Category Archives: Knowledge management

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

Enterprise search case study: Vårdaktörsportalen makes reliable information easy to find for health professionals

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Vårdaktörsportalen (VAP) is a portal for health care providers made by Västra Götalandsregionen (VGR). This portal makes information from a number of reliable and authorised sources findable and accessible for the people who need it in their daily work. This stretches from doctors and nurses to medical secretaries primarily located in the region of Västra Götaland, Sweden. The site and most of its features and information is also accesible (in Swedish) to anyone through http://vap.vgregion.se. In November 2012 the first version of this site went live and Findwise had a big role in the creation of this search centric site. The main source of information for VAP is the regional guidelines found in a document repository within VGR but some other external sources are also included. These include trustworthy authorities like

  • Socialstyrelsen
  • Läkemedelsverket
  • SBU
  • TLV
  • 1177 - the public health care information site for citizens

This search solution is built around the open source search engine Apache Solr and our common tools for processing and indexing. For this site we have also implemented a rather unique metadata enhancement service that automatically extracts keywords from the document to index and attaches it as metadata. The keyword extraction is based on information from the medical term database SweMeSH. More information (in Swedish) can be found on Google Code. We also include synonyms to keywords to increase recall, making it easier to find documents regardless of what synonym used.

The metadata enhancement service was included because the quality of metadata on the external sites was not very good. VGR will work with the above mentioned authorities to try and make them understand that they would benefit if they improved their data. The source 1177 stands out with very good meta data and overall good quality texts.

We have conducted a user study to see how this first version is able to satisfy user demands. The result of that study shows that some local sources are missing, but a general positive feedback on the idea and the graphical design was collected.

Findwise is looking forward to continue working on VAP with VGR in the future to make it an even better tool.

Related links:

Presentation: Enterprise Search – Simple, Complex and Powerful

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Every second, more and more information is created and stored in various applications. corporate websites, intranets, SharePoint sites, document management systems, social platforms and many more – inside the firewall the growth of information is similar to that of the internet. However, even though major players on the web have shown that navigation can’t compete with search, the Enterprise Search and Findability Report shows that most organisations have only a small or even a non-existing budget for search.

Web Search and Enterprise Search

Web search engines like Google has made search look easy. For enterprise search, some vendors give promises of a magic box. Buy a search engine, plug it in and wait for the magic to happen! Imagine the disappointment when both search results and performance are poor and users can’t find what they are looking for…

When you start planning your enterprise search project you soon realize the complexity and challenge – how do you meet the expectations created by Google?

The Presentation

This presentation was originally presented at the joint NSW KM Forum and IIM September event in Sydney, Australia by Mattias Brunnert. It contains topics as:

  • Why search is important and how to measure success
  • Why Enterprise Search and Information Management should be friends
  • How to kick off your search program

Search as an Integrator of Social Intranets

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Wikis, blogs, microblogs, comments, ratings…we all know the buzzwords around the “Social Intranet” by now. Can we consider search as an integrator of Social Intranets?

If the first trend was about getting people to use the new technology, the second seems to be about making sense of all the information that has been created by now.

I sat down with a number of our customers the other week to talk about intranets and internal portals and everyone seemed to face one particular challenge: making sense of the collaborative and social content. How do we make this sort of information searchable without losing the context? And how do we know who the sender is?

One approach which was discussed is to use the people card and search as an integrator between the social components. By using search we can easily integrate everything from microblogging-flows, to comments and contributes in different communities used in the enterprise. The search engine fetches the information and presents it real-time.

Social intranets and search

Social intranets and search

When searching for project One HR on the intranet you can, besides all search hits, get an overview of the owner of the project and all the related discussions that has been going on. Apart from this, networks i.e. people who has been involved can be shown – creating 360° view of the information.

What is your view of the future social intranets? Have you solved the issues with search in collaborative and social content?

Knowledge Management: Retrieve, Visualize and Communicate!

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As noted by Swedish daily paper Metro, Findwise is working with JCDEC, the Joint Concept Development & Experimentation Centre at Swedish Military Headquarters. In Metro’s words the project aims at developing a knowledge management system for the headquarters of tomorrow. The system is expected to be up and running in time for the international military exercise VIKING 11, to be executed in April of 2011.

Good decisions stem from good information; this is true for both military and civilian enterprises. Vast amounts of time and resources are being invested in order to collect information. But to what end? Granted, somewhere among that information there is probably something you will find useful. But large amounts of information quickly become incomprehensible. In order to combat information overload you need a select-and-filter tool such as Search, and that’s where Findwise comes in.

