Mastering discovery with relational navigation

Whether it was ancient mariners trying to move from island to island across the vast Pacific Ocean in search of new food sources or modern day knowledge workers navigating the seemingly endless amounts of digital information in order to satisfy current job requirements, uncover new business opportunities or satisfy compliance audits, the results are the same. Those who can master discovery will win the race.

Would you consider yourself a “master of discovery?” Which is to say, can you readily find whatever it is you are looking for regardless of format or location? Can you uncover new business opportunities in a timely fashion? Can you satisfy eDiscovery audits, uncover relationships in data within and across sources and explore the full scope of available information without having to worry that something was missed or wait for someone else to hard code reports?

Have you ever felt like the more access to information you have, the more difficult decision making has become? 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. According to an AP article published on www.cnn.com on March 6, 2007 “Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes -- 161 exabytes -- of digital information last year.”

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 relational navigation, people do not need to guess how to ask for information they need (like they do with search engines) 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.

User Controlled Information Access

Organizations are recognizing the convergence of information consumers and producers and are now looking for ways to implement effective solutions for more user controlled information access. A recent Siderean Seamark application for a leading software company enabled the client’s customers to achieve a new level of information access and community. By aggregating multiple sources of content into a single information portal with a common search and browse metaphor, this client achieved a breakthrough user experience for its customers. The Seamark application extends the search and browse metaphor over each of six information types: headlines, articles, downloads, blogs, podcasts, and forum posts. These information containers allow a single unified view of all information available. Users are able to personalize the existence and order of the information containers. In addition, many of the information types support additional data visualizations including tag clouds, contributor clouds, and timelines. Each of these visualizations puts the user in control of the information by suggesting the next information discovery step to take. The community now enjoys a fast, intuitive and satisfying customer experience that puts the user in control of the discovery process. This could not have been accomplished without Relational Navigation.

Relational Navigation

Relational navigation puts multi-source content at user’s fingertips to propel unified access, discovery and participation. Siderean’s Relational Navigation Platform is built around the following key experiences:

• Relationships drive action – Seeing and understanding relationships between information allows users to discover and participate in the information flow. This is unlike search which is all about exact word matches and the user’s ability to remember and user keywords and also unlike traditional navigation which supports fixed relationships and drill down only. Relational navigation identifies relationships dynamically and allows users to pivot around the information set. Relational Navigation is different from keyword search and from traditional navigation.
• Context is key to direction – context helps users decide what is of interest and how to proceed. Navigation context is the directional signpost that helps explorers find their way in unchartered territory. Navigation metaphors - expand, narrow, and pivot - will help information seekers by giving them contextual direction. Search shakes words from the tree, but in a singular list they lose all meaning. Context provides Siderean a clear difference from search by maintaining context throughout the discovery process.
• Participation increases value – By facilitating participation, Siderean allows web sites to increase traffic, interest, and stickiness leading to more relevance and value.
  The Siderean difference is Relational Navigation, enabled by Seamark our Information Access Platform. Keyword search alone in information-dense websites is obsolete. Our Relational Navigation solution is different because it provides context which drives user action. Search provides listings – relational navigation is based on graphs of relationships between information; this allows users to follow these relationships for an unanticipated navigation and discovery experience.

Unify Discovery, Access and Participation

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, Inc. enables organizations to navigate their digital universe. Siderean’s information access platform, Seamark Navigator, uses patented relational navigation technology to allow customers to keep pace with their exploding information access requirements. The next step in the evolution of information access, Siderean’s solutions break through traditional search technology limitations to deliver high-value, high-impact information to users in a personalized and intuitive way. Seamark provides users with a new way to aggregate and navigate through all their information to illuminate previously unseen relationships and create actionable context for information from across the enterprise and on the Web. Siderean enables Media, High Tech and Government organizations to effectively provision their information for unified discovery, access and participation. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures. For more information about Siderean, 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.