from our customers. We have more than 20,000 customers using our search solutions, encompassing a range of business sizes and types, and many of these are large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies.

Kimberly Clark, a Fortune 500 company known for brands such as Huggies and Kleenex, is a fantastic example of a large company faced with precisely the dilemma you outlined. They had millions of documents across a range of departments and repositories, and they needed a solution that could bring it all together. With the Google Search Appliance, employees can now search more than 22 million documents from across their company intranet, as well as web applications, homegrown document management systems, filer servers, and their public internet site. And best of all, they were able to install the search appliance quickly, and with minimal training for employees who were already used to the Google.com search experience.

Honeywell International, a leader in the tech manufacturing industry, is another great example of a large enterprise using the Google Search Appliance with great success. Honeywell needed a solution that could power both their internal search, as well as the external search on their public website. The Google Search Appliance addressed both of these needs, and was optimized and serving results within a day.

The range of customers we serve, again, speaks to the flexibility of our search solutions for the enterprise. Whether a small business with a rapidly growing number of files to manage, or a large business with content buried across databases and departments, our search solutions can scale and be tailored to meet a range of different needs from across the business community.

FCM: Users are always saying they want the Google consumer experience in the enterprise, but you don't seem to have the same success there you have on the web, why do you think that is?

NM: Our corporate motto at Google is "focus on the user and all else will follow". In the case of enterprise search, users are demanding the Google experience they know, trust and depend on. We can't think of anyone in a better position to provide this experience than us.

We hear from many of the businesses we work with how glad they are to have a solution at work that is as easy to use as Google.com. Our solution saves time and money by being easy to set up and maintain, and saves businesses the worry of needing to provide extensive training to employees who already understand and trust the experience they get with Google.

Success has many forms. If our success is judged by adoption, then we stand by the 20,000 customers using our search solutions. If it's judged by commitment to innovation, then we stand by our continued deployment of new products and improvements. And if it's judged by end user experience, then we absolutely stand by the power and simplicity of the search solution we provide to our customers. Search for us is never a solved problem, and in our minds, the best is yet to come.

You need to get familiar with BPM

Ron Miller — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:56:49 -0400

Carl Frappaolo, VP at AIIM, posted to his blog this week after giving a webinar on AIIM's latest Market IQ report on Business Process Management. I have to admit I hadn't thought much about BPM until I read Carl's post, but he certainly gave me food for thought. The fact is, that business process management, which involves defining the way work flows through your business, has everything to do with content and records management, two areas that are important to readers of this newsletter.

When it comes to content management, content flows from the CMS and touches practically every aspect of the business. As it does, it intersects with BPM as it moves through different defined business processes. Frappaolo goes on to explain that it also has to do with records management in terms of how the record gets into the system and the process through which it becomes an official record.

If you aren't familiar with BPM yet, you probably should be. You can watch the archived webinar and learn more about what this means to you and your company.

To learn more:
- read Frappaolo's blog post

Enterprise search is not a simple matter

Ron Miller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:35:48 -0400

If you work in an enterprise, chances are you've heard the complaint: "Why can't our search work more like Google?" Employees, spoiled by the Google search experience on the web quite naturally think it should be simple enough to extend to the enterprise. Unfortunately, as Dan Woods points out in his Jargon Spy column on Forbes.com this week, it's not easy to extend this type of search to the enterprise for a number of reasons related to the differences between the open web and a company content repository.

In fact, AIIM released a study last spring that proved that employees want a consumer experience, but the enterprise is a different animal. In an article in EContent called "Enterprise Search Still Lacking", Carl Frappaolo, VP at AIIM stated that the enterprise has to deal with what he calls a digital landfill of information. With so many content sources to cross, it's not easy to pinpoint the document you need. Woods points out that Google is built on a page rank algorithm and most companies don't have a link-based system.

There are a myriad of other issues, too, including the fact that, as Woods points out, you don't always know what you're looking for. One way to solve this issue is to use targeted tagging, but in a large enterprise this is a hard system to keep under control. There are, in fact, no simple answers to enterprise search. If there were, somebody would be making a lot of money.

