Earley Information Science Team

Governance is boring, difficult to implement, and rarely keeps the attention of leadership. However, the process of making resource decisions, getting value from technology investments, and solving core data quality issues in order to provide an optimal customer experience requires moving the organization from intent to action. This session will review case studies and describe a practical approach for getting and maintaining buy-in for governance initiatives and showing the tangible value from such efforts. By linking programs and projects to metrics around baselines and outcomes, a metrics-driven governance agenda will catalyze and guide the organization in implementing meaningful change.

With thousands of vendors in the marketplace, organizations are overwhelmed with choices around building their marketing technology stack. By evaluating tool choices according to a customer experience maturity model and aligning the results of that evaluation with the customer journey, organizations can make more intelligent choices around process gaps and acquire appropriate technologies to fill those gaps by relying on thoughtful analysis and fitness to purpose rather than being hijacked by slick vendor demonstrations. Using hands-on exercises, we will guide participants through the steps to understanding customer lifecycles and aligning stages with classes of technology in order to improve engagement. Attendees will leave with an approach for developing their own marketing technology blueprint.

Avoid the problem of “getting to governance” by putting governance first, and doing so quietly. In this presentation, Seth Maislin will explain how you can establish a culture of sustainability and ownership without ever using saying the G word aloud. Learn to create and support a top-down vision using metrics-driven communications, social campaigns, and spirited collaboration.

Historically, information development managers measure success in terms of on-budget and on-time delivery of content, plus some measure of end-user satisfaction with the content. No wonder our executives are left scratching their heads on the value of content developers to the firm – what is their ROI? How do we connect the dots between day-to-day content publishing activities (content development, editorial review, tagging, taxonomy, search), the knowledge work that info products enable (sales, service, support), and business outcomes (revenue growth, market share, margin)? In this session, Paul Wlodarczyk will share our point of view on managing information development processes to drive business outcomes. Paul will review real-world cases, including an intelligent assistant application at Allstate, to illustrate how we connect the dots: Relate business outcomes to value drivers (like revenue growth to lead generation). Relate knowledge worker success to value drivers. Measure user interactions with content using web analytics software, relate it to worker success. Measure content quality, relate it to behavior. Define a governance cycle using metrics to identify what content to develop and improve, and to measure the impact of content on the business outcome. This approach provides information development managers with a powerful framework for delivering “on-time, on-budget” as well as achieving targeted business outcomes (e.g., service time to solve, product time to market, cross-sell success, customer self-service, etc.). Attendees will learn: How search-based applications help us watch user interactions with content. How content processes can drive business outcomes. How to design governance dashboards using simple web analytics.

