Last week I dropped in on the IntraTeam 2015 conference in Copenhagen, an event focused on intranets with some content on enterprise search. After a rather pleasant evening of Thai food and networking I attended the last day of the event. The keynote speaker was Dave Snowden, who has an amusing and rather curmudgeonly style of presentation, making sure to note the previous presenters he’d disagreed with for their over-reliance on simplistic concepts of knowledge and how the brain works. His talk was however very interesting and introduced the Cynevin framework (a Welsh word which apparently refers to homing sheep!). He also discussed how the rush to digitisation has had a cost in terms of human cognition, how the concept of an intranet will soon disappear (a brave assertion at an intranet conference) and how future systems should perhaps use storytelling metaphors – with some great examples of how collecting these micro-narratives from employees and others can produce extremely rapid feedback on the health of a business.
Andreas Hallgren of Chalmers University showed the evolution of their site-wide search facility, now based on Apache Solr. Unsurprisingly one of the main problems was determining who ‘owns’ search in their organisation: at least now they have a staff member who dedicates 25% of their time to improving search. He had some interesting points about the seasonality of academic searches and how analytics can be used to ‘measure more, guess less’. I was up next talking about Search Turned Upside Down, using a similar set of slides to this one: thanks to all who came and asked some great questions.
Next was Helen Lippell who I have heard speak before on how to get Enterprise Search right – Helen had some great anecdotes and guidance for an attentive audience. Ed Dale followed with five tips for great search: index the right content, optimise this content, measure search, make a great UI and listen to your users – I can only agree! He also characterised the different kinds of content including the worrying ‘content we think we have but we don’t’. The last presentation I attended was by Anders Quitzau of IBM on their fascinating Watson technology: sadly this was a rather marketing-heavy set of slides, with plenty of newly minted buzzwords such as Cognitive Computing and very little useful detail.
Thanks to Kurt Kragh Sorenson and Kristian Norling for inviting me to speak and attend the conference, next time I hope to see a little more of the event!
