It’s a Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous World (for Content)
There is a famous film called “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” 
where the film begins as the occupants of four vehicles on a narrow road in a southern California desert stop to help Smiler Grogan, a man who has just careered off the highway. With his dying breaths, he tells bystanders about $350,000 hidden in the fictional town of Santa Rosita, A wild race follows to find the treasure. There was a recent study by Accenture that reminded me of this film where in this case the chase was for content not money.
The study highlights:
- Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
- More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
- 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
- 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
- 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable
- 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
- 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
- 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
- 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information
- 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data
- Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal
When you look at these statistics it may seem like a “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” but in reality it is a “Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous Content World”!
Content Management and Search is critical for people’s productivity
- Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
- 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
- 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data
Content Control and Records Management is critical to people’s productivity. Content that is not approved should not be available to everyone. Security should be applied to search so that users only get access to content that are are supposed to view. Out-of-date, incorrect and invalid content needs to be marked and retired.
- More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
- 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
- 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable
The web is not one website and corporate content is not one repository - It’s a Distributed Content World
- 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
- 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
- 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information
It’s a Federated World. To analyze a competitor you need to search across internal repositories and external repositories. These may be content management systems, blogs, wikis - It’s a Heterogeneous World
- 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
The consumer interface is coming into the corporation. Interestingly 31% said it was hard to get competitor information vs. 45% for other parts of the company. It is easier to search the web and get useful information on a competitor that search an internal repository and also users don’t want to use their internal portal. Users want the simplicity of the web interfaces across internal and external content
- 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
- Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal
It’s a Standards, Standards, Standards, Standards World
Given this scenario the only option is to use standards to search across these repositories. In the old proprietary, legacy content world distributed meant going across a couple of that vendors repositories and maybe another competitors repository. In this scenario creating adaptors in feasible. In the consumer driven, distributed, federated, heterogeneous world of today the options are endless and not under a companies control. Writing hundred of adaptors is not an option.
That is why is this world OpenSearch against content repositories is the solution today. OpenSearch is the standard used by:
- Yahoo
- Amazon
- eBay
- Wikipedia
- Technorati
- Creative Commons
- and many more
Alfresco version 2.0 has adopted OpenSearch as a search standard.
David Caruana has written an excellent blog on Alfresco OpenSearch.
John Newton has also written an excellent blog on Open Search.
Alfresco 2.0 can be downloaded at
http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/
and read about in the Wiki at
February 27th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
[...] In my blog I wrote an article titled “It’s a Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous World (for Content)” and about the need for OpenSearch. (Scroll down to the bottom of the blog to play the podcast) In this I highlighted an Accenture study that found: [...]