However, for JCDEC it is not enough to simply locate the information they have available. Captain Alexandra Larsson, Concept Development Lead for Knowledge Support, makes this fact very clear. It is just as important to get an idea of what information is not there. In essence, JCDEC is in the process of creating information from information. This is also one of the great differences between the kind of web-based search and retrieval systems we have come to depend on and a state of the art knowledge management system. The latter is not just a retrieval tool; it is an information workbench where the user can select, retrieve, examine and manipulate information.

The key to finding information gaps is to study patterns. For example, consider the trivial problem of birthday distributions. Without any prior knowledge one would probably expect there to be roughly as many births in May as in August or November. This is not always the case. Depending on where you are in the world birth figures may actually be skewed so that one month has significantly more births than other months do. Why does this happen? Being able to pose that exact question may in turn teach us a lot about the mysterious workings of the Stork.

In military intelligence the filling of information gaps may mean the difference between victory and defeat. Why is there an increase in partisan activity in that district? Why were eight weapons silos raided over the course of two days? Why at this moment in time? These questions are expected to lead to insights into the plans and activities of suspects and to notify those in command of looming threats.

Retrieve, Visualize, Communicate

Retrieval

The envisioned work-flow for JCDEC information operators is threefold: retrieval, visualization and communication. Each research session will typically be initiated through a keyword search interface, much like you would issue a web query on Google. Just like its online counterpart the system would present the results ordered according to their expected relevancy to the operator’s query. Using facets and query refinement the result set can be narrowed down until the information in front of the operator is expected to contain that which is being sought for.

Captain Alexandra Larsson hints at another strategy for getting to information. Facets are so speedy these days that they can be applied on the full document set without any delays. Clearly, JCDEC is using search technology to provide directory listings much like websites such as the Open Directory Project, although completely dynamic. The option of simply browsing these directories is also available to operators.

Visualization

The next step, visualization, employs an array of tools for visually displaying the results. These include plotting objects on maps and timelines and looking for groupings where objects have a disproportionately dense distribution, so called cluster analysis, among others. This is where clues are uncovered and questions posed: why there, at that time, with those people? In some cases a field investigation is necessary in order to answer these questions. Other times the answers can be deduced from the tools themselves. The tools also allow the operator to formulate new search queries based on the visual information. The operator may choose to limit the scope of the search to one or more of the clusters in the timeline or map, for example.

Communication

If or when the operator finds something interesting this should be recorded. But to JCDEC it is not necessarily the results themselves that are important. The act of getting to the information is valuable in itself. The reason for this is that different operators have different backgrounds and possess different types of information. Where one operator filters or deduces information from a search result in one way, another operator might choose a completely different approach and unveil other clues.

According to Captain Alexandra Larsson it is absolutely necessary that operators share knowledge as well as refinement strategies as part of their work. One of the paradigms that JCDEC is looking to experiment with is social bookmarking along with the ability to search through sets of bookmarked objects. Objects can be both tagged and commented on, useful for conveying meta-information to fellow operators. It is likely that there will be custom-based filters, where an operator can inform the system of types of objects that do and do not interest him or her and have the system automatically filter the result sets based on this information. These filters can of course also be shared with other operators.

An evolving system

The process of retrieval, visualization and communication is only one, albeit the most prominent, feature of the JCDEC knowledge management system. The system itself will be put to use in the spring of 2011 and development will surely continue beyond that point. The ideas and concepts at work today will most likely be refined over time as Captain Alexandra Larsson and JCDEC learn from hands-on experience with working with information. And as evolution progresses I hope to be able to go into more detail on some of the other tidbits.

The Future of Information Discovery

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I recently attended the third annual workshop on Human Computer Interaction and Information retrieval ( HCIR 2009) in Washington DC together with my colleague Lina. This is the first in a series of blog posts about what happened at the workshop. First up is the keynote about the Future of Information Discovery, by Ben Shneiderman.

Ben Shneiderman, professor at the University of Maryland and founding director of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory held the workshop keynote. He started off by talking about what he called the elephant in the room, Google. Because whenever you talk about search these days you have to talk about Google. Google has become the baseline for search and the system that users relate other search experiences to. Almost all of our customers’ users has in one way or another asked “why can’t our intranet be more like Google?” (Read more about expectations to Googlify the company in a previous blog post by Mickel. You can also download the slides to Ben Shneidermans keynote presentation.)