Business, Government and Academic Leaders Meet at Earley Information Science To Discuss Where AI Is, and Where It Is Going More than 120 leaders from business, government and academia met to discuss the impact and promise of artificial intelligence at an evening “knowledge salon” held recently at the headquarters of Earley Information Science (EIS) in Carlisle, MA. The gathering was hosted by Seth Earley, founder and CEO of EIS, and Susan Feldman, founder and executive director of the Cognitive Computing Consortium.AI is gaining traction in the marketplace, with Apple’s Siri, Google’s driverless car and other high-profile products and services capturing headlines along with our imaginations. Hundreds of startups are raising billions of dollars to employ AI in every area of business and consumer life. What does this mean for companies, and for government agencies and schools? What will the impact be on technology firms? And how will the workforce be affected? Are fears justified that AI’s machine intelligence and smart applications will take away jobs? Or, as was the case with the machines of the Industrial Revolution, will AI replace old tasks with new opportunities? “AI is at an inflection point,” Earley said, noting the theme of the salon. “Or to put it another way, it is a revolution in the making.” Representing a diverse range of industries and public-sector entities in the greater Boston area, the salon participants broke into about a dozen groups, discussing such topics as AI’s implications for the workforce, the investment landscape, the public-sector impact, industry applications and a primer on cognitive computing, the cutting-edge technology that is now powering AI’s advances. Tom Davenport, Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College and co-author of “Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines,” helped facilitate the discussion on near- and long-term implications for the workforce. The conversation revolved around ways in which robots can augment what humans are capable of, just as the machines of the 19th and 20th centuries expanded our physical capabilities. Davenport noted, "I liked the fact that the session participants were all passionate about finding a way for smart humans and smart machines to collaborate in the workplace." Others who shared their perspectives included: o Katie Stebbins, Assistant Secretary for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. “I was amazed at the range of expertise gathered at this venue and the ability to make the discussions accessible to a non-technology person. AI is going to impact all of us and it is important for the public sector to embrace and apply these new tools for serving the public interest and providing new education, growth and economic opportunities.” o Leslie Owens, former research director at Forrester Research Inc. and now executive director of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems Research. “It’s always nice to find a relaxed venue with smart, like-minded people to share ideas with. AI is going to increasingly touch all aspects of our lives and there are extremely important ramifications that business and technology people need to understand.” o Henry Truong, the chief technology officer of TeleTech, a call center and customer experience organization serving major technology players such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, as well as a who’s who of the financial services industry and companies organizations like FedEx and Ford. A $1.4 billion publicly traded company, TeleTech is already quite advanced in its use of AI in call centers encompassing 110,000 workers. But, said Truong, “Even though we leverage AI in many parts of our business, we know we have a great deal of work ahead of us. No one has the answer yet in fully leveraging AI—even the big technology firms and consultancies. The AI salon was a great place to discuss what people are doing and to see where pockets of innovation are occurring.” One outgrowth of the salon is the formation of an AI Working Group, now in the process of establishing a broad agenda to explore AI’s future. One of the group’s goals is to create a framework for evaluating potential AI projects. Another goal is to produce a policy paper, in conjunction with Governor Baker’s office, that would serve as a blueprint for the public and private sectors in Massachusetts to capitalize on AI’s ability to retrain workers and spur job growth.

Dave Ebert has joined the Earley Information Science team as Director of Delivery. Dave has extensive professional services experience both in the Financial Services industry and at digital agencies like Razorfish, Cloudberry Creative, and TandemSeven. He brings deep expertise in digital customer experience design and delivery, and has a wealth of knowledge and capabilities in managing large-scale project operations, as well as building and leveraging new delivery methodologies and tools. Dave joins EIS to continue to strengthen the methodologies and disciplines of the EIS delivery teams while also applying his expertise to EIS successes in digital customer experience engagements. His addition to the EIS team signifies the company’s continued investment and commitment in helping organizations drive digital business innovation, enhance customer experiences, and increase operational performance. “I’m thrilled about the opportunity to not only tackle the challenges that EIS helps organizations to overcome, but to help drive innovation around service delivery, and to organize and steer enterprise-level Program Management Offices that serve our customers. Dino Eliopulos, Managing Director, EIS, said “Dave’s wealth of knowledge and expertise has already made him a key addition to the EIS family. His appointment will enable us to expand our innovative and exceptional services capabilities. He is already helping us re-imagine process enhancements and launch a new Program Management Office (PMO) offering.”

