When businesses implement intelligent content, they usually adopt a “day forward” strategy that assures all new content is “intelligent” (i.e., is developed in XML and dynamically published), and they minimize the volume of legacy content to convert and migrate. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers – like many other capital equipment manufacturers – support products that last 30 years or more, so legacy technical content is critical to keeping that equipment up, running, and profitable for their customers.

In one such company today, that legacy content exists as monolithic manuals in PDF format that are hundreds of pages long, or as PDF renditions of engineering drawings, or as data in enterprise systems in relational databases or ERP systems. Field Service Engineers spend many hours per week searching for content across multiple systems – ERP data, content repositories, engineering websites, drawing repositories, knowledge bases, technical forums, email, personal notes – to find the procedures, drawings, reference information, and expert advice they need to effectively troubleshoot and repair customer equipment.

In the future, that information needs to be seamlessly integrated into a single-point of access that provides the Field Service Engineer with information that is relevant to their current context: the product they are working on, the customer account, the current configuration, the current problem or fault condition, the latest engineering information and best known methods – all without entering a word into a search box.

The challenge for intelligent content is simply stated: How do we get there from here?

In this presentation at the Intelligent Content conference, we’ll discuss this company’s unique pathway forward to intelligent content:

• The complexity and richness of content types and sources that must be unified through search and navigation for the end user (service engineers);
• Building a firm foundation with a sound information architecture including taxonomy and metadata;
• Taking the first steps with a modular content strategy based upon PDF documents in SharePoint, with a unified custom search experience;
• Transitioning in later phases of the project to intelligent XML content integrated with enterprise data in a seamless, task-focused interface.

Thursday October 1, 2009

1:00 – 2:30 p.m. EDT

Register here for free.

In this session, we will hear a case study from the Hartford Insurance Group about how taxonomy was applied to improving findability of Underwriting content.  We’ll also learn about the state of the insurance industry with regard to adoption of metadata standards and taxonomy practices. This is based on our research into how insurance companies are addressing challenges around content and document management efficiency and search effectiveness by applying taxonomies and metadata.

Join us to hear Seth Maislin, Senior Consultant at Earley & Associates, and Jeff Auker, Assistant Vice President at the insurance company The Hartford, discuss an enterprise taxonomy initiative for managing over 200 million documents in support of underwriting and claims processing. They will address best practices for organizing a taxonomy project, methods for gaining support from stakeholders, and operationalizing a taxonomy program for ongoing success.

Paul Wlodarczyk, Director of Solutions Consulting for Earley & Associates, will review findings of our benchmark metadata survey updated with new results specifically for the insurance industry. The goal of the study is to measure industry progress on a Metadata Maturity Model scale, a road map designed to help get practitioners started – and continuously improve – content tagging within organizations.

Topics include:

• Applying taxonomy to improving findability of information
• Case study – The Hartford
• The role of metadata and taxonomies in content reuse
• Trends in metadata maturity for the insurance industry

Register here for free.

September 24, 2009
1:00-2:30 p.m. EDT

John Greene, Managing Director, Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC
Seth Earley, President & CEO , Earley & Associates
Mike Axelrod, Senior Consultant , Earley & Associates

What is the role of Web 2.0 and Social Media in the insurance industry? How do these new technologies and approaches for creating content fit in with more structured content processes?

In this first session we’ll survey the core processes of insurance operations, show what types of content typically supports such processes, and talk about how some of the newer approaches to collaboration and user generated content fit in to the big picture. Learn how Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, the world’s leading risk and reinsurance specialist, utilizes social media from John Green, Managing Director in Global Marketing & Communications.

We’ll provide tangible examples of how improvements can provide bottom line benefits and how services can be better performed, products can be more accurately priced, and customer experiences can be improved by well designed content management approaches. We’ll discuss types of challenges in each of these areas and approaches for remediation.

