Venkatesh writes that while the technical challenges faced by enterprise search are daunting, they can be solved with enough engineering talent. He thinks the real reasons for failure lie in organizational behavior.

I desperately want him to be wrong about office politics undermining enterprise search, but I suspect he’s right. I’ve experienced it.

The situation

In a previous job, I served as a consultant deploying enterprise content management systems. The company was making a big push to get their software installed on every workstation. Getting the software onto more computers meant more employee licenses meant more money.

Most end users disliked the content management system. Putting stuff into the systems was time-consuming and difficult process. Unless managing corporate records or documents was your job, it competed with all the other work you had to do.

The enticement for registering material in the content management system was that it became searchable and sharable. That’s nice, but many employees had worked out some method of finding stuff on their own computers, however inefficient. And you can always share stuff by sending endless streams of email back and forth, however much people say they hate that. No, the real draw of enterprise search was being able to find other people’s stuff.

My job was to battle the adoption problem. You needed a large base of employees contributing material to build the network effects. You needed enough other people contributing their stuff to entice you to search and contribute your stuff. If you didn’t get a critical mass, the system wouldn’t work.

So you’d think that the software company I worked for would have invested massive amounts of time and effort in making the search and sharing features as attractive and usable as possible, right?

Wrong. The search and sharing features sucked.

It took me several years to figure out why.

Cross purposes

Although the more users = more licenses = more money equation seems simple enough, my old software company knew that the secret to sales was getting upper management to sign the check. And their reasons for paying for a system are quite different than employees’ reasons for using the system.

Usability failure.

At one company I worked with, the biggest champion of the content management system was the corporate counsel. She wanted all important records and documents collected in one system. This would bring the company into compliance with Sarbanes Oxley and a host of other government regulations. Public companies are required to keep records.

But public companies hate being sued. And they really hate the “discovery” process by which lawyers pick through corporate records looking for misdeeds. An ideal content management system, she explained, would be one where you could add records (as required by law) but never get them out again (to keep the company out of trouble).

At another company I worked for, a senior leader wanted more information about far-flung satellite offices. He had responsibility for service delivery and quality control, and wanted to monitor everything. His position and authority depended on him being “in the know”.

But it also depended on others not knowing the things he did, or being able to draw their own conclusions from his data. He particularly didn’t want these satellite offices coming up with their own ways of doing things, without help from headquarters and from him. An ideal content management system would vacuum data directly from all his service techs machines — ideally without their intervention — and piped directly to him for analysis. Only he or members of his staff were to have access to the information in the system after it had been entered.

For these check-signers and management champions, the fact that our enterprise search sucked was a feature, not a bug.

Cognitive Dissonance

Most organizations simply aren’t ready to adopt the radical transparency and decentralization that pervades the web, even if they accepted these things as worthwhile goals. Many wouldn’t think it necessary. And some will actively resist it.

The same features that engage knowledge workers may actually put off those in management. This inevitably leads to compromises in the design and implementation of enterprise search tools.

And if enterprise search isn’t comprehensive, a lot of what makes it compelling as a solution is lost. It becomes yet another repository that must be consulted and cross referenced, in addition to all the other partial solutions that already exist within the organization. It will add to the noise, rather than reduce it.

Venkatesh is surely right that if your organization’s culture is hostile to information sharing, or even ambivalent about it, your enterprise search initiative is likely to fail. You’ll be forced to make compromises that undermine the system. And there are plenty of consultants and software companies that will help you sabotage your effort. You’ll get a broken system, because on some unconscious level, that’s what your company wanted.

But if there’s a shred of hope, it’s this: Not all corporate cultures are hostile to information sharing. Some enterprises thrive on it. And politics and culture can be changed. It just isn’t as easy as buying and installing software.

Related posts:

1. Two Strategic Visions for Enterprise 2.0
2. Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
3. Enterprise 2.0: What’s up with Google?

