Posts Tagged ‘search’

Making Complexity Your Friend

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Our businesses are relentlessly becoming more complex. We are engaging with an expanding network of contractors and partners to get our work done. We are utilizing more diverse channels to reach more customers. We are operating in more countries and in more languages, while we wrestle with more regulations and market variables.

In one sense, this complexity is a dangerous enemy. Complexity can increase the probability that some process somewhere will break or that somebody will do something wrong. Orders get screwed up. Customers get ticked off. Revenue goes out the window.

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Recovering from Search Addiction

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Addictions are things we persist in doing, despite the fact that doing them creates problems for ourselves and others.  Typically, we use the term “addiction” when we have become firmly habituated to doing something because of some immediate perception of pleasure or reward we associate with it—even though that pleasure or reward may have long since ceased.

Search is such an addiction.  When we first start using it, search feels good.  It offers us a sense that we can actually find the information we want and need.  All we have to do is type in the magic words, and our search engine gives us a dose of documents to satisfy our urge.

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Does Search Need the Semantic Web to be Disruptive?

Monday, August 16th, 2010

If you read the inside-the-Beltway publication Washington Technology you may have noticed that the August issue has an article on five “disruptive technologies”. Search, lumped together with the Semantic Web, is discussed as one of the five. No argument here on search being disruptive, even though it has been around quite awhile. And I wouldn’t argue about the importance that the Semantic Web will play in our future, or the decision to combine search and the Semantic Web in the same discussion.

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Intelligence on the Front Lines

Monday, April 26th, 2010

It looks like the Department of Homeland Security is starting to implement some of the ideas that I expressed in a previous blog entry.

This is a good sign.  When you tell front-line screeners that a certain set of people should not be allowed to board a plane, you are also in effect telling them that everyone else should be allowed to board the plane. That is, the unspoken assumption is that all the important and necessary thinking has already been done by someone else.  The screener’s job is therefore just to use whatever information has already been spoon-fed to them.

On the other hand, if you empower screeners with tools that allow them to search and evaluate information themselves, you make it clear that they are actually supposed to think.  This license to think and decide is what puts them in a position to add value to the process—instead of merely behaving robotically.

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