From the Hart

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.