Time to Knowledge XChange!

Benefits of automatic content classification

2012-02-14T04:36:00.004-08:00

Taxonomiesare used to classify content in an organized way to make it easy to navigateand find for other users, much the way a library catalogue works.

However,recent research has shownthat up to two thirds of organizations cannot access their information assetsdue to poor information classification or tagging.

So ifeveryone agrees that proper content classification helps you find theinformation you need, the question that businesses must ask themselves is HOW to classify the masses of contentthey face every day?

There aremany ways of doing this. In the past, this has often been a manual task,whereby users themselves placed content in different topics, folders, tagsaccording to how they interpreted the content.

I am sureyou have all had experience with shared network drives, directories in WindowsFile Manager, e-mail folders, intranet portals, etc..

Manual classification can work, but only if content islimited, focused and classification is done by true experts (not only of thetaxonomy and the content itself, but also of user needs).

However,manual classification is a costly process that requires a lot of effort inorder to be accurate and timely.

Automatic classification is often a far better alternative.There are many different technical solutions to automating, but even simplesearch-rule based classification will take you very far.

Thebenefits of automatic content classification are:

- More consistent. They produce the same unbiasedresults over and over. Might not always be 100% accurate or relevant, but ifsomething goes wrong, it is at least it is easy to understand why.

- Larger context. Enforces classification the wholeorganizations perspective, not the individuals. For example, a personinterested in sports might tag an article mentioning the player “CristianoRonaldo” in the “Football” sportstopic (correctly), but forget/not consider that it might be relevant also inthe team topic “Real Madrid” and also in the country topic “Portuguese players”(whohc might be where others would look for the same article.

- Persistent. A person can only handle a certainnumber of incoming articles per day, whilst a classification engine works roundthe clock.

- Cost effective. Possible to handle thousands of articles much faster than a person.

Toconclude, automate your content classification and consider using manual labormainly for quality checking and approval of content.

Comintelliare in the process of writing a white paper that discusses contentclassification and are interested in any input you may have to this discussion,please join us!

Free Webinar on Feb 15: Knowledge XChanger for Knowledge Management

2012-01-31T01:44:00.000-08:00

Knowledge XChanger enables you to integrate internal and external sources in one single place. This webinar includes a live presentation of how Knowledge XChanger can be used to support cross organizational Knowledge Management, including XML content retrieval, taxonomy management, search using the open source Solr engine and different user dashboards.

Register Here!

The List of the Year!

2011-12-22T01:58:00.000-08:00

Fast Company have put together a long list of the best and worst...well, lists, of 2011.

So, here it is; the good, the bad and the ugly of the year that passed:

The Best and Worst of Everything in 2011: A Mega, Meta Mashup

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ovecoming Common Intelligence Mistakes

2011-12-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

Aurora WDC CEO, Derek Johnson, leads a discussion about how to overcome the most common mistakes made by strategic, market and competitive intelligence programs. In part one of a two-part conversation with Aurora's Chief Learning Officer, Dr. Craig S. Fleisher, VP of Client Solutions, Daman Cambra, and Founder & Chairman, Arik Johnson, you will learn about the proper use of SWOT as an analysis framework, avoiding the trap of industry tunnel vision, and how to optimize the combination of technology and human intelligence, or HUMINT.

Which persona are you in the workflow?

2011-12-02T05:26:00.000-08:00

By watching and analyzing how people work, the project design team at Dow Jones discovered that there are several different personas represented in the professional workflow. The yearlong research examines the “core ecosystem of information” inside the enterprise and how users seek, search and share information.

Vice President of product design and information architecture at Dow Jones, Greg Merkle, says that while a person’s title may describe their job functions, they don’t tell you how each of them fits into the overall workflow as different people have different behavior when it comes to the handling of information. The created personas puts more focus on the behavior of key individuals rather than just what they do which give you a better understanding of the people you work with. The six personas, as described by Merkle, are:

The Compass – An executive visionary who relies on past, present and future patterns, activities, and forecasts to make long-term decisions; needs high-level views as well as granular information.

The Connector – A strategic bridge in a company who is embroiled in all facets of the news; curates and shares information with colleagues and clients.

The Captain – A leadership delegator who monitors trends in the industry and focuses on analyzing new information to influence short-term decisions; passes along initial research to others.

The Miner - A self-motivated investigator who seeks industry-specific information and searches current events; needs information to keep up-to-date on industry opportunities.

The Scout – A news seeker who channels information to what is needed for current work projects; focuses on topics in his or her specific responsibility area.

The InfoPro – A next-generation corporate librarian who is adept at using search and databases; assesses value of market reports and white papers.

The results from the study showed that people who used an information portal to obtain knowledge and information was very unsuccessful in doing so. As Merkle said; “we all know that knowledge is exchanged in emails”. It was also clear that people were storing information inefficiently in emails or on C drives. “What we uncovered in this recent research was the concept of how important current awareness and monitoring tools were”, says Merkle.

The goal at Dow Jones product design is to provide tools that help users move from a technically led organization to a user led organization. Merkle says that he is now seeing a natural movement toward self-service and a natural efficiency toward getting information.

From: Information Today, December 2011, Volume 28, no 11, p.13

The article will be available online at; http://www.infotoday.com/IT/dec11/index.shtml, later this month.

Meet Comintelli in November!

2011-10-26T00:24:00.000-07:00

November is around the corner and here at Comintelli we are getting ready for two big events this year; KM World and SCIP Europe.

The 15th annual KMWorld Conference will be held on November 1 – 3, 2011 at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park in Washington DC. Come and meet Comintelli in booth no 24!

On November 8-10, 2011, Comintelli will be at SCIP Europe 2011, presenting "How to Effectively Use Technology to Tap Intelligence from Internal and External Resources". This event will be held at the Austria Center in Vienna, Austria. Hope to see you there!

If you would like to get in touch with us before the event or see a demo of our award-winning product Knowledge XChanger™, please do not hesitate to contact us: contact@comintelli.com

Workshop with Communications guru Pär Lager!

2011-09-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

Last week Comintelli had a very interesting workshop with Pär Lager, former CEO of world renowned Berghs School of Communication focusing on how to improve communication. Mr Lager also talked about the new trends for 2011, presenting some interesting insights into the world of communication. The key take-away was "Never underestimate the power of Storytelling!"

Breakthrough Analytical Fitness Diagnostic Survey

2011-09-02T04:40:00.000-07:00

An ongoing global survey by Dr. Craig Fleischer, Chief Learning Officer of Intelligence firm Aurora WDC, is measuring Analytical Fitness in competitive intelligence, market intelligence and business intelligence teams. The intent is to provide intelligence managers with a confidential, annual scorecard to be used when planning how to improve the skills and capabilities of their team for better performance. Findings will be presented at the Inaugural Competitive Intelligence Users Conference, on October 20^th,in Carmel, Indiana, hosted by Bitwise Solutions and Comintelli.

To read more about the survey, view the full press release here.

Do you think you can search?

2011-08-26T01:41:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered why your searches don’t return what you’re looking for although you know it’s out there, and as a result; blamed the adequacy of the search engine?

In a guest article in ‘Overload Stories’, Cody Burke, senior analyst at Basex, reports on findings revealing that the majority of people have a very poor ability to use search tools effectively. The first item brought to light being statistics derived from a search anthropologist at Google who’s study showed that 90 % of computer users don’t know how to search locally for keywords in a text document, PDF, e-mail or Web page using CTRL + F (PC) or Command + F (Mac).

Secondly, results from the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries project (Erial) that was conducted over 2 years, showed that only 7 out of 30 students could conduct a well-executed search, as considered by a librarian. Students failed to run searches that would return good results by choosing the wrong search engine or database appropriate for their search needs. They were also unsuccessful when it came to formulate their search queries using Boolean logic and would as a result of their ‘search failure’, change the research topic to one that would be easier to find information on.

Burke concludes that there is an undoubted need to teach students basic search techniques, so that they’re able to take advantage of the different search tools and technology available today.

Pharma CI Conference & Exhibition 2011

2011-08-11T01:22:00.000-07:00

Between September 13th-14th, Comintelli will be represented at The Pharma CI Conference and Exhibition in New Jersey, U.S., exhibiting the CI solutions provided by their Knowledge XChanger. The event is the largest and best gathering of pharma competitive intelligence professionals in the world! Attending this event gives you the opportunity to participate and help shape your industry, so if you're a senior level pharma, biotech, device and healthcare professional, this is your chance to find out the latest news and network with all the industry luminaries.