For more information:
- read Wilson's column
- check out the EContent article
- view AIIM's findability study

Google's Mayer says search is 90 percent there

Ron Miller — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:56:52 -0400

In a wide ranging interview with the LA Times last week, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, talked about the company she's worked for the last 10 years. Mayer has seen Google grow from startup mode to worldwide technology force. She covered a lot of ground in the interview, but as TechCrunch pointed out, one particular answer stood out in which she stated that search is practically solved:

"I think there will be a continued focus on innovation, particularly in search," she said. "Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95 percent of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10 percent."

Really, she thinks it's that far along? I'm not so sure, especially in the enterprise. And as we move forward, semantic search, better video search technology and increasing innovation will drive dramatic improvements over today's search results. In fact, in July AIIM released a report on enterprise search that found that most enterprise users were unhappy with the state of enterprise search. This is a serious content management issue because if you can't find the content inside the enterprise, it's not doing employees a lick of good.

To give Mayer the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she was talking about consumer search, which is probably much further along than its enterprise counterpart. But 90 to 95 percent is probably still being generous. There's still a lot of garbage in results. There's still a problem when your enter a search with multiple possible meanings, such as "Jaguar," and get cars, animals and operating systems all bunched together (and even Google can't differentiate among the differences in meaning). Yes, Google gets you a good answer a good portion of the time, but there's still a healthy amount of time where it's wrong; it's probably more than 5 to 10 percent of the time.

For more information:
- read the entire LA Times interview

Related Articles:
The search is on
Is search really 90 percent solved?

Web 2.0 transforms enterprise content management

Ron Miller — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:02:35 -0400

Sometime over the last year, we witnessed a transformation where content management became less about storage and maintenance, and more about action and collaboration. At the heart of this change was the emergence of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise. At the AIIM show back in 2007, John Newton, CTO at Alfresco, was one of the few people talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on content management.

Newton recognized, well before many of his colleagues, that Web 2.0 was about to overtake the enterprise, and that IT departments stuck on outdated content management models were going to get swept aside. He predicted correctly that content production was moving away from the company's servers and onto web-based tools; content management vendors needed to find a way to deal with this.

Of course, by the time AIIM 2008 came around, you couldn't talk to a vendor without hearing about Web 2.0 and collaboration. What's more, Microsoft Sharepoint, a tool built by Microsoft specifically for collaboration, was suddenly seen as a content management system. The concept of collaboration and content management had somehow morphed in a single year.

That's why it's so interesting that Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management company, bought Koral, a content management company with firm Web 2.0 roots in Spring 2007. Tim Barker, senior director/product management for Salesforce Content, says that as the Salesforce content management component has developed, the goal has been to deliver content directly to users where they work using Web 2.0 tools to help them find the best content.

"Users want content delivered into a CRM app to help the sales individuals," Barker said. "As part of this, we use the 'wisdom of crowds' to build up a profile of the content that is most used or highest valued by the users. This helps us guide users to the most relevant content."

Barker adds that when a company places content blindly in a repository, it loses some value. "I think standalone content 'vaults' as a software service will struggle, they are so far removed from the business applications."

Salesforce seems to recognize, acutely, the vision that Newton articulated back in 2007 that there is life outside the firewall and you need to make content available to users where they work. It's important to note that Salesforce, as a CRM tool, is aimed squarely at Sales and Marketing, not the entire enterprise. Still, what it offers has broad implications for ECM as well. If you need proof, look at EMC's announcement last week for Documentum ECM 6.5. The release was peppered with talk of Web 2.0 and collaboration.

If your company is still working on the old model, there's no need to worry. There will always be a long period of transition from one era to the next, but it's clear that the torch has been passed, and that ECM involves more than simply handling storage and maintenance tasks. It also has to enable workers to share and collaborate, or it's not terribly useful. - Ron

AIIM study: Enterprise search needs work

Ron Miller — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:26:09 -0400

Last week, AIIM released a comprehensive review of Enterprise Search called "Findability: The Art and Science of Making Content Easy to Find." The report, which is based on research with 500 enterprise search users across a range of jobs and experiences, found that people were strongly influenced by their web consumer search experience, with 82 percent of those surveyed agreeing or strongly agreeing that "the consumer web created increased demand for findability." What's more, 50 percent believe the search they use inside their companies is worse or much worse than the company's consumer facing website. The worst part of it is that almost half believe their company has no formal findability goal. This study should have an impact on content management because ultimately, the underlying system is only as good as a person's ability to find and retrieve the information stored in the repository. This report suggests that a crucial piece of the content management puzzle still needs work.

For more:
- read about or purchase the study