New equation for business success

Would it surprise you to know that all the information necessary to accomplish these things are readily available today? Unfortunately this information is not only spread across the World Wide Web but buried in multiple repositories within your enterprise under incompatible formats and inconsistent schemas. The answers are out there, but the classic approach to searching requires you to know precisely what you are looking for, where to look and how to ask for it. This challenge is further exacerbated by the need to have IT take man-years worth of development effort to generate reports, build portals and establish data warehouses or restructure enterprise content management repositories.

The key to traversing this information quagmire and speed IT’s Information Access development challenges is found in the new equation for business success:

Content Analytics + Visualization = Findability

It may be a blatant statement of the obvious, but if you could just find the answers you would have them… Answers to questions like: What are your competitors doing? What new government or industry regulations are being enacted that will affect your business? What local, national or global market dynamics are changing that can have a positive or negative impact on your customers? What information assets do you have available? What combination of those assets, whether from inside or outside of your corporate firewall, will create a new market breakthrough? What brilliant new idea has that group in the lunch room been toying around with for the last three months?

How do you achieve Findability? It is certainly easier said then done. Chances are today your challenges are a matter of knowing where to look, what to ask for, who to ask, when to ask and how to ask. The answers may be out there but sometimes it’s a matter of knowing the right question to ask in order to get the correct (read: best available) answer. True Findability requires an interaction between you and the entire available information corpus based on your role and security clearance. True Findability requires a visualization schema that facilitates exploration, discovery, participation and collaboration. True Findability requires a flexible means of pulling out the analytics of your content in a transparent manner.

From an IT perspective, Findability manifests itself in the form of a Search or Information Access project. However, the Information Access challenge is also not just about Findability, although that is the cornerstone to all Information Access projects in the enterprise today, different audience requirements must also be dealt with:

• 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. This directly translates to workforce productivity and can be measured as part of the value brought to your organization.
• 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. This facilitates the emergence of participation (read: “social web”) within a corporate-controlled environment which will aid in collaboration efforts.
• 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

Today, business success is increasingly defined by how well you can get information to your audience, not only channeled among your own diverse operations but also connected beyond the enterprise with customers, suppliers and partners. Information flows from everywhere, all of the time and in increasing amounts; you have to channel the flow or risk losing your audience, customers and/or market relevance. In order to succeed at this, you need to better understand the types of audiences you serve.

Digital Natives versus Immigrants

Students in kindergarteen through college today represent the first generation of the truly digital age and therefore have been labeled Digital Natives. They have relied almost exclusively on their personal computer and the internet as their primary information source, Instant Messaging for communications, blogs for creative outlet, wikis and social sites (like myspace and facebook) for collaboration. These Digital Natives also have only known cell phones, digital music players, video games and digital cameras as their primary tools for education, group collaboration, social interaction, entertainment and personal productivity.

Everyone not born into this generation, but have been thrust into this brave new world of digital communications by virtue of their desire or their job represent the group known as Digital Immigrants.

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their former nondigital ways. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as reading a manual first rather than turning to the internet or collaborate with a coworker via IM or a wiki to solve a problem. Examples of this “digital immigrant accent” abound: printing out an email (or even this whitepaper) to read, a phone call to notify someone of an email, an email trail instead of an IM for casual conversation, asking someone to come see a webpage in your office instead of forwarding a URL, requiring a daily meeting or weekly status report rather than using a wiki or collaboration tool.

The bottom line is that dynamic on-line information is exploding and Digital Natives want to contribute and have a choice in filtering and managing it, within the confines of role and security privileges, while Digital Immigrints may find traversing the volume a daunting task. These challenges are not mutually exclusive and will require a specific Information Access strategy to be established inorder to ensure workforce productivity, competitive viability, business profitabilty, regulatory compliance and corporate governance.

Why Findability?

Failure to “know what you don’t know but should” can be personally annoying but can be disastrous in business – finding hidden information and relationships can be essential to networked information in the enterprise. Bottom line: Findability can mean the difference between workforce inefficiency and productivity, lawsuits and regulatory compliance, market timeliness and competitive mistakes, corporate success and failure.

Search can be a starting point for accessing information on the web and may suffice for simple information retrieval requirements. However, search requires significant added personal effort to achieve reasonable results. Search returns huge quantities of false positives and rarely returns comprehensive results even when the false positives are eliminated.

Search alone is inefficient, insufficient, and usually unacceptable to meet the more demanding requirements of the enterprise. Ultimately people want to see the full scope of information available, find what they want, discover what they didn’t know but should have and choose their own ways to filter and share information.

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?

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

About Siderean

Siderean Software, Inc. helps people master discovery by quickly viewing and exploring the full scope of enterprise and Web-based information available for better-informed decision making. Going beyond search, Siderean illuminates previously unseen relationships that help users discover new avenues of exploration and “lets you know what you don’t know” while navigating from a “bird’s-eye” to a “bug’s-eye” view. 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 or to find out how your corporation can gain the benefits of Relational Navigation, please visit www.siderean.com.