Is Your Business Information Working For or Against You?

Corporations thrive on digital information today and billions of dollars are spent yearly in order to improve the generation, access, management and archive of structured data and unstructured content, all in the name of improved productivity. But have these improvements in our ability to create and manage business information truly improved corporate productivity, or at a minimum, the productivity of information-based employees?

Demand for information is exploding and the days of brochure ware websites are long gone. Information is being produced and consumed at a continually increasing rate. People are demanding more information, from more points of view, and more ways to participate than ever before. You can see this being led by consumer sites. The most visited sites are no longer pure content sites. They are content aggregators that have a strong social network/collaboration component – sites like www.myspace.com, www.digg.com, and www.flikr.com. While we don’t expect nor want to turn your site into myspace, there are definitely transferable lessons to be learned for the enterprise.

Essentially, your content alone is not enough. The big question is how do I get interest and maintain relevance while maintaining editorial control over the information flow?

Audience requirements are also maturing:

• For Consumers it’s about “Findability”. A highly usable and useful source of rich information is where they will consistently return to for answers to questions or the desire to browse new subjects
• For Contributors (enthusiasts, editors, remixers) it’s about “editorial control”. High productivity power tools for remixing, tagging, annotating and playlisting content and data into a niche market navigation site quickly will deliver the real-time requirements of this audience.
• For Publishers it’s about “enhanced relevance increases eyeballs”. A source of consumer-generated metadata that can increase the value of core content and data offerings drives user visits and stickiness
• For Advertisers it’s about “precise placement of advertising”. Delivering higher yield ads based on navigation rather than keywords.

One of the unanticipated by-products of Moore’s Law is the explosive growth of data. Since computing power and resources are doubling every 18 months, the data created and stored as a result of that computing power has grown exponentially. In fact, the total amount of the world's newly generated digital information in 2005 exploded by 60%--to over 8 exabytes from 5 exabytes in 2003, according to figures and extrapolations developed by the University of California at Berkeley. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. To give you an idea of scale, 5 exabytes would be equal to all the human words ever spoken by human beings.

That means that in 2005, the world generated 57,000 times the total of all information in the Library of Congress--that's 8 exabytes. Furthermore, 93% of all data is born digital. Enterprises are drowning in a “sea of information”. Knowledge workers are basing business decisions on guesswork because they can’t pluck the critical items from the flood of data. The volume and complexity of data is growing daily while the users have less and less time to digest it.

To deal with this flood of business content we need a new approach to information search and navigation. Most organizations still rely on traditional keyword search technology in spite of its limitations. Traditional portals, search engines and enterprise search tools are good at retrieving a large data set, but are poor at leading the viewer quickly through the results to get to the specific information required.

Today, you have three fundamental choices for exploring and discovering information buried across and outside of your enterprise. These three methodologies are:

With navigation, people do not need to guess how to ask for information they need (like they do with Google) because relevant content is presented to them to explore. They immediately get a sense of all the content that is available on a particular topic. Navigation is the perfect marriage between the “bird’s eye” perspective and “bug’s eye” view.

“Navigation” is “the act of steering a course through a medium.” The digital equivalent of real-world navigation is relational navigation. It answers two questions for the user. Like a map, it tells us “what’s out there.” Once we identify our destination, it tells us “how to steer a course from here to our goal.” Traditional keyword search in contrast makes us grope blindly at potential destinations. It doesn’t help us find our way.

ILLUMINATE PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN RELATIONSHIPS

Ultimately it’s what you don’t know that you should that will negatively effect your business. If you don’t easily see the relationships between business information crossing multiple repositories, you will miss crucial decision making opportunities; or worse, fail to satisfy a regulatory audit.

Imagine the challenges a financial analyst at a bank catering to high net worth individuals deals with on a daily basis. They have access to customer databases, financial systems, trading systems, profiles, and market research in order to evaluate the health of their customer’s portfolio. The only relationships seen in the decision process include the state of the financial markets relative to the existing portfolio. Now imagine the decision power of an analyst using relational navigation software to aggregate all of this internal data along with readily available external data such as news headlines, websites, and blogs in order to take a more proactive approach to comparing ever-changing market and individual news for decision making.

