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Fitting a Square Peg into a Round Hole

By on May 20, 2013 in Big Data, Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management

Big Data is all the rage (when is enough enough?). Conceptual or semantic modeling is often viewed as taking information, regardless of where it exists, and forcing that information into a relational database for analysis. In an excellent article by Malcolm Chisholm, Ph.D., Big Data and the Coming Conceptual Model Revolution, he discusses the topic of the importance, and change in approach, needed for conceptual modeling.

Where I don’t think he has gone far enough, is that ‘concepts’ do not and will not fit logically into a database. “The success of columnar databases in ultra-large scale data environments has presented a challenge to the relational paradigm. Of course there is enormous hype about big data, but it is also enough of a reality to demand attention. To use the columnar databases successfully you have to unlearn the relational paradigm.” I agree with this statement.

He continues, “Conceptual models must capture all business concepts and all relevant relationships. If instances of things are also part of the business reality, they must be captured too. Unfortunately, there is no standard methodology and notation to do this. Conceptual models that communicate business reality effectively require some degree of artistic imagination. They are products of analysis, not of design.” This is where I disagree, and the traditional approach won’t work, and people need to start thinking outside of the box.

From an outside-of-the-box approach, there is indeed a standard methodology and notation to do this. It is the purpose of semantic metadata, classification, and business taxonomies. Speaking on behalf of all of us vendors there are products that work quite well in capturing the essence, meaning, concepts, and relationships between disparate pieces of data (content), and some have extreme scalability and performance capabilities. With over 80% of data in an organization categorized as ‘unstructured’ (IDC) these needles in the haystack are quite valuable to the organization and are not captured in a relational database.

Primarily relegated to ‘text analytics’ it has become a specialized practice under the ‘Big Data’ umbrella. One the one hand can the two live as one? I don’t really see that happening. Can they co-exist? They have to as the largest quantity of enterprise data is unavailable for analysis, decision making, and improved business processes.

WDYT?

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Is the Door Open or Shut for Portals?

By on May 14, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Search

I just read a very good article that talked about the portal, where it was and what it has become. I encourage you to read it. This made me think quite a bit about this topic and sad to say I still remember when there weren’t any portals!! In thinking about the authors comments, he touched on what portals used to do (or were supposed to do) and where they going now.

Technology is more complicated even from yesterday to today. With the rise of bring your own device organizations can be hard pressed to accommodate all the types of devices that are being used to access information. As the author correctly pointed out, the security issues are also coming to the forefront as a key priority.

The conclusion and point of the article is summed up by the author, “in the old days the enterprise portal would provide you with an Information Architecture that pulled together the links to all these disparate tools and resources, and tried to group them together and categorize them in a logical manner. Can we still do things this way for the Digital Workplace?”

I don’t see how you cannot. Maybe you can’t do it the same way, but a way needs to be found. It is not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have’ from a business perspective. The goal, possibly never achieved by many, provided a single point of access for end users to find the information needed to do their jobs. Although the underlying framework is now tremendously more complicated, organizations can face loss of revenues, poor communication, productivity losses, and higher risk by not developing the framework to support the myriad of ways end users communicate today and solving the new technology challenges that didn’t exist before.

What are your thoughts? How would you accomplish this problem? Of course, through a heap of planning, but it also needs to solve strategic as well as tactical challenges. Throw out the baby with the bath water and start again? Or transition from where you are to where you ‘must’ be?

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Follow the Yellow Brick Road – Which way to SharePoint 2013?

By on May 14, 2013 in Blog, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Ahha, seems the only way to get to SharePoint 2013 from an older version is to migrate. Ok from 2010 to 2013, but nothing before – think 2003 and 2007. We have several clients on SharePoint 2013 – and got there without glitches. We don’t have many that are left on 2003 or 2007 as a matter of fact.

So what’s the difference from the standpoint of unstructured and semi-structured content? Either clean up the mess now or later, or like many folks not at all. From this perspective, migration is a better choice to follow. Many migration tools have solid products that do what they say they do. Our products work alongside of them. The ability to mass move content is relatively straight forward. However, from an information governance approach, mass moving content results in the same problem of mismanaged content.