Topics include:

• Overview of content intensive processes
• The use of social media in insurance
• How well architected content can improve knowledge flow
• Classes of content technology in support of insurance processes

Visit earley.com for more information or to register

Speakers
Robert Berry, Information Developer, IBM
Michael Harris, Information Architect, IBM
Erik Hennum, Information Model Architect, IBM
Paul Wlodarczyk, Director Solutions Consulting, Earley & Associates

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you’re using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It’s logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.

Our research confirms that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. However, the use of native DITA metadata capabilities is rare, and many are also missing out on opportunities to use taxonomy for reuse and improved findability. We will explore the metadata capabilities within DITA and component content management systems, discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Check out the preview on SlideShare:

August 05, 2009
1:00 PM EDT

An enterprise search audit will determine where you need to specifically improve search processes.  Based on actual user behavior and system results, a search audit will provide hard data for a baseline evaluation of search effectiveness.  We’ll discuss types of search audits, approaches for gathering data and ways a search audit can pinpoint the needs for improvement  in system tuning, metadata and content management processes.

Jeannine Bartlett will present Strategies for Search Auditing

What’s in a search audit, and why should you consider conducting one? We’ll look at enterprise search security audits, a framework for measuring the enterprise search “experience”, and an approach to website search SWOT analysis. We’ll wrap up with a range of ideas for interpreting and leveraging search audit results.

Avi Rappoport will present Auditing Search: The Invisible Part

The searchable index itself doesn’t get much attention, but there are very important things there (or not in there) that define the quality of the search.  Search log top query and click-through metrics can indicate missing sources and other problems.  The index may need to update more frequently, it may have security and access control problems, it may be tuned for smaller disk space requirements, and the document store may be insufficient. Essentially a Search Audit should also analyze what’s in the index, what’s not, and why.

Price: $50.00

Register here

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 Eastern Time
Cost: $50 (Survey respondents need not register and will receive an invitation to this call at no cost)

Register here.

Four years ago, a benchmark survey was conducted to understand how organizations understood and applied metadata to content assets and what business benefits they were realizing. Earley & Associates along with Taxonomy Strategies, launched a project to update this research. The goal of the study was to measure industry progress on a Metadata Maturity Model scale, a road map designed to help practitioners get started – and continuously improve – content tagging within organizations.

Preliminary results have shown that organizations that are more mature in metadata and taxonomy best practices outperform less mature organizations, with more mature organizations reporting findability and content management problems 10-15% less often. In addition to presenting results around maturity levels, this call will benchmark current search, taxonomy, and metadata practices against the 2005 survey and report on some surprising key findings around information access and best practices adoption.

Register here.

Free.  Register here

This session will cover issues in implementing an effective search experience and the range of available add-ons and compatible tools for extending SharePoint search functionality.

As the volume of information creeps steadily up in your SharePoint portal, so does the importance of sound navigation and metadata that can be leveraged for search. There are challenges around implementing hierarchical metadata and faceted search in SharePoint.

Lars Farstrup will discuss various options for creating an effective navigation and faceted search experience in Sharepoint. Paul Wlodarczyk will cover the range of available SharePoint add-ons and compatible tools to help you manage metadata, taxonomies and provide more robust search and tagging.

Topics include:

• Navigation pain points in SharePoint search
• Using faceted search for better navigation
• Build vs. buy scenarios for custom taxonomy & faceted search
• Taxonomy/Metadata/Search vendor landscape overview
• Specific tool features and limitations

If you’re going to be at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next week, please stop by on Wednesday afternoon and listen to Richard and me present on integrating taxonomy and folksonomy.  This presentation by Earley & Associates was developed by Stephanie Lemiuex over the last several years, who was originally scheduled to present it.  She has developed four categories describing how taxonomy and folksonomy can be used together, and has collected a wealth of illustrative examples.   Richard is an excellent presenter (he has a Ph.D. in Ontology!); I’m honored to share the dais with him and to have the opportunity to present Stephanie’s fantastic content.  