Information Lost in the Ocean...

2011-08-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

In this video blog titled “KM: an organisation’s weapon of choice”, by David Griffiths , he looks at the potential Knowledge Management can bring to an organization and explains why it should be more of a proactive function rather than reactional. By scanning the environment and react to what’s happening there you will bring more value and competitive advantage to the organization.

Griffith also highlights the problems associated with just relying on solutions such as Sharepoint that stores the knowledge/information you’ve captured and uploaded, but then makes it really hard for you to ever find it again, and thus also use it. The question is if you can afford to lose it?

The Search For What You Want

2011-07-28T00:53:00.000-07:00

'Giving search users what they want not what they're asking for', is the name of a guest post written by Seth Early and Jeannine Bartlett for Fierce Content Management. The message is that we need to think of a broader concept of findability because the issues associated with current search functions are affecting "site search effectiveness". The search box used on most sites provides a good compliment to the search if a users can't find what they are looking for through navigation, but should not be the only search option available. Although the option to refine your search in some way is necessary, having to move to another page to perform an advanced search is mentioned as another issue. User's don't generally like doing this and search terms can in general be quite ambiguous and thus not return very relevant, if any, results....even if the user typed in what they wanted to find.

Online retailers are however used as a good example here as they tend to use 'navigated searches' rather than the ordinary search box. This makes the users believe that they are navigating their way through the system, when in fact, they are conducting a search. The reason for this are a few "usability tricks", one being that instead of having to type in your own search term, the content of the system is presented to you as navigational links. You also don't have to move to another page to perform the search.

But in order for a navigated search to function effectively, it is concluded that you need to have a well structured taxonomy and a set of controlled keywords used in this taxonomy which can help the user find what they want. In turn, you have to understand the user and mirror these keywords, so it matches the intent of the user and appears relevant to them.

Stay ahead of your competition

2011-07-22T03:27:00.000-07:00

Increased competition in the marketplace seem to be somewhat of an unwanted trend today. Globalization and distribution channels such as the internet are surely contributing factors to this increase. So in order to stay ahead of the competition you need to know what they are up to and find out what their strenghts and weaknesses are.

I was just reading through a 2011 trend report for travel and tourism which showed that only a surprising 25 % of respondents reported that they made an effort to understand and monitor their competitors ongoing activities. What the numbers are for other industries I don't know, but it's still an indication that far too many companies are missing out on valuable information. Because in order to get an advantage, you need to really pay attention to, and analyze, what your competitors are doing. The task of monitoring your competitors and collecting competitive information should also be structured and not something that occurs occasionally. As Michael Porter said it; " Compiling the data for sophisticated competitior analysis requires more than just hard work. To be effective, there is a need for an organized mechanism -some sort of competitive intelligence system - to ensure that the process is efficient. Analyzing competitors is too important to handle haphazardly."

Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger has in addition to its core of automatic content retrieval and classification, some dedicated intelligence and analysis tools, which are designed to help view patterns and trends in large amounts of content. Products like this make the process of keeping track of your competitors easier and faster and allow you to more easily discover new trends before someone else does.

Webinars now open for registration!

2011-07-19T06:18:00.001-07:00

In time for the launch of Knowledge XChanger version 7, Comintelli will host a few webinars which gives you a great opportunity to learn about the fundamental functions of Knowledge XChanger, as well as explore what's new in version 7. The 45 minutes webinars are free and now open for registration here! Secure your spot today!

Knowledge XChanger provides solutions for Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Enterprise Search and Content Delivery and automates the task of:

Aggregating content from mulitple sources
Classifying content using topic maps (taxonomies)
Searching full text documents
Analyzing trends and patterns
Delivering content in a relevant format to authorized users

The latest version includes new developments in the following areas:

Publication process
Start pages /views
My reports
My alerts
Search
Content in /out
Topic classification
User interface
Usage statistic

Comintelli visits BitWise Solutions!

2011-07-18T00:48:00.000-07:00

Comintelli recently visited its new US partner BitWise Solutions in Indianapolis. Besides several rewarding business discussions, the bond already formed between the two partners was strengthened. Bitwise also hosted a well attended lunch roundtable that sparked a lot of interesting conversations and ideas.

BitWise position and experience in the marketplace allow them to provide both the technical expertise and user experience in Competitive Intelligence needed to deliver cutting-edge CI solutions. We really look forward to the opportunities our partnership will bring and to work together with BitWise in the future.

Also, pay a visit to their blog where they discuss the 'new world of market intelligence' and how Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger adds value to this!

Intelligent Enterprise Survey Sneakpeak

2011-07-12T02:28:00.000-07:00

IBM Institute for Business Value and MIT Sloan Management Review have for the second year in a row conducted a survey as part of the project "The New Intelligent Enterprise" in order to discover how organization are turning analytics into a competitive advantage. The results are being analyzed and the full report of the survey won't be published until this fall, but here is a preview of the some of the results so far:

Access to data needs improvement - Only about 4 out of 10 reported having sufficient access to the information and analytics they need to do their job effectively.

Realizing the value of using analytics for strategic decision making -The top objective for using analytics are 'making real-time decisions' and 'improve resource allocation'.

Consistency in the quality of data is important - This was shown to be the top data characteristic that would make respondents gain more confidence with the data.

Difficulties integrating data - The main technology challenge that inhibit organizations using analytics effectively was 'integrating data'.

Focus on new business objectives - The top objective this year is 'growing revenue' compared to last year when it was 'innovating to achieve competitive differentiation'. There is also more focus on penetrating new markets and acquiring new customers.

Many of the findings so far points towards the increasing need and value of companies such as Comintelli who work with helping organization improving their time to knowledge and allow them to make more confident decisions! Also consider how this might, or is perhaps already, affecting the different parts of your own organization.

Knowledge XChanger 7 Webinar!

2011-07-08T06:47:00.001-07:00

Don't miss out on our 45 minutes free webinars about Knowledge XChanger version 7! Now open for registration here!

Have a good weekend!

Applying Scenarios, Wargames and Advanced Intelligence Analytics

2011-07-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

New video on applying scenarios, wargames, and advanced intelligence analytics, with Eric Garland, Craig Fleisher and Arik Johnson (founder and chairman of Comintelli's partner Aurora WDC). Part 1 /2.

The Green in Knowledge Management

2011-07-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

People often write about Knowledge Management as a solution helping companies organize their information so that they they can easily fetch it and learn from it. Although this is a crucial aspect of being able to utilize all the information they all sit on, there's also another side to this coin. The link between Knowledge Management and Sustainability has become more evident than ever before. Today, KM World posted an article touching on this topic; how "KM supports green initiatives worldwide."

For corporations, becoming sustainable includes improving the way they run their business and analyzing the impact they have, economically, environmentally as well as socially! All to ensure that the company's processes and preferably also finances, can be run more efficiently.

For one, by having a Knowledge Management system in place, it allows you to reduce the amount of paper that otherwise would be required to handle all the business processes in your company. Further, if the system also allows people to collaborate without having to meet in person, you save both money and the environment by not having to use any means of transportation. Besides these benefits, Knowledge Management systems can be used to help companies conserve energy in order to become greener (and thus also more cost-efficient), through e.g. automated power monitoring systems, something that I believe we'll be seeing much more of in a near future.

Interview with a Competitive Intelligence Expert

2011-07-01T04:05:00.000-07:00

Estelle Métayer is an expert in Competitive & Strategic Intelligence and also the founder and former President of Competia. In a recent interview she shares her view on Comeptitive Intelligence, future trends, good reads, and what she thinks that CI professionals need to improve, namley; "the ability to analyze the information and derive insights that go way beyond simple synthesis".

Read the interview here!

(FYI: Comintelli once won the Competia award for Best-in-class-Software!)

Manage your Knowledge!

2011-06-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

Ron Young, writing for Knowledge Management Online, attempts to clarfify the concept of Knowledge Management. Based on his experience, delegates he meets at seminars and people in his KM workshops tend to be confused with the terminology. Whereas there are usually no questions arising when discussing the need to 'better manage your knowledge', a re-ordering of the words into 'Knowledge Management', seems to immediately affect the understanding of it. Young has therefore put together a list of 10 points to "demystify knowledge management". Here is a shortened and slighlty simplified version of it;

1. We communicate information to one another, verbally and through various means of communication. This makes us better informed.