As Ben Shneiderman said, Google does actually do the job, finding facts work. However searching for information can be dangerous. Google does well on handling simple fact-finding tasks but we need better tools to handle other types of searches such as:

  • Extended fact finding tasks where the queries are often vague
  • Tasks involving exploration of availability where the requested results can be vague
  • Open ended browsing and problem analysis where there can be hidden assumptions
  • Mismatch between the users information needs and the available metadata which will require exhaustive searching.

One of the points that I appreciated the most in this keynote was that systems that support searching for information not only need to support simple known-item searches, which Google does well. They also need to support other things:

  • Helping users enrich query formulation
  • Expanding result management
  • Enable long-term effort
  • Enhance collaboration

I am especially pleased by this statement since these are some of the important issues that we are working with in our customer projects. You will also learn more about query formulation in one of our upcoming blog posts from HCIR.

Supporting these cases are important for supporting users in their information seeking tasks and, according to Shneiderman, this should also be done while enabling users to deal with specific cases of search, concerning:

  • Completeness – Do I have all the information on a specific topic? This is especially important in for example legal or medical cases.
  • Absence of information – proving non-existence of information is very difficult but needed when applying for a patent or registering a trademark.
  • Outliers – making unexpected connections between information and finding and learning new  things that you would not have expected to find.
  • Bridging – Connecting different disciplines with each other.

This is very important because when users search the goal is not the information itself. No users go to a search interface just for the fun of searching for information. They need the information for a purpose. Search therefore needs to support things such as decision-making, collaboration, innovation and societal improvement. Search will only be of true value to users when it not only searches the simple fact-finding tasks but when it helps users solve the real problems in the real world. And good tools can force people to reframe their thinking and see things in a different light. That is the kind of tools that we should be designing.

Six Simple Steps to Superior Search

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Do you have your search application up and running but it still doesn’t quite seem to do the trick? Here are six simple steps to boost the search experience.

Avoid the Garbage in-Garbage out Syndrome

Fact 1: A search application is only as good as the content it makes findable

If you have a news search service that only provides yesterday’s news, the search bit does not add any value to your offering.

If your Intranet search service provides access to a catalog of employee competencies, but this catalog does not cover all co-workers or contain updated contact details, then search is not the means it should be to help users get in touch with the right people.

If your search service gives access to a lot of different versions of the same document and there is no metadata available as to single out which copy is the official one, then users might end up spending unnecessary time reviewing irrelevant search results. And still you cannot rule out the risk that they end up using old or even flawed versions of documents.

The key learning here is that there is no plug and play when it comes to accurate and well thought out information access. Sure, you can make everything findable by default. But you will annoy your users while doing so unless you take a moment and review your data.

Focus on Frequent Queries

Fact 2: Users tend to search for the same things over and over again.

It is not unusual that 20 % of the full query volume is made up of less than 1 % of all query strings. In other words, people tend to use search for a rather fixed set of simple information access tasks over and over again. Typical tasks include finding the front page of a site or application on the Intranet, finding the lunch menu at the company canteen or finding the telephone number to the company helpdesk.

In other words, you will be much advised to make sure your search application works for these highly frequent (often naïve) information access tasks. An efficient way of doing so is to keep an analytic eye on the log file of your search application and take appropriate action on frequent queries that do not return any results whatsoever or return weird or unexpected results.

The key learning here is that you should focus on providing relevant results for frequent queries. This is the least expensive way to get boosted benefit from your search application.

Make the Information People Often Need Searchable

Fact 3: Users do not know what information is available through search.

Users often believe that a search application gives them access to information that really isn’t available through search. Say your users are frequently searching for ”lunch menu”, ”canteen” and ”today’s lunch”, what do you do if you do not have the menu available at all on your Intranet or Web site?

In the best of worlds, you will make frequently requested information available through search. In other words, you would add the lunch menu to your site and make it searchable. If that is not an option, you might consider informing your users that the lunch menu—or some other popular information people tend to request—is not available in the search application and provide them with a hard-coded link to the canteen contractor or some other related service as a so called “best bet” (or sponsored link as in Google web search).

The key learning here is to monitor what users frequently search for and make sure the search application can tackle user expectations properly.

Adapt to the User’s Language

Fact 4: Users do not know your company jargon.

People describe things using different words. Users are regularly searching for terms which are synonymous to—but not the same as—the terms used in the content being searched. Say your users are frequently looking for a ”travel expense form” on your Intranet search service, but the term used in your official company jargon  is ”travel expenses template”. In cases like this you can build a glossary of synonyms mapping those common language terms people tend to search for frequently to official company terms in order to satisfy your users’ frequent information needs better without having to deviate from company terminology. Another way of handling the problem is to provide hand-crafted best bets (or sponsored links as in Google web search) that are triggered by certain common search terms.