Here’s the official abstract:

Tagging isn’t new – it’s been around for a dog’s age in internet years.  But in the past few years some fresh ideas and tools have reinvigorated the social tagging world.  These new approaches include an attempt to improve findability through a bit of structure and control.  While the idea of adding control to folksonomy seems like going against the whole selling point of social tagging (flexibility, openness), it is bringing the tagging to a new level, making it more viable for practical use in enterprises.  This session will present hybrid approaches to formal taxonomies and social tagging.  How can they be used in the corporate environment?  What type of content is appropriate for social tagging?  What kind of software is available for the enterprise?  Learn how social tagging is not necessarily anathema to corporate taxonomy programs and how this hybrid approach can bring the best of both worlds: a fresh, up to date taxonomy with the structure needed to improve information findability.
Key Takeaways:

• Folksonomy and taxonomy defined
• Drawbacks of pure social tagging
• Social tagging in the enterprise
• Hybrid taxonomy & folksonomy approaches: Four models

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Depending upon context, “tagging” can mean one of three different things: tagging a document, tagging within a document, or tagging a content object.

Tagging documents.  These days most of us think of tagging as the keywords we put on our documents – like our photos and websites – so that others can find them when they search.  User tags are fine for finding photos in flickr, but for tagging to be effective in business we need to make it systematic, so that we avoid ambiguity and improve search recall and relevance.  So we’re increasingly “mature” in our approaches to tagging: We use taxonomy to organize our terms into classes and to manage the relationships between terms.  We develop thesauri and foreign language equivalents.  We integrate taxonomies and thesauri into search indexes for ECM and site search and SEO.

Tagging within a document.  I got interested in tagging in the early days of XML (back when we spelled it “S-G-M-L”), when we were tagging within documents.  By tagging unstructured content inside documents we could do really sophisticated things – not just multi-channel output.  For example, knowing that a paragraph in a document was a step in a service procedure or that a string of gibberish was a part number let us bring life to that content when we transformed it from markup into an interactive electronic technical manual.  Tagging let us turn books into diagnostic software.

Tagging reusable content objects. As content reuse matured with standards like DITA, organizations had more reusable components, with more people creating them in more departments.  Tagging reusable content objects became essential to actually reusing them – if you couldn’t find it, you’d never reuse it.  If you had a single service manual with 100 procedures, now you have at least 100 reusable content objects, so the search scope increased by two orders of magnitude.  At IBM, colleagues report having over a million DITA topics in more than six repositories, with over a dozen departments sharing content across thousands of publications.  Searching for content objects is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except you’re trying to find the right needle, and you have more and smaller needles to search amongst, in more and increasingly bigger haystacks.

Measuring Metadata Maturity.  Each type of tagging can have measurable benefits on your business.  Five years ago, Earley & Associates and Taxonomy Strategies developed a survey to understand metadata maturity for various types of businesses.  Earley is conducting an updated survey to see how organizations have moved up the learning curve.  Since we have a baseline of responses from five years ago, we’ll be able to describe how metadata and taxonomy practices have matured over time.  Also, the original survey was focused on the impact of metadata best practices on knowledge management and e-commerce search.  We now recognize that metadata is also used by technical communicators – especially those that use XML and other technologies to create, manage, and multichannel publish reusable content.  We want to hear from you all for the first time.

The survey is pretty detailed, so you might want to grab your favorite caffeinated beverage before you dig in.  As compensation for your time (about 15 minutes) Earley & Associates is offering these nifty incentives:

• A free pass to any future Earley & Associates Community of Practice conference call (a $50 value).  These are monthly, and the next one is Wednesday June 2^nd on Taxonomy for Portals featuring Giovanni Piazza, Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young, and Ralph Poole of Earley & Associates.
• A $200 discount on registration to the Henry Stewart conference on digital asset management, June 1-2 in NYC.  Seth Earley will be there presenting preliminary results.
• Free participation in a webcast reviewing the results of the survey (date TBA).

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