Services
Seth Earley speaks on a range of topics at conferences all over the globe.
Below are some sample abstracts on the following topics:
Download complete Earley & Associates abstracts
Taxonomy Development and Implementation
Organizations are embarking on taxonomy initiatives to serve a wide variety of audiences and purposes. Fundamentally these are metadata management projects, but business sponsors rarely see them in that light. In many cases, taxonomy initiatives are seen as separate from enterprise data initiatives. This workshop will go through taxonomy project processes for derivation, validation, testing, integration, rollout and governance. Attendees will be able to understand how taxonomy projects should be integrated with overall metadata management and the best ways to communicate their role to business users and sponsors.
Taxonomy drivers:
- Information architecture versus Semantic architecture
- Project definition
- Audience selection
- Data gathering techniques
- Content review processes
- Term Extraction
- Creating search and navigation scenarios
- Search engine and content management system integration
- Testing and validation
- Training and Rollout
- Governance and integration with enterprise metadata management
Taxonomy Development: Understanding the Role of Metadata
What is the relationship between navigational taxonomies and classification taxonomies? One leverages the hierarchical structure in user interface and the other leverages metadata applied to content and exposes that content through a number of mechanisms.
With newer search, content management and portal technologies, ways of implementing taxonomies are becoming more complex and nuanced. The boundaries between structured and unstructured data are becoming less clear. Faceted search (also known as guided navigation) is somewhere between traditional data modeling and content management information architecture - and is one way to resolve taxonomy, metadata and navigation.
In this session we'll explore the relationship of structural metadata and taxonomic metadata and show how to improve search and navigation by fully leveraging the relationship between taxonomy and metadata in design and integration phases of your implementation.
Attendees will learn
- The relationship between taxonomies and metadata
- Ways to apply taxonomies to faceted search/guided navigation and site architecture
- How to leverage taxonomies in many aspects of portal design
- How taxonomies and metadata structures can improve search (federated search, term expansion, tuned search, "best bets" and rules based ranking)
- Ways to integrate taxonomy and metadata work streams more effectively in content and portal projects
Metadata, Taxonomies, and Information Architecture: Putting the pieces together to create an effective user experience
How are taxonomies integrated with metadata management and standards? What is the relationship between taxonomy and information architecture? There are many ways to consider taxonomy, metadata and IA in content and document management systems but these all boil down to two things: Navigation and Search. Creating an effective user experience is about helping the user meet their objectives and find the information they seek. However, developing and implementing taxonomies in an IA context is not as simple as it seems. Classification taxonomies feed metadata and navigational taxonomies are used to, well, navigate. But these are not necessarily the same. Search can be tuned with best bets and meta data weighting.
Navigation can be influenced in multiple ways. Faceted search is really navigation or is guided navigation really search?
In this session we will define these interrelated areas and discuss how they all work together in your content and document management systems to create an effective user experience.
Taxonomy Deployment & Governance
How do you roll your taxonomy to the enterprise? This may mean technical integration, but also new editorial standards and work processes. The real question is how the taxonomy fits in with overall content creation and management. Deploying the taxonomy means integrating it with existing systems and wrapping tagging into current and updated processes. Another issue is training consumers of information. Is there a way to do that effectively? Is it possible to train external users of your site? This thoughtful session explores these and other issues around "socializing" the taxonomy within the organization to ensure it is an effective tool.
From Taxonomy to Folksonomy
“We don’t need no stinkin’ taxonomy…” So you say? Just going to tag everything “socially”? Let that web 2.0 magic organize, evolve and watch content ‘emerge’ from the miasma of your unstructured shanty town of an intranet? Well guess again, Tonto. It ain’t that easy, as they say.
Yes, Web 2.0 concepts are valid. Emergence is a legitimate concept. In fact complexity and tagging actually have a great deal in common. In this session we’ll explore the role of folksonomies and help you understand where they fit in through the “continuum of information value” from low cost/low value, unstructured content and processes to higher cost, higher value, well constructed content with inherent organizing requirements and principles.
After this session you’ll be able to argue with the best of them and understand that it’s never an either/or scenario. We’ll give you tools to understand how to think about informal and formal taxonomies, social and structured tagging and when to apply each.
