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Visit My Blog - Semanthink

semanthink - semantic thinking about information access problems - is where i have been writing, on and off, since 2002 about applying ontological and lexical skillsets and experience to solving information business problems. I don't write a lot of posts - just to write a lot of posts. I focus specifically on where the paradigms are emerging into play, and thus overwriting current paradigms. A fun subject to write about ...
Oceans of information ... Obscured by clouds ... Finding one’s way alone ... step by step ... Reliant on I know not what ...
No, it’s not haiku grown too big into poetry ...  Just commonly used metaphors, that I’ve heard over recent years, from both information seekers and pundits, to describe how knowledge workers in the enterprise often experience the gathering task - the gathering of facts and figures for the day’s work at hand.

Read More About My View of the Enterprise Content Supply Chain

You can read more about thinking about your content supply chain in the April 2009 issue of the New Idea Engineering newsletter. Mark Bennett of NIE interviewd me, and we had a really interesting back and forth on some fundamental issues. You can read the published interview on the NIE site.

Business Problems in the Content Supply Chain

I’m Rennie Walker.  I specialize in ... because I am professionally fascinated by ... solving business problems caused by information that is not found.  The causes always lie in the content supply chain.

The Contradiction of Information Everywhere and Nowhere Simultaneously

Information is Everywhere - information in a multitude of formats. Information is easy to create - from a diversity of easy-to-use applications. And yet, the business problem of consistently presenting relevant, contextualized, co-associated information to users and customers remains stubbornly … pervasively … continuously unsolved in many organizations. Business problems caused by the right information NOT being found at the right time are widespread. Users suffer forced inefficiency and the turmoil of negative sentiments, and the organization itself suffers at the bottom line, and often also in performance measured against its peers.

Yet, Current Information Access Platform are Powerful

We really can and should be positive about winning at information access. Right now, today, this moment, information platforms for processing and presenting unstructured content - in response to user querying - have more than enough functionality to be “intelligent”. They are designed to be made intelligent. Vendors have done a great job with product functionality and features. And yet …

What Is the Problem Then?

Partly us. The onus is on us to make them intelligent. By ‘intelligent”, meaning that information access systems – in fact, the total content supply chain – needs to have appropriate human semantics and conceptual models programmed into them by those with the appropriate semantic and ontological skillsets. Information access systems are NOT natively intelligent out of the box. We make them so by programming human semantics and ontologies into them.

What is a Broken Content Supply Chain?

Just as Wal-Mart has a (very sophisticated, minutely-managed and metrics-based) supply chain, so every organization has a supply chain for the facts and figures that it’s users require - whether the organization itself understands that the content system is a content supply chain system, or not. Facts and figures are bundled into documents, documents pass through different applications (CMS, search processing etc.) and are found by users in a presentation layer.

Information that is not found causes business problems, and these business problems are almost always the result of a broken content supply chain. So, when the enterprise content supply chain, from the only point of view that counts - the information user - is broken, it needs to be fixed.

The Usefulness of Models

Thinking about your content environment – from initial idea for a content item to it being successfully found – as a content supply chain, is to use a cognitive model. Models help us re-define and hone in on business problems. The model of the content supply chain gives us the basis for our business analysis – the model lays out, different for each organization, the particular steps that are applied to content as it moves towards being presented in the front-end and whether it is successfully found or not.

How to Fix a Broken Content Supply Chain

The key analysis tasks are to understand what aspects and touchpoints of your content supply contribute to an effective information experience for users and customers and identify those which are currently producing a non-optimal finding/knowledge/ontological experience.