Furthermore, research suggests that Intranet searches often contain company-specific abbreviations. A study of the query log of a search installation at one of Findwise’s customers showed that abbreviations—query strings consisting of two, three or four letters—stood for as much as 18 % of all queries. In other words, it might be worthwhile for the search application to add the spelled-out form to a query for a frequently used abbreviation. Users searching for “cp” on the Intranet would for example in effect see the results of the query “cp OR collaboration portal”

The lesson to learn here is that you should use your query log to learn the terminology the users are using and adapt the search application accordingly, not the other way around!

Help Users With Spelling

Fact 5: Users do not know how to spell.

Users make spelling mistakes—lots of them. Research suggests that 10—25 % of all queries sent to a search engine contain spelling mistakes. So turn on spellchecking in your search platform if you haven’t already! And while you are at it, make sure your search platform can handle queries containing inflected forms (e.g. “menu”, “menus”, “menu’s”, “menus’”). There’s your quick wins to boost the search experience.

Keep Your Search Solution Up-To-Date

Fact 6: Your search application requires maintenance.

Information sources change, so should your search application. There is a fairly widespread misconception that a search application will maintain itself once you’ve got it up and running. The truth is you need to monitor and maintain your search solution as any other business-critical IT application.

A real-life example is a fairly large enterprise that decided to perform a total makeover of its internal communication process, shifting focus from the old Intranet, which was built on a web content management system, in favor of a more “Enterprise 2.0 approach” using a collaboration platform for active projects and daily communication and a document management system for closed projects and archived information.

The shift had many advantages, but it was a disaster for the Enterprise Search application that was only monitoring the old Intranet being phased out. Employees looking for information using the search tool would in other words only find outdated information.

The lesson to learn here is that the fairly large investment in efficient Findability requires maintenance in order for the search application to meet the requirements posed on it now and in the future.

References

100 Most Often Mispelled Misspelled Words in English – http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html

Definition of “sponsored link” – http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Sponsored+link

The ROI of Enterprise Search—Where’s the Beef?

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When faced with the large up-front investment of an Enterprise Search installation, executives are asking for proof that the investment will pay up. Whereas it is easy to quantify the value of search on an e-commerce site or as part of the company helpdesk—increased sales, shorter response times—how do you go about verifying that your million-dollar Enterprise Search application has the desired effects on your revenue stream?

Search engines on the Web have changed the landscape of information access. Today, employees are asking for similar search capabilities within the firewall as they are used to having on the Web. Search has become the preferred way of finding information quickly and accurately.

Top executives at large corporations have heard the plea and nowadays see the benefits of efficient Findability. However, it costs to turn the company information overload from a storage problem of the IT department to a valuable asset and business enabler for everybody. So how do you prove the investment worthwhile?

The Effects of Enterprise Search

Before you can prove anything, you need to establish the effects you would like your Enterprise Search solution to have on your organization. Normally, you would want an Enterprise Search solution to:

  •  Enable people to work faster
  •  Enable people to produce better quality
  •  Provide the means for information reuse
  •  Inspire your employees to innovate and invent

These are all effects that a well-designed and maintained Enterprise Search application will help you address. However, the challenge when calculating the return on investment is that you are attempting to have an effect on workflows that are not clearly visible on your revenue stream. There is no easy way to interlink saved or earned dollars to employees being more innovative.

So how do you prove that you are not wasting money?

There are two straightforward ways to address the problem: Studying how users really interact with the Enterprise Search application and asking them how they value it.

User Behavior through Search Logs

By extracting statistics from the logs of your Enterprise Search application, you can monitor how users interact with the tool. There are several statistic measures that can be interesting to look at in order to establish a positive influence on one or more of the targeted effects.

A key performance indicator for calculating if the Enterprise Search application enables people to work faster is to monitor the average ranking of a clicked hit in the result list. If people tend to scroll down the result set before clicking a hit and opening up a document, this implies the application does not provide proper ranking of the results. In other words, users are forced to review the result set, which obviously slows them down.

By monitoring the amount of users that are using the system, by following the number of different documents they open up through search and by observing the complexity of the queries they perform, you can estimate the level of information your users are expecting to find through searching.