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

The title of the book is a bit misleading; it contains a collection of thought-provoking essays rather than a coherent statement of principle. But it’s worth reading closely because it’s an insightful critique of current techno-culture made by a prominent technologist that helped to create that culture.

Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers of virtual reality technology. He’s worked on human computer interface research and design in Silicon Valley for decades. When he discusses the dark side of social media, social software, and the Web 2.0 ethos, he does it with an insider’s eye and enthusiast’s attention to detail.

If you’re looking for a thinker to challenge the current techno-centric zeitgeist championed by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier is your man.

Lanier touches on many different topics relating to culture and technology in this series of essays. But if I had to pick three themes that captured my imagination, these would be:

1. How collective or collaborative Web 2.0 designs devalue individual contributions
2. How social software cheapens interpersonal relationships
3. How the pursuit of artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence

To understand fully the arguments Lanier is making, you’ll need to read the book itself. But I’ll try to summarize the key points here, partly as a reminder to myself.

Emphasizing collective ownership harms individual initiative

One of Lanier’s central themes is that the ethos of anonymous social production devalues the contributions of creative individuals. Contributing ideas and artifacts anonymously often means that the significant contributions to knowledge and culture made by individuals go unacknowledged.

If people aren’t rewarded for their efforts somehow, most will stop participating. Only the tiny minority that find the act of creating new music or books or software intrinsically rewarding will continue to do so. But these can be expensive hobbies. How will those individuals pay their bills?

And if fewer folks make original contributions to culture or knowledge, then online culture might degenerate into nothing more than remixing or repeating previous material.

Social software reduces relationships

The praise lavished upon the current crop of social media and social software tools must be galling for a researcher that has spent his entire career inventing technologies to deepen human interactions on the Internet.

Lanier provides many examples of how these “social” systems dumb-down human thought and opinion, and eliminate any nuance in relationships.

What does it mean to boil down all interpersonal connections to the single act of “friendling” or “following”? This reduces human relationships to the equivalent of a second-grader’s hastily scribbled “Do you like me? Check this box!” note.

Other means of social or collaborative filtering are just as primitive. The advantage of simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating systems is that the results can be easily aggregated and calculated by computers. The results might help gauge popularity, but lack the depth and context that human reviews provide.

Many of these tools, with their profiles and avatars, make self-definition a conscious and deliberate act. In the past, only public figures and celebrities needed to manage their identities carefully. Now we all do.

Worse, these constructed identities tell us much more about our tools than they do about ourselves. We stuff our resumes with keywords so that search engines can find them. We tailor our public profiles, leaving out gender or age or location, so we won’t be deluged with advertising. It’s not about who we are. It’s not even about how we want other people to understand us. It’s about how we want our computers to see us.

Artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence

Lanier devotes several large sections of You Are Not a Gadget to deconstructing the idea of computationalism. There are several strands to this belief, the primary tenet of which is that the human brain processes information like an ideal Turing Machine would.

If human thought is computable, then it is only a matter of time before computers become humanly intelligent.

This goal has become the holy grail of the Artificial Intelligence community. But Lanier points out that today’s hardware and software have limitations that cause them to deviate from an ideal Turing Machine. (It’s not physically possible to construct one, so it’s less a real “machine” than a thought experiment carried out by Alan Turing, for which it is named.)

But even if you could work around the technical limitations, it’s not clear that human intelligence is computable at all. The brain-as-computer analogy might be completely false. Despite the fact that processing power is getting faster and cheaper all the time, it could be that machine intelligence is a very different thing than human intelligence. Computers will never catch up to people; they are running a different race.

Lanier notes that despite a few well-publicized successes, progress in artificial intelligence has been slow, and its definition of success has shifted over time. Yet it’s still an article of faith in Silicon Valley. It is the motivating philosophy behind Google and hundreds of other companies there, and it infuses the culture of the technology industry in general.