Taxonomy and Resource Location: Finding the Who and the What
The knowledge and expertise held by resources both inside and outside an organization are often difficult to capture and retrieve. Combining taxonomy and search can help an organization locate the right person with the right skills. This presentation will focus on the challenges of capturing resource knowledge, the use of taxonomy in categorizing the skills and expertise of resources, and the use of taxonomy to enhance search results.
Taxonomy Validation and User Testing Strategies
Building an enterprise taxonomy is always an iterative process. No first draft will ever be perfect as multiple users with multiple perspectives make taxonomy design difficult. Taxonomy validation and user testing helps ensure that the final taxonomy meets user needs and accounts for the ways different groups view the content in question. This session will help you understand key elements of the validation and user testing process including:
• Persona development
• Designing test scripts & methodologies
• Metrics & analysis
• Testing environment considerations
• Presenting results to stakeholders
Validation and user testing is critical step in taxonomy development. Come learn how to ensure the success and usability of your taxonomy.
Freedom and Control: User-Tagging and Controlled Vocabulary
Controlled vocabularies and user-tagging are two methods for structuring information. The first implies rigor and control while the second implies unregulated user organization. Is it possible to bring the two approaches together and allow for control and user participation? This session discusses the ideas behind both approaches to information organization and posits methods to allow for both in the enterprise.
Taxonomy and Resource Location: Finding the Who and the What
The knowledge and expertise held by resources both inside and outside an organization is often difficult to capture and retrieve. Combining taxonomy and search can help an organization locate the right person with the right skills. This presentation will focus on the challenges of capturing resource knowledge, the use of taxonomy in categorizing the skills and expertise of resources, and the use of taxonomy to enhance search results.
Taxonomy and Metadata Standards Governance
How do you manage taxonomy and metadata implementation across 20-plus business units, five geographies, and 20 projects? What are the factors that need to be considered when deploying standards that affect taxonomy application and operationalization? Learn how these and other challenges were addressed in a global governance deployment for a large, diverse publishing organization. Topics include developing a governance framework, governance dimensions and factors, roles and responsibilities, specific charters and templates, and developing an action plan with accountabilities. This is a detailed session covering both strategy and tactical deployment issues.
Developing an Educational Strategy to Support Content Management System Rollout
Education and training are core components of CMS deployments. In order to attain organizational buy in, multiple constituencies need to be educated from different perspectives.
The strategy for educating the organization is also the strategy for increasing its level of maturity in content processes. This includes the following:
- Ongoing formal workshops and training events
- Development of a community of practice
- Methods for measuring progress and impact
Constituencies may include: Product managers, Content authors, editors and creators, Web developers, Marketing communications, Line of business managers and Senior management. Each will have different needs around knowledge and awareness relative to the content management project. In this session we will talk about strategies for educating these constituencies and developing a greater level of competence and maturity across the entire organization.
We will discuss:
- Differing needs of these audiences
- Short term and long term educational goals
- Making the message resonate
- Change management approaches for CMS projects
Developing a Content Management Strategy
Strategy is an ambiguous term. What does a content management strategy mean? Is it the business strategy and how business needs are supported by content? The strategy for developing content, messaging and branding? Is it the technical strategy for implementing the CMS? The strategy for selecting a tool? Strategy for migrating and tagging content? Change management/educational/adoption strategy? Globalization strategy? And so on. In this session we will review the core components of a content management strategy and ways to execute and “operationalize” strategy.
Attendees will learn:
- Various approaches to developing a content management strategy
- How to most effectively gather requirements
- How to correctly drive technology selection with business requirements
- What to do when you cannot drive technology selection with business requirements
- How to keep your strategy from becoming “shelf ware”
Workshop: Building an Effective Content Management Strategy
Organizations today are struggling with unifying their content management tools, enterprise information systems and web applications so that classifications can evolve to the needs of changing markets and business processes yet remain in context to one another. When building a content framework that unifies the user experience (whether a portal architecture, public web site, extranet or intranet), how can multiple information architectures be connected in a structured way, yet allow for changes that do not break linkages or have unwanted effects that cascade through the organization? This interactive workshop reviews the challenges that an electronics manufacturer faced in their intranet content management program from the perspective of multiple taxonomies and complex metadata architectures. It cuts across cultural challenges, knowledge systems, business processes, and technologies to illustrate ways to tackle these issues, shares an approach for dealing with the complexity of inter related systems and tools in the context of shared classifications, and provides a framework for evaluating solutions.
