Thank you to all those who filled out their attendee surveys for KMWorld & Intranets, Enterprise Search West, and Taxonomy Boot Camp. We do value your feedback and pay attention to your suggestions.  If you did not have an opportunity to fill out a survey on site, you can fill one out online. Thanks, we hope to see you next year in San Jose at our events, November 17-19, 2009.

Leslie Owens, an analyst for Forrester, is this morning’s keynote at Taxonomy Boot Camp, a related conference to KMWorld & Intranets 2008.

Taxonomy impacts search in four key areas:  query pipeline, results pipeline, user/interaction analytics, indexing pipeline.

Evaluating search vendors against taxonomy criteria shows leaders including Endeca, Fast.

Information access sytems are complex and heterogeneous and include: interface, search system, content.  Enterprise search is used to crawl content, or federate to it, or leave some behind.  Not all content is equal or valuable.  Scope matters and communicating it is tricky — do you want multiple search boxes on one portal page?

So where should you invest your taxonomy effort?  With content — controlled vocabularies, browsing structures, social tagging and user profiling.  In the search system — entity extraction, custom intelligence, clustering/classification.  In the interface — navigation, facets, social tagging, user profiling.

Taxonomy coupling with search and enterprise content management (ECM) — align your taxonomy efforts with both ECM and search to fast forward your efforts.

Suggestions:  Align taxonomy initiatives with business objectives and technology investments — and show something so understanding will come.  Accept and influence your dynamic ecosystem.  Be perceptive and pertinent to the needs of your audience.  Dig in and deliver results.

Great visuals and slides here.

The presentation sessions have been great, and as you can see from the comments being posted here, nothing less than provocative. However, having not seen anything about the KMWorld 08 Exhibit Hall, let me attempt to get a conversation started on this, the other side of the conference “Tracks.”

The Attivio Luncheon and Web Event

Being a sucker for free lunches, I signed up for Attivio’s live web event, which included lunch, and the obligatory chance to win a free iPod or other such tech toy. Having been a part of the huge crowd attending Google’s lunch extravaganza yesterday, imagine my surprise finding today’s event tucked away in a tiny little room, with less than two-dozen “live” participants, along with an online audience.

The results of an instant survey, backed up by data from Forrester Research’s Matt Brown, quickly revealed what was going on. The main topic, the notion of bringing together the two very different worlds of enterprise search and business intelligence, was evidently anything but mainstream. But it quickly became apparent that “Mars and Venus” need to get together and start producing some offspring.

If you’ve read Prahalad and Krishnan’s book, “The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks, you’ll know that N=1 means that “one size fits all” is pretty much over. Brown reinforced this notion by noting that the size and diversity of the client base keeps expanding. The words he used were “options, options, options,” and “customize, customize, customize.”

Remember the notion that many dissatisfied customers never bother to tell you, they just tell all their friends? Sites such as http://caradvice.com.au and http://reviews.cnet.com, which were used as examples, show the serious impact this trend can have on your business.

It also exposes a widening gap in traditional business intelligence systems. Your CRM database, for example, may not even come close to revealing the true extent of your customers’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Enterprise data alone cannot give you an accurate response to the question, “What are our customers in demographic “X” saying about product “Y?”

Attivio’s SVP, Andrew McKay (pronounced, mik eye‘) provided a clear and understandable explanation, with examples, of how their Active Intelligence Engine unifies these two separate worlds. With all the discussion regarding innovation going on at the conference, Attivio’s platform should be held up as an excellent example. In fact, it was, having just received KMWorld’s Promise Award for 2008 this morning.

Before closing the session, an instant online survey conducted by host Andy Moore, KMWorlds’s Publisher, showed that only around 30% of respondents were even considering a “unified information access” approach, combining enterprise search and business intelligence in a meaningful and effective way. This is definitely a trend to watch. No, make that, get in on - starting now!

If you missed this event, you can sign up for the rebroadcast at http://webinars.kmworld.com/attivio/97/

Busy morning at the San Jose Convention Center for KMWorld & Intranets 2008. Dave Snowden & Mary Boone are leading a full day workshop on the “Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”. Theresa Regli is discussing enterprise search technology. Lots of workshops about building taxonomies, integrating taxonomies and auto-categorization supporting the Taxonomy Boot Camp event which begins on Wednesday evening. James Robertson focuses his workshop on strategies for innovative intranets and Peter Morville on information architecture 3.0. Ann Rockley is leading a workshop on content management strategies. More workshops will get underway this afernoon.