Earley Information Science Team
We're passionate about managing data, content, and organizational knowledge. For 25 years, we've supported business outcomes by making information findable, usable, and valuable.
Annual Enterworks Engage User Conference
Sep 16, 2018
The 2018 Enable User Conference is free and open to all Enterworks customers. This event brings EnterWorks’ PIM and MDM experts and users together to connect, share best practices, learn, and grow. EIS is pleased be a Silver sponsor for the event. If you are going, be sure to stop by and say hello to the EIS team: Jeannine Bartlett, Chief Digital Strategist and Alison Tran, Client Partner.
MinneBOS: Boston Analytics Conference
Aug 23, 2018
MinneAnalytics, the Twin Cities Big Data, Data Science and Analytics Community, has announced its first East Coast analytics conference, planned for August 23 at Boston University Questrom School of Business in Boston, MA. Like their Midwest events, this event is expected to be accessible, authentic and engaging. Imagine an all-day, multi-track event in the Boston area for 400-700+ people for free. Seth Earley will be speaking at the event on the topic of "There is No AI (artificial intelligence) without IA (information architecture)." To learn more and get involved or become a speaker contact the organizers at boston@minneanalytics.org. Seth's presentation deck for, "There's No AI Without IA" is available for download. Click here.
The Revolution in B2B Customer Engagement
May 8, 2018
As buyer expectations continue to grow, sellers scramble to up their game, say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable. One rising star: the online marketplace. It used to be that it was all business on the B2B front. Buyers didn’t expect to find a touchy-feely environment as they trudged from site to site—and manufacturers and distributors were happy to comply, delivering the goods in a bare-bones setting. But as B2C marketers have worked hard to make it easier for shoppers to find what they need, the fallout has found its way to B2B. Buyers there are increasingly impatient with experiences that fall flat and leave them frustrated, compared with what they now expect when shopping as a pure consumer. In short, the revolution has arrived in B2B, rewriting the rules of customer engagement in both the direct and distribution channels and giving rise to a new star, the online marketplace, said a panel of experts at a recent Executive Roundtable hosted by Earley Information Science (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business impact. The message is clear, the experts said: B2B players have to up their game in an ever-more complicated ecosystem where roles have blurred and expectations are soaring. “Think about how complex this has become for most of our business models,” said Jeannine Bartlett, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Strategist of EIS. In traditional manufacturing, for example, “it’s hard to know if you are a consumer brand or B2B. Or are you B2B2C?” In some cases, these classifications have lost much of their meaning. “What hasn’t lost its meaning, though, is that you have a lot of trading partners you are sharing the load with.” What all B2B players are after, Bartlett added, “is getting into the right customer engagement touchpoints, regardless of where they live around the ecosystem—whether we own them or they are owned by our trading partners or are out in the wild on social media. But doing that in a coordinated, choreographed way is the challenge in 2018: the trick is to make it look like a seamless, frictionless experience for the customer regardless of who’s providing the interaction.” The April 18 discussion, “What’s New/Now/Next in B2B Customer Engagement,” was led by Bartlett, who was joined by Siamak Baharloo and Nicholas Rioux, the co-founders of Labviva, a B2B marketplace in the life sciences sector. Baharloo is the company’s Chief Executive Officer and Rioux serves as the Chief Technology Officer. To offer the right B2B experience, you first have to understand that there are two personas to satisfy, with “intrinsic conflicts of interest,” Baharloo said. There are the business buyers, “driven by priorities set for them by a finance or procurement department—they want to standardize purchasing,” automate the process, cut costs and get the most leverage when dealing with suppliers and manufacturers. Then there are the consumers, who want “to have access to the widest variety and availability of products, and they may be concerned about parameters other than price.” All B2B companies must understand the differences between the two personas, Baharloo said, “and have a solution that addresses the needs of each one.” The advent of marketplaces in B2B is one acknowledgment of those differences. The marketplaces are collections of “very specific, very technical expert-level shops, manufacturers and distributors that provide large amounts of choice for the end users,” Baharloo said. They offer “a much more comprehensive set of products and solutions that goes beyond what is available in general markets and distribution chains.” Easier said than done, Labviva’s Rioux said. “One of the challenges with marketplaces is doing this in scale. You’re not just selling a single product portfolio from one manufacturer with 10,000 products. For the customer experience to be rich and have the product selection that the customer is looking for, you need a process and a system that can handle millions of products and billions of parameters because you are bringing products together from many sellers.” In Labviva’s case, Rioux said, “we need to be able to handle millions of scientific products with millions of different applications. And so we heavily automate this,” augmented by the newest techniques in natural language programming and statistical evaluation. “The secret to participating in a high-information market like this in the B2B space is beyond having operational excellence for transactions and order taking.” What’s key is grappling with “theoretically an unlimited portfolio” of product information, “so you to need to constantly improve your data quality” and that’s where automation becomes such a big part of the differentiation. Whatever the challenge, the marketplace channel is proliferating, Baharloo said. Many sectors are adopting it and “it is going to be a lot more significant in the coming years, giving the old established distributors and manufacturers a real run for their money. Customer experience, the user experience, is at the heart of it. Done right, it can be revolutionary.” All customers, whether B2B or B2C, “are looking for neutral trusted advice,” said EIS’s Bartlett. “In a way, marketplaces can act as that neutral third party,” she noted, by aggregating expertise and content that adds value for both buyers and sellers. “In effect, marketplaces are becoming the Consumer Reports of a given vertical that helps the dialogue go back and forth.” The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees: In describing their approach to customer engagement, 13% said they are “customer obsessed” and in dialogue at every buying stage; 38% have “solution offerings” for key customer types; and another 38% share customer engagement with their trading partners. But 13% focus on “describing what we sell rather than on who buys.” In assessing the added value that new marketplace alternatives offer, 25% said they participate in marketplaces as an extension of their customer engagement strategy while 75% are still investigating how the channel could fit into their strategy. One-third of the attendees said they have plans to go beyond product data syndication and fund next-generation engagement strategies within the next 12 months; two-thirds are still evaluating ways to leverage their current approach. Please use this link to access the roundtable. The Earley Executive Roundtable is an educational webinar series focusing on topics of interest in the areas of digital transformation and information science. Each month, EIS leads a lively discussion with a panel of industry experts. The next Roundtable, taking place on June 20th, will explore the implications of building voice capabilities whether that is for conversational commerce, voice-based search or chat/voice hybrid interfaces. Use this link to register. About Earley Information Science: EIS is a specialized information agency. We support business outcomes by organizing your data—making it findable, usable and valuable. Our proven methodologies are designed specifically to address product data, content assets, customer data and corporate knowledge bases. We deliver governance-driven solutions that scale and adapt to your business as it grows. For more information, visit www.earley.com.
B2B Online 2018
May 7, 2018
Earley Information Science is pleased to sponsor B2B Online for the fourth year in a row. B2B Online is where the top manufacturers and distributors meet, collaborate and learn about the newest innovative strategies to bring your customers the best online experience. Designed to build your business and your profit, we cut out the fluff and provide you with content from the companies who have and are reshaping their digital marketing strategy. Jeannine Bartlett, SVP & Chief Digital Strategist for EIS, will lead a Cocktails & Conversation for B2B Best Practices Roundtable on the topic of 'What's New-Now-Next in B2B Customer Engagement' starting at 4:55PM on Monday, May 7th. Download the agenda.
ASPECT ACE 2018 - Build momentum with customer experience
Apr 23, 2018
Register: https://www.aspect.com/microsites/aspect-customer-experience-2018 Join us at ACE 2018 to explore ways to provide unforgettable service, to make the most out of every interaction, and to ensure your employees have the tools and knowledge they need to do their jobs better than ever. Seth Earley will be speaking. There’s No AI without IA: Artificial Intelligence Driven Customer Support using Information Architecture and Knowledge Engineering Many organizations are experimenting with artificial intelligence technology – whether for predictive analytics, chat bots, conversational search or intelligent virtual assistants. What these have in common is the need for the right data and content. In fact, many in the field have identified having the right “training data” as more important than the software algorithm itself. Chatbots are no exception and need to be fed the right knowledge in the correct form in order to function appropriately. That information and knowledge has to be architected to suit chatbot functionality but can also improve customer self service and call center productivity through traditional applications. In this session, knowledge management and AI expert Seth Earley will explain how existing knowledge assets can be engineered to support many types of applications and how improving content and data hygiene can provide value today while preparing organizations for the future.
Product Data: The Great Enabler for IoT, Marketplaces and More
Apr 5, 2018
Well-organized, consistent and accessible information is not only essential for ecommerce – it also serves as the lifeblood for the Internet of Things, new marketplaces and many other digital initiatives, say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable. Detailed, accurate and comprehensive product data makes all the difference in ecommerce. By improving the quality of the data, searches are more successful, user experiences are richer and cross-selling and up-selling are more likely. That’s old news, of course. But what many companies have not fully understood is how much more important product data has become to a new generation of online services, said a panel of experts at a recent Executive Roundtable hosted by Earley Information Science (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business impact. “Yes, the foundation of world-class commerce is world-class product data,” said Dino Eliopulos, Managing Director of EIS. “But that’s just the beginning of the picture – what you have now is an ecosystem that is driven by the initial investment in the data, giving it a life outside of ecommerce.” That life is playing out in countless new directions, including supporting online marketplaces, syndicating products to different partners and breaking traditional channels with things like replacement part guides and ways to provide information at the time of need, even for people who aren’t original purchasers. But perhaps the most high-profile use is with the Internet of Things (IoT) – machines wouldn’t be able to connect and have something meaningful to say without data-driven reporting, diagnostic and analytic tools. And looking ahead to other uses, augmented reality is just around the corner. In all these cases, the information has to remain world class by being well-organized, accessible and consistent across platforms and language barriers. The March 28 discussion, “Product Data: The Great Enabler for IoT, Marketplaces and More,” was led by Eliopulos, who was joined by digital marketing managers from three manufacturers: David Bonk, Senior Product Information Management Analyst at Graco, which makes fluid-handling products, like paint sprayers, pumps and industrial processing equipment; Russ Sharer, Vice President of Global Marketing and Business Development at Fulham, a lighting sub-systems company; and Luis Marcos, Digital Transformation Leader in environmental and energy solutions for Honeywell/Home & Building Technologies, Europe/Middle East/Africa. The panelists discussed the difficulties in creating and maintaining world-class data as well as the increasing number of benefits that can accrue. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are still at the crawling stage, trying to master their data and build the platform from which they can ultimately extend the range of their business. Why is it so hard to get started? “In crossing the bridge to digitization,” David Bonk said, “product data is often overlooked or initially undervalued – it’s kind of hard to just dip your toe in the water and take on a huge initiative like a website revamp.” His company made the commitment to invest in “future proofing our product data,” and now has a PIM (product information management) solution in place. That said, “the hardest part is collecting, aggregating and normalizing all of the data and building some governance around it across the organization,” adding that change is particularly hard when legacy systems are at play. “Getting all the data to synchronize is really a key issue,” Russ Sharer said, offering his company’s experience as an example. “In the last 25 years, we’ve done some acquisitions, involving systems that used different formats and nomenclatures.” One organization used 12-digit part numbers, another used 20. And then there are the language challenges. Fulham has operations in China. Comparing data in Mandarin with data in English is “difficult,” Sharer said. Another challenge is getting buy-in. Companies have different stakeholders, Luis Marcos noted. “There is a certain investment of time to put everyone on the same page. That means working on the business case, creating awareness, making sure that everyone understands the benefits of the initiative.” The benefits for ecommerce are clear. “You have better navigation and you increase your product awareness and that contributes to channel growth and revenue growth,” Marcos said. But that’s only for starters as data initiatives multiply. “We’re going to leverage our product data for print and more effectively syndicate our data to our customers, our distributors,” David Bonk said. “We are also going to be faster to market with our products because we will have a more defined way of collecting and managing our product information.” And some industries will use the data to redefine their mission. Because IoT applications will make it possible to understand how a given light fixture is aging, Russ Sharer explained, his industry is moving from being a “consumable-oriented business to more of a service offering,” with major implications for energy use and operating costs. The great enabler in all of these contexts is “managing and mastering your data,” EIS’s Eliopulos said. “It’s not a separate silo.” The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees: In terms of developing world-class product information, 19% say they are at that level and 31% are rolling out master organizing models, but 25% are only at the first stages of enrichment and another 25% are not yet making any special investments. Where is the value of master data? Fostering differentiation and innovation (38%), introducing new products and services (31%), supporting new channels (19%) and entering new businesses (6%). The remaining 6% say they have no apps to leverage yet. Are you extending your investment in PIM to support future business opportunities? 