Impressions from Findability Day 2013

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We at Findwise host Findability Day to raise awareness of the importance of enterprise search and search in business, big data and to share best practices in implementation and management as well as inform about technology developments. Attending and being part of Findability Day this year was a real energy boost for all of us at Findwise. We were about 200 attendants all with focus on search and big data.

On stage, we had some very inspiring presentations. Martin White explaining the journey of search and pointing out its future direction showed how the principles of search have been around for decades. What we use it for and how we approach it is key along with enabling technology. Martin has also written a blog post about his impressions from the event, read it here.

Ravi Mynampaty of Harvard Business School showed how the search journey has evolved within Harvard Business School. One take away was the importance of step by step implementation and ensuring satisfied stakeholders along the way. Christian Finstad of Meltwater explained how they connected business values with technology to convince their clients. I think an internal decision within an organization needs similar argumentation in order to win acceptance.

Johan Johansson gave a thorough presentation about the search project at the Municipality of Norrköping. This was a tight budget project with strong deliverables. One thing to remember from Johan was his talk about “you need to try it out yourself – do the most common searches and experience it”.

DJ Skillman from Splunk, Troels Walsted Hansen from Microsoft and Daniel Bergqvist from Google gave some interesting insights into new technologies. How Splunk can be used to just harvest every imaginable data type, just bring it in and worry about using it later. How Google want to align enterprise search with consumer search and Microsofts Facebook inspired developments within graph search.

We also had some great breakout sessions with Jonas Berg, Svensk Byggtjänst who showed us their partner search application, Martin Öhléen, SKF who talked about mobility, Sebastian Forseland, Husqvarna who gave an expert lecture on master data management and Niclas Lillman&Nicklas Eriksson, Scania who talked about their journey towards a common search solution for all their knowledge workers.

If you weren’t there or if you just want to see it again we have posted videos of the presentations and most of the slides here.

We would like to thank everybody who came to the event – you made it a real success. A big thanks also goes out to our sponsors Google and Splunk who made this event possible.

The networking possibilities at the location were great and really demonstrated how the Search industry is growing.  We are very happy with the event but there is of course always room for improvement for next year. Make sure to be there!

Big data and cloud solutions at Atea Bootcamp

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After attending the very well organized and inspiring event Atea Bootcamp 2013 I want to share some of what was said about big data and about the cloud.

Data is the new oil

On the topic of big data Atea had several speakers, one of which was Niklas Andersson, the Swedish CEO of Cisco who talked about the internet of everything. With more and more devices connected to the Internet the modern world produces massive amounts of data that, to a large extent, is unstructured and transient. It comes from a variety of sources and types – as text, video, geospatial data, information captured by a sensor in a plant or a vehicle, or from social interaction via the web. One might argue that big data is nothing new, that it is just a buzz word summarizing what has been going on for many years. However, even though we already have a perception of Big data and ideas about how to handle it and use it, we are still just scraping at the surface of what will come. According to Mr Andersson 99 percent of what could be connected to the Internet still remains to be connected. What happens when we start connecting all those things? A mind blowing perspective that makes a good case for IBMs statement that data is the new oil. For us at Findwise this is of course a highly interesting field where our knowledge can be put to good use. We recently joined Spotify among others in a big data analytics research project led by SICS. Read more about it here.

Findability in the cloud

Steve Dietch, Vice president of HP Worldwide Cloud, gave an insight into the developments of cloud services and the driving forces that control IT decision makers. According to him their customers usually have two main concerns about moving into the cloud; security and choice. Security is an obvious issue and for some organizations there are regulatory aspects to it as well. The aspect of choice has to do with the pace of development and uncertainty about which vendors will dominate the field in the future and what will become industry standards. IT departments everywhere are afraid of vendor lock in. Putting all your data in the hands of an external supplier is understandably a scary concept. What happens if you want to move it? What about how it is organized? I see an obvious case for state of the art search solutions to help handling some of these issues and to relieve some of the worries from IT departments that their data will get lost. With good findability it will not matter where it is stored or which vendor provides the cloud solution.

In conclusion, big data is big business and even though different aspects of it make for different definitions of the concept it is undeniably going to have a huge impact on all of us.

Update on Findability Day 2013

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Findability Day 2013 is just a few weeks away and the agenda is now finalized. We will have great keynote speakers and cases for inspiration and of course the approximately 200 attendees will create a valuable networking opportunity.