If the application is trusted to render relevant, up-to-date results, more users will use it, they will carry out more complex queries and they will open up a wider range of different documents. If your users do not trust the system, however, they will not use it or they will only search for a limited set of simple things such as “news”, “today’s menu” or “accounting office”. If this is the case, you can hardly say your Enterprise Search application has met the requirements posed on it.

Conversely, if the users access a wide set of documents through search and you have a large number of unique users and queries, then this implies your Enterprise Search application is a valued information access tool that promotes information reuse and innovation based on existing corporate knowledge.

User Expectations through Surveys

Another way to collect information for assessing the return of investment of your Enterprise Search initiative is to ask the users what they think. If you ask a representative subset of your intended users how well the Enterprise Search application fits their specific purposes, you will have an estimate of the quality of the application.

There are a lot of other questions you can ask: Does the application help the user to find relevant corporate information? Are the results ranked properly? Does the application help the user to get an overall picture of a topic? Does it enable the user to get new ideas or find new opportunities? Does it help him avoid duplicating work already done elsewhere within the organization?

A Combination of Increased Usage and Perceived Value

As we have seen, the return on investment of an Enterprise Search initiative is often hard to quantify, but the impact such an application has on a set of targeted effects can be measured using search logs and user surveys. The data collected this way provides an estimate of the value of Findability within the firewall of an organization.

Nowadays, hardly anybody questions the marketing value of a good corporate web site or the impact email has on the way we communicate. Such channels and services are self-evident business enablers today. In this respect, the benefits of precise and quick information access within the corporation should be self-evident. The trick is to get the tool just right.

Customer Service Powered by Search Technology

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I was on the train, on my way to Copenhagen and UX intensive a four day seminar hosted by Adaptive Path. Looking forward to this week I was also contemplating the past year and the projects we’ve been working on. I recently finished a project at a customer service organization at a large company. The objective was to see if the agents (employees) helping customers could benefit from having a search platform. Would the search engine help the users in finding the right content to help their customers?

Our point was off course that it would, but it was up to us to prove it. And we did. The usages tests showed results better than I would have dared to hope for.

  • All users found it to be easier to search for information than browsing for it.
  • Searching helped the users not only in finding information faster, but finding information they didn’t know where to find or didn’t even know existed.
  • All users preferred using the search functionality instead of navigation for information.
  • The search functionality helped new employees learn the information they needed to know in order to help the customers, hence they were productive faster.Less time was spent asking for help from colleagues and support since users found the information they needed by searching for it.

These results are all very positive, but the most overwhelming thing for me in this project was the level of engagement from the users. They really enjoyed being a part of the evaluations, bringing feedback to the project team. They felt that they were a part of the process and this made them very positive to the change this project meant.

Change is often a hard thing in development projects. Even if the change is better for the end users of the system, the change in itself can still be problematic making people hostile to the idea, even though it is improving their situation. Involving users not only helps in creating a good product, but also in creating a good spirit around the project. I have experienced this in other projects as well. By setting up reference groups for the development process we have not only managed to get good feedback to the project but have also created a buzz about what’s happening. People are volunteering for being participants in our reference groups. This buzz spreads and creates a positive feeling about the change the project is bringing. Instead of dreading the users are welcoming the change. It’s user research at its best.

So the next time you are asking yourself why you should involve users in your project and not only business stakeholders – think about how not only the end product, but the project and the process as a whole, could benefit from this.

Wisdom Comes With Knowledge – Let’s Have it at Our Fingertips

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Wisdom comes with knowledge – this is our payoff, a generic statement, easy to agree with. But what do we mean with these few words….

The management guru Peter Drucker (www.peter-drucker.com) stated already 2001 that the next society will be a “knowledge society”. Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce. Its three main characteristics will be:

  • Borderlessness because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money.
  • Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education.
  • The potential for failure as well as success. Anyone can acquire the “means of production”, i.e. the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win.

Together, those three characteristics will make the knowledge society a highly competitive one, for organisations and individuals alike. Information technology, although only one of many new features of the next society, is already having one hugely important effect: it is allowing information to spread near-instantly, and making it accessible to everyone.

But the important thing in the knowledge society is of course to find the right information at the right time. This is the success factor, to turn information into knowledge that could be built up for each separate task or mission. This requires a good way to extract the useful information. A good search engine could give you this, the ability to dynamically find, extract, structure and understand information and to turn information into knowledge.

We call this “dynamic knowledge”, easy to achieve through search solutions, suitable for each situation. This is a way to feel wise and well informed in the knowledge society. The ability to get the right information for each and every situation will give you the ability to have “dynamic knowledge at your fingertips”.