To migrate document collections effectively, the text content of each document needs to be searched to determine its value. This can’t be done manually, as the volume is too high, and the consistency of human review and decision making is unreliable as well as costly. If manually processed, the security rights of the documents as they are moved to their new location must be applied. General migration tools cannot safeguard document confidentiality because they do not make intelligent taxonomy workflow decisions based on the text content of the individual document.

The way we do it, as content is migrated it is analyzed for organizationally defined descriptors and vocabularies, which will automatically classify the content to taxonomies, or optionally the SharePoint Term Store, and automatically apply organizationally defined workflows to process the content to the appropriate repository for review and disposition.
The end result is a highly effective approach to cleanse irrelevant or unnecessary documents, as well as to identify records that may not been declared or have potential privacy exposures.

Alas, as a vendor I wish everyone used our technologies for migration, but they don’t. How do you approach this? If you are moving from 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2013 what would be the best method for you to strategically cleanse content before it available in your shiny new SharePoint 2013 environment?

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Open Roads, Open Future, Open Source

By on May 14, 2013 in Government

We do have a client using open source. Quite a large customer and internationally very well known. Although we are platform agnostic the majority of our clients are using some flavor of SharePoint.

I just read an article referring to the government that open source was quite well accepted and becoming more ubiquitous, from web sites to operating systems to blogs. Although initially embraced by the financial and intelligence community primarily due to high performance and not necessarily low cost, the tables are turning where lower cost is driving adoption in government.

According to Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst, about 50% of all operating systems are open source. From a marketing perspective I would be interested in your feedback regarding how you are using open source in your organization, if you are considering it, and what are the reasons?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

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Is text analytics like playing in the sandbox?

By on May 7, 2013 in Big Data, Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Search

In our organizational sandboxes, do we have enough wherewithal to capture those grains of sand that contain the ‘aha’ moment of insight? How do we identify that one grain of sand that ties everything together?

It’s not easy and I don’t think most organizations really know where to begin, or even know what they are looking for. Although for the very large organizations, volume and velocity are key objectives for Big Data, but for text analytics, for most of us, doesn’t it just come down to what do I need to know that improves sales, customer service, business processes, marketing, and brand just to name a few. Text analytics is a harder nut to crack. Most organizations don’t even have adequate search, let alone the ability to identify snippets of information from vast volumes of information that provide insight into the state of business, nuances, or sentiment.

Due to media hype, we have been informed in no uncertain terms, we are supposed to be doing Big Data and at a lesser level text analytics is creeping up the value chain. I would be curious, if you could think of your organization what would you like to unlock as it pertains to text analytics? I hate to admit my lack of creativity, but right now I am at a loss.

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Tweet Me This Batman

By on May 7, 2013 in Blog, Information Governance, Social Networking

For now this is the last in a series of thoughts regarding the reining in of social networking applications. ‘Opening a Pandora’s Box – Collaboration, Social, and Litigation’ can be accessed here, and ‘Can the Caged Bird Sing’ can be accessed here. In yet another article, ‘Pitfalls of Social Networking at Work’, the author outlines both employee and management guidelines on the management and recommended ‘rules’ for social networking. The issue, of course, is the merging of personal and business, and the premise is that ‘personal’ does indeed impact the ‘business’.

A few years ago there was an uproar regarding potential employers asking for log-in information from potential candidates’ personal sites and accounts. I always felt that was a clear invasion of privacy. Although the author agreed with me, on the other hand the author does quote a source that states you could not separate one’s personal views from one’s employers’ views in the social media space. “Social media must be properly managed with a written social media policy that sets boundaries on what can be said or not said by the employee on social media space and the consequences of that action must be specific.”

How does an organization manage this with potentially thousands of employees? Do they have a right to tell employees what they can and cannot say on personal sites? Do organizations just wait to see if an ill-stated or harmful comment is made and then try to mitigate the problem?

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Can the Caged Bird Sing?