When using virtual assistants, companies need to employ the right technology but also keep humans in the loop, say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable CARLISLE, MA (PRWEB) JULY 26, 2016 Companies and consumers are both captivated and frustrated by virtual assistants. They are dazzled by the ability of a Siri or a Watson to find just the right needle in the data haystack. But they are put off when other “intelligent” assistants prove to be anything but, offering searches that turn up the wrong things or leaving the user in limbo. The challenges posed by today’s virtual assistants, and the potential of tomorrow’s smarter agents, were the subjects of an Executive Roundtable discussion hosted on July 20 by Earley Information Science Corp. (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on digital transformation. The discussion, “Training the Robots: Evolving Virtual Assistants and the Human-Machine Partnership,” was led by Seth Earley, CEO of EIS, and Dino Eliopulos, Managing Director of EIS, and featured guest speakers Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester Research, and Manuel Ebert, a data scientist and founder of summer.ai. Today’s virtual assistants can provide huge advantages, the panelists agreed, but only if the relevant data is organized in the right way, the virtual assistants have been “trained” properly with the right technology, and humans are involved at sensitive junctures to make sure that the interaction with machines is as helpful and efficient as possible. Even if the language used by the assistant in the interaction is somewhat stilted, users will be forgiving so long as their goals are being met in a reasonable period of time. All that said, “we are at a very early stage” of development, Eliopulos noted. That makes it critically important to take full advantage of existing systems, said Curran. “We will get smarter over time,” Earley added, alluding to advances that will ultimately result in fully automated transactions conducted by intelligent agents equipped with natural language processing. The key to reducing current frustrations and producing more natural interactions is to understand that virtual assistants aren’t meant to replace humans but to augment them. Human-machine partnerships are needed, Curran said, as the systems move from “primarily taught to primarily learned” functionality. For now, “AI only gets you part way there, and the missing pieces will frustrate and alienate users,” said Ebert, the summer.ai founder. “Hybrid AI keeps humans in the loop to get to 100 percent.” Think of AI, he said, as the “extension of a human, not as a competitor,” and as a tool “to scale humans.” The roundtable included a real-time survey of the webinar attendees. Among the results: 40% of the respondents are still in an exploratory stage with AI, while an equal number are already employing it in a business process 60% use it for internal access to knowledge, while three other uses each attracted 10%: improving customer engagement, enabling self-service support and augmenting call-center workers 73% see the current value of AI as a step in an evolutionary process, but 18% say that no clear value has been identified yet To access the roundtable, please use this link: http://info.earley.com/roundtable-virtual-assistant-human-machine-partnership Also see this related blog. About Earley Information Science: EIS helps organizations establish a strong information architecture and management foundation to drive strategic business outcomes and enhance operational performance. EIS has more than 20 years of experience in working with Fortune 1000 organizations globally across many industries. Corporate headquarters are in the Boston metropolitan area with consultants working on projects around the world. For more about Earley Information Science, visit our website athttp://www.earley.com or contact us at info(at)earley(dot)com. ####

MAY 09 - 11, 2016 CHICAGO, IL B2C digital retailers learned early on that to win in the digital channel they needed to differentiate on user experience, and on the quality and richness of their product data. B2B industrial suppliers are quickly learning those same lessons – that to compete and win in digital, you not only need to provide products that your customers want, but also high quality product data (so they can discover products) and “ways to shop” (different user experiences to find and select products – e.g. “shop by brand”, “shop by application”, etc.). When you create a digital marketplace, you can’t rely upon product vendors – distributors need to “own” accountability for high-quality product data. Many industrial suppliers are now looking to update their product taxonomies, to review attributes to make sure they support the kind of shop and compare interface your customers need, and to internalize product data production to assure that data fill rates are high and quality is consistently high. In this presentation, Paul will review trends that Earley is seeing among industrial suppliers and large OEMs, and will discuss what it takes to internalize product data quality – how to rapidly overhaul your taxonomy and product data to attract new customers and win a larger share of wallet with more ways to shop and better data.

Carlisle, MA -- Earley Information Science is featured in KM World’s list of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management. The list which was released today is featured in the March 2016 issue of the publication. Early Information Science was recognized for its services to help organizations mine data and harvest contextual insights for stronger business outcomes. “Being named to our list of 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management is a prestigious designation because it represents the best in innovation, creativity and functionality,” says KMWorld Editor Sandra Haimila. “The 100 Companies offer solutions designed to help users and customers find what they need whenever and wherever they need it … and what they need is the ability to access, analyze and share crucial knowledge.” “We are extremely pleased to receive this award and recognition,” said Seth Earley, Earley CEO. “Additionally, in January KMWorld, named Allstate Business Insurance as the winner of this year’s KM Reality Award and Earley Information Science as a key contributor to their success. The KM Reality Award recipient is an organization that demonstrates leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits. ### About Earley Information Science: EIS helps organizations drive digital business innovation, enhance customer experiences, and increase operational performance. The company helps establish a strong information architecture and management foundation to drive strategic business outcomes and enhance operational performance. EIS has over 20 years of experience in working with Fortune 1000 organizations globally across many industries. Corporate headquarters are in the Boston metropolitan area with consultants working on projects around the world. For more about Earley Information Science visit our website at http://www.earley.com or contact us at info(at)earley(dot)com. About KMWorld KMWorld (www.kmworld.com) is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market and covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management, informing more than 30,000 subscribers about the components and processes - and subsequent success stories - that together offer solutions for improving business performance. KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc. (www.infotoday.com)