From the Hart

Moving On

I have some big news to share: On March 1, I’ll be leaving my role at Factiva to join Dow Jones as Executive Vice President Dow Jones and President, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.  Dow Jones, as you know, is one of Factiva’s parents.  Please see the respective press releases from Factiva and Dow Jones. 

I’ve been with Factiva since its inception, and I have been CEO since January 2000.  In that time, Factiva has enjoyed continued success and the Factiva team has truly had a lot of fun.  Through strong customer relationships and continuous innovation we have been able to build award winning products and a strong financial position with year-on-year revenue and operating income growth.

While leaving day-to-day involvement with this great team was a difficult decision, it was made easier by the fact that as part of my new role at Dow Jones, I also become Chair of Factiva’s board, so I am privileged to remain involved in Factiva’s future success.  Further, I’m confident that I’m leaving Factiva as strong as it has ever been.  The company will be in the extremely capable hands of Claude Green, who has been Deputy CEO from the beginning and will become the Interim CEO on March 1.  He will remain in this position until the Board has appointed my successor.

I’m so grateful to all of you who have made Factiva so successful.  We have wonderful, loyal customers, excellent partners and such talented employees.  Without any one of these elements, Factiva would not be leading the market today.  To all of you, I want to say thank you so much for the support that you’ve given me over the years.  I will miss working with you, but I will enjoy keeping track of all your achievements in my new role. 

For now, I will not be posting as frequently as I step into my new role but will post periodically as I find new things that will be of interest to colleagues and friends in the information industry.

Enterprise, Group and Individual Customization – We’re getting there!

I have been in Europe the past couple of weeks and having spent some time with customers, I am pleased to say that a great deal of progress is being made towards the “holy grail” of delivering information based on who I am, what I do and the specific information I need to do my job.

Meetings with clients in the B2B world often focus on how to help salespeople/relationship managers become more productive through better implementation of technologies designed to manage information overload.

It was great to meet with a client and see a practical implementation of a sales portal that delivered broad information about the industry in which this company competes, complimented by information specific to the industry sector this salesperson was focused on and finally a custom view of information built around the salesperson’s client list!!

We have been talking about this for a number of years, knowing the technology was available, it was simply a matter of time before it would be built into an application – and now it has.

An example of one of Factiva’s concepts of integrating information and customizing it to the individual user’s needs is the screen shot on this page – designed to illustrate how information can and should be presented to individuals based on who they are, what they do and what information they need to do their job.                                       

Also included are a couple of examples of how the custom taxonomy might be set up for this sample executive recruiting company.

The good news; we are moving from concept to reality!

   

Blogs are Business

We all knew the blogosphere was a part of our lives when friends sent us links to their “new baby blog,” “getting married blog” and other personal milestone blogs. 

We also knew that blogs were becoming part of business news and information as we began to monitor blogs as part daily routine - similar to the way we check e-mail, most of us have set up a feedreader to help us keep up with our favorite blogs.

And as proof that blogs are part of business life… 

As some of you know, Factiva prepared a Business Terms index (click on first small thumbnail) for The Financial Times Deutschland throughout 2005. We saw the term “blog” rise from 9th out of the 45 words we were tracking in January across the German media, and move to number 1 by the end of 2005. As the article points out, the term “blogs” was the most widely mentioned business term in December above terms like Risk Management, Crisis Management, Corporate Governance, Turnaround, ERP and Wikipedia.

This was the German press.  When applying the Business Terms Index across all of Factiva’s sources, the term “blog” moved from number 4 in January to number 1 in December 2005.

Overall in 2005, the term “blog” ranked second out of a list of 45 business terms.

A frequently used business term and a growth phenomenon, blogs are a source of business news and information, and an increasingly important part of our personal, group and enterprise information collections. Blogherald estimates that there currently are over 100+ million blogs. CNet News.com estimates that the number of blogs is doubling every 5 months at the rate of roughly one blog a second.

SIIA Information Industry Summit 2006

The Software and Information Industry is hosting its annual Information Industry Summit, which is always an excellent two days of networking with colleagues, meeting new people and listening to industry leaders talk about what is happening in the industry today and where it may be going in the future. The conference starts today.