By on May 7, 2013 in Blog, Social Networking

In my last blog I rambled on about exposures stemming social type applications and litigation. I just read another article about how organizations should define a social media policy. In this approach, end users are trained on acceptable behavior for participation in workplace social type applications, specifically those that cross the boundaries between internal and external communications. Sort of like the ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’ stage from our childhood. Although this article was specifically focusing on defamation of the character of fellow colleagues, one remark stood out which sums the whole strategy up, “A clear-cut social media policy should serve to considerably minimize the risk of industrial and public relations crises as well as litigation, by ensuring that the boundaries pertaining to online conduct are known, understood and acknowledged by each employee.”

Although I think there is a clear distinction between internal and external communications, I had never really thought about the HR problem with defamation of character type issues occurring internally. You have to wonder with the slow acceptance of enterprise social networking will we end up putting the bird in the cage effectively defeating the purpose and benefits that could be achieved?

What boundaries, training, and methods do you think should be implemented? Should there be two sets of ‘rules’ for internal governance and external?

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Opening a Pandora’s Box – Collaboration, Social, and Litigation

By on May 7, 2013 in Blog, Data Security, Social Networking

I was reading an article about best practices in compliance as it pertains to eDiscovery and litigation. It was a good article and written in English, not legalize. This led me to ask the question if collaboration, social type enterprise tools have not really caught on is there a link to non-compliance and litigation exposures? Does part of the reluctance stem from opening a Pandora’s box of problems? In our increasingly litigious business and personal world does upper management feel the risk isn’t necessary, and does it present a ‘fear’ of what could be exposed. Collaboration and social tools can generate a ROI, but is it worth the risk?

What do you think?

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Bribery, Corruption, & Espionage – just another daily responsibility

By on May 2, 2013 in Blog, Data Security, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance

If you are moving into the global economy, or have multinational operations chances are you are beginning to address bribery, corruption, and espionage or have been for a while. Interesting topic. As an example, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, compliance rules are aimed at preventing bribery of foreign government officials in an effort to obtain or retain business. This is quite complicated, as multinationals often deal with hundreds of third parties and ensuring compliance is enough to pull your hair out. Audit rights, anti-bribery, and corruption clauses are now being used in contracts that clearly spell out the rules for third parties. All very well and good, the challenge is actually conducting an audit on third parties where business books and records are not always in the traditional form.

Wrapped up in all of this is the protection of trade secrets. For example, the Chinese are becoming well known for hacking of confidential data across organizations in multiple industries. Although the Economic Espionage Act was expanded in 2012 in an effort to protect trade secrets for US companies, it is the companies themselves that are the front line of defense. Security protocols and procedures may need to be addressed in real-time, and quickly.

Organizations need to determine exactly what data they have, where it is stored, and whether they need to keep it and assign the appropriate security. Finally, we now retreat back to the end users. A culture that educates and communicates the importance of compliance has to be implemented so all staff realize the importance of compliance.

Do you have GRC initiatives that address these potential issues? How have you handled?

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Poor Data Quality – Do you measure it?

By on May 2, 2013 in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance

Data quality, including unstructured, can be a source of pain in the pocketbook for companies. But do companies evaluate this as a bottom line cost? I don’t think so. We jump through hoops showing the value of our software and the impact on the bottom line (which is fine) but turning the coin do companies actually look at the cost of wrong, erroneous, irrelevant information that result in bad decisions?

In a recent blog, When Poor Data Quality Lands on the Ledger, the author references a recent Mental Floss article, “10 Very Costly Typos,” including the 1962 $80 million dollar missing hyphen in the programming code that led to the destruction of the Mariner 1 spacecraft, the 2007 Roswell, New Mexico car dealership promotion where instead of 1 out of 50,000 scratch lottery tickets revealing a $1,000 cash grand prize, all of the tickets were printed as grand-prize winners, which would have been a $50 million payout, but $250,000 in Walmart gift certificates were given out instead, and, more recently, the March 2013 typographical error in the price of pay-per-ride cards on 160,000 maps and posters that cost New York City’s Transportation Authority approximately $500,000.

Perhaps humorous, I can assure you they did not put smiles on the faces of the organizations. And they all have to do with plain and simple proofing. However, organizations continue to waste time searching for information they can’t find, re-creating the information they couldn’t find, and then using the bad information to make decisions. Does that impact the bottom line? Can that approach be costly? You bet.

Does your organization spend time quantifying the cost of poor data – whether structured or unstructured? If so, how?

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