Likewise the challenge of satisfying regulatory audits can be a daunting challenge as sometimes the relationships of information necessary to satisfy that audit are not apparent. With relational navigation every inquiry is answered with the full scope of available information, within scope and context, regardless of location or format. This ensures a timely, comprehensive analysis and response to every audit.

The true value of relational navigation can be realized around the following business issues:

• Relational Navigation: Ability to dynamically deliver scope and context as well as pivot and sub-setting for metadata instead of hard-coding navigation into all web and application requirements; deliver everything from a “bird’s eye to a bug’s eye view of information.”
• 360o View: Ability to aggregate internal and external data sources to provide a complete view of a person, place or thing delivering a visualization to previously unrealized relationships.
• Regulatory Compliance (eDiscovery): answering the following question: How do I find the information I need to meet various regulatory reporting requirements? With increasing regulation, enterprises need to retain an ever increasing amount of information and retrieve that data and supply it to regulators quickly and accurately. Further complicating the landscape for enterprise IT managers, is more complex storage requirements for the discovery of this information. Enter relational navigation, which gives the IT manager a view at all the data related to a particular request, plus the ability to pinpoint the specific data set needed.
• Communities of Interest: Ability to aggregate internal and external information sources in order to establish a “total topic-relevant view” for greater “brand stickiness” and/or “brand expansion.”
• Navigation Prototype/Development: Ability to rapidly (in minutes/hours not days/weeks) prototype and develop the selection, aggregation and organization of metadata for navigation into web and application requirements dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.
• Semantic Middleware: Ability to leverage industry standards (RDF/OWL) to serve as semantic middleware (aggregation, organization, navigation) engine between metadata sources and presentation layer dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group: “One of the reasons the information access market is experiencing a fundamental shift is because enterprises are trying to extract more value from their information assets, thus demanding more features from their search vendors. Enterprises no longer want point solutions to facilitate one function such as enterprise search; rather, they want solutions that blend together different functions such as desktop and Web search, knowledge and content management, and analytics and Business Intelligence. Siderean helps achieve this blend, going beyond traditional search by allowing users to conduct flexible, spontaneous inquiries. Users can also interact with results to uncover relationships that help them find out what they may not know. Discovering these previously unforeseen relationships is a powerful function that gives users the scope they need to make critical business decisions. Without scope, many decisions made in business today could be compromised.”

By implementing a relational navigation solution, you can:

• Deliver on the promise of everything digital in a single view for better/faster information access; aggregate, navigate and participate.
• Improve productivity by providing scope and context to the right user to the right information with the least amount of clicks.
• Reconcile the human desire to start at a “bird’s eye” perspective of information assets before driving down to a “bug’s eye” level.
• Conduct business across an extended enterprise for your eBusiness initiatives with minimal impact to development resources or existing applications.

SIDEREAN SOFTWARE

Siderean Software helps people view and explore the full scope of enterprise and Web-based content available on a topic for thorough, fast and flexible inquiries. Our open, Web-based tools gather, analyze and organize all kinds of structured and unstructured digital content; presenting it in a single, unified navigation view that dynamically displays content in context. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures. For more information please visit www.siderean.com.

CEO PROFILE:

Michael Schmitt, CEO Siderean Software
Mr. Schmitt has over twenty-five years experience in the enterprise software industry, with a proven track record for success, growing and positioning enterprise software companies to achieve long-term profitability and market leadership. He has held executive management positions at Ariba and JD Edwards and has served on the board of a private company.

Most recently, Mr. Schmitt served as Ariba’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, helping to develop and implement Ariba’s turnaround strategy and corporate repositioning to Spend Management. Simultaneous to his tenure at Ariba, Mr. Schmitt served as a board member at Camstar, a leader in manufacturing execution application software. Prior to Ariba, he enjoyed an eight year career at JD Edwards (now Oracle), where he held the positions of Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing; Vice President, General Manager, Central European Operations; and Vice President, General Manager, West Area.

Mr. Schmitt received his B.S. degree in Business Administration from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California.