2. 'Learning' is the process of turning this information into knowledge, whether it's received through listening, reading, seeing or doing, and then fusing it with our existing knowledge.

3. Knowledge resides within us and when it's communicated to others it becomes explicit.

4. This knowledge that we've shared with others becomes information to them unless they've heard it before. It does not however become part of your knowledge until they've gone through the learning process.

5. Information can be communicated in seconds, knowledge takes time through learning.

6. Collaboration is working together to achieve something. This can be taught to do effectively.

7. Managing knowledge effectively is about identifying 'critical knowledge areas' that will make a 'big difference' , capturing, fusing new learnings with old knowledge, sharing knowledge and using knowledge to make the best business decisions. This calls for efficient communication, collaboration, learning and knowledge strategies, processes, methods, tools and techniques.

This can be referred to as 'Knowledge Management'

8. Knowledge must be managed at all levels; the personal, team, organizational and inter-organizational level in order to achieve 'effective knowledge management'. We have to learn how to effectively communicate, collaborate, learn, share and apply our knowledge on each of these levels. If you learn 'how, what, who, why, where and when' for each of these levels you achieve 'extraordinary knowledge management'.

9. These 'four dimensions of knowledge management' is a framework to make 'extraordinary knowledge management' possible. This can be used to help organizations 'mainstream knowledge management'.

10. An outcome of effective knowledge management is innovation. Thus, mainstreaming knowledge management will result in mainstreamed innovation.

Do you agree or disagree with this list?

If you're interested in Knowledge Management solutions, you can read about what Comintelli can offer you here!

Reminder to Register! The Inaugural Competitive Intelligence User's Conference

2011-06-27T04:08:00.001-07:00

For you who haven't already signed up for The Inaugural Competitive Intelligence User's Conference, hosted by Comintelli and Bitwise Solutions, please note that everyone who registers before June 30th will recieve $200 off the registration for a friend or a collegue. For more details, go to the event page!

The event provides exactly the kind of resources you need to effectively execute your competitive intelligence program. You will gain insight from some of the top industry experts.

To register, click here! And for information about the speakers and their sessions, as well as the workshops, click here!

Internet Search vs. Knowledge Management Search

2011-06-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

For you out there who haven't quite comprehended the difference between an Internet search and a Knowledge Management search, John Meehan, blogging for Consona Corporation, a software and service provider, attempts to once and for all explain the difference between the two.

He describes how Internet searches, or Enterprise searches, are designed to find an answer to a question rather than the answer. An Internet search generates plenty of results with perhaps some aspects of it related to your search query but not necessarily specific to your search. A Knowledge Mangement search however, presents you with fewer options but that are more search specific. It also allows you to enter further details to return even more refined results. Meehan also refers to the KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) v5 Best Practice Guide, developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation, who he reckons gives a brilliant explanation of the difference between a Knowledge Management search and an Internet or Enterprise search.

Multiple-meaning words makes it difficult for search engines to determine exactly what results you're after. The word "stock" is used as an example, which can be a financial instrument, part of a gun, or a soup base. As it's hard for machines to define the meaning of a word based on the context it's in as a human would do, a consequence of these type of issues may be less relevant search results. In a situation like that, popular search engines such as Google has an advantage due to "the structure of the web itself", the sheer volume of users and also the behavior of the user which helps returning more relevant search results. The same goes for when a user is looking for a solution to a problem. But as not knowing what you're after prevents you from making your searches very specific, you need different methods of getting the help you need.

The Knowledge Management solution in Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger includes a smart alternative way of finding information when a 'normal search' isn't enough. It allows the user to search for "experts" within a topic that can be contacted when looking for support or an answer to a question that can be better given by a person rather than a machine.

The significance of search analytics

2011-06-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

The author of Lucene in Action and founder of Sematext here talks about the importance of search analytics in order to make searches more effective by monitoring search performance. This is a relevant topic as most organizations depend on search functioning well, yet the majority lack the means to determine the success of the searches. He also emphasizes the importance of auto-completion of searches, something commonly expressed as being a feature of high priority, yet only about 2% have this function internally. Mentioned as must-have tools for enterprise search are "top-topics", "top-queries", the ability to see who's performing most searches (users & roles) and most popular results etc.

Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger 7.0 built in search engine automates many of these features by auto-suggesting searches, list topic activity and topic expertise within a topic, as well as giving the user the option to save frequently used searches etc. The product is continiously re-evaluated and developed based on user requirement which has resulted in better solutions. To listen to the interview, click here!

Finding semi-structured data on the web

2011-06-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

I just came across this search engine called Zanran. It's still an early beta version but give it a go! In contrast to e.g. Google, Zanran focuses on finding 'semi-structured' data rather than just primarily text which would perhaps make it a good supplement to other 'traditonal' search engines. 'Semi-structured' data is referred to as numerical data presented as graphs, tables and charts from HTML, PDF and Excel files (will soon also process Word and PPT files).

As Zanran themselves puts it; "Zanran is Google for data".

So much to do, not enough time...

2011-06-10T02:01:00.000-07:00

A study has shown that the key to great success is to "work harder in shorter bursts of time". Then give yourself a break before getting back to work again. The reason why this seems to work is that it keeps you focused the time you do work so you'll get more done in a shorter period of time. The study was intially conducted on musicians but when the researchers started looking at succesful people in other professions, they came to the same conclusion.

You can read the article "Why Succesful People Leave Work Early" here.

I believe the majority of people today feel like there's not enough time to do everything they need or want. Preferably, you would want to work less but get more done, right? There's actually a whole lot of principles out there that set out to achieve exactly this (you can e.g. download the "Get-it-Done-Guy" Stever Robbins free podcast here).

But although working less will help you be more efficient with your time, you will still need to have an effective system in place so that your personal efficiency won't suffer from external factors. For a musician, an effective system would be a well working instrument, and perhaps a good quality amplifier. But for the majority of people, the corner stone in their day-to-day work is information-based. In this case, there needs to be a system ready to manage this information, make it accessible, relevant and ready to use! You can say that the findings from this study also supports the theory previously discussed in this blog, about the importance of finding the information you need fast. Because if finding the information you need takes too long, you would most likely still need to spend those extra hours in front of your computer.

Speed of Enterprise Searches

2011-06-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

More than half Enterprise Search applications do not meet the expectations of managers in Europe and the U.S, shows a recent survey of more than 2000 directors and managers, by MindMetre and Smartlogic. The U.K and Germany reported the biggest 'findability' gap. That is; the difference between the time they were expecting to find the right information and the actual time it took to find it (with 4 minutes considered too long).

The findings indicate that a search-based application good at searching for information might not be good at finding the right information. Considering that ease -and speed of access is crucial for an organization to stay efficient and competitive, this is quite concerning.

One main goal of Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger is just to optimize findability for the end users, so that they can easily and quickly find the content they are looking for. Hence why the search engine in Knowledge XChanger is based on the leading Apache Solr technology. The latest version of Knowledge XChanger (7.0) is even more Solr search driven (less SQL database) than before, which will result in a much faster performance and findability.

The Annual Inaugural International Competitive Intelligence User's Conference

2011-06-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Comintelli and BitWise Solutions are hosting 'The Inaugural International Competitive Intelligence User's Conference', between the 14th and 15th of July. The event provides exactly the resources you need to effectively execute your competitive intelligence program. You will gain insight from some of the top industry professionals during two information packed days!

To learn more about the speakers and their sessions, as well as the workshops, click here!

And click here to register!

Knowledge Management and Satisfied Customers

2011-05-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

Executing a Knowledge Management program can be a challenge in terms of getting sufficient support and resources from executive teams to succeed with the program, the "findability" of content, as well as keeping the content "timely". KM World (http://www.kmworld.com/) have listed 6 best practices for succesfully implementing knowledge management programs, with focus on how it can increase customer service:

1. Align the organization for success

Gain organizational support and define project team and strategy.

2. Design a framework for knowledge management

Identify main users of the system and the most effective way to organize content.

3. Create and maintain relevant content

Content must be fresh and useful to the target users or it's worth nothing.

