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Written by Sarah Meyer
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Monday, 22 February 2010 |
We frequently hear complaints that a critical event should have been avoided, but groups of people were unable to "connect the dots." The problem expressed here is that the dots are all available in various repositories, but there was no way to synthesize the intelligence, which would appear only after the information was assembled and analyzed. Inaction itself isn't the issue — it's a problem of access to insight. You can't act on what you don't know.
The publicized unconnected dots stories are typically about poor communication and information sharing among government agencies, but corporations suffer from the same challenges — even when all or most of the dots are internal data.
In an op-ed piece published recently in the Washington Post, Toyota President Akio Toyoda addressed the company's recent recall of nearly 8 million cars to correct serious safety problems, a crisis that has eroded a fifth of the company's market value (or $30bn) and has already cost the company over $2bn. Toyoda acknowledged that the root of the problem was that the company "failed to connect the dots." He went on to say that the company needed to improve "sharing important quality and safety information across our global operations."
"When consumers purchase a Toyota, they are not simply purchasing a car, truck or van. They are placing their trust in our company," Toyoda wrote. The cost of not connecting the dots can destroy not only quantifiable market value but also the long-term value of the brand. That trust, once tarnished, is hard to restore.
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Written by Sid Probstein
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Wednesday, 02 December 2009 |
It's a common enough question: can a search engine replace a relational database? The answer is "sometimes".
One challenge is transaction support and the ACID properties. If we focus on replacement for the purpose of querying only, we can leave that aside. This leaves some other interesting challenges. First and foremost is the need to translate the relational model to the search model.
Relational databases are so named because they organize data in various ways – typically by commonality, but this is dependent on the application - with relationships between sets of data expressed through foreign keys. Data stored in relational database is sometimes normalized, but this is not required. Using this model, it is a straightforward matter to represent one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, and query them.
In contrast, search engines map words to documents; the documents may have structure - typically fields - but content/data is generally not normalized. Converting relational data to an index model requires running a query in the database to produce a single table - a "flattened" view that can be indexed such that each row is a document, and each column is a field within it.
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Written by Sid Probstein
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Wednesday, 05 August 2009 |
It seems obvious that the major web search engines have solved the problem of finding exact matches to user queries and separating the wheat from the chaff. Search for Twitter ( Google, Yahoo, Bing ), iPhone ( Google, Yahoo, Bing ) or even Attivio ( Google, Yahoo, Bing ) and you'll see largely the same results and variations - all of good quality. (Both Yahoo! and Bing blend results for the latter query with incorrect spelling suggestions, but one presumes they may be doing that deliberately to differentiate themselves, even if in this case it makes the results considerably worse.)
But what happens when the user is vague and doesn't know exactly what they are looking for? Or is interested in a topic that is more ambiguous, statistically speaking? For example if they are trying to find out about the "one-electron universe" hypothesis, but mistakenly remember it as the "one electron theory"...
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Written by Sid Probstein
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Friday, 29 May 2009 |
Last week I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the MIT CIO Symposium. It was a great conference, particularly notable because of the focus on leadership and innovation in IT. Most of the conferences I attend tend to be either topically or industry focused, so this was a welcome change. Getting to meet and talk with so many smart people with wildly different backgrounds was extremely interesting.
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 |
"A deteriorating economy will make B2B customers more sensitive to price, less sensitive to advertising, and harder to win and keep... use "voice of the customer" efforts to make sure that the entire organization provides great customer service...."1 - Alan Webber, Forrester Research, 2008
Companies need to focus on customer loyalty even more during a difficult economy to protect revenue and ensure the continuation of their most important customer relationships. Innovative organizations are even taking their Voice of the Customer initiatives another step by consolidating information about customers and their opinions from all relevant sources, providing cost-effective, customer-centric insight that gives all their customer representatives a complete 360 degree view of their customers to ensure they are providing the best service possible. And when the technology includes workflow and automated alerts, you can reduce costs in addition to improving service and increasing customer insight.
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