A Content Management Maturity Model
Walk before you run. Crawl before you walk. A common mistake for many organizations that are developing content management systems is that they try to take on more than they are capable of given their level of experience and maturity. Trying to implement a sophisticated workflow tool with complex approvals will not work for a group of designers who are used to ad hoc collaboration. Or attempting to offer high levels of personalization may lead to an overly complex deployment that is costly and difficult to maintain unless certain practices have already been embedded and become routine.
Just as you would never try to run a marathon without going through the process of building physical capabilities, an organization cannot traverse a learning curve and simply mandate a new set of capabilities without the correct foundation. In this session we will review a content management maturity model developed by two consulting firms for a global content strategy engagement. We’ll review each stage of core framework components and take users through an interactive exercise to assess where they think they are in the model.
This half day workshop will answer the following:
- How do content management capabilities differ across the organization or between organizations?
- What are the 5 stages of maturity and the 5 core framework components?
- What are the best ways to move from one stage to the next?
Information needs of organizations are complex and nuanced; therefore search solutions cannot simply be an afterthought. There are many types of tools and techniques that can be applied to solving challenges around "findability". Search has not become the boring utility that many thought it would be – we need to think through the nature of our content, how users will access that content and what work processes and user tasks will be supported. Different search mechanisms and tools are required for various types of problems and content.
However, there are still decision makers that think you just put up a search box and that's about it. Unfortunately, some vendors are also promoting this type of solution. Content management systems can leverage a variety of tools and approaches to best meet the needs of users, their tasks, the type of content supported and the business objectives of the organization.
In this session, we will discuss ways to consider search as a function of content value and understand how to apply various classes of search tool appropriately to satisfy user needs. These will include:
- Complex federated search
- Leveraging of large taxonomies
- Integration of multiple taxonomies
- Entity extraction
- Advanced clustering to improve search results and usability
- Integration of public data sources with custom taxonomies
- Auto linking of results
- Streamlined search that combines multiple data sources and leverages one result set to derive the second result set
- Natural language queries and semantic search
We’ll also talk about the role and appropriateness of “search appliances” and provide some criteria for considering such a solution.
Solving the Findability Problem: How to get the most from content management and search
Does any of this sound familiar?
- You have great content but your members complain that they can’t find what they need
- You know you have something on your site but don’t know where it is
- Navigation is convoluted and has grown out of control
- Search is ineffective turning up too many irrelevant results or not returning the things you know you have
You’ve gone through the work of creating a taxonomy or implementing a new search tool, or content management system but problems still exist. What is the answer?
Solving the problem of finding relevant and actionable information is ongoing and a moving target. There are a number of complex pieces of the puzzle that have to come together. What is the best approach for leveraging the investments you have already made in tools, processes and technologies? Is it to get yet another (seemingly better) search engine? Do another taxonomy project? Go in and hand tag or clean the content?
The answer is a combination or methodologies and technologies that allow your organization to stay ahead of the findability curve and keep content and community in synch, accessible and relevant to your membership.
In this session we will discuss a wide range of topics related to addressing these challenges and provide insights and approaches you can take back and apply for short term wins as well as part of your long term technology and content plan.
Content Management Governance and Deployment
How do you roll out your CMS to the enterprise? This may mean content migration, but also new content creation processes, editorial standards, and work tasks.
The real question is how the CMS fits in with overall content life cycles and organizational processes. A CMS saves time and money and makes the organization more efficient, but the benefits and workload are not always evenly distributed. In some cases, the CMS creates more work for upstream content creators or shifts work to another part of the organization. If one part of the organization benefits but shifts costs to another area, managers of the group with new tasks and higher costs will resist. How is this resolved? What is the executive oversight and governance that needs to be put into place? Deploying the CMS means integrating it with existing processes and getting buy in from various parts of the organization. This thoughtful session explores these and other issues around deploying and operationalizing the CMS to ensure its effectiveness.