20% are doing that, and to great effect, and 10% have funding to start in the next year, but a big majority (70%) say they are still evaluating approaches. Please use these links to access the roundtable and a related article, “Analytics, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things.” The Earley Executive Roundtable is an educational webinar series focusing on topics of interest in the areas of digital transformation and information science. Each month, EIS leads a lively discussion with a panel of industry experts. The next roundtable is scheduled for Wednesday, April 18, at 1 p.m. ET, on “What’s New, and What’s Next, in B2B Customer Engagement.” For more information and to register click here: http://www.earley.com/training-webinars/whats-new-now-next-b2b-customer-engagement About Earley Information Science: EIS is a specialized information agency. We support business outcomes by organizing your data – making it findable, usable and valuable. Our proven methodologies are designed specifically to address product data, content assets, customer data and corporate knowledge bases. We deliver governance-driven solutions that scale and adapt to your business as it grows. For more information, visit www.earley.com.
IA Summit - Where Information Architects and Experience Designers Converge
Mar 23, 2018
In the fast changing world of technology and the advent of artificial intelligence information architects may fear that their expertise is no longer relevant. In this keynote, Seth Earley will show how IA is not only relevant but a driving force behind many AI applications today.
Putting Your Chatbots to Work
Mar 15, 2018
Don’t obsess about the technology – focus instead on equipping bots with carefully structured content and data to give customers what they want, sometimes even before they ask for it, say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable. Companies can be easily dazzled by their newest workers, the chatbots. They’re on the job 24/7, easing the load of “real” employees throughout the day and night. They never complain or get sick. And they don’t ask for raises. But companies can be just as easily disappointed when customers become frustrated by opaque and time-consuming interactions with the bots. It’s not the bots’ fault, said a panel of artificial intelligence experts at a recent Executive Roundtable hosted by Earley Information Science (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business impact. Yes, chatbots are loaded with the bells and whistles of AI technology. But content and data are their lifeblood – and many companies are sabotaging their new armies of virtual workers by not supplying them with enough knowledge about products and processes to do their job. Too often, the companies turn to off-the-shelf software that misses the mark in packaging their information. What is needed, the experts said, are organizing principles and classification systems that are fully aligned with the unique aspects of each company’s business. Without those nuts and bolts in place, a chatbot can’t retrieve the information that a customer has asked for. Nor can it get to the next level – anticipating unasked questions about other needs. “The data and the content are more important than the algorithm,” said Seth Earley, Founder and CEO of EIS. Notwithstanding all of its AI features, a chatbot is essentially “a channel to knowledge data and content, and when you have such a channel, you must have a knowledge architecture to support it.” Companies have to “repurpose” their existing content and data, he added, “to tag and organize it consistently so that it can be used for customer self-service, to support the call-center representative and across other types of AI systems.” The Feb. 21 discussion, “Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Management and Chatbots,” was led by Earley, who was joined by Tobias Goebel, Senior Director of Emerging Technologies at Aspect Software, a customer-engagement technology and customer experience company; Joe Gelb, President of Zoomin Software, which creates content publishing platforms; and Alex Masycheff, Co-Founder and CEO of Intuillion Ltd., a content management and software development firm. The panelists discussed how knowledge engineering supports AI’s role in improving the customer’s experience, including advances in conversational search and information retrieval. Key to the effort, they said, is putting the right information foundation in place. “Chatbots can answer user’s questions, but so can other communications tools,” said Masycheff. What sets them apart is that they are also able “to infer questions not asked and answer them as well.” But