What does it all mean?

Posted on January 7, 2009
Filed Under BI, Enterprise 2.0, Semantic Web | Comments

I can’t believe how long it has been since I’ve posted here! Not that I haven’t had anything I wanted to write about, I just haven’t had the time to do it. Things have been very busy at work, with many positive  happenings in the past 6 months.

One of the most positive is some of the research we’ve completed, and the great conversations we’ve had with our customers. The Information Industry is one that is going through many changes as I’m sure you’re aware. From our research and customer interactions, it is clear that knowledge workers know this too.

We’re quickly seeing the focus shift from “help me find information” to “help me understand what this information means to me”. Search fatigue is something I have seen become much more prevalent over the last 180 days or so. Knowledge workers aren’t looking for a better way to search. They would in fact prefer not to search at all.

How can the data a knowledge worker needs be sought out for him? How can that data be put into the appropriate context to become valuable information? How can this information be analyzed to help the knowledge worker make a decision?

These challenges are complex, but solutions are definitely achievable. The ultimate solution has to be simple. As simple as Google’s solution to “help me find information”.

And these challenges need to be overcome quickly, it won’t be long before knowledge workers expect their information management solutions to make recommendations and even take the appropriate action for them…

Meet or Meat? The choice is yours.

Posted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under Product Management | Comments

Here is a really simple tip to being a more effective product manager. Avoid meetings. Like the plague. I’m not a Latin scholar, but I’m pretty sure that the root for the word meeting means ‘to destroy productivity and crush creativity’.

The results of formal meetings are so often contradictory to what you need to do as a PM. Usually formal meetings with large groups of people end up with a promise from a few of the participants to do some work. Meetings are a great way to provide an update to a large audience of people, but are not a way to understand the perspective of individuals, influence, make progress, and get honest answers (I’ll exclude workgroups, which really aren’t meetings at all, just a formalized way for people to spend time collaborating. I was in a very good one today in fact).

If you want to make some real progress, walk over to your sales manager’s desk and ask why product isn’t moving. This one on one venue is a place where you will get an honest answer, not a promise to reach out to the team and do some investigation. Instead of a formal meeting where everyone will be afraid to admit they may have made a mistake – take your developer and designer out for a burger, and figure out the best way to solve a problem.

So the choice is yours, discuss a topic for an hour, let people grandstand and make false promises, or make progress and get some good quality red meat while you’re at it.

 

Profit Inhibiting Service

Posted on June 3, 2008
Filed Under Advertising, Business Models | Comments

I think that is the name for Time Warner’s new pricing program that went into Beta recently. A lot has been written about what a bad idea this is, and how bad it is for TW customers.

But what about from an advertiser standpoint? If I’m not mistaken, the TW customer portal features some ads. Now if I’m an advertiser, I know that the customers that have the potential to see this ad, have just been discouraged from doing so (not to mention all the ones that will drop the service and never come back). This decrease in traffic would make the TW portal a less valuable place to advertise. I wonder how the ad sales team for the portal feels about that?

What’s next? Am I going to have to pay extra if I read all of the articles, or ads, in next months issue of Time?

Landing the plane

Posted on May 17, 2008
Filed Under Product Management | Comments

One of the cool things about software product management is the ability to be visionary. To innovate, and find new ways to use technology that people haven’t thought of before. Being able to understand how the technology, process, and behavior of your market are changing and predict where they are going is really a talent.

But it doesn’t make you a good product manager.

A good product manager can actually translate vision into an achievable business and product strategy. First, you have to be able to understand the process of change and how it affects your business. How long will it take for your sales and marketing teams to understand your vision? More importantly how long will it be before any of them can communicate it to your customers? How long will it be before our customers buy into your vision, and then how long before they are willing to adopt it? Good product managers understand these things, and then create a strategy which takes all of these things into consideration. They know it is almost impossible to get everyone around them from A to C without going through B, even if they can.

Formulate your vision, communicate it to everyone – it is critical. But understand it will take some time for them to really understand it. And develop a product strategy that is patient enough to get people there one step at a time.

Who cares if you can fly a plane (create the vision) if you can’t land it (be a good product manager)?

Making People Dumber?

Posted on April 10, 2008
Filed Under Semantic Web | Comments

I had a great conversation the other day with The Sadrhino about the impact of new semantic technologies and applications. His thought was that by presenting users with key pieces of data the computer has extracted from information, people will end up dumber. This of course because they will rely on the extracted information, and use it as a substitute for reading, and more importantly learning about a subject.

I actually agree, to a certain extent. One example he cited was how people are more and more reading a headline and snippet from a widget or RSS feed, and then forming opinions or taking actions based on limited information. I agree with this, and probably have been guilty of it myself.

I think there is a difference with semantically extracted information however. First, the headline example is one where the headline and snippet are written as an advertisement to get people to read the actual article or go to the site, not to summarize the important pieces of data contained within it. Secondly, with the semantic technologies, people are actually writing the rules to help determine what to extract and how to present it. Therefore, if done properly a much bigger picture should be presented to the user, not just a slanted view.

Of course using just the extracted summary is no way to reach a conclusion, or use as input for a decision. Learning still needs to take place.  I think that smart people will understand this, and use the extracted information as a shortcut that will reduce the amount of time, and perhaps drastically reduce, it takes to learn. With more time to learn, smart people can learn about more subjects, or learn more detail about a particular subject. But they know the technology is not a substitute for learning.

Of course some people will not understand this, and think these new technologies are  a pure replacement for the process of learning.

So maybe instead of making smart people dumb, semantic extraction technologies will make smart people smarter, and dumb people dumber?

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