The event takes place in Stockholm on May 30th and as organizers of the event we are proud to present the following list of speakers and topics:

Martin White – The future of search

Daniel Bergqvist, Google – The Star Trek Computer

Bjørn Olstad, Microsoft – Unveil the hidden values in your organization

Ravi Mynampaty, Harvard Business School – Developing a Search & Findability Practice for the Enterprise 

Kristian Norling, Findwise – The 2013 Findability Survey

Sebastian Forseland, Husqvarna – Master Data management + Enterprise Search = User Satisfaction

Christian Finstad, Meltwater – Big data for online insight

Martin Öhléen, SKF – Search as a driver in Mobile applications

Jonas Berg, Svensk Byggtjänst – The next generation business search engine

Johan Johansson, Municipality of Norrköping – Governance and the role of search in user satisfaction

Niclas Lillman, Scania – Search as a service

DJ Skillman, Senior Director Technical Services, Splunk – Big data

Check out the agenda here for more details and for registration. There are just a few seats left so make sure to register today!

It promises to be a great event and a day full of inspiration, knowledge sharing and networking opportunities to help develop your business, personal skills and professional network.

Hope to see you there!

Why search and Findability is critical for the customer experience and NPS on websites

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To achieve a high NPS, Net Promoter Score, the customer experience (cx) is crucial and a critical factor behind a positive customer experience is the ease of doing business. For companies who interact with their customers through the web (which ought to be almost every company these days) this of course implies a need to have good Findability and search on the website in order for visitors to be able to find what they are looking for without effort.

The concept of NPS was created by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues of Bain and Co who had an increasing recognition that measuring customer satisfaction on its own wasn’t enough to make conclusions of customer loyalty. After some research together with Satmetrix they came up with a single question that they deemed to be the only relevant one for predicting business success “How likely are you to recommend company X to a friend or colleague.” Depending upon the answer to that single question, using a scale of 0 to 10, the respondent would be considered one of the following:

net-promoter

The Net Promoter Score model

The idea is that Promoters—the loyal, enthusiastic customers who love doing business with you—are worth far more to your company than passive customers or detractors. To obtain the actual NPS score the percentage of Detractors is deducted from the percentage of Promoters.

How the customer experience drives NPS

Several studies indicate four main drivers behind NPS:

  • Brand relationship
  • Experience of / satisfaction with product offerings (features; relevance; pricing)
  • Ease of doing business (simplicity; efficiency; reliability)
  • Touch point experience (the degree of warmth and understanding conveyed by front-line employees)

According to ‘voice of the customer’ research conducted by British customer experience consultancy Cape Consulting the ease of doing business and the touch point experience accounts for 60 % of the Net Promoter Score, with some variations between different industry sectors. Both factors are directly correlated to how easy it is for customers to find what they are looking for on the web and how easily front-line employees can find the right information to help and guide the customer.

Successful companies devote much attention to user experience on their website but when trying to figure out how most visitors will behave website owners tend to overlook the search function. Hence visitors who are unfamiliar with the design struggle to find the product or information they are looking for causing unnecessary frustration and quite possibly the customer/potential customer runs out of patience with the company.

Ideally, Findability on a company website or ecommerce site is a state where desired content is displayed immediately without any effort at all. Product recommendations based on the behavior of previous visitors is an example but it has limitations and requires a large set of data to be accurate. When a visitor has a very specific query, a long tail search, the accuracy becomes even more important because there will be no such thing as a close enough answer. Imagine a visitor to a logistics company website looking for information about delivery times from one city to another, an ecommerce site where the visitor has found the right product but wants to know the company’s return policy before making a purchase or a visitor to a hospital’s website looking for contact details to a specific department. Examples like these are situations where there is only one correct answer and failure to deliver that answer in a simple and reliable manner will negatively impact the customer experience and probably create a frustrated visitor who might leave the site and look at the competition instead.

Investing in search have positive impacts on NPS and the bottom line 

Google has taught people how to search and what to expect from a search function. Step one is to create a user friendly search function on your website but then you must actively maintain the master data, business rules, relevance models and the zero-results hits to make sure the customer experience is aligned. Also, take a look at the keywords and phrases your visitors use when searching. This is useful business intelligence about your customers and it can also indicate what type of information you should highlight on your website. Achieving good Findability on your website requires more than just the right technology and modern website design. It is an ongoing process that successfully managed can have a huge impact on the customer experience and your NPS which means your investment in search will generate positive results on your bottom line.