4. Empower the customer with usable content

Have a user-friendly Web self-service site for customers to find the information they need.

5. Focus on the agent experience

Agents should have a personalized view of the knowledge base, tailored to his or her role, and be able to interact with the content.

6. Continually improve knowledge management practices

Knowledge management is a journey that just keeps on going. Remember to re-evaluate usage, features and content of the knowledge base to develop a more succesful system and more satisfied customers.

Note that this is just a summary of the article, to read it in full go to: http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Six-KM--best-practices-to-enhance--customer-service-75658.aspx

Analytics in the Enterprise

2011-05-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

MIT Sloan Management Review (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/) are currently conducting a survey to find out how companies are handling their information and analytics activities. The big question they aim to answer is whether there are any cultural differences that would challenge the use of information and analytics in a company, such as; unwillingness to share data internally, limitation due to power restrictions, technology, or difficulty extracting information from unstructured sources. We look forward to hearing the results!

You can take the survey here: https://survey.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5jyUhj2TXolQKlm&GroupNumber=2

Sweden, the world's 4th most competitive nation!

2011-05-24T23:51:00.000-07:00

IMD (http://www.imd.org) has announced the results from the World Competetiveness Yearbook 2011, which places Sweden on number 4 on the list, underlining the fact that the nordic competitiveness model is working very well. USA and Hongkong were the most competitive countries, closely followed by Singapore; last years winner.

Stéphane Garelli, Director of IMD's Competitiveness Center says "The world of competitiveness becomes more national. 'World Competitiveness 2.0' is thus characterized by a greater self-reliance of countries. It increasingly emphasizes re-industralization, exports and a more critical look at delocaliztion."

You can watch it here: http://www.imd.org/research/publications/wcy/World-Competitiveness-Yearbook-Results/#/wcy-2010-rankings/

The Importance of Unstructured Information

2011-05-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview in SLA Management Review, K. Ananth Krishnan, chief technology officer at Tata Consultancy services, one of the largest companies in India, reflects on all the "unstructured information" that most companies miss out on. Acccording to Krishnan, companies are now realizing that they have to capture the unstructured information both inside and outside their company, rather than turning to the structured data generated inside the enterprise as a primary source of information. In order to get the insights you need, information about competitors, about customers and about new strategies, you will need to look further!

He also talks about the challenge we face in automating the analysis of text, video and audio, and that we also need to figure out how to use this information. This is an area that has a lot of potential but that is still crawling on its knees. Are advancements in this area due to privacy concerns or merely due to cost -and technical limitations?

You can read the full interview here: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2011-summer/52401/the-unstructured-information-most-businesses-miss-out-on/

Apache Solr was the answer for Motley Fool

2011-05-19T00:48:00.000-07:00

This article from CIO Magazine describes why Motley Fool, a provider of investing information, chose Apache Solr to make their archive of over 25 million documents, images, and discussion threads easily available for their users. The reasons for choosing Apache Solr over other search engines includes the ability to index a larger amount of documents, as well as having the ability, thanks to it being open source, to tweak the code to refine the search results to obtain more relevant results for the users.

Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger is powered by Apache Solr, making it an interesting choice for companies that want to encorporate more information management abilities in addition to enterprise search.

Rising need for better information access tools

2011-05-16T23:39:00.000-07:00

A recent McKinsey report found that data can play an important part for the world economy, strengthening the productivity and competitiveness of companies and the public sector, as well as creating considerable economic advantages for consumers. Provided that you can access and manage this data of course...

As millions of sensors are being embedded into devices such as cell phones, computers, smart energy meters and other industrial machines, massive amounts of data are being generated every day, both by companies and consumers, and also about companies and consumers. The report refers to it as the growth of "big-data", defined as "datasets with a size beyond the ability of a typical database tools to capture, store, manage and analyze". This increasing flood of information has highlighted a need for information structuring and access, but also given way to new possibilities of how to make use of this data.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_challenge_and_opportunity_of_big_data_2806

Things to consider when YOU search for information

2011-05-16T01:49:00.000-07:00

In this interesting video, Eli Pariser raises the point of how search results are tailored according to your preferences.

Is this a problem? In competitive intelligence it might be if you don't get the search results that are most relevant for your business. Therefore it is important for business users to get the most relevant results regardless of what your preferences are as an individual. Different search engines produce different search results. One of my favorite links is http://www.bing-vs-google.com/ where you can see the search results from both Bing and Google side by side. Also, it is important to understand the difference between a web search engine and a enterprise search engine. For more information on how the Enterprise Search engine Apache Solr gives your business the fastest and most relevant search results, please download Comintelli's white paper "Improve Findability by using Solr".

Comintelli and BitWise join forces at SCIP in Orlando

2011-05-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

At the yearly SCIP event in Orlando, our new North American partners BitWise Solutions joined us to meet the “crème de la crème” of the intelligence community. After loads of interesting conversations and meetings with partners, old customers and new customers, we wrapped up the event by concluding that we have only scratched the surface of intelligence technology and there is so much more to do.

Christian, Ron, Jesper and Dan joining forces

Special thank you to our friends at:

Aurora WDC for hosting a fantastic concert and party…

BitWise Solutions for showing us what a real Mexican fajita is…

Text analytics market is growing fast

2011-05-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Washington DC based consultancy Alta Plana has recently completed a market study of the software and service text-analytics market showing that 2010 revenues now total $835 million globally.

Growth is steepest for applications that seek business insight in social networks, online media, and surveys. Applications include brand-reputation management, market research, competitive intelligence, and customer service and support. Alta Plana expects the text-analytics market to sustain healthy annual growth, with rates in the 25%-40% range, in each of the coming years.

Given the importance of social and online text data sources, the variety of text analytics solutions and deployment options, and vendor commitment to bringing content analysis to the masses, they expect to report 2011 vendor text-analytics revenues that will easily clear the $1 billion mark.

Obviously, Knowledge XChanger is in the right place to be...

Enterprise Search Summit 2011

2011-05-11T01:22:00.000-07:00

The Enterprise Search Summit is currently under way in New York. It is quite interesting to read people's tweets from the summit on what they percieve being the most interesting aspects of Enterprise Search. Click here to view all tweets

SCIP 2011

2011-05-09T02:33:00.000-07:00

From today May 9th until May 12th, Comintelli will be exhibiting its solutions at SCIP (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals) International Annual Conference & Exhibition, in Orlando, Florida. Comintelli's session will be focused around Scenario Tracking and key take-aways will be:

Success factors in taking scenario analysis to the next level
Examples from different organizations using Scenario Tracking to boost their analysis
A framework to apply Scenario Tracking on your own scenarios

For more information about SCIP and to read the full program, visit their website http://scip.org/

What are your experiences with bringing scenarios to life?

Online reputations in the dirt

2011-05-02T23:22:00.000-07:00

A very interesting reflection as a consequence of the recent Amazon and Sony happenings:

http://www.economist.com/node/18620636?story_id=18620636

Search driven solutions, NoSQL or RDBMS?

2011-03-31T06:54:00.000-07:00

Since 2009 “NoSQL” is the new buzz word on the net, but what does it mean and what are the benefits and how do they compare to Search driven or RDBMS solutions?

Traditional relational databases (RDBMS), are typically not very scalable and has poor performance in some data intensive operations.

Web 2.0 applications are typically very data intensive and does not scale well on traditional databases, at least not to a reasonable cost.

So there is a great need to find a new technology replacing (or at least complementing) RDBMS in some applications, and in many cases that would be a NoSQL technology. Knowledge XChanger is typically a target application for NoSQL, and while extending the products capability to handle millions of documents (instead of a few 100k), the need became a necessity.

Some would argue that NoSQL technologies are not databases at all, but more a highly available store of data. The major benefit is that NoSQL can handle extreme quantities of data compared to RDBMS.

NoSQL is a wide definition for much different software’s specialized in different areas like Document Stores, Graph Databases and Key Value Stores. In a sense RDBMS is also a sub set of the definition, but what about search engines? I would argue that a search engine like Appache Solr / Lucene is a NoSQL application. The only differences I see is that the schemas might not be as flexible in Solr and that NoSQL does not provide search functionality. At least for the number of documents we expect to handle. If we need to scale even more, to query terabytes of data, there are examples of Solr + Hadoop clusters that contain thousands of servers doing the job nicely, but frankly that’s beyond my current horizon.