to pull that off, he said, they “must be able to capture context and be aware of the domain” in which they operate. And to make them aware in that way, chatbots have to be “fed with an ontology, a structured model of everything we know about this domain.” Another challenge is to help chatbots serve up all that information by engaging customers in “conversational AI.” Because the chatbot’s user interface is so different from the traditional graphical user interfaces of web sites, mobile apps and desktop applications, you have to make sure that the bot delivers information in discrete bite-size pieces easily understood by the customer, according to Aspect’s Goebel. Chatbots are dialogue-based, not screen-based. “It’s about gradual information discovery,” he said, “question by question, message by message.” There are great rewards in getting this right. On the flip side, though, there are great risks in getting it wrong. “If the conversational flow is not effective, the technology will be disregarded and have an adverse commercial effect,” said Zoomin’s Gelb. “Anything less than excellent is worse than nothing at all.” The panelists also discussed project costs (you can start small), governance (you really need it) and returns on investment (short- and long-term). The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees: 37% said their knowledge management function was aware and another 37% said it was competent. On the high end, 18% called it synchronized and 3% choreographed. But 5% said their function was unpredictable. Bot projects are generally valued: they are a major priority drawing executive attention and funding (35%), they are in development or deployed (33%), or they are in the initial investigation stage (38%). Some projects have limited proof of concept (28%), but only 3% of the attendees said that their leadership doesn’t see the value. Which bots are under consideration? Support and customer service (66%), internal HR functions (43%), conversational commerce (37%), lead conversion (29%), other types (37%). Please use these links to access the roundtable webcast and a related article, “Knowledge Engineering: Structuring Content for AI.” Seth Earley will be talking more about knowledge engineering’s critical role in enabling chatbots and other AI-driven initiatives at the 2018 ACE (Aspect Customer Experience) event in Las Vegas, in late April. The Earley Executive Roundtable is an educational webinar series focusing on topics of interest in the areas of digital transformation and information science. Each month, EIS leads a lively discussion with a panel of industry experts. The next roundtable is scheduled for Wednesday, March 28, at 1 p.m. ET, on the topic of “Product Data: The Great Enabler of IoT, Marketplaces and More.” To sign up, register here. About Earley Information Science: EIS is a specialized information agency. We support business outcomes by organizing your data – making it findable, usable and valuable. Our proven methodologies are designed specifically to address product data, content assets, customer data and corporate knowledge bases. We deliver governance-driven solutions that scale and adapt to your business as it grows. For more information, visit www.earley.com.
Getting Serious About AI: The Year of the Tipping Point
Feb 9, 2018
It’s time to cut through the confusion and get over the hype – approached in a pragmatic way, today’s AI will deliver value to your business, and at a manageable cost, say experts at Earley Information Science roundtable. Too much of the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence is coming across as noise, confusing many companies about what to do with AI and when. Some are pushing mountains of chips into the pot, betting on complicated projects to solve difficult problems – and typically coming up short. Others are sitting nervously on their hands, not sure where to start but convinced that the entry fee is prohibitive. Somewhere in the middle lies the promise of 2018. In recognizing and discounting the hype surrounding AI, companies can become realistic about what it can do, now, to add value to their business. And in building on the platforms that have already been developed by the Googles, Facebooks and Apples of the world, they can avoid the expensive exercise of inventing a rickety new wheel. “To the extent that AI projects are more narrowly focused, they are more achievable and provide more tangible benefits,” said Seth Earley, Founder and CEO of Earley Information Science (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business impact. “When AI is employed in realistic and practical ways, companies can begin to take the steps that will lead them to powerful new capabilities.” The steps that are available today – to manufacturers, retailers and service companies – were discussed by a panel of knowledge engineering experts at an Executive Roundtable hosted on Jan. 17 by EIS. The discussion, “Enterprise Adoption of AI Technology: Looking Ahead to 2018,” was led by Seth Earley and included three EIS partners who work with clients on AI initiatives: Dino Eliopulos, Jeanna Giordano and Jeannine Bartlett, the firm’s Chief Digital Strategist. All three assessed the AI landscape at the start of the new year and identified opportunities to pursue in 2018. In looking back at 2017 from a B2B perspective, “my headline is around the value of AI for product management,” said Eliopulos. Every investment that’s made in improving the quality and structure of product data “is an investment that improves the performance of AI.” Even better, those investments turn into a two-way street: “AI can be used to improve and enrich your product information and to support the construction of relationships between products and other products.” Which gets you to 2018, he said, “the year in which information architecture and AI meet the Internet of Things – many companies are seeing that as the next level of engagement in their marketplace.” Consumers are looking for the value-added services that transcend the individual product and tap into the ecosystem that the product is part of, a connection that is largely fueled by AI. “We all want our Alexas and Pandoras.” And then there are the industrial applications. Fast-food restaurants, for example, “are instrumenting their cooking and refrigerant devices, and monitoring and building dashboards and benchmarks, restaurant to restaurant, to improve their power footprint.” On the consumer side, said Jeannine Bartlett, “the biggest sort of aha moment of 2017” was how fast voice-activated search went from being something of a novelty – Alexa, Siri or speaking to Google – to starting to have a major impact on everybody’s business. In short, voice-activated search has become a real play in determining who is going to own the customer. Consumer adoption of “voice first engagement” will transform digital marketplace models in 2018, and retailers will scramble to secure a place in the “shopping conversation.” As market leaders invest more in smartphone-enabled conversational commerce and home device platforms, the outcome will likely turn on how well companies tie together “both product and service taxonomies,” either from their own cupboard or through “really tight” mergers and acquisitions (think Amazon and Whole Foods). “When product catalogs and service taxonomies get integrated with voice-activated search,” Bartlett said, “you wind up with some pretty powerful customer-journey scenarios.” As for the services sector, said Jeanna Giordano, three trends are worth noting. First, many companies are “starting to take a much more holistic view” of AI. Instead of focusing on the technology itself, they are looking “at how AI opportunities can be brought into play at various touch points and service interactions.” Second, they are recognizing that AI requires “a lot of good data and processes” and that “being really articulate about your knowledge, and having deep understanding of your own data, is critical” in dealing with AI vendors. And third is the possibility of developing new workplace models that view AI as a tool for “augmentation,” rather than just strict automation. “People can have richer opportunities by working in collaboration with some of these technologies,” Giordano said, and in using them to solve business problems. In that respect, AI is no different from all the other tech advances that have come before it. Despite its powerful potential, it is not going to make the human factor redundant, said Seth Earley. “It’s not about replacement – it’s about putting tools in the hands of humans, and that’s the way it has always been: to improve people’s capabilities and effectiveness and reduce the cognitive load as they engage in whatever their work is.” The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees: Only 17% said that AI is now a crucial part of their offerings. A quarter are testing pilots or proof-of-concept projects, 42% are in “very early” stages, 10% said AI is just a glimmer in leadership’s eye and 6% said it is not even on the horizon. In terms of the projects that are under consideration or being developed, more than a third, or 36%, identify patterns in data (“cognitive insights”), 22% involve chatbots, virtual assistants or product recommendations (“cognitive engagement”) and 11% revolve around robotic process automation (RPA), enabling rote or repeatable processes like data entry. More than a third, or 37%, said leadership understands AI and is realistic about what it can do, but 23% said their managers have unrealistic expectations, another 23% said they understand AI only on a rudimentary level and 13% said they don’t understand it at all. Please use these links to access the roundtable and a related article, “Enterprise Adoption of AI.” The Earley Executive Roundtable is an educational webinar series focusing on topics of interest in the areas of digital transformation and information science. Each month, EIS leads a lively discussion with a panel of industry experts. The next roundtable is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 1 p.m. ET, on the topic of “Knowledge Engineering for Chatbot Design.” To sign up, register here. About Earley Information Science: EIS is a specialized information agency. We support business outcomes by organizing your data – making it findable, usable and valuable. Our proven methodologies are designed specifically to address product data, content assets, customer data and corporate knowledge bases. We deliver governance-driven solutions that scale and adapt to your business as it grows. For more information, visit www.earley.com.