The Four Types of Search and Vivisimo's Social Search

After looking at my post on the Vivisimo Social Search, I thought back to how it relates to each of the four types of search. For those of you who missed my post from a few months ago on types of search, my studies show there to be four types of search: fetch, recall, precedent and research.

With the fetch, you have exact identifying information. For instance, with a document in the document management system you have the document number, or you have a filename and path, or a URL. Obviously, an enterprise search engine adds little to this type of document search. The social search would allow you or others to annotate that item. For instance, the law has changed and a provision in the document does not work anymore.

With the recall search, you have some distinct information about the nature of the item. You remember a matter it was associated with, who created it, when it was created, etc. With this type of search you typically get back several or many items and you need to sort through the results to find the item you were looking for. The social search may help with this sorting. For instance, if an item were tagged as the final document. Or just the opposite, the item was tagged as being an interim or discarded draft.

The research is the type of search that an enterprise search was built for. You want to find information on a topic and you may have no idea if the enterprise has any information on that topic. Information could be stored in a variety of sources/databases. The social enterprise search should pull back information that others found useful, more so than just an enterprise search. If I am looking for information on "poison pills" it would be great if the search pulled back intranet pages on the subject, documents on poison pills and personnel with experience with poison pills. It would be even better if those search results were improved with tags and annotations from others: "useful summary memo", "helped me get poison pill approved by the board", "the courts overturned this poison pill", etc.

The enterprise social search also gives you a tool to allow for or improve your search for a precedent. With a precedent search, the information that makes the item relevant is generally not in the text of the document. For instance, if I were looking for a purchase and sale agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida that is buyer favorable. The words "Florida" "retail shopping center" and "buyer favorable" may not appear in the document and if they do they may only appear once or twice. To enable this kind of search you need to harness the document collection to another database of information. The social search gives you another option. You can just add an annotation to the document that it is a "buyer favorable agreement for a retail shopping center in Florida."

Some skeptics of the social search will point out that you can already accomplish some of the same results. For instance, if you have a comments field in your document management system, you could use that comment field for annotations. The problem is that the comment field is anonymous and therefore the annotation is anonymous. I do not know if I wrote it, someone smarter than me wrote it or someone less competent wrote it.

I think Vivisimo's new search tool offers a lot of promise to improve all of the types of searching and better harness the knowledge of an enterprise.

Live Blogging Thoughts and Reaction

I was surprised at the lack of "live bloggers" at ILTA. It is a technology conference so I expected to see some interesting ways people were keeping notes and tracking information. Lisa Kellar Gianakos was toting around a tablet PC. But otherwise, I saw very few people using computers. Mostly, I saw people scratching some simple notes in the back of the conference book.

I first started live blogging at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June. I was (still am) new to blogging. But I thought a blog would be an excellent way to keep notes from the conference. Just before going to that conference I came across some notes I had taken from another conference I attended. There was some good stuff in those notes, but they were just sitting in a pile. I could not retrieve the notes, leverage the notes for other use or leverage my attendance at the conference.

With my notes in a blog, I can use the blog search to quickly retrieve them, use labels to add some organization and incorporate them into the stream of thoughts embodied in this blog.

In addition to my use of the notes, the blog makes them readily available to my colleagues in the knowledge management group at the firm (and shows my director that I was not just off having a good time).

I think it is important to stop the blogging shortly after each session. I do not want blogging to take the place of person-to-person interaction at a conference. As the session ends, I will generally do a quick spellcheck and a quick skim for obvious errors. If it is decent enough, I just hit publish and let it go with whatever typos, grammatical errors or formatting problems I missed. If it is in really bad shape, I will wait to edit the post during a later, quiet time. For me the key is to capture the information, more than polishing them for prime-time.

During a session, I will look surgically attached to my computer. But the end result is much more useful. Isn't that what technology is all about?

ABA CLE iPods and Podcasts

ABA is now selling iPods, in your choice of colors and pre-loaded with ABA CLE programs: ABA-CLE Podcasts and Preloaded iPods.

When I initially bought my iPod I ripped my CD collection and bought a few albums from iTunes. Over the last year I have used my iPod mostly for listening to podcasts. It is great way to take in news and information while commuting. My Monday morning ritual is listening to Wait Wait . . . Dont' Tell Me during the walk to the train, the train ride and walk to the office. Of course that means I am the crazy guy giggling to himself on the train or walking down the streets of Boston.

I would be happy to listen to CLE programs or internal training programs on my iPod. Or watch, if I get a video iPod some day.

Does IT Make You More Productive

Computerworld.com posted an interview with Marshall Van Alstyne. He and his co-authors Sinan Aral and Erik Brynjolfsson recently completed a five-year study analyzing 1,300 projects and 125,000 e-mails to see how IT affects individual productivity.

Some of the key findings are that heavy IT users do more multi-tasking and therefore and can take on a heavier workload.

Download the whole paper here. [SSRN.com]

12 Tips to Learn How to Be Curious

Lori Grant published a great article.

I particularly like the last tip: "Slow Down." With the speed of business, business decisions and the execution of actions from the decision, knowledge workers have limited time to slow down and think. The result is often knee-jerk reactions.

As a knowledge management professional it is my job to help my colleagues and clients to get access to information and knowledge quicker, so they can take the time to dwell upon their results.

Assuming the worker has x amount of time to make a decision. If the worker uses 90% of x finding the relevant information and knowledge relevant to the decision, the worker only has 10% of x to make the decision.

By shortening the retrieval time to 50% of x, the worker would have 50% of x to process the information and make the decision or 5 times as much time to make the decision.

Slow down, think about the information you found and make a better decision.