I have taken some new pictures for my Toy Comic Toolkit, some Stock Characters. I needed just some simple people shots where I could:
That is the update. It is a simple one, check it out I hope you like them.
It was a privilege to be part of the team for Microsoft® PowerPivot, a new product that will change business intelligence by empowering information workers with the ability to conduct ad-hoc data analysis on massive amounts of data.
I’m going to tell you a tiny part of the PowerPivot story which is how the product icon came to be.
A few weeks before the deadline for CTP2 I was asked to create a product icon for PowerPivot — sooner rather than later.
Here is what we thought… in the end :-)
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First we started with these sketches:
The Data, Information, Knowledge, & Wisdom hierarchy has shifted. Systems that store and transform data automatically apply simple or semantic metadata to the records they process.
What most consider data is really information in an early stage of refinement. Raw data off the sensor is something that a human will rarely see.
Information architects have the opportunity to extend their purview of information into what most would consider data.
- Information Warehouse not Data Warehouse
- Master Information Services not Master Data Services
The notes above are parts of an idea that has been bashing around in my brain for a while now. Data is Information. Information needs IAs.
I recently worked for the Microsoft SQL UX team; there I was exposed to many things that I had ignored throughout my career because I thought “I’m not a database guy”. Even now I’m not even a novice DBA but at SQL I was exposed to the problems that individuals and organizations have with managing and manipulating ‘massive’ amounts of data (I have massive in quotes because my personal definition of massive has changed dramatically). The challenges that I was asked to deal with was how people dealt with these problems… because I’m a designer. When I stopped thinking about data as a blob and starting thinking about it as information that people need in context then I realized that many of the issues that ‘information workers’ have with data are information architecture challenges.
Many of the people that I’ve met who have been responsible for massive data sets approach it from the supply side: Is it secure; is it highly available; is it optimized; is it clean; …etc. The people who need the data to do their job demand answers to their questions and don’t know, or need to know, the ER diagrams of your database. These people need to find pieces of data, understand how they relate and use it to answer their questions.
After my exposure to the difficulties people have manipulating data because they don’t understand its context, I became fascinated with how we could make this easier on people and provide more value to organizations. After all, my job isn’t to create better information systems my job is to make better information workers.
A few months ago I found a podcast where Jon Udell speaks with the Chief Scientist of IBM Entity Analytics, Jeff Jonas, who discusses a set of themes woven through his work, explored on his blog, and captured in a series of evocative phrases: perpetual analytics, non-obvious relationship awareness, sequence neutrality, “data finds data”, and anonymous resolution. I’ve listened to this 50 minute talk about a half a dozen times now and each time I find a new notion that totally blows me away.
When the “data can find the data,” there exists an opportunity for the insight to find the user.
Content, Context, Users + Intent
For even more on this check out Jeff’s blog post or download chapter seven by Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol from Beautiful Data (O’Reilly)
After leaving SQL I was trying to figure out a way to talk about the ideas I had on how information architects could help with the challenges. Early in 2010 Gene Leganza published Topic Overview: Information Architecture for Forrester Research, Inc. In this overview he talks about the 15 hot technology trends that Forrester has identified as fueling the next period of technology innovation and growth and how 5 of them could benefit from better information architecture practices.
I agree with the 5 that he has chosen but I also feel that having someone who practices IA on the team could help improve the user experience of:
I (mostly) like the article and I can recognize that its primary audience is Enterprise Architects. Keeping this in mind the paper provides great potential to re-imagine what enterprise information architecture could be. Information architects are needed because when exploiting and organizing information questions are more important than answers and, in my experience, designers tend to ask better questions then engineers.
I hope that the Information architecture community embraces this opportunity, I will explore this more in the future but I’m notoriously slow to post. I wish I could have been discussing this with people at the IAsummit, maybe next year.
Having a website people can easily navigate is common sense. It can save taxpayer dollars and help your agency achieve its mission. Here’s how to dramatically improve your website by focusing on your customers’ needs and adopting some basic usability techniques.
How To Increase Usability Of Government Websites and Boost Your ROI on Howcast is a very good video. It is easy to understand, the tasks they layout are simple and straight forward to implement. Check out the page to see the steps written for reference.
