Blog
Intranet development projects – the value of search analytics
The primary theme of many of the ‘strategy’ presentations at Intranet Italia Day 2022 was the importance of a structured approach to defining user and business requirements. Many speakers emphasized the importance of in-depth interviews to gain an understanding of the...
The autobiography of David Hawking and the enterprising story of P@NOPTIC, Funnelback and Squiz.
I expect that few readers of this blog will have read the 2011 edition of Modern Information Retrieval edited by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Riberio-Neto. It runs to almost 900 pages. Chapter 15 is a brilliant essay by David Hawking which sums up everything you...
Intranet Italia Day Milan 19-20 May 2022 – Conference report.
The European intranet community is indebted to a small group of entrepreneurs for staging conferences and workshops of the highest quality. I’m referring of course to Wedge Black (Intranet Now, London), Kurt Kragh Sorensen (IntraTeam, Copenhagen and Stockholm), Guy...
Managing corporate language diversity
In order to be awarded my chemistry degree in 1970 I had to pass a reading comprehension examination in German. This was because at that time the Beilstein and Gmelin handbooks on organic and inorganic chemistry were primarily published in German, as was Angewandte...
IntraTeam Findability Event Copenhagen 13/14 June 2022
I continue to be both surprised and concerned by the lack of conferences at which good practice in search and findability can be shared. This seems to be primarily because of a reluctance by enterprise search vendors to support conference and events with financial...
The role of snippets in assessing the potential relevance of search results
The message coming from the enterprise search vendors at present is that AI (usually vaguely defined) can solve all search problems and present a very high percentage of relevant items on the first page of results. This ‘machine’ ranking of relevance is determined by...
Information – A Historical Introduction. Book review
How do you review a book that runs to almost 900 pages? Answers on a pack of postcards please! Two books sparked my interest in the history of information. The first was A History of Online Information Services 1963-1976 by Bourne and Hahn which provides a vast amount...
Enterprise search access permission management – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In any organisation there are multiple invisible silos. These silos are based on access permissions and the reason they are invisible is because the user has no means of knowing that they are not seeing the entire enterprise-wide corpus of information. A feature of...
Dyslexia in the workplace – too little awareness and support!
I continue to be concerned by the lack of understanding by digital workplace vendors, including enterprise and intranet search vendors, of the challenges that employees with dyslexia face using their applications. Although there is now a wide acceptance of WCAG these...
Enterprise search management training course for on-site/hybrid delivery
Today I have launched a one-day on-site enterprise search training course. The course has been in the planning stage for ten years. In 2012 I undertook a research project for the European Commission to determine the barriers to enterprise search adoption and...
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