Tag Archive for 'Human factors'

Age Divides and KM

Published by lynda on July 26, 2011 in Friday Breakfast Meetings. 1 Comment

Friday, August 5, 2011 at 7:30 - 9:30 a.m. Rebecca’s Cafe at Reservoir Place, Trapelo Road, Waltham.

TOPIC:  At the suggestion of one of the Boston SIKM leaders, Kate Pugh, we are going to toss out the issue of “age divides” in approaches to knowledge leveraging and utilization. This is a topic that surfaces in various forms at many of our meetings and is often in relation to styles of sharing, learning, and collaborating. Another member picked up a quip from our Bentley program on July 20th and shared it with amusement, ” “just because we both have iPhones doesn’t mean my mother-in-law & I have great conversations.” Is this another aspects of an age divide?

This end-of-the-summer topic should be fun to contemplate. It would be great to come to some mutual understandings about how we can all play nice together in the workplace.

Registration Form for Friday Only

Registration Details (Cost, logistics, etc.)

Finding Knowledge Assets: How Web search behavior can be applied to the Enterprise Intranet

Published by lynda on February 10, 2010 in Thursday Afternoon Meetings. 1 Comment

Thursday, February 18, 2010, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m., Microsoft, 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor, Waltham, MA 02451. Directions.

SPEAKER: Mark Sprague, Principal, Msprague.com

TOPIC: Human Search Behavior must be studied to effectively prepare content for maximum findability.

Preparing content so that it can be found easily on the intranet requires the understanding and interactions of three disciplines augmented by a fourth (understanding how people find and consume content). Though clearly in a symbiotic relationship, three disciplines: Content management, Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), are often dealt with as if they are stand-alone activities.

This is what happens:

  1. Content can be developed or re-purposed without understanding how it will be positioned within a website.
  2. Websites can be designed and developed without a coherent initial search strategy – SEO experts are brought in after the site is completed to optimize the best that they can.  Sites that grow organically and change frequently over time present challenges as well.
  3. Content experts can know about search, but often don’t really understand in any depth how search relevancy works, and how it impacts their content in search results.

Join us for this discussion about how understanding search behavior can influence the information architecture of your intranet with all the implications for how it affects sharing content and knowledge expertise. Mark will share some techniques and practices for getting more out of search. PRESENTATION NOTES

RELATED ARTICLE: Giving Customers What They Want: A Search Behavior Analysis

Jun 25, 2010 at 10:03am ET by Mark Sprague

BIOGRAPHY: Mark Sprague is an information and software products visionary with a passion for the customer/user experience. He has generated many value-added products and services in new niches in everything from Social Networks, Social Media, Search Engines, Auto-Classification tools, Entertainment Titles, Education Applications, Business Applications, Web Services, and Usability Analysis Newsletters. He has recently been consulting in Enterprise Search, SEO, Content Strategies, Mobile Applications and Social Networking. Mark founded the Internet search engine Northernlight.com in 1995, notable for its early use of clustering and auto-categorizing Web search results.

PLEASE Register even if you are not certain you can attend so we have an accurate estimate of attendees for handouts.

Registration Form for Thursday

Registration Comments (Cost, time, meeting format)

Additional Readings:

Hearst, Marti. Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press, 2009  ISBN: 9780521113793

McDaniel, Clay. 13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools’. MarketingProfs, 05/19/2009, 1p.
1. Google Alerts; 2. Technorati; 3. Jodange; 4. Trendrr; 5. Lexicon; 6. Monitter 7. Tweetburner; 8. Twendz; 9. TruCast; 10. and 11. Radian6 and Cision Radian6; 12. Techrigy; 13. Collective Intellect

Mullan, Eileen. Searching for Answers at ESS East. EContent Magazine, 05/19/2009, 1p.  …
Miles Kehoe, a founder and president of New Idea Engineering, Inc., explained that the blame for a company’s search problems may lie with the implementation. “Maybe it is not the technology, it may be