Content Management Deployment & Governance
How do you roll out your CMS to the enterprise? This may mean content migration, but also new content creation processes, editorial standards, and work tasks.
The real question is how the CMS fits in with overall content life cycles and organizational processes. A CMS saves time and money and makes the organization more efficient, but the benefits and workload are not always evenly distributed.
In some cases, the CMS creates more work for upstream content creators or shifts work to another part of the organization. If one part of the organization benefits but shifts costs to another area, managers of the group with new tasks and higher costs will resist. How is this resolved? What is the executive oversight and governance that needs to be put into place? Deploying the CMS means integrating it with existing processes and getting buy in from various parts of the organization.
This thoughtful session explores these and other issues around deploying and operationalizing the CMS to ensure its effectiveness.
Integrating With CMS for Dynamic Content: Motorola Case Study
Ever wonder what in the world organizations do after all those taxonomy initiatives are finished? Speakers highlight the ongoing taxonomy development and global implementation at Motorola, global manufacturer, showing how this company is integrating its global taxonomy with its CMS (Content Management System) to improve navigation and labeling consistency and to drive dynamic content on its customer-facing website, www.motorola.com.
KM
The KM Technology Continuum: Tools and Trends KM is facilitated by a range of technologies - it is not comprised of a single class of product. KM is not search, it is not content management, it is not collaboration. These are component tools of KM that need to be assembled within the context of organizational processes and cultural buy in. In this session we'll explore this continuum along with example applications as well as ways to associate tools in the KM toolkit with specific processes.
- The continuum of knowledge processes
- Knowledge management lifecycles
- Classes of KM technology
- Association of classes with processes
- Example applications
SNA
Social Network Analysis and Knowledge Processes: Connecting People and Content
We all know about the value of social networks – a number of years ago author and KM researcher John Seeley Brown wrote “The Social Life of Information” which talked about how when looking at a piece of content, a great deal of value was placed on the social context – who wrote the document, whether we knew or trusted that person, if we personally worked on the artifact, and so on. Many times when looking for a document, what we really want to do was find the right person - and the document becomes the pointer to the expert.
Lately, social networking applications have come to the fore - sites like LinkedIn and the youth oriented Myspace, but also applications that attempt to leverage collective knowledge and collective behaviors. While some of these applications hold great promise for the future, there are some very practical methodologies that can be applied today in order to understand and leverage formal and informal workgroups and knowledge networks.
Social Network Analysis, and it's corporate cousin, Organizational Network Analysis are analytical disciplines that, when applied to work processes, can yield exciting insights into the nature of how work gets done and how knowledge flows in both high functioning as well as dysfunctional environments.
These tools can be used as a diagnostic technique and as a way to target interventions aimed at improving knowledge flows. In this session, we will explore a very practical application of ONA to development of a global content strategy for a large electronics manufacturer. We'll show how this approach can help pinpoint bottlenecks in information flows and lead to new organizational designs that will facilitate content management processes.
Building out a collaboration framework and supporting content management systems assumes that the correct people are collaborating in the first place. ONA can help determine the best ways to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing in support of specific business objectives. Analysis results can bolster the business case for content management processes, tools and systems by revealing disconnects between content creators and content consumers. We’ll spend time on the basics of ONA and show an example of ONA in action.
The Use of Organizational Network Analysis in Content Management Projects
ONA is a relatively new technique that can be used to help improve the success of content management initiatives at organizations of all sizes. When implementing a content management strategy, a number of things need to take place in order to prevent the strategy from becoming “shelf ware”. On tool to help is ONA. ONA identifies repositories of knowledge that need to be connected through content processes as well as the key influencers in the organization that need to be brought on board in order to communicate and ‘operationalize” the strategy.
