On a recent visit to a very large storage vendor I had a discussion about a social portal that they had developed. It was struggling to get user engagement and they were puzzled as to why.
My response seemed a surprise to them. Social software is personal. Users think of it as a personal tool. If you look at the most popular web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or even Delicious they are tools that provide a benefit to users on a personal level.
You cannot force user engagement. The tools either help them (so they use it), or they really don't provide much benefit (they don't use them). Facebook is about personal expression, Twitter about having a voice, and Delicious is about sharing your own interests. If tools don't deliver this personal benefit then users will not use them.
In a round about way this gets us back to the companies social portal. Enterprise 2.0 software suffers from this lack of personal, intimate interaction. It has a corporate aura about it, residing on the corporate portal, and workers don't feel the same personal connection with it. Does it really help them get their work done or just create more work for them? One more application they have to use.
As we discussed Jumper and how it might help I told them that if they deployed Jumper on the same corporate portal that it would likely suffer the same fate. The users would not feel any personal connection with it.
Jumper works best when it is deployed directly into a community of users. Smaller deployments that can be customized even personalized to users interests. I asked what groups had heavy information requirements and they mentioned the project managers, research lab teams, product development groups, etc. and I discussed that a customized Jumper deployed onto a small VM with minimal system resource requirements should be deployed for each of these groups. Users feel a more personal connection with a bookmarking engine when it is focused in this way. Search returns only the results relevant to them, not the whole company. Resources have been tagged by colleagues that they know and trust, basically their friends at work who they can holler over the cube wall at.
You have to change the way you think about applications. From the web to mobile phones applications are more specialized, more organic in their user communities. And large organizations need to understand and adapt to this expectation from their users. Search is no different.
Personal search or a point solution approach really means a more customized or tailored approach to search that meets the unique needs of its users. It is precisely because Jumper is an open tool that you can change to meet your own
unique requirements that this works so well. Precisely because it is license free and light-weight that it can easily be deployed in this way. The ability to reflect personal or group interests includes greater flexibility in the terminology or data dictionary to include a hybrid of corporate taxonomy and group based folksonomy. Specialist users have very specific and often highly technical terms that never make it in a formalized corporate taxonomy. Yet these terms matter to these specific users and make it easier to search and find things. Another critical factor is that the tag fields can be customized to meet the unique needs of users. For instance, with structured knowledge tags a materials engineer or biologist will have very different tagging needs than a SAN storage architect or a chemist. One might require a tag to identify the protein the other a tag to identify the compound, etc. A point solution approach allows the local bookmarking engine to be highly customized to meet these unique needs in a way a centralized system never could.
Personal search is not enterprise search. We understand that this tool must be simple. Easy to use, easy to navigate and intuitive. It must also provide a direct and immediate benefit to users. There must be something in it for them, it must not be a generalized tool, it must be very specific, even personal for each user to see and feel the value. It is more like a cube conversation. In this sense it must be localized. Sharing a common skill-set or job description, just as most users with similar skills are sitting together on the same floor and their conversations are based around this shared understanding so the tool must have the same level of intimacy.
This is what we mean by personal search and it requires an entirely new way of thinking about enterprise search. And it is often that thought process that is the hardest thing to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment