I spent a day at the FASTForward conference in Orlando and listen to 4 provocative keynotes. All about Search, as a proxy for web and other analytics. FAST, a Norwegian company in the fast growing enterprise search space, was recently acquired by
Microsoft
a) John Hagel, expounded on the work he has been doing over the last
few years around "Pull Platforms" - which leverage a new breed of
empowered consumers (with search and other information sources) and
talent - as against traditional Push Programs which worked in the past
as demand was more predictable and processes could be standardized a
lot easier. The biggest threat to most corporations- that these
consumers could leverage the talent themselves (or are also the talent
themselves) and cut the middleman out.
I talked to him afterwards and he believes the single most important
capability for an enterprise is identifying and developing new forms of
talent that understand the new consumer. And he is big on networked
communities like that of Li and Fung, a Chinese company, which helps
apparel designers around the world connect
with 10,000 highly specialized providers of production and logistics
services. He also cited Cisco Connection On-line with 40,000 partners.
b) Then it was Clare Hart, President of Dow Jones Enterprise Media
Group and she showcased "search without the search box" Using her Factiva 2.0
tool kit she demoed two roles at a bank - an investment banker, and a
wealth management exec - and the analytics they would see driven by an
"event" - say missed earnings at a stock. What's impressive is the
range of information (from news feeds, blogs, streaming stock
information, and proprietary customer and other data) and data types
(docs, graphs, videos etc) all customized by role, linked and triggered
by event types which have "anticipatory discovery" done ahead of time.
So instead of having users run multiple and inconsistent queries
seeking such information, much of it has been thought out and being
processed in background. I talk to too many folks who think a better UI
to enter transactions or queries is "user empowerment". Giving a user
powerful information with little user involvement like Clare showed is
a much higher form of user empowerment.
c) Then on to Dave Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.
His last slide showed a well manicured topiary and next to it a pile of
fallen leaves in stunning Fall colors. He loves the disorganized pile
and thinks enterprises have tried too hard to organize data into
information and made it "soulless" . The web is about links and links
should be unpredictable and "messy". Some would call it anarchy, but it
was a refreshing perspective on not trying to predefine data models,
and instead let communities of internal and external users influence
it. They will always bring broader and fresher "tags" than a corporate
team can ever think of.
I spent a few minutes with him later and you can see the man's
bright lights - though on his blog he describes himself tongue-in-cheek
as "a Ph.D in philosophy that entitles him to affect an air of smug
obscurity whenever he chooses"
d) Dave was followed by Tom Davenport, who, of course has written
many books on analytics. Tom's presentation was as much about
disciplined analytical rigor as
Dave's was about enjoying the messiness that comes from the web. Tom's
presentation focused on companies like Harrah's and Progressive which
have for long known the value of mining intelligence from mountain of
data. He updated that with newer examples of analytics the web is
facilitating from recommendation engines at NetFlix to better customer
experiences at Careerbuilder.com as it optimizes across millions of job
searches.
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