Now that that has been said I can tell you the picky grumpy problems that I have with it :-) It’s so simplistic it obscures the reality that some of these tasks are hard and need specialists and real buy-in from all the members of the team. Their ROI calculations are ridiculous vague and if this is the kinda logic that our government uses I think I understand why we are in trouble.
Still it is very nice, well put together introduction that I think every government site owner should look at.
Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen) tweeted some great notes about Tagging and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 along with some valuable insight into deciding whether or not to pay for the FAST search license.
- Materials being presented by Smartlogic, with product Semiphor — a taxonomy product integrated with FAST search.
- Why are taxonomies needed? Terms have different meanings, is contextual. Expert vocabularies may not match search terms.
- Terms may be in documents that are really irrelevant to the overall focus of the piece and would be meaningless results.
- Taxonomy: Allows for capture of a domain knowledge, vocabulary and topical relationships. Ontology is multiple taxonomies.
- Content as an asset should be organized/managed. Ontologies help with this (what’s missing, what are the relationships).
- Ontologies can help support records management policies.
- [Professional services firm Ascentium now presenting their experiences doing implementations w/2010 including inside MSoft
- 2010 has a utility Term Store Manager for facilitating taxonomical activities.
- Concerns: Rely on users for taxonomies? Preferrably not, but allow them to add their own folksonomies.
- Concerns: If you build a taxonomy, many companies are not willing to add staff to maintain and they must be maintained.
- The manager is extensible, but there are challenges (running into while inside Microsoft via 'eat own dogfood' effort).
- One primary goal: improve findability. Architecture of Term Store: Group, Term Set, Term
- [search for blogs that deal with Term Store Manager -- they offer great advice]
- [BTW Term Store Manager is still in beta and not yet generally released. Great steps forward, but one step back.]
- [Showing UI. Have created two groups: fruits, vegetables. Adding tomato to both. Can 'borrow' but also have multi-terms]
- [Have talked to Microsoft about the issues with disambiguation when multiple meanings are presented for a term.]
- Added Term Set “vine” to house “tomato”. But have different Term Sets of Vine under Fruit and Vegetables. Different GUIDs
- [Issue: Right now anyone with access can change definitions. Governance models needed to manage for disambiguation.]
- [I'm still trying to figure out why they're going to all this effort when FAST does most of this automatically.]
- [I'm guessing this is still 'brute force' version of SharePoint, which still requires 'brute force' search management
- [The dropdown lists can get unwieldy because there is no description in the dropdowns, no way to know which term is which]
- [Back to Smartlogic staff] Small or Large Ontology? Small: Easier to maintain, buckets larger, results less granular.
- Asking users to self-tag against a really large taxonomy requires considerable effort (requires understanding of whole)
- Companies restructure, change clients, add lines of business — all effects the total taxonomy (and existing content base)
- In 2007 there were no real taxonomies available. Keywords are not the same thing. Results can be tuned via taxonomy.
- Smartlogic now demoing Semaphore. The taxonomy is only half the equation. The content itself must have relevant metadata.
- [Semaphore is totally integrated as an add-on to the SharePoint UI, as if it were simply utilities in SharePoint.]
- Adding a document to SharePoint brings up the Semaphore UI for taxonomical additions, via ‘assisted’ tagging.
- That is, there are recommendations made to which edits can be made. Effectively ‘automated’ with overrides.
- This UI is useful for existing SharePoint stores to be reviewed and classified as well. [Again, only relevant w/o FAST]
- [With this level of effort, I'm still trying to figure out why a company wouldn't pay for the FAST licenses instead?]
- [Interesting navigation of topic maps and managing the 'collection' from the whole rather than the discrete elements.]
- Semaphore Architecture: Allows for imports of existing structures and reorganized. Text mining and classification.
- Rules-based approach used for classification server to make recommendations (rules can be tweaked).
- Now talking about the FAST Server and explaining the greater control over the results, multi-content results, etc.
- May 11th there will be another event to cover the FAST Server in more detail.
- Q&A raised issues of cross-cultural-language issues for global taxonomies. See Motorola study http://twurl.nl/f3crub
- Bottom line, assuming that you can get meaningful search results out of the box from SharePoint is erroneous.
