Brother, can you share your content?

A woman's hand rose in the audience. "But what if you can't get your colleagues to share their content. How do you make them do it?" It wasn't the first time I had heard the question -- God knows I said it to myself often enough when I was running the interactive division of a media group in trying to get a feed from one of our two daily papers -- in a format we could use.

With all the discussions on digital asset management, the theorists often leave unmentioned the largest obstacle of all: internal politics. While I don't have numbers on how wide-spread it is, I do know that when I re-asked woman's question to the audience about whether they had dealt with this issue -- they were nodding and raising their hands. And while on a call on Friday with my co-panelists at the upcoming Create-a-Sphere symposium I suggested this as an obstacle --- and everyone chimed in, in agreement.

Like the filibuster option in politics, it seems the minority can just say no to sharing content -- and what are beleaguered colleagues to do? Running to the board and saying that so-and-so won't play nicely would certainly qualify as a CLM. But board members and senior management alike that don't provide tools and policies to thwart this very toxic power play ... will end up with the same disastrous stalemate seen today in government. Line managers won't complain they just won't get the job done. And the entropy can be costly.

According to the Butler Group, up to 10% of staff productivity is lost trying to find things.  And searching for something that you know should be there -- but just can't find is probably the biggest time waster of all. More recent research from IDC supports that and notes that a company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it.

Is there a Holy Grail to this? Yes, and it begins at the top of the food chain. The C-suite needs to acknowledge that knowledge is power -- and therefore some people don't want to share. (And your most powerful managers -- may be your worst offenders.) Creating a Lord of the Flies environment is not the answer. Some people may thrive in that environment but the majority don't; they will either begrudgingly go along (and go without) or quit.  Instead there needs to be an enterprise-wide initiative to invest in technology that automates processes -- to neutralize the human gate-keeper. These technologies fall under the heading of DAM - digital asset management solutions -- but also are known more narrowly as BAM (brand asset management) and MAM (multimedia asset management) and sometimes more broadly as ECM (enterprise content management).

Technologies vary depending upon 

• the types of assets being stored -- largely text, photos, videos?  
  
• the frequency of searching for them -- everyday or once in a while? 
• the applications -- recombination and repurpose, or e-discovery?

These technologies need to be embedded enterprise wide into the workflow. Techniques include automating the ingestion of all assets into a single repository -- either physically or virtually and creating a method to standardize metadata (I'll dive into that topic on another day.)

A sane digital asset management solution eliminates the insanity of having employees dropping to bended knee saying "please sir, can you share your content?"

Semantic Metadata & Sagacious Serendipty

I sat in numerous conferences at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco last week listening to and, preparing to speak on, search. Personally I want to see this word retired, as it conjures up phrases like “…in vain,” “desperately seeking,” and images of poor Diogenes schlepping around Athens with his lamp and cynicism. Or, closer to home, the time I had to find 40 pairs of white tube socks, seamless, for a snowman project for my son’s class (during a snowstorm no less). Since that “in vain,” “desperately seeking” experience, I only volunteer to bake brownies.

But I digress. Now don’t get me wrong; I am not one of those protectionists that is against sharing content. Personally I think sharing is a good thing. What I am against is the word search itself. Because which of us wants to search anyway? I’d rather be finding things, like the $100 bill on the sidewalk outside the OTB located around the corner from my apartment. Or the brand new earring I had lost – and found – outside my car door. Find is about that Eureka! moment; that culmination of both relief and joy that comes with discovery. While search to me is futile and thankless toiling.

Public site search for the most part makes me crazy. Like the time I went to a city’s business site to look for someone – and for whatever reason was inexplicably given people with the same name located from other cities and states. Upon further digging, I “found” the person I was looking for on the site. The search tool just didn’t filter the results by the geographic location I was actually in. It just pulled people with the same name and vomited it out results. Well really, how interested are you going to be in something that was just vomited at you?

Physical-world architects have long known that site satisfaction and return visits are highly correlated. That people explore their environments encumbered by whatever stresses in their lives: are they late for a meeting? in dire need of a restroom? Do they have specific destinations in mind – or are they out for a stroll and will respond to whatever catches their fancy? The physical world uses many different types of sensory cues to guide people.

The digital world is more limited when it comes to sensory cues -- but there is a way to create a framework to allow people greater site satisfaction and discovery. The key is Metadata. As my friend Ali Rahman says, “metadata provide a big picture and a detailed view of your information. Now we are not talking about generic, run of the mill metadata. The type that says the type of file, the date created, modified, type of format and so on.A ccording to Kent State's College of Library & Information Science, that type is called Administrative Metadata.

No, the type of metadata I am talking about is more Xtreme, if you will. The academics at Kent State call it descriptive metadata, while the folks at Nstein prefer to call it semantic metadata (semdata??). It is metadata that is generated using a multi-faceted approach of computational and linguistic analysis. It not only extracts meaning from documents – but also embeds the synonyms, summary, categories, even the tone, in order to create a linguistic fingerprint. This linguistic fingerprint can then be matched against any other linguistic fingerprint – to find like pieces of content.

Having this metadata means you can create interesting ways to guide people through the site. Go back to the shopping mall metaphor: The mall maps group stores by category – such as women’s shoes -- look at the map, check where you are -- and voila! you are on your way. In the digital world, commerce sites do a super job faceting information so that a person can be guided right to the shoe they want to buy, allowing people to search by Color, Brand, Size, even Heel Height!

But commerce sites are easy – as that data is fairly structured since information is normalized and sitting in fields with headers that say “heel height.” Prose and rich media are considered unstructured, using synonyms and inferences, and as such, are much harder to correlate. Semantically analyzing and enriching content allows sites to marry content – even if those words are not explicitly used! This allows content to be packaged together so people can find what they are looking for without breaking a sweat.

Serendipity is often referred to as an accidental discovery -- but in science, serendipity is linked with sagacity which presupposes a framework that facilitates discovery. The use of semantic metadata provides a matrix of "triggers" from which people are now able to have more meaningful explorations -- leading to those highly coveted finds.

Take it from Diogenes: search just doesn’t guarantee that you will locate what you are looking for.