A voluntary non-commercial research blog since 2015
Introduction Finding information in the enterprise continues to be problematic for many reasons. There are many mechanisms that may influence conditions for better enterprise search & discovery outcomes. Some mechanisms may only work (‘fire’) under certain conditions. For example, a torch has the potential to cause a light, but not if the batteries are dead.... Continue Reading →
You may be interested in the 'Future of Search' conference write up I did for the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Group which was published in the BCS Informer last week. http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2016/01/the-future-of-search-search-solutions-conference-26th-november-2015/
Whilst using search engines for online web searches or in the workplace, our hidden mental models of the information space play a part in how we search. They may also influence how we feel when searching and ultimately, our expectations. The mental models we hold of the information space can be hard to verbalize, but... Continue Reading →
The term ‘Deep learning’ has been increasingly used recently to describe how organizations augment their learning by applying machine learning techniques on large volumes of information (big data) to discover patterns. Building on the 2015 article ‘emergence of the corporate brain’, this article applies a systems thinking approach to balance the technology focus on deep... Continue Reading →
A synthesis of the relevant literature and commentary (focusing on the oil & gas sector although some elements may apply to other sectors) has enabled the identification of a number of potential trends, gaps, challenges and opportunities with respect to enterprise search & discovery. It is anticipated that practitioners may find this multi-disciplinary discussion and... Continue Reading →
Two recent pieces of research provide some evidence that business management may be underestimating the impact of people (social and cognitive) with respect to enterprise search and discovery capability. The research suggests there may be value in moving away from fragmented process based 'technology centric' viewpoints, to more of a 'systems thinking' outcome based approach.... Continue Reading →
Slideshare Link Here With the exponential growth in ‘big data’ information volumes within the organization, the convergence of traditional business intelligence, enterprise search, social media, text analytics, knowledge organization and machine learning has the potential to revolutionize how we search for and discover information and knowledge. However, it appears to have become almost unfashionable to... Continue Reading →
Presentation given at Enterprise Search Europe 2015 in London (October 21st) here . Provides evidence that companies may be missing crucial information during exploratory searches but are largely unaware. One of the causal factors is search expertise, caused by a lack of learning. The presentation offers some practical suggestions to address this issue.
As part of my PhD research on the socio-cognitive aspect of enterprise search, I had a paper published this week in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Abstract No prior research has been identified that investigates the causal factors for workplace exploratory search task performance. The impact of user, task,... Continue Reading →
I recently conducted a survey of 55 business professionals to identify what channels they use to seek information. The pie chart below illustrates the role of the Internet (purples), internal search tools (oranges), the importance of direct people to people interactions (green) and minimal use of traditional 'library' services (blue). The fact that almost a quarter of... Continue Reading →
A Geodyssey - Geoscience Text Analytics and Enterprise Search Research 