While developing the next generation of Knowledge XChanger, we discovered that moving away from SQL solved many performance problems and made it both easy and affordable to scale horizontally. In some cases we found Appache Solr to be up to 10.000 times faster than MS SQL Server on similar operations on the same hardware. The most surprising part is that the transition to Solr has been so easy and quick to implement. The next version of KXC will still use SQL for storing statistics and relations but in combination with Solr it has much less negative effect on performance. Maybe a future version will be based on NoSQL and Solr only? At this time I believe NoSQL applications to be a bit to immature to base a commercial application on, if there are other solutions available.

Anders Thulin, CTO Comintelli AB

Some more information about these topics:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135086/No_to_SQL_Anti_database_movement_gains_steam_

Time For KM To Manage Knowledge About Management?

2011-03-28T01:03:00.000-07:00

In an article in Forbes Magazine, Steve Denning discusses the demise of successful KM programs, and later addresses what KM professionals can do to ensure KM survival within the organization! To read the article, please click here.

Using Solr to Power your Website

2011-03-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to its speed and features, an increasing number of large web sites are being powered by Solr search. Some noteworthy ones are:

AOL (http://search.aol.com/aol/webhome)
The White House (www.whitehouse.org)
Linked In (www.linkedin.com)
Digg (www.digg.com)
Sears (www.sears.com)

Here is a list of websites that use Solr: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/PublicServers

Lucid Imagination also hosts a good list of showcases at: http://www.lucidimagination.com/developer/Community/Application-Showcase-Wiki

Contact Comintelli to learn how you can use Solr to improve findability in a very cost effective manner!

What Makes a Great Competitive Intelligence Program

2011-03-15T01:15:00.000-07:00

From Capture Your Flag's Youtube channel, we have found the following video with description:

Chapter 12 of 17 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, customer advocacy marketing executive Alan McNab highlights what differentiates a good competitive intelligence program from a great one. McNab cites freshness, noting the importance of keeping sales teams the most informed people in the industry. In addition to fresh information, McNab also notes the importance of implementing feedback processes and systems to gather on the ground feedback from sales teams. McNab holds a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. He has worked in various technology marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Motorola, and is now Vice President, Customer Advocacy at NCR based in Dublin.

Comparing Search Results

2011-03-02T04:54:00.000-08:00

When people think about websearch, they most likely think of Google. Even though Google will most certainly provide you with an answer to your query, you have to ask yourself if that answer is the most relevant one? Is there a way to compare Google's search results with other search engines without having to type the same query on two different websites? The answer is yes, and if you click on the link provided below, you will be able to compare the search results from Google and Bing on the same page. Now the questions is, which one provides the most relevant search results? What do you think?

http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

Search Strategies

2011-02-21T01:17:00.001-08:00

A presentation on the strategies behind a search for information:

Search Strategies

View more presentations from Damone Virgilio.

Want to learn more about Knowledge XChanger?

2011-02-17T08:00:00.001-08:00

Do you want to learn how Knowledge XChanger can help you in your role as a knowledge management or competitive intelligence practitioner? Attend one of our webinars for a more in-depth demonstration of our product! To register, please click here

Yippi, the metasearch engine

2011-02-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

Yippy is a metasearch engine: it queries multiple search engines and combines the results to be displayed as a group, or cloud, on one screen.

The benefits of using this search engine is that it gives you a good and quick overview of your search results, and encourages the users to continue browsing. The difference between a search engine like Yippi and for example Google is that by continuing browsing can allow the user to discover information he/she initially was not looking for. For Google, you more or less know what you are looking for, and Google most often gives you an answer to your query without necessarily promoting additional discovery.

That is why (business) taxonomies are good. It stimulates further discovery.

10 Reasons to Create a Business Taxonomy

2011-02-09T05:51:00.001-08:00

With the ever increasing flow of information, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out the noise and find the relevant information you are looking for. The loss of productivity (i.e. time spent looking for information) costs organizations millions of dollars. This is explained in detail in multiple analyst reports.

One simple way to address this problem is to organize all your organizations information into taxonomies. I found an interesting article on TaxoDiary giving you 10 reasons why your company should create a business taxonomy in 2011. You can find the article by clicking here

SCIP Orlando

2011-02-02T01:45:00.001-08:00

This year's American SCIP Conference will be held in Orland, Florida. At the event, Comintelli will present a case called "Scenario Tracking: Bringing Scenarios to Life!" together with Daniel Grönqvist from NormannPartners.

For more information regarding the event, please click on the here. We hope to see you at the event, and please come and visit us at our booth!

Comintelli looking for new Marketing and Sales Assistant

2011-01-26T00:49:00.000-08:00

Looking for a job? Know someone that is looking for a job? Comintelli is currently looking to hire a highly motivated Marketing and Sales Assistant. Please click the link below to see the description of the job, as well as information on how to apply for it.

Comintelli Marketing and Sales Assistant

Knowledge XChanger Review in VIP Magazine

2011-01-24T00:32:00.000-08:00

Comintelli's award winning product Knowledge Xchanger has been reviewed in VIP Magazine's January edition. For a full text report or an executive summary of that report, please visit our download page on our website!

Comintelli's Christmas Gift

2010-12-20T01:17:00.000-08:00

In honor of our valued customers, this year's Christmas gift is over 500 hens and chickens to women in the village of Khome in Malawi. Please follow this link or click on the image to our holiday card to learn more about this project: http://www.giftsinaction.org.uk/ecard/MzY4NzAtMzA5NjU

Wishing you health and happiness this holiday season

and prosperity in the New Year

SCIP 2010 in Barcelona

2010-12-02T06:01:00.000-08:00

The annual Strategic Competitive Intelligence Professionals conference was held in wonderful Barcelona in November. Comintelli were of course there with a booth to showcase our latest solutions and meet with customers, prospects, and partners.

Thanks to all that came by to visit us!

Money Management Executive's take on Information Overload

2010-11-15T05:02:00.000-08:00

A recent article in Money Management Executive describes the information overload problems that affect the money management industry. In the article, Comintelli CEO Jesper Martell is interviewed and gives his take on how to deal with information overload problems using role-based delivery of information. To read the article, please click here (you have to log in to read the entire article)

SCIP Barcelona 2010

2010-11-11T05:42:00.001-08:00

Next week is the annual European SCIP Conference, this time in Barcelona, Spain. To see the program for the conference, please click here

Do not forget to stop by the Comintelli booth, as we will be showcasing during the conference! See you there!

Does your organization have an Information Strategy?

2010-11-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

With the amount of information that is dispersed across an organization, it is important to have a strategy regarding capturing the organization's entire knowledge base, so that the "wheel does not get reinvented over and over again".

In these two articles, the author describes what an information strategy is, and the different components of a sound information strategy. Click here for the first article, and here for the second.

Comintelli has created a white paper regarding information strategy in Knowledge XChanger. For those of you who are interested in the white paper, please contact Daniel.thomasson@comintelli.com

InfoReady Showcase in Sydney

2010-10-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Following a very good week in Singapore, Comintelli is this week visiting our APAC partner Infoready in Australia. Showcase seminars in first Melbourne and today Sydney have extended the reach of Knowledge XChanger awareness.

THE ART OF INFORMATION ANALYSIS, OR THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTIONS OF INTERVIEWING

2010-10-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

This is a brilliant article written by Jeroen van Luik and Anne van den Brink about interviews as a tool of collecting information for an information analysis. The article describes what the most important aspects are when interviewing key stakeholders. Very interesting article for the intelligence worker. Click here to read it

Also, please visit the SCIP group on LinkedIn to read the discussion concering this article.

CNN acknowledges Happy Information Overload Day!

2010-10-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

October 20 is Information Overload Awareness Day!

Technology and efficiency experts are urging people to take stock of how an increasing flood of digital data is slowing down their personal and professional lives.

In 2008, technology writer and New York University instructor Clay Shirky gave a presentation at the Web 2.0 conference in New York titled "It's Not Information Overload; It's Filter Failure."

"For 15 years, we've been reading the same story about information overload," he said. "Thinking about information overload isn't actually describing the problem. Thinking about filter failure is."

