Above and Beyond KM » searching

Are We Organizing the Right Stuff?

VMaryAbraham — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:51:26 +0000

As a self-confessed pack rat, I’ve had a morbid fascination for folks who preach and practice the virtues of minimalism and a clutter-free existence. Call it a form of self-abuse, but I just can’t help reading their propaganda. And then, I come every workday to a business that never has a shortage of stuff to organize. No matter how much we try to move away from the old KM 1.0 chores of building, organizing, maintaining and searching data repositories, the reality is that as long as we work in a document-intensive business, law firm knowledge management will always include a significant portion of KM 1.0 work. Vendors promise silver bullets in the form of super search and auto-profiling to help us manage all this data, but even still we hear stories of people spending hours searching fruitlessly.

Recently Kathleen Hogan reported that studies show that managers and executives spend 6 weeks each year just looking for stuff. My initial reaction was what a waste of time! Can’t they get a better search engine? And then, I had a radical thought — what if we really aren’t supposed to save and organize all this stuff? What if there really is too much to organize effectively? What if there’s no reasonable way to stay on top of it all? Are our taxonomies and search engines designed to cope comfortably with our exploding data collections? What if they can’t?

If you take a look at all the anti-clutter propaganda I’ve been saving for a rainy day, you’ll soon discover that the first step to organizing stuff is — get rid of what you don’t need. By so doing, you reduce the amount of material you actually have to organize and maintain. I know we think we need to organize all the data in our firms, but do we really? Does it all matter? Does it all need to be saved and organized for posterity? Or, is some of it truly ephemeral?

Greg Lambert suggests that law firms have been saving all this stuff for all the wrong reasons:

There are certain things we should legally and/or ethically keep for a specific period of time. But, most of the data that we handle does not fall under these requirements. In fact, I’d wager that 90% of the emails, electronic documents, or paper documents we keep, we do because we are implementing the “CYA” rule.

Folks who drink the super search kool-aid will say that the cost of saving and searching data is becoming increasingly trivial, so why spend any time at all trying to weed the collection? Rather, save it all and then try Filtering on the Way Out. On the other hand, look at the search engine so many of us envy — Google. It indexes and searches enormous amounts of data, but even Google doesn’t try to do it all. Google doesn’t tackle the Deep Web.

So why are we trying to do it all?

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For information on searching the Deep Web:

A guide by Robert J. Lackie
UC Berkeley – Teaching Library Internet Workshops, Invisible or Deep Web: What it is, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity
Michael K. Bergman, The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value

From my deep stores of anti-clutter information:

Julie Morgenstern, When Organizing Isn’t Enough: SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life
Zenhabits – Zen Mind: How to Declutter
Zenhabits – The Minimalist’s Guide to Fighting (and Beating) Clutter Entropy

[Photo Credit: Jason Rust]

What Do Your Searches Disclose About Your Work?

VMaryAbraham — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:10:12 +0000

When you use a search engine, you’re thinking aloud. It’s almost as if you’re standing in the middle of Central Park or Hyde Park shouting, “Does anyone know anything about [X]?” In Central Park, at least, people are likely to ignore you and just keep walking. What would happen, however, if someone stopped, paid attention, and made a note of your request? And, what if they then noticed that other people were asking about [X] and that these people worked with you? Could that someone reach the conclusion that you and your colleagues are interested in [X]? Now, what if X=Initial Public Offering, or X=Merger, or (more likely these days) X=Bankruptcy? What would that attentive person know about you and your work?

I’ve heard reports of investment bankers and lawyers around the world beginning their research assignments on popular internet search engines. What if someone noticed that lots of people at a particular firm were interested in Company [Y] and the topic “initial public offering.” That’s normally the kind of information that is considered highly confidential within a company, an investment bank or a law firm. However, do our searches on public search engines, social media sites or commercial subscription databases reveal information to a careful observer that we don’t intend to disclose? What could that observer do with that information?

Do you remember when Amazon reported on which books seemed popular in certain organizations? (E.g., we’ve been selling lots of books on bankruptcy to people at the ACME Company.) It is possible for providers of public search engines or commercial databases to gather this data and make sense of it. Is anyone doing that now with respect to our searches outside the firewall? Should we be doing something about that?

[Photo Credit: pavel1998]

The KM Solution?

VMaryAbraham — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:53:31 +0000

In a recent meeting, a vendor said with great enthusiasm, “Let me show you our KM solution.” For a brief moment of intense joy, I actually thought I was about to experience KM enlightenment.

I should have known better.

After a bit of fanfare, he unveiled … a search engine. Admittedly, it appeared to be a very fine search engine. Nonetheless, if search and retrieval were the entire KM solution, most of us engaged in law firm knowledge management could have retired years ago. The reality is that while good search and retrieval are important components of a law firm knowledge management program, they cannot fairly be described as the complete answer.

I know that and you know that. When will the vendors figure it out?

[Photo Credit: Sharon Pazner]

KM in an Era of Information Snacking

VMaryAbraham — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:54:00 +0000

In a recent letter to his customers about the eBook reader Kindle, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discussed the current tendency to engage in “information snacking”:

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.

