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ITI Bloggers December 1st, 2005

We are pleased to bring you this exclusive interview with David Brown, Director of Publisher Relations at the British Library. David describes the Library’s digitization program, including a significant grant from Microsoft. He also mentions the Library’s copyright policy for this project.

Hear David, direct from the floor of the Exhibit Hall.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers December 1st, 2005

Just a few hours after winning the IWR Information Professional of the Year Award, Euan Semple from the BBC keynoted the track on social networking. The BBC has created a gateway allowing its employees to use a number of social networking tools. The first is a forum with 11 different discussion groups, including Editorial, Production, What’s Going On, etc. Over 11,000 people use the forum to ask questions and get answers. One result of this platform is that trivial questions can turn into interesting issues; misinformation gets corrected, and lurkers (people who read but do not participate in the discussion) get the benefit of the discussion. Euan stressed that these types of systems must be sociable places where people will want to go to get their information, and it can be a challenge to get conversations started. Once the conversations begin, the statistics show that thousands of people may read posts, but only a few contribute comments or replies.

Other social networking tools that have been added to the BBC’s gateway are:
• Connect.gateway—used to identify and find other people in the organization. A search tool allows employees to find others with specific expertise (foreign language speakers, etc.)
• An internal blog has had a large impact on journalism processes. Over 250 people within the BBC are blogging, even senior managers. Blogs have started to replace “all hands” broadcast e-mail announcements from upper management.
• Wikis are used by over 1,500 people and have become a rich resource for all kinds of information. With their freely available editing capabilities, wikis are very different from traditional documents. For example, when new policies are proposed, employees are encouraged to comment and change the initial documents, and then they are considered for incorporation into the final policy.
• RSS software that runs and syndicates content for those interested.

The BBC environment is a dispersed one, but it is very powerful. Social networking will increasingly impact workflows in companies. Younger people coming into the workforce are already heavy users of these technologies and will not accept a lack of them in their working environment. If we do not establish social networking within the organization, they will do it on their own outside the firewall, so we must bring the technology inside now and start learning about it.

After his talk, I asked Euan some questions about the points he discussed. Click here to hear his remarks.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers December 1st, 2005

The exhibit floor has a special pavilion for enterprise search vendors (way back in the far corner), two days of programming in one of the exhibit hall theatres on the topic, plus a track in the main conference. That’s quite a lot of coverage of this hot topic, but unfortunately it was fragmented and dominated (even in the main conference sessions) by vendors. Actually that’s an pretty good description of the industry itself: vendors in search of a market that is difficult to define and identify.

(Disclaimer: My primary priority over the next several weeks is organizing the program for Enterprise Search Summit, scheduled for May 22-24 in New York. So I was looking more closely than most attendees for people, ideas, topics, and trends, as I covered these sessions.)

If you are looking to learn how to select, implement, or manage enterprise search in your organization, Tracy Lunt from DuPont (in the last session this afternoon at 2:00) is a super speaker, not to be missed. It looks like one at the same time in the exhibit floor theatre by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu will be equally good.

On the other hand, if you follow the enterprise search industry, Angela Ashenden’s presentation yesterday in the exhibit hall theatre on The Enterprise Search Landscape was outstanding. (I suspect that quite a number of the audience were vendors, listening to learn what their future might hold!)

A senior analyst at Ovum, Angela cited the enterprise search market in 2004 at $500 million and growing to about $1.1 billion by 2009. Currently the market is dominated by small independent players, with only 4 generating more than $100 million in annual revenues. Of the top 4, Automony, Verity and Fast claim 36% of the market, and 50% of the growth in 2003-2004 came from the top players. Fast, Google, and Endeca are currently showing impressive growth.

The biggest change, and indicative of a maturing market, is the serious entry by IBM and Microsoft, and the positioning of search as infrastructure rather than as an application. She predicts these giants will shake up the market and many of the smaller players will disappear, either as they are gobbled up by the big guys or lose market share. Still, growth and technology development is dominated today by small companies and research organizations, offering opportunities to those who can seize the opportunity and grab some momentum.

Her ranking of vendors by market share in 2004 looks like this: Verity, Autonomy, and Fast, followed closely by Google. Microsoft, Endeca, Inxight, Open Text, IBM, and Convera follow those top four, in that order.

Angela concluded by acknowledging that the recent acquisition of Verity by Autonomy has shaken up the market, but that it is too soon to speculate on the impact.

Separately, Steve Arnold keynoted the Enterprise Search track this morning with a presentation on Enterprise Search in 2006. His remarks were more wide-ranging than Angela’s, and his presentation can be viewed on his web site, www.arnoldit.com.

Nancy Garman
Information Today, Inc.
ngarman {at} infotoday(.)com
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ITI Bloggers December 1st, 2005

Anyone involved in publishing can appreciate that the process comes with its own set of problems … writers miss deadlines, editing gets delayed, fact-checking hits a snag. Wolters Kluwer Health has just taken most of the pain points out of publishing with PubFusion, an online content management solution that paves the way for an efficient workflow.

The single-source, single-view system tracks documents through the production process, coordinates schedules, and enforces deadlines (for editorial, advertising, art, layout, and permissions), and that’s just for starters. To-do lists and workflow diagrams (with color-coded icons) makes the process easy to use. Production managers can trace each stage of the process in real-time to customize schedules and deadlines for each project. PubFusion started as an internal project to manage Lippincott Williams & Wilkins’ medical journals (all 160 of them), but it didn’t take long for the word to get out. Patti Ward, director of editorial solutions for Wolters Kluwer Health’s Medical Research Division, said PubFusion actually reduced production cycle time for its journals by an average of 10 percent. It also increased production capacity by 50 percent, sliced delivery time, and reduced production postage costs (by routing materials online) by 60 percent. “These are real numbers with a real impact,” said Ward.

“PubFusion is built upon the EMC Documentum [5 Digital Asset Management] platform,” according to Ward, “and Flatirons Solutions can deliver optional in-house solutions for customers who prefer their own system.” PubFusion’s release is expected in spring 2006.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today
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