Digital Landfill

My guest blogger today is C. David Seuss.  C. David Seuss is CEO of Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), which provides strategic research portals to research-driven businesses.  Mr. Seuss joined Northern Light in July of 1996, and later led an employee group in purchasing Northern Light from its corporate parent in 2003.  Prior to Northern Light, Mr. Seuss was founder and CEO of Spinnaker Software Corporation, which he led from inception to a public company with $65 million in revenue and 280 employees. Before starting Spinnaker, Mr. Seuss was a consultant and manager for the Boston Consulting Group.  Mr. Seuss has an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School.

The market research and competitive intelligence functions within large enterprises face an enormous content management challenge.  They are responsible for gathering, organizing and analyzing large quantities of information from greatly diverse sources, digesting and interpreting it, and serving it up to thousands of employees across their worldwide organization.

Typically the research content is drawn from sources within and outside the enterprise –- but it is the external content, licensed from multiple publishers often at considerable cost to the organization, that can be most problematic from a management perspective.  Here are eight common pitfalls enterprises must overcome to effectively maximize the value of licensed, premium research content:

8 Risks of Managing Licensed Content Across an Enterprise

1 -- Cumbersome and complex research environment.

A large enterprise may purchase subscriptions to a dozen or more third-party research services. Each third-party research provider maintains its own website through which subscribers access their content. That means users within the enterprise must visit the website of each licensed source to perform a truly comprehensive search of the licensed content.  Users have to confront the complexities of multiple sites, multiple log-ins, multiple user interfaces, multiple search options and syntax, different alerting solutions, and the shear, unmanageable amount of work required to use the multiple sites.

2 -- Employees miss relevant content when performing research.

Because of the cumbersome and complex research environment described above, the reality is most users will rely on just a couple of the available research sources.  This means the company’s investment in external research is underutilized, and worse yet, the research performed by the employees are not as well informed as would be the case if all sources were consulted every time.

3 -- Unauthorized employees access the content.

In a collaborative company culture, people are encouraged to share information they find valuable; that’s generally considered a good thing.  But it is not necessarily so if the dissemination of certain content is limited by the company’s contract with the publisher.  By divorcing the search solutions (at the external content publishers’ sites) from the in-house enterprise collaboration solution (e.g., SharePoint), the potential exists that an authorized employee may post the document and share it with unauthorized employees.

4 -- Financial exposure related to unauthorized access.

There are cases where an employee (innocently) violated document distribution rules stipulated in an organization’s contract with a third-party publisher by posting a restricted document to the company intranet and the publisher sent the company a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Good intention; bad outcome.

5 -- Advanced search tools are not feasible when using third-party research sites.

Typical search facilities on the websites of research publishers present a list of document links and summaries in response to a key word query, leaving all the interpretation to the user who has enough persistence and time to slog through the documents on the search result.  But search tools like “text analytics” and “meaning extraction” can read all the market intelligence documents a researcher has access to, identify the business issues reported on, suggest the trends, flag the threats, highlight the opportunities, and distinguish those documents that are the most important, not from a search relevance perspective, but from a meaning perspective.  The more content that is available in a research repository accessible by such tools, the more value can be delivered to users from an integrated text analytics/meaning extraction facility in the search solution.

6 -- Not being able to find internal experts and collaboration partners.

Documents are a catalyst for collaboration, and identifying the people who have expertise about a particular topic can become part of the content within the system.  The search application should identify internal collaboration partners by observing users’ behavior in areas like bookmarking, tagging, downloading, and sharing.  But if all usage information travels only between each individual user and the third-party content publisher, how will the enterprise record the activity and make it available to potential collaboration partners across the organization?

7 -- Failure to “alert."

One popular way that people learn of the existence of relevant content is through “alerts”.  But given the complexities of working on a one-off basis with each external source, each with its own alerting syntax and options,  it is usually impractical for a user to set up alerts on every topic of interest at every website of every content publisher.

8 -- Multiple purchases of the same document (or multiple subscriptions to the same services).

The risk of financial waste is acute if within an enterprise one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing.  It’s not unusual within large organizations for several business units to independently (and unknowingly) purchase the same third-party research report or service.  Repeat that scenario often enough and an organization wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary spending.

One way all these potential pitfalls can be addressed effectively is by deploying an enterprise-wide strategic research portal that provides a single online place for employees to go to search and access (within license limitations) all of an organization’s research resources.  While third-party content aggregation, indexing, security and management; integrated search; text analytics with meaning extraction, alerting, and user collaboration are individually and collectively complex, they are eminently doable.  The pay-off is more and better use of research and, as a result, more informed business decisions.  It’s hard to put a price tag on that.

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