Books, books, more books, and free books too...

So I am just going to drop some 'authors' names in this post, just to show off that I know them, well I have to admit its not like any of them are Steven King or anything, but......

Martin White clued me in to an excellent new book on Search User Interfaces by Prof. Marti Hearst. Its a 'real' book, printed on paper and all that, but if you click on that title link you can read the entire thing online for free courtesy of Cambridge University Press - bless em' ! In fact his blog includes a posting on how he convinced the publisher to let him do that: http://www.searchuserinterfaces.com/blog/

Now as Martin brought this book to my attention, it is only fair that I bring it to the attention of my 3 regular readers (who probably already know) that Martin is the co-author of a rather spiffing book on search himself: Successful Enterprise Search Management (which is now available on Amazon as well as directly from the publisher).

I would think that if your running an enterprise search team in any organization these two books should definitely be on your shelf.

However my next read, when it arrives in the mail from New Zealand is SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: Using SharePoint to enhance business collaboration by Michael Sampson, who is also the author of Seamless Teamwork.

Seamless Teamwork is on my desk at this very moment (see picture for proof!) but I have to admit by the time I bought it, everyone else had written (rave) reviews, so my aim this time is to get a review of SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration posted in good time. Well, when it arrives........

Totally off the topic of information management and search books, but for Micheal's benefit should he read this, I will qoute a conversation from a certain avaiation podcast I subscribe to:

• Technical Editor: I can never understand who the Australian's think the main threat is anyway
• European Editor: Well, the All Blacks are quite scary.........
  

Now if only I can get Martin and Micheal to collaborate (i.e. do all the work) on my 'seminal volume' on practical knowledge management....... :-)

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.