He worries that the drive to create artificial intelligence harms our understanding of the human kind. In the tech industry’s rush to build and promote machine intelligence, it could accidentally create solutions that constrain individual creativity, thought and judgment.

Worse, the notion of computationalism contributes to the sense that computers and people are interchangeable. If you only had a big enough server farm in the cloud, the thinking goes, you could replace most of what people do with their brains. And the bits that computers can’t calculate or simulate could be gathered or harvested by aggregating the actions of billions of anonymous users online. Humans become just another input device to the computing cloud.

Conclusion

While the idea that an individual is just one component of the vast collective consciousness of the Internet might be appealing to some, it’s a horrifying proposition for humanists that celebrate individual creativity and initiative.

Lanier reminds us that our technologies have cultural implications. We shape our tools, but they also shape us. We should be mindful of the effects that these tools will have on the way we think and interact.

We are not gadgets, he says, and we should be skeptical of technologies that treat us that way.

Related posts:

1. People in the Computer
2. Jabberwocky
3. Review: Ambient Findability

So what have we been up to lately?

Based on the continuing feedback from our initial release of Infovark, we decided to forgo a 1.5 update and push ahead to Infovark 2.0. Our second release brings several major changes.

First, we’re focusing the core of the application on keeping things together. Whether you call it information management or knowledge management or content management, it all boils down to one key principle: having one place to look to find what you need. Infovark will help gather and organize your stuff so you can spend more time doing and less time searching.

Second, we’ve cut out many of the confusing parts of our application. This includes just about anything that caused us to get a bewildered look or blank stare when we tried to explain it. The cuts include one or two features that are dear to our hearts — and may resurface in later versions in different forms — but we think simplicity and ease of use is an important feature, too.

Third, the new focus and stripped-down feature set has allowed us to completely re-engineer the Infovark user interface. Where before we had a separate “Manager” application and a website for everyday use, we now have one consolidated view of your information.

We’re really excited about the new direction the product is taking. As we get closer to launch, we’ll share more details.

Until then, happy varking!

Related posts:

1. Infovark 2009
2. Ideas are Easy
3. One to Throw Away

I’ve talked a lot about the drab look of enterprise applications. Most corporate-ware simply looks unfinished to me. I’m surprised by companies that will pay millions for fancy office space, but won’t spend a little extra to make their internal applications a little more pleasant to use.

But then I saw an article on Read Write Web reviewing an application that touted its battleship gray color scheme as a feature. No kidding: Waste company time without getting caught using FaceoffIM. It’s corporate camouflage in action!

FaceoffIM: Ugly is the new social?

Battleship gray, indeed. Why fight grim a corporate culture when you can employ a little subterfuge?

Related posts:

1. Whoa! Look at the Colors, Man!
2. You Sank my Battleship!
3. Why the Web has Won

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management is the title of Scott Berkun’s revised second-edition book on project management. It contains the lessons distilled from a career in getting a team of people to work together to achieve common goals.

The book doesn’t spend time on any particular methodology. Instead, the focus is on the practical skills you’ll need to determine priorities, manage tasks, and lead teams. There’s no grand theories here; just things that have been proven to work.

If you’re an accomplished project manager, you’ll probably find the book a bit basic. But for someone like me, who accidentally finds himself in charge of teams from time to time, it contains down-to-earth descriptions of the essential tools and skills you’ll need to get things done.

The book is organized well, with clear section headers, lists and diagrams. It makes it easy to find the sections you need. The revised edition also contains discussion questions and what-if scenarios, which I found useful for putting the advice in context.

I really appreciated Scott’s focus on pragmatism and real-world issues. If it’s more complicated than making prioritized lists or checking in with the members of your team regularly, you won’t find it here. But those simple reminders are just the sort of advice many of us occasional project managers need to keep things on track.

Related posts:

1. Review: Thinking with Type
2. Review: Keeping Found Things Found
3. Review: Ambient Findability