This session will discuss a case study where ONA was used:
- As a diagnostic to find content management pain points across the organization
- To determine key connectors across business units who needed to exploit the CMS in cross selling initiatives
- To identify hubs of influence who would be instrumental in making rollout a success
Attendees will learn:
- What ONA is and its relationship to Social Network Analysis
- How ONA is used in organizations
- The value that ONA brings to content management projects
- Example survey questions that can shed light on content challenges and opportunities
- How ONA is part of a comprehensive knowledge management project
Beyond Portal Search: Enterprise search and Search Appliances
There are lots of tools and techniques that can be applied to solving challenges around "findability". Some less informed people think you just put up a search box and that's about it. However, search can include a variety of tools that can be integrated as search applications and search systems.
In this session, we will see examples of advanced and innovative integrated search environments that will leverage various classes of search tool. This will include:
- Complex federated search
- Leveraging of large taxonomies
- Integration of multiple taxonomies
- Entity extraction
- Advanced clustering to improve search results and usability
- Integration of public data sources with custom taxonomies
- Auto linking of results
- Streamlined search that combines multiple data sources and leverages one result set to derive the second result set
- Natural language queries and semantic search
We'll also talk about the role and appropriateness of “search appliances” and provide some criteria for considering such a solution.
Product-Centric Search: Models for Extracting Implicit Metadata from Unstructured Content
Product search illustrates a number of search techniques that can be applied to creating innovative search solutions. This includes integration of structured and unstructured search, entitiy extraction, metadata mapping across systems, federated search, faceted result filtering, problems of embedded data, and varying untructured information formats.
In this session, we will examine each of these approaches and provide lessons for tackling complex search challenges. We will discuss implicit versus explicit metadata and retaining search context as metadata.
- Search as an application versus a utility
- Tuning search and mapping metadata across systems
- Integrating product information management and search strategies
- Challenges in heterogeneous environments
- Federated search to improve recall and retain context
- Entity extraction and faceted navigation
How Faceted Navigation Aids Discovery
Faceted navigation is one of the most interesting approaches to improving search precision and recall to appear within the past several years. There are a number of considerations to making the most of faceted navigation: choosing the correct facets, developing data models, leveraging explicit and implicit metadata, and testing application usability. Seth Earley will provide a high-level survey of these issues in this nuts-and-bolts session.
Search and the Effective IT Strategy
Search is not a utility or an appliance that you simply plug in and walk away from. However, many organizations don’t spend sufficient time developing a search strategy that fits within their larger infrastructure. Instead, they purchase tools and technologies, install them, and then decide that search does not work. Developing a search strategy cannot be an afterthought. Search needs to be considered in the context of information architecture, taxonomy, and content management. Earley will provide a practical approach to developing an actionable search strategy including checklists and example questionnaires.
Developing an Enterprise Search Strategy
There are numerous misconceptions about search that lead people to believe that it is about “installing a search engine”. The question of search is all too often limited to a technology choice and rarely considered within the context of a broader organizational framework.
As a result lots of money is spent, products are purchased, but the situation is often only improved marginally, and sometimes it can even get worse.
Search is not simply a box where we type one or two terms and expect to get exactly what we are looking for. Search is a framework. This presentation will outline the steps involved in developing a comprehensive search strategy including:
- Understanding your organization's content management and search maturity
- Search use case development
- Aligning search technology with your technical infrastructure
- Search governance & analytics
Developing a search strategy means thinking beyond the search box and understanding all of the elements in your organization that will contribute to successful implementation and management of search technology.
Web 2.0 / KM
Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management – How to harness network effects that lead to emergent organizational knowledge?
You are no doubt hearing about “Web 2.0”. Perhaps you have heard various definitions around “social networks”, emergence” or “collective knowledge” or even that techniques like social tagging and folksonomies will make content management systems and tools obsolete.
How much of this is just theory and how much is realistic? What is possible versus what is currently practical? In this session we will explore the legitimate phenomenon of complex systems and emergent behavior and discuss how to leverage these effects with social networks, social tagging and self organizing behaviors to facilitate knowledge creation and reuse.