As a reader, I’m supportive of Bezos’ attempt to give reading the advantages of the electronic age, but I can’t help wondering if he is entirely right about the impact of tools on how we read. Perhaps it isn’t just the tools that nudge us away from long-form reading and towards information snacking. Could information snacking in fact be a by-product of the pace of modern life? Or does the abundance of available information at our fingertips force us to find faster, more efficient ways of retrieving and reviewing what we need?

Wikipedia’s article on Information Foraging, which appears to draw on the work of Peter Pirolli and Jakob Nielsen, notes that once users have been trained by search engines to go to a variety of sites to gather information, they will be reluctant to invest much time on a single site. Instead they make quick strategic raids to collect specific information and then leave the site.

If information snacking and short attention spans are an unavoidable part of the knowledge terrain of the 21st century, this leads to some interesting questions for law firm knowledge management:

- Are we providing lawyers with tools that encourage information snacking over long-form reading and analysis? (Bloggers and Twitterers may want to take the Fifth on this one.)
- Are there risk management issues arising from the increasing tendency to engage in information snacking?
- If information snacking by lawyers is a bad thing, how do we counteract it?
- If information snacking is inevitable, how do we adjust our KM systems to accommodate it?

As we deploy increasingly more powerful search engines within our firms, we give lawyers the ability to find more information with Google-like ease. And that information is fragmented, providing a perfect opportunity for information snacking. Perhaps the most important thing knowledge management systems can do now is to ensure they provide adequate context for and connection among these fragments so that we diminish some of the negative side effects that result from information snacking.

Finding the Right Stuff

VMaryAbraham — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:07:00 +0000

The best search engine in the world cannot convert garbage into useful content.

So, before you spend megabucks on the latest cool search tool, think about what repository you’re searching. If your office is anything like most offices, you’ve got tons of ephemera — stuff that probably isn’t going to matter 30 minutes from now — and tons of materials that really ought not to see the light of day. However, a decent search engine has the effect of shining a klieg light on the shortcomings of your content.

In fairness, a great search engine can help filter out much of the suboptimal content, but if there isn’t anything worth finding, what have you really achieved?

One solution is to stack the deck: make sure you put a goodly amount of useful content into your repository before you turn the search engine on. And what constitutes “useful content”? Not just something that someone might possibly need someday. (That’s the sort of rationale the turns a document repository into a cluttered and confusing packrat hell.) “Useful content” is content that is vetted: someone has reviewed it and given it a seal of approval or it’s been used with good results enough times for you to know it’s a great resource.

With that kind of content, you’re going to look like a genius every time the search engine does its thing. How often can you say that about a KM project?

For more information on the benefits of vetted content, see my article “Loading the Deck” in ILTA’s 2007 Knowledge Management White Paper.

What are People Searching For?

VMaryAbraham — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:44:00 +0000

What are people searching for and where are they looking? That’s the question asked and answered in a thought-provoking article in the March 2008 issue of KMWorld. While working with an admittedly small sample, the survey yielded some interesting findings:

- 62% of respondents said that they first search the Internet before searching more specialized resources such as their own company’s website or intranet
– while 13% of the time the respondents said they were searching for information about their own companies, they began their search on their company intranet only 2% of the time
- respondents tended to ask their colleagues for help before they tried their company intranet
- business users spend a lot of time searching for information at work (approximately 9.5 hours per week)
- knowledge workers tend to search using general indices like Google and Yahoo rather than specialized web sites or search engines

The picture that emerges is troubling:

- companies aren’t doing a good job of making their intranets the first choice for company information
- despite the hours spent searching, many knowledge workers are not searching efficiently
- knowledge workers don’t seem to understand the inherent weakness of general web search engines like Google and Yahoo when it comes to finding specialized, high-value content
- searchers tend not to use content aggregators, specialized vertical search sites or topical sites to find data

For knowledge management, these findings pose some real challenges. In many companies, it’s the knowledge management group that’s responsible for the intranet. The findings of this survey are a real indictment of the job we’re doing. So what must we do differently to make our intranets the first choice research resource for our colleagues? It might be worth asking them.

And while we’re talking with them, we should investigate why it is they are using sub-optimal search methods. Is it a lack of awareness about how search engines like Google and Yahoo work? Do they simply not understand that high-value content can get buried in the Web, but will tend to be more visible on specialized web sites? According to the author of this article, people in the online industry know that “the `good stuff’ gets hidden if it is thrown into the larger web grab bag. And very often, it isn’t even in the grab bag because it isn’t indexed.” Clearly the average knowledge worker doesn’t know this or they wouldn’t be using the grab bag search engine.

Despite this (or perhaps because of this), the author notes that there are some signs of progress in the growing recognition of the value of finding high-quality information rather than merely relevant information. As a result, there is renewed interest in recommendation engines, contextual search and vertical search sites. These are “tools that will tell [knowledge workers] what they need to pay attention to in the pile” of information they face. In this age of overload, this sounds like a step in the right direction.