FastForward’07
I’m sitting in the FastForward’07 conference. They have three guys in red make-up doing a ripped-off copy of the blue man group. Lots of flashing lights. A loud rock group. And no Wifi. They claim that this is the only business focused conference that focuses on search technology. For full disclosure, I need to tell you that I’m here as a guest of Fast, having done a contract gig to blog about Enterprise 2.0 at FastForwardBlog.
The key note focuses on the questions that people ask when they want automate the web and get relevant information. Eight people provide quick quotes on what they think search will become and what it means. Here are two quotes I liked:
Search will become social. It will become a way to express who I am. (This made me think of social bookmarking)
The line separating enterprise search, web search and mobile search will disappear.
Fast says that they have turned the paradigm of information on its head - it is no longer about information centricity. It is now about user centricity. Their goal is to bring the right information to you when you need it.
John calls search the new interface. He says that in the 70’s, we digitized the back office, and used the command line as an interface. In the 80’s, we digitized the front office, with the interface being windows. In the 2000’s we digitized customers. The interface is search.
The organization principle is natural language, and sites that evolve to give people “the right” information. The question then becomes how do you use search to drive a conversation that is good for your customer and good for your business.
To achieve this, you need structure and context.
Andrew takes to the stage accompanied by a fully rocked entrance tune. Did I mention the live band? The bassist is even wearing Jim Morrison style black leather. Crazy kids and their rock ‘n roll. Here’s a summary of Andy covers - a good portion of which are direct quotes from him:
Three schools of thought about Enterprise 2.0
- Not a big deal
- Interesting, but not going to lead a competitive advantage
- Enterprise 2.0 is going to lead to a disruption
The key term in his definition of E.20 is that it must lead to emergent behavior - we should not dictate how people should work; instead we should let the way that people emerge. Taylorism Bad! To assess which group Enterprise 2.0 falls into, Andy uses the VRN approach. The VRIN criteria:
- Is this resource Valuable?
- Is it Rare
- Can it be Imitated
- Is it non-substitutable
Let’s look at the grab bag of enterprise 2.0 technologies - is it valuable? E 2.0 gives Collaboration (ie Wikipedia). We couldn’t do this effectively before Web 2.0 technology. E 2.0 gives a group a way to express judgement. Think Digg,, think prediction markets. Andy also asserts that E 2.0 is valuable because it is self-organizing. I agree with that. E 2.0 can, with search, also provide search knowledge management.
Is it rare? Yes, but you can not just assume that if you build it, they will come. It will only work when you have sustained senior management participation. Andy speaks about companies having a very slow roll out and lots of trouble getting people to use the technology. However, what he is talking about are examples of wikis - not activity centric enterprise blogs.
Is it inimitable? The software is easy to buy - but success is hard to emulate. The problem is that best practices are very hard to diffuse the best practices.
Is it non-substitutable? How could you do anything to get people to share information as effectively. Email is just a channel - it doesn’t become part of a platform or in a searchable. Groupware is too structured. KM has low uptake.
Final thoughts - IT is a differentiator? Andy’s answer is yes. What are the end user incentives? In my opinion this is the biggest issue. As I have said before, the only way to “maange” people in an emergent environment is to guide them obliquely using incentives. You need to think like a coach, not like a dictator.
Andy also mentions the 9x problem.
Tim takes to the stage and does a quick talk before leading a discussion with some FAST executives. Tim says value is migrating up the stack from hardware to software to the web to companies that are capable of harnessing network effects.
The secret of web 2.0 is building companies that get better as more people use them. I have to interject at this point and say that this is one of the things that we are certainly aiming to do at Teqlo. Teqlo will get better as more people use it.
Tim gives examples of Craigslsit, Youtube - users creating the value. Tim then quotes an executive from one of these Web 2.0 companies by saying “What we sell to our customers is control”. “If you want to be a participant in the game of giving end users control, how to you structure your business?”. Of course my obvious answer to that is to say that you need to expose your company’s API within Teqlo, thus giving your end users the ultimate control to build their own DIY mash-ups…..
During the talk that Tim lead, FAST said that they are aiming to deliver tools that let end users help to define relevance. The example that Tim gave was that Google only focused on delivering good search results. You still can not pay for top search results on Google. Your web site has to be the most relevant one for the search. Although, Google did refactor the problem and allow companies to pay for lists next to top search results.
Press and Analysts Meeting with CEO and CTO from FAST
Fast suggests that you can replace the DB back-end with a retrieval back-end. The difference is that long vectors of results are presented in order of relevance. The application is the ads you need to see, the products we should suggest to you, the widgets that you are likely to need for your application. The delivering in the context of what you are doing - your pc, the web site you are currently in, your mobile device, or, potentially, where you are within your application on Teqlo.
Conclusions
Much of the article above simply recounts what I heard today. I’ll try to follow up tomorrow with a bit more analysis and a description of some of the amazing people I had the opportunity to run into.