Last night was the annual Genesys Partners Ventures Dinner, hosted by Jim Kollegger, CEO of Genesys. As always, Jim selected a few industry luminaries to share their insights on the future with his dinner guests. A couple of thoughts

Esther Dyson mentioned two of the most influential companies in the industry – Google and Yahoo! and tongue-in-cheek noted that one has a culture that is largely based on Darwinism the other more about Intelligent Design! She mentioned two things that I completely agree with regarding the future of Search – the increasing importance of vertical search and the need for "human assisted taxonomy."

John Patrick, former VP of Internet Technology from IBM opened his comments by saying that we are only experiencing about 5% of what the internet ultimately has to offer! No need for me to tell his story, check out his website and look at his book – Net Attitude.

Finally, David Thomson, author of Blueprint to a Billion, 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth was the guest speaker for the evening and left us all with a lot to think about regarding our respective organizations and what is necessary to become a billion dollar company!

The Future of Search

Factiva launched Search 2.0 beta this past week and the feedback from the press, industry analysts and customers has been great - Bloor Research, Shore Communications, and Information Today.

I am very excited about this launch because I believe it is the best example of utilizing leading edge technologies (FAST Search and Transfer) and sophisticated business taxonomy (Factiva Intelligent Indexing) to manage huge volumes of information to deliver the most meaningful results to individual users. 

Like so many innovations in information technology, Search 2.0 is going to raise expectations around information management – external sources like Factiva’s, but internal information as well.   

People are Busy

I was reminded this week why I feel so strongly about the clear presentation of relevant information and simplifying search - a long-time colleague from Factiva finally admitted we will not be able to teach the world to search using Boolean logic!

This revelation hit him when he read Paul Kedrosky's blog about why structured blogging will never work. Paul’s reasoning; people are lazy!

While I agree with Paul’s conclusion, people will not put the effort into different blog formats depending upon the blog post, much the way they will not spend the time building complex Boolean queries or tagging articles with appropriate meta tags.

I do not agree with his reasoning. Some people may be lazy, but I think most are just too busy. His position about smart algorithms and technologies working behind the scenes is really the point and essential to the future of information management.

What do I see in 2006?

My predictions for enterprise information management in 2006 center around:

1)      Search – everyone knows Google, Yahoo! and MSN (GYM as we affectionately call them) and as John Battelle says in his book The Search, GYM and others have transformed our culture.  But Search as we know it has its limits.  I see Search changing in three distinct ways:

a.       Visualization – fewer lists of headlines with links to articles or web pages and more meaningful "information" presented visually as Factiva is doing in its new release of Search 2.0

b.      More emphasis on “vertical search”

c.       More emphasis on “enterprise search”

2)      Collaboration Tools – this is linked to enterprise search; interest in collaboration tools will intensify as companies work to be FAST – respond quickly to market opportunities and threats – they must tap into all of their intellectual and information assets.  Driving this trend is the need for employees in enterprises around the world to FIND the information they need to do their jobs.  Today, most do not find what they need. (See McKinseyQuarterly study, Strategy in an era of global giants)

3)      Metadata - taxonomies & ontologies   - terms are becoming more common and broadly understood, thanks to del.icio.us and Flickr.  But as Forrester notes, it is early days.  I believe that a more strategic approach to metatagging is required for the enterprise. Folksonomies are good, but relying on business people to tag articles on their own is risky, they are simply too busy to take the extra minute required to tag. A more powerful means of managing information requires a strategic view of how the organization’s information must be categorized and tools to automate the application of the tags must be implemented to ensure universal and consistent application of tags.

Welcome to My Blog

From the Hart is a blog about the business information industry written by myself, Clare Hart, CEO, Factiva.

Business information is inextricably linked to technology.  Whether it is RSS, mobile or technology used to integrate content into an enterprise application such as a CRM system, information is most powerful when it is relevant and easy to access.   

As the CEO of Factiva, I work with clients and partners from many different industries and geographic regions and something that strikes me every time I meet with clients is how similar we are – regardless of industry or region – when it comes to managing information.  We want to be able to present businesspeople with information they need when and where they need it. This sounds so cliché, I know, but that is what Factiva does.

In this blog, I am going to write about what I see happening in the world of enterprise information management.  How are enterprises managing the ever increasing volume of information, which includes mainstream media sources, web content, including blogs and internal content?

In order to keep this blog interesting, it would be great if you send me your feedback about posts and your thoughts about what you would like to see in the future.