I’ve been talking with several organisations recently about how they would know what it is that users want in systems to help them manage their information (be it EDRMS, ECM or SharePoint).

And you might recall that one of the trends from KM World is that of letting users decide - putting a smorgasbord of features and functionality in front of the user on the basis that only the strong (the things that users like) will survive.

At the same time, I’ve come across this interesting paragraph from Gary Klein’s book, Sources of Power.  Sources of Power is about how people in high pressure situations make quick and good decisions.  Yes, I know it doesn’t really apply to information management - I don’t get any urgent calls for taxonomy building - but there are some useful insights about mental models.

Anyway, one of the comments that Klein makes is: “In a marketing research project for a large company we studied how consumers imagined a product in action…Many consumers could not formulate a mental simulation to describe how some common products really worked…We should be careful in assuming that consumers know how products work.  Some were using the product inappropriately, getting unsatisfactory results, and blaming the product.”

Does that sound familiar?

This paper really hit a hot button for me.  How and where do documents fit into all of this Web 2.0 stuff?

This was part paper and part demonstration from the Singapore Armed Forces.  They started out by identifying the key activities of knowledge workers, boiling them down to four: writing papers; attending meetings; attending courses; and communicating.

They built an enterprise system to support their knowledge workers comprising a learning management system, a content management system, an enterprise search engine, a knowledge mapping tool and a collaboration portal integrated all integrated their EDRMS Livelink.

What struck me most of all was how clean and easy to follow their interface was.  The user home area was split into three columns. The first column contains a reference space for news, feeds etc.  The middle column is the workspace for email, my documents and my learning.  The third column is the sharing space for blogs, wikis and shared workspaces.

Very simple but with lots of power packed into it.

The main open source components are JOOMLA for communities, forums, blogs and wikis, MOODLE for learning management and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

The focus of this paper was federated search. Federated search works across multiple repositories – typically the extranet, EDRMS and intranet – and returns the results together.  The user interface presents the results either sliced by repository (top 3 intranet searches; top 3 EDRMS searches) or by relevance using tricky behind the scenes algorithms.

The key challenges faced by vendors developing search tools are:

·        De-duping (removing duplicate entries)

·        Developing algorithms that generate useful relevance rankings

·        Reflecting the security models present in each repository

When a tool meets these challenges then a vendor has a ‘viable’ federated search tool.  However, that doesn’t account for that nasty thing: human behaviour.  Letting humans at your repository can really stuff the accuracy of the search tool.  The nasty things that humans do include:

·        Changing content types

·        Adding and removing directories

·        Creating new workflows

·        Creating versions

·        Opting out of metadata

·        Changing taxonomies

All of these can conspire to seriously challenge your search tool.