Attendees will leave with:
- An understanding of the basics of complex systems
- How to practically facilitate emergence
- How different classes of technology can be leveraged in very different ways based on these principles
- Actionable take aways to make Web 2.0 more than just theory in your organization
Building a Search Strategy
Search is not a utility or an appliance that you simply plug in and walk away from. However, many organizations are not spending time developing a search strategy but are instead are purchasing tools and technologies, installing them and then deciding that search does not work and starting over again. Developing a search strategy cannot be an afterthought. Search needs to be considered in the context of information architecture, taxonomy, and content management. Organizations are struggling with unifying their content management tools, enterprise information and search systems so that information can evolve with changing markets and business processes yet remain in context to user needs. How can you create a search strategy that will address diverse business and technical requirements without creating redundant integration points as new repositories and applications are developed? This session provides practical approaches to developing an actionable search strategy including checklists and example questionnaires as well as illustrative findings and approaches.
Using Taxonomies to Improve Search
What are the various ways that taxonomy can be applied to search? Faceted search is one, but what are others? Since taxonomy is a core organizing principle of a content management application and related search tools, there are numerous ways to influence search recall and precision by using thesaurus structures and taxonomies. Even search appliances can leverage taxonomies, and integrated search applications can maintain context of federated search using taxonomies. This practical workshop covers a variety of ways that you can integrate and fully leverage large public taxonomies as well as apply small controlled vocabularies in search applications and search systems. It discusses examples of advanced and innovative integrated search environments that leverage metadata and taxonomies with various classes of search tools.
Search as a Platform
Search is a service, no it’s an application, no it’s a utility… Search is all of those things. Search is foundational and can be considered a platform for offering a variety of information access functions. By understanding the implications of a search framework, each application’s characteristics (degree of structure, processes supported, quality of metadata, etc) can be fully leveraged for optimum precision and recall. Taking this approach means that common search requirements are bundled and organized according to the most effective approach: use of a plug and play search appliance, development of faceted search, clustering algorithms, auto categorization, stored queries, and so on. A search platform facilitates distributed search and federated search by connecting various search mechanisms while retaining source context. This session will explore various models for developing a search platform using integration frameworks and web services and will explain various approaches in technical and non technical language.
Semantic Search
What is Semantic Search? One can argue that all of search is about semantics. Typically when people talk about “semantic search” they are thinking about concept based search – searching on an idea versus searching on a keyword out of context. There are a number of approaches to enabling semantic search – linguistic analysis, Bayesian algorithms, rules based approaches, even so called “social search”. Linking a search engine to thesaurus structures can provide “see also” references – results that are conceptually related to the search that the user is executing. Semantic search is based on context and approaches need account for the body of content, user processes and user roles. One powerful approach is “disambiguation”. Disambiguation allows a search engine to take a very broad term and return back terms that have a more granular meaning and present those that are most appropriate for the user. This session will discuss these and other factors that make semantic search practical and usable.
Building a Practical Semantic Framework: The role of taxonomies and controlled vocabularies in data integration
What if your sales organization spoke French, customer service English, and Product Development Italian? What is the likelihood of getting consistent answers, creating consolidated reports, and building applications that cut across processes? Unless you painstakingly translated terms to a common language, it wouldn’t be possible. In fact, you do speak different languages – different parts of the organization have terminology and jargon or their own conventions that make it difficult to integrate applications and search consistently. Learn how a number of global organizations have handled taxonomy issues on an enterprise basis, creating a common semantic framework as the foundation for integration.
Applied Semantics: The Web and Enterprise View
Introduction to Metadata, Taxonomies, Taxonomy Governance & DRM
- What’s a taxonomy and why do you need one?
- How do you make a semantic architecture practical in the organisation?
- Developing a consistent terminology with common understanding
- Laying the necessary foundation for integration, search, content and records management
- The politics of change management
Taxonomy Governance, Development & Implementation
How do you make a semantic architecture practical in the organization?
Developing a common understanding and consistent terminology is a good place to start and lays the necessary foundation for integration, search, content and records management, business process management, even a services oriented technical architecture.
Semantics are about meaning, nuance and context.
Building and implementing a taxonomy impacts application design, application integration, search engine tuning, metadata strategies and operational components such as user adoption and training. The goal is to create a shared understanding of concepts and processes so that information can be tagged and accessed in the context of work tasks and user goals.
This session will go through taxonomy project processes for derivation, validation, testing, integration, rollout and governance.