More posts on this topic will follow.

/Olof Belfrage

Event related data – the buzz word at ECIR 2013

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One of the major trends at the 35th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval was event related data. The conference took place between the 24th and 27th of March this year in a snowy Moscow, Russia. It attracted around 300 participants from all over the globe, 3 of them findwizards. While ECIR 2013 provided talks on a large variety of topics from across the field, event related data was definitely a buzz word.

The keynote speaker opening the second day of conference was Rutgers University assistant professor and Mahaya inc. CTO Mor Naaman. In his talk, Mr Naaman let the following image explain why Mahaya inc. are in business.

 rome-then-and-now

The past two papal elections.

The image above clearly shows that the way people act at events has changed considerably in the past few years, nowadays everyone is a reporter and their stories can be found on social media. Using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as data sources Naaman’s company creates products which not only extracts, but also synchronizes event coverage. One interesting feature in their latest product is the synchronization of video clips, making it possible for a user to easily switch view when watching video footage of for example a concert.  An arguably even stronger feature of this use of social media is the fact that news and event footage can reach the world even if no press is present at the scene. Slides from this inspiring talk can be found here.

Another presentation the same day displayed promising results in the task of automatic event detection. Using machine learning algorithms a team of researchers from Hanover, Germany have designed a system for detecting and summarizing entity related events from Wikipedia edit history data. Basically the idea is that when a Wikipedia article is edited by a large amount of users in a short period of time that can mark an important event considering the subject of the article. More information about this research can be found here.

The last day of the conference opened with a presentation from Jimmy Lin of Twitter. His talk centered on the importance of fast real-time indexing in social media platform architecture. One of the strengths of Twitter is presenting the users with information about events as they happen. As an example of this he used the event of an earthquake hitting eastern USA in 2011. Tweets from locations closer to the epicenter of the earthquake reached Twitter users in New York City before the actual quake did. I have to admit “Twitter, faster than earthquakes” is a pretty good slogan.

So whether it’s using social media data to let people (re)visit events, automatic event detection in open source dictionaries, making sure your indexing is fast enough to let your users cover events as they happen or something else, event based data seems to be one of the driving forces in the field of IR at the moment.

Big Data is a Big Challenge

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Big Data is also a Big Challenge for a number of companies that would like to be ahead of the competition. I think Findwise can help a lot with both technical expertise in text analytics and search technology but also with how to put Big Data to use in a business.

During the last days of February I had the pleasure to attend IDG Big Data conference in Warsaw, Poland. It brought plenty of people from both vendors and industry that shared interesting insights on the topic. In general, big vendors that try to be associated with Big Data dominated the conference. IBM, SAS, SAP, Teradata has provided massive marketing information on software products and capabilities around Big Data. Interestingly every single presentation had its own definition on what Big Data is. This is probably caused by the fact that everybody tries to find the best definitions for fitting own products into it.

From my perspective it was very nice to hear that everyone agrees text analytics and search components are of big importance in any Big Data solution. In multiple applications analysis (both predictive and deductive) and for mass social media one must use advanced linguistic techniques for retrieving and structuring the data streams. This sounded especially strong in IBM and SAS presentations.

A couple of companies revealed what they have already achieved in so called Big Data. Orange and T-Mobile presented their approach of extending traditional business intelligence to harness Big Data. They want to go beyond standard data collected in transaction databases and open up for all the information they have from calls (picked and non-answered), SMS, data transmission logs, etc. Telecom companies consider this kind of information to be a good source for data about their clients.

But the most interesting sessions were held by companies that openly shared their experience about evolution of their Big Data solutions based mainly on open source software. In this way Adam Kawa from Spotify showed how they based their platform on Hadoop cluster starting from a single server to a few hundreds nowadays. To me that seems like a good way to grow and adapt easily to changing business needs and altering external conditions.

Nasza Klasa – a Polish Facebook competitor had a very good presentation on several dimensions connected to challenges in Big Data solutions that might be used for summarisation of this post:

  1. Lack of legal regulations – Currently there are no clear regulations on how the data might be used and how to make money out of it. It is especially important for social portals where all our personal information might be used for different kinds of analysis and sold in aggregated or non-aggregated form. But the laws might be changed soon, thus changing the business too.
  2. Big Data is a bit like research – it is hard to predict return on investment on Big Data as it is a novelty but also a very powerful tool. For many who are looking into this the challenge is internal, to convince executives to invest in something that is still rather vague.
  3. Lack of data scientists – even if there are tools for operating on Big Data, there is a huge lack of skilled people – Big Data operators. These are not IT people nor developers but rather open-minded people with a good mathematical background able to understand and find patterns in a constantly growing stream of various structured and unstructured information.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, Big Data is also a Big Challenge for a number of companies that would like to be ahead of the competition. I truly believe we at Findwise can help a lot within this area, we have both the technical expertise and experience on how to put Big Data to use in a business.

Welcome to Findability Day 2013

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Don’t miss the opportunity to visit the biggest search event in Northern Europe focusing entirely on how to find and display corporate information.

Last year we took the first steps towards creating a new industry event for everyone interested in search and findability. This year we are taking it to the next level!

The agenda is work in progress but we can promise a day full of inspiration, knowledge sharing and networking opportunities to help develop your business, personal skills and professional network.

The event takes place in Stockholm on May 30th. For more details check out the event here.

Hope to see you there!

Graph Search from Down Under

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We’ve already written about the new concept called Graph Search, which is being popularized by Facebook. Wouldn’t it be cool if we applied this to the enterprise as well, as I wrote in an earlier blog post on Enterprise Graph Search? That’s what Australian startup company Lumanetix thinks, when they created the SPAR-K graph search engine for the enterprise.

Applied graph search

As seen in the screenshots of the product, the product do queries against relational databases with linked data objects such as Movies linked to People in Casts, or Managers of Departments in an organization. One difference to Facebook graph search is the more Google-like query syntax which is keyword-based where Facebook uses natural language processing to describe specific queries.Graph search applied to the enterprise

It’s exciting to see that the market is picking up speed with new innovations in the enterprise search field, as Lumanetix SPAR-K is an example of.

 

/Christian Ubbesen

Finding the right information requires finding the right talent

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At Findwise we are experts in helping organizations setting up systems to find their corporate information and presenting it in every way imaginable. But we are not only good at finding the right information, we must also be good at finding the right people to come work for us.

The people working here are highly skilled consultants within different areas such as business consulting, information management, text analytics, user experience, system design etc. They all have two things in common; they were handpicked to work here because of their unique expertise and passion for search technology and they could all easily have chosen to work someplace else.

Our way of finding these people is based on the notion that talent attracts talent. That means in order to find new talented people we must make the ones who are already working here thrive and come to work each day filled with joy and anticipation. That creates the ripple effect we need to compete for talent with the giants of the IT industry.

How do we accomplish that? Well, talented people must be respected as equals and be given the freedom to create and innovate. You don’t hire a talent to tell him or her exactly how to do what they are talented at. That would be like hiring Michael Jackson and then telling him how to write a hit song. We want our talented people to feel encouraged to act independently and bravely, that is how their talents best are put to use for Findwise and our clients.

Within the corporate world today these are still surprisingly uncommon ideas and two of the major daily newspapers in Sweden have both written about our approach to management, an article in SvD last fall and one recently in Dagens Nyheter.

To summarize the news, Findwise approach to management is to continue to uphold an open, trusting environment with a flat corporate structure, in which flexible working hours, freedom and own responsibility are principal. »Use your own judgment« is the golden rule which encourages a fighting spirit and the desire to develop new ideas.

We gladly walk this talk. And it has paid off so far. We are now employing more than 90 people, have managed more than 700 client projects and have enjoyed steady and profitable growth since the start in 2005. We are well on our way towards becoming a world-leading enterprise in our field, and it is all thanks to the talented people who work here.

/Olof Belfrage

Speaking about Search as a Service @ PROMISE Technology Transfer day, want to meet up?

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Tomorrow morning I leave Gothenburg to attend the PROMISE Technology Transfer day @ CeBIT 2013 in Hanover, Germany.

The event is a workshop introducing its participants to methodologies for the systematic evaluation and monitoring of search engines, and for discussing future trends and requirements for the next generation of information access systems. In other words, it is right up our alley at Findwise.

As Director of Research at Findwise I will speak about Search as a Service. If you are at the event or just nearby I would be happy to meet up and have a chat.  I will be around from Tuesday March 5 until Thursday March 7. Feel free to email me, henrik.strindberg@findwise.com or give me a call at +46709443905.

Hope to see you there!