Read the CNN article here
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/10/20/information.overload.day/index.html?iref=allsearch

Comintelli nominated as KMWorld Promise Award Finalist

2010-10-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

We at Comintelli are very proud to announce that for the second straight year, we have been nominated as finalists to KM World’s annual Promise Awards.

Award Description

Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. One of the greatest challenges for organizations purchasing these technologies is to determine which of these companies will deliver on this promise. This award is given to the organization that is delivering this promise to its customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are imbedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.

The winners will be announced at the KMWorld Conference in Washington DC, November 16-18^th. To find out more about the event, click here.

SCIP Asia

2010-10-19T00:33:00.000-07:00

SCIP Asia in Singapore is now more than half through the program. Comintelli is on sight, exhibiting as the only SW provider present. The program has been very good so far. Great presentation by SABIC illustrating the importance of a distributed CI organisation. F&S own chairman, David Frigstad, highlighted their own research proving that CEO's main challange (acording to CEOs) is growth and that the most important tool to acheive growth is Strategic Intelligence.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD AWARENESS DAY 2010

2010-10-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

Comintelli will participate in “INFORMATION OVERLOAD AWARENESS DAY 2010”, an online web event organized by Basex (www.basex.com) , the world's foremost knowledge economy research and advisory firm.

The event takes place on October 20, 2010 on the Web starting at 11 a.m. EDT/3 p.m. GMT/8 a.m. PDT

Read more and sign up at http://www.informationoverloadday.com/

Use the code ”IPledge” to attend for free.

Comintelli will participate as one of three Visionary Vendor Panels!

Please feel free to forward this to relevant persons.

Dissatisfaction with SharePoint?

2010-10-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

In a survey conducted by SharePoint consultants on a website called endusersharepoint.com, 78 percent of respondents, reported that SharePoint "user experience was inadequate," while only 17.6 percent chose that SharePoint was "great and adequately met their needs."

That raises an interesting question about how user friendly SharePoint really is, and costs that arises to address that issue. Please click here for a blog comment, and click here to read the article.

Boosting the productivity of Knowledge Workers

2010-09-15T02:07:00.000-07:00

Excellent article from McKinsey Quarterly September issue!

The key is identifying and addressing the barriers workers face in their daily interactions. All interactions are constrained by one of five barriers:
1. physical,
2. technical,
3. social or cultural,
4. contextual, and
5. temporal.

The article discusses remedies to these barriers that are applicable to most organizations.

Supporting Pakistan Disaster Relief

2010-09-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

Because of the magnitude of the flooding disaster in Pakistan in these last couple of weeks, Comintelli has decided to donate money to support the Red Cross in its emergency relief efforts to help those affected by this disaster. To donate money, please visit the Red Cross' American or Swedish website, or any other website that donates money to the victims in Pakistan. Google has set up their own website where they have collected information to support organizations. Please make your own donation!

Navigating for Information Using Wonder Wheel

2010-08-30T05:52:00.000-07:00

A (new) way of navigating for information is using Google's Wonder Wheel. The function allows you to enter queries and later navigate topic related to your queries. This is a good way to discover new information. For additional information about Wonder Wheel, please click this link

2010 SCIP Europe Agenda posted online!

2010-08-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

This is the message sent out by SCIP about the upcoming SCIP conference in Barcelona.

LinkedIn Groups

Group: Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)
Subject: SCIP European Competitive Intelligence Summit agenda now available

The agenda and brochure for the 15th SCIP European Competitive Intelligence Summit, November 16-18 in Barcelona, is now available on the SCIP website.

The agenda is at:
http://www.scip.org/content.cfm?itemnumber=10479
and the brochure is at:
http://scip.cms-plus.com//files/SCIP%20Barcelona%20brochure.pdf

The Summit's three tracks cover tactical intelligence, CI tools and best practices; strategic intelligence, the application of CI analysis; and CI, its organization and structure.

Sessions include:

How to successfully partner with an external supplier for internal buy-in.
Strategic intelligence: how pro's do It.
Getting real value from trade show intelligence.
Self-diagnosis methodology based on BSC.
Competitive brand intelligence gathering technique and its use by Japanese companies.
The impact of real-time news.
Why do so many companies ignore ethical boundaries?
Creating strategic foresight by using megatrends
The human intelligence in a collection plan.
Combining individual analysis for better conclusions.
War rooms for wargaming.
Competitive advantage through scenario analysis

Online registration will be available by the end of the week. Fax registration is in the brochure pdf.
Posted By Bonnie Hohhof

Back in Business!

2010-08-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

Hello!

I hope everyone has had an excellent summer break! We here at Comintelli are excited to be back and are looking forward to a very exciting Fall 2010. Keep an eye open for news and interesting articles!

Summer Break

2010-07-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

Hello! The Comintelli blog will take a short summer break and be back in a couple of weeks with more interesting articles and links, as well as news about Comintelli! Enjoy your summer!

Free is good, but not always

2010-07-16T06:09:00.001-07:00

In this blog we will try to write about all aspects of Knowledge Management, Content Delivery, Competitive Intelligence, Market Research, Enterprise Search. All those areas have one thing in common, how to manage information and knowledge, and how to act upon it.

So one thing that we haven't discussed in this blog is where you find the information. One of the most common ways to receive/retrieve information is probably through RSS or newsletter subscription. But where do you find good RSS feeds for example?

There is a lot of good information out there, but not all of it is free. You can get the majority of the information you need for your daily job through free RSS feeds. One of my favorite websites for free RSS feeds is Moreover. There you can create your own RSS feed with the keywords of your choice. They also have prebuilt RSS feeds in a variety of topic areas. Another source for free RSS feeds is Google Alerts. One thing you need to keep in mind when it comes to free RSS feeds is that the quality might vary. Sometimes you can for example receive duplicate articles. Not always good.

If you for example need information from a macro economic perspective, then I strongly suggest subscribing to RSS feeds from The World Bank, IMF, or OECD. If you want more industry specific information, you might want to look up industry associations that often produce good information. For example, if you are in the Telecom industry, why not subscribe information from Telecommunications Industry Association? For more generic news, you can check BBC, Reuters, or CNN.

It is worth mentioning again, that free news is not always good. Sometimes the news can be too generic and not related to your industry. The quality of the feeds is not always optimal either. For more information about good sources, feel free to contact daniel.thomasson@comintelli.com for more information!

Avoiding information overload, part 2

2010-07-15T04:57:00.000-07:00

In addition to having different ways of displaying the information (like the example yesterday), one must have a structure to the information one wants to view and interpret. For Competitive Intelligence or Knowledge Management professionals, a piece of information is rarely about just one thing. For example, a news article can be about a competitor, regarding a specific product area, in a specific market. Those are three examples of filtering parameters, that can help you filter or sort your information.

The most efficient way to tag all the content would be to do it automatically, so you can spend more time analyzing the information, right? So how do you tag all the information with those parameters, or topics as we usually like to call them? The best way is to create rules with key words, using for examples the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT that will tag the content into different topics depending on what key words are in the text.

This will ultimately create a structure to all your content, making it easier to navigate. Structuring your information into a hiearchical structure is also called a Taxonomy. Later this summer I will discuss more about how to best structure your information, as well as give you tips on good free sources of information.

Avoiding information overload

2010-07-14T06:00:00.001-07:00

Have you ever worked with pivot tables in Excel? This video describes Microsoft Live Labs Pivot that does the same thing as Excel's pivot, but for different content. Do you think it avoids information overload? I think is part of the solution, but not the whole one. More on that tomorrow:

Evaluation of SharePoint as CI tool

2010-07-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

SharePoint as a Competitive Intelligence Tool

This article is an excellent evaluation of SharePoint 2007 as a Competitive Intelligence tool written by Raoul Farcot. It does a comparative breakdown of SharePoint 2007 functionality with the primary user requirements of CI professionals. The main conclusion Farcot does is that SharePoint requires a lot programming and technical customizations in order to fully meet the key CI user requirements and deliverables. Furthermore, "SharePoint is primarily configured for power or technically savvy users and would require the implementation of a user friendly interface in order to be effectively applied by CI professionals."

In the report we published on July 7th about SharePoint, more and more organizations seem to roll out SharePoint for universal employee access (For more findings about SharePoint and SharePoint 2010, make sure to download the report). If you belong to one of the Competitive Intelligence functions who use SharePoint but need a more user friendly interface as well as better support for CI requirements, you might want to investigate difference solutions that can easily be integrated with SharePoint. Comintelli's Knowledge XChanger is one of them. On our Download page on our website, we have a whitepaper describing how Knowledge XChanger can be integrated with SharePoint. Please contact daniel.thomasson@comintelli.com or go to our download page on our website for more information.

Enterprise Search Webinar Download

2010-07-12T04:54:00.000-07:00

For those of you who missed our webinar on Enterprise Search, do not worry! We recorded it and it is now available for download! If you are interested, please send an email to daniel.thomasson@comintelli.com and we will send you all the details! If you want to read the description, please click here for the blog post

SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies are Lacking

2010-07-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

In AIIM's (Association for Information and Image Management) most recent survey, they have investigated on what organizations use Sharepoint for. To read the whole press release and to download the research, please click here

The Knowledge Workers Day

2010-07-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

To find out a bit more about how knowledge workers spend their days and how Information Overload impacts them, Basex (the knowledge economy research and advisory firm)launched a brief survey that asks you to look at your most recent full day at work and answer a few questions. If you haven’t already taken the survey, please stop here and take it now.

Here are some of the results so far:

— 63% of knowledge workers feel they don’t have enough time to get all of their work done.

— 49% of knowledge workers feel that the amount of information they are presented with on daily basis is detrimental to getting their work done.

— 58% of those surveyed feel overwhelmed by information to the point of incapacity at least several times a week.

— 29% of knowledge workers have no time at all for thought and reflection during their day, and 58% had only between 15 and 30 minutes.

Searching for fileformats on specific websites through Google

2010-07-08T01:36:00.000-07:00

If you know that you are looking for information on a specific website in a specific file format, then you can enter one single search query in Google. Type "Search Term" "fileformat:XXX" site:http://www.competitorX.com"

So if you want information about for example BMW's Sport Cars in pdf format, enter the following query on the picture to the right:

How to improve your search

2010-07-05T07:16:00.000-07:00

This video shows how you can improve your search by analyzing what result you want to obtain. This goes hand in hand with a previous post about pre-search analysis. Although you can question the quality of a video that uses a pet dinosaur and mammut to illustrate its point, it hits the nail on the head in terms of how to create a good search query.

The real cost of implementing Sharepoint

2010-07-01T02:05:00.001-07:00

Sharepoint 2010 is now starting to be rolled at on many organisations and it is being marketed heavily fro web content management (WCM) solutions.

As we all know, the final cost of implementing a solution based on Microsoft Sharepoint is quite complicated to calculate since there are many options and alternatives.

Last week, I finally came across an article that sheds some light on this issue. It is an article by the IT research firm J. Boyd entitled "Untangling SharePoint pricing & licensing for WCM" and can be found at:
http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/untangling-sharepoint-pricing-licensing-for-wcm/

One of the main points is that many enterprises believe that their cororate licenses include everything they need from Sharepoint. However, in order to build more advanced information access solutions, including e.g. FAST search and other functions, additonal costs will apply.

Also note that the figures quoted are the license costs to Microsoft. In addition to this, the total life time cost must include development and maintenance costs for IT consultants that use the Sharepoint platform to create solutions.

Why Business Taxonomies?

2010-06-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a good video of why organizations need business taxonomies to structure their information collection/storage:

Happy Midsummer Celebration!

2010-06-24T05:29:00.001-07:00

We here at Comintelli would like to wish you all a happy midsummer celebration (for those of you who celebrate it!!)

The CEOs perspective in CI

2010-06-21T04:32:00.000-07:00

The CEOS perspective on Competitve Intelligence.
Presentation held at SCIP in Washington 2010 by David Frigstad, Chairman of Frost & Sullivan.

SCIP: David Frigstad Keynote from Frost & Sullivan on Vimeo.

Ipad - already a megabrand!

2010-06-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

“Before take off, all electronic equipment such as mobile phones, laptops, mp3 players and Ipads must be turned off… “Yes, I am sitting on an airplane between New York and Chicago and just heard the sentence we all have heard a gazillion times, or have we? Mobile phones, laptops and mp3 players, yes, but when did the Ipad emerge as a generic piece of electronic equipment? I have never heard any air hostess ask me to turn off my IBM, Asus, Dell or Compaq and even less so my IBM thinkpad, Asus Eee PC or Dell XPS. Ipad is not even a company brand, it is a product brand that within weeks form its launch is so generic as a concept that air carriers apparently find it necessary to specifically ask their passengers to turn that device off. Well done Apple, is all I can say.

Now, this opens up for some reflections. Ipad is apparently the name of the game for the modern mobile usage of web services but is it not both a step forward and a step backwards? Forward in the sense that the user interface is unprecedented in simplicity and usability but backwards in the sense that it is really mainly a web 1.0 devise, not web 2.0 devise. It is much more an information consumption tool than it is a support for information production/sharing. Indeed, you can do all that but it is really not built for typing any longer passages on or (even without a webcam) share live experiences. Personally I just love the apps concept and the world it opens up for information providers to tailor make their own apps for me as a consumer. But…, what about the corporate world? How are big corporation going to deal with Ipads as Apple has to approve all apps going to be available on their employees pads. Maybe a 50.000+ people company would like to be able to decide that by themselves. Will this be the advantage that eventually makes Andriod win the game? What do you think? Right now I am just amazed about the brand building capabilities of Apple corp.

Go Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence

2010-06-17T02:11:00.000-07:00

This presentation provides tons of different tips on how to use free internet resources for good intelligence gathering. Slide 56 summarizes how you can use that intelligence. If you want to visit the actual website where they also have the presentation outline, please click here

Go Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence

View more presentations from Cascade Insights.

Pre-searching Analysis part 2

2010-06-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

so this is the follow up to yesterday's blog post about pre-search analysis.

4. Do any of the words in 1, 2, or 3 belong in phrases or strings -- together in a certain order, like a cliché? Search these as "phrase in quotes" as you will get better search results.

5. For any of the terms in #4, can you think of synonyms, variant spellings, or equivalent terms you would also like to accept in relevant documents?

Use the search term OR and include each set of equivalent terms in ().

6. Can you think of any extraneous or irrelevant documents these words might pick up?

Exclude term of phrases with "-"[no space] before each term, or AND NOT.

For example, if you want to find information about BP that is not related to the oil spill, enter BP NOT "Oil Spill", or in Google; BP -"Oil SPill"

7. What broader term could your topic be covered by?

When browsing subject categories or searching sites or databases on your topic, try broader categories.

Pre-searching Analysis

2010-06-15T02:22:00.000-07:00

This is from a document that I found on the UC Berkley library website that describes how to do a pre-search analysis in 7 steps:

1. What UNIQUE WORDS, DISTINCTIVE NAMES, ABBREVIATIONS, or ACRONYMS are associated with your topic?

This may be the place to begin because their specificity will help zero in on relevant pages.

For example: British Petroleum, BP, or "stock ticker name", which on NYSE is BP. That will give you all information about BP.

2. Can you think of societies, organizations, or groups that might have information on your subject via their pages?

Search these as "phrase in quotes", looking for a home page that might contain links to other pages, journals, discussion groups, or databases on your subject.

One website I like to use is Wikipedia. At the bottom of each article you will have the reference section with many links to other websites.

3. What other words are likely to be in ANY Web document on your topic?

You might want to require these by joining them with AND or preceding each by +

Just typing in "BP" in Google gives you information about the actual company, financial information, or information about the recent oil spill. However, if you want to find information about their environmental policy, here is a search string that incorporates the Boolean search (please see previous blog posts) that would give you relevant results: "(BP OR British Petroleum) AND (Environmental Policy)"

These are the first three steps explained, and I will post the last 4 with comments tomorrow. Later this week I will also post a very corny but interesting Youtube video that explains how to improve your searches.

More exact search, Proximity search

2010-06-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

Have you ever done a two or more word search in Google, only to find that those words do not show up near to each other in the result list? the answer to that could be using Proximity search. Proximity search allows you to modify the query to only display the two words close to each other.

I Apache Solr, to search for Apples and Oranges within 10 words of each other, you would type "apple oranges"~10, where the "~"-tilde denotes the proximity operator.

In Google it is a little bit different. Here it is the "*" that denotes the proximity operator. The search “apples oranges” will only find pages containing those words consecutively, “apples * oranges” will match “apples and oranges”, and “apples * * oranges” will match “apples, pears, and oranges”.

So whether you are looking for information for your school project or information about a competitor, proximity searches open doors to new information regular searches wouldn't help you find.

How to modify your search by using Boolean operators

2010-06-09T01:17:00.000-07:00

On Monday I wrote a short post about free text search, and that there is a difference between internet free text search and enterprise free text search. However, the objective of the two methods is the same, to find the exact information you need.

One technique to use when doing free text search to get better results is to use Boolean operators. Using them will allow you to broaden and/or narrow down your result list.

Use	To
AND	Narrow search and retrieve records containing all of the words it separates.
OR	Broaden search and retrieve records containing any of the words it separates. The \| can be used instead of 'or' (e.g., 'mouse \| mice \| rat' is equivalent to 'mouse or mice or rat').
NOT	Narrow search and retrieve records that do not contain the term following it.
( )	Group words or phrases when combining Boolean phrases and to show the order in which relationships should be considered: e.g., '(mouse or mice) and (gene or pseudogene)

Using AND narrows a search by combining terms; it will retrieve documents that use both the search terms you specify. In the example “Apple AND Oranges”, the result must contain both those words.

Using OR broadens a search to include results that contain either of the words you type in. OR is a good tool to use when there are several common spellings or synonyms of a word, as in this example: “Great Britain OR U.K. OR United Kingdom OR England”.

Using NOT will narrow a search by excluding certain search terms. NOT retrieves documents that contain one, but not the other,of the search terms you enter, as in this example: “Apple NOT Steve Jobs”. To do the “NOT” search in Google, use the “-“ before the word you want to exclude. So if you want information about apples (as in the fruit) type the query in the attached picture. You would be surprised at how hard it is to find information about just plain and simple apples.

How do you free text search?

2010-06-07T02:57:00.000-07:00

There are different ways to free text search. It is safe to say that the majority knows how to do a Google search. However, there is a difference between doing free text search on the internet and doing an enterprise search.

Google Search:

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

However, searching for information in an enterprise is a bit different. You want to find a specific piece of information, not necessarily the "most popular" document related to your search.

Comintelli's search solution is based on Lucene's Apache Solr, and there are different methods to modify your searches to find the exact information you are looking for. On Lucene's website, they have a good description of different methods to narrow down your searches. Please read the different options on this website. Later this week I will talk about the different methods more in detail.

Mobile Devices

2010-06-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

Knowledge XChanger supports browsers using the layout engines WebKit, Gecko and Trident. This means that you can use many kids of devices and browsers;

· Google Chrome and Safari uses WebKit

· Mozilla and Firefox uses Gecko

· MS Internet Explorer, Outlook / Outlook Express, Winamp and Real Player uses Trident.

Some devices are limited in screen size but with smart functionality like “zoom in”, it’s perfectly possible to use your Apple iPhone or iPad to browse the application. In my opinion the iPad experience on Knowledge XChanger is awesome!

2010-06-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

Top ten tips for successful Knowledge Management according to NHS Evidence:

Review your options - gain a broad understanding of the variety of approaches to knowledge management, and choose the best one for your department.
Keep it simple - make the concepts of knowledge management real for others in your organisation, by using simple definitions and simple language to explore real problems and opportunities.
Learn while doing - don't wait until you know everything about knowledge management, because you never will.
Celebrate what you're already doing - in most organisations there will already be examples of good knowledge management practice, so make people aware of these successes and build on them.
Fit in with your department's goals - see how you can meet them by using knowledge management techniques, such as lessons learned and best practice models.
Start with the problems - solve outstanding issues by using knowledge management techniques, as this is a good way to demonstrate the benefits of KM.
Start small - and expand as interest develops.
Don't take off without a pilot - test the water, if you are about to implement a major new intitiative.
Remember the 'big three' - people, processes, and technology, are all required for successful knowledge management.
The ultimate aim - an automatic culture of sharing, innovation, and good practice.

Comintelli's recipe for successful Knowledge Management touches some of these points, but our main focus lies in the sharing of information and Knowledge, with a strong system supporting that. Therefore we believe that KM systems should be designed to make it easy to capture, share and find new information and knowledge. Furthermore, we believe in the importance of creating a good taxonomy that makes it easier for people to find and share information. Do you have any questions regarding taxonomies or the creation of taxonomies? Please contact our taxonomy specialist daniel.thomasson@comintelli.com with your questions.

Competitive Intelligence for Marketing Professionals

2010-05-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

Browsing around for informaiton for an article we are writing for the SCIP magazine, I found a frequently updated blog about Competitive Intelligence for Marketing Professionals, with a couple of interesting posts. It is worth a visit.

Arik Johnson's Blog

2010-05-27T07:08:00.000-07:00

I strongly enourage you to visit Arik Johnson's blog. Arik is somewhat of an "guru" within the CI community and he posts good, interesting material on his blog (not necessarily always related to CI).

I also recommend visiting the CI community on Ning, as well as SCIP's website and also their discussion page on LinkedIn, where many interesting discussions are available to take part of. Click on the link on the right to navigate there.

The 2010 SCIP European Summit Call for Proposals

2010-05-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

The 2010 SCIP European Summit Call for Proposals is now open!

Proposals for conference sessions and workshops may be submitted beginning May 10, 2010. The deadline for submissions is midnight, June 14, 2010. It is crucial that SCIP adhere to this deadline, in order to meet subsequent conference planning milestones. To view the call for proposals please click here.

Did you know?

2010-05-24T06:37:00.000-07:00

Did you know that with the latest version of Knowledge XChanger 6.2 it possible to set up Search alerts? This enhances and completes the alert function within Knowledge XChanger, making it easy to subscibe to both Topic Alerts and the recently launched Search alerts.

To find out more about our new exciting Enterprise Search Solution, don't forget to sign up for our webinar this coming Wednesday, May 26th. To register, please click here

Google News Timeline

2010-05-21T01:24:00.000-07:00

Today I found this in GoogleLabs: Google News Timeline.

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes information chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a zoomable, graphical timeline. You can navigate through time by dragging the timeline, setting the "granularity" to weeks, months, years, or decades, or just including a time period in your query (ie. "1977").

Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts and Twitter status messages, sports scores and various types of media like music albums and movies.

This way of searching and displaying information gives you a good overview of the developments of a particular event that you want to track.

Can Sharepoint really be used for CI? No!

2010-05-20T03:59:00.000-07:00

No! And here is why:
The basic point here is that Micrsofot Sharepoint in itself is not and will never be a Competitive / Market Intelligence application (or any application for that matter). It is great platform for e.g. collaboration, integrating with Office and acting as a front end portal for applications, but to use it for real CI (other than document sharing) will require substantial customizations.

Sharepoint 2010 was only just released and I would not recommend being an early adopter, although Microsoft are good at creating a sense of urgency around this, especially in IT departments. Also note that migrating existing Sharepoint 2007 solutions to 2010 will NOT be a trivial task

And as usual with Microsoft, once the improvements come they will start to cost you much more than previously. Alot of the search goodies will come at an extra cost...

If you want to learn more about evaluating Sharepoint, I strngly recommend the CMS blog at http://www.sharepointwatch.com/Blog/Channel/Evaluating

Don't forget to register for our Webinar about Enterprise Search!

2010-05-19T02:32:00.000-07:00

Learn about the advantages of the rapidly growing open source search technology from Apache Lucene/Solr, that is now embedded in the Comintelli Knowledge XChanger application.

Besides from being extremely cost effective compared to traditonal search engines, its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

See the new search interface in action and discover how it can be used to meet your Enterprise Search requirements and help you improve your findability!

The webinar will be led by search experts Anders Thulin, CTO of Comintelli (www.comintelli.com) and Max Charas, Solr specialist at Findwise (www.findwise.se).

Please click here to register

Also read this article about what others write about our new Enterprise Search solution!

Offline CI Sources

2010-05-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody! Hope the weekend has been great! Here in Sweden the summer is approaching fast, and there is not that much left until summer vacation. However, until then there is a lot to! For example, Comintelli promises to update this blog more regularly.

As a first step to that, wWe will try to post a couple of interesting articles per week for you to read.Today's article is about offline sources that CI professionals can utilize.

Offline CI Sources

If you have any interesting articles that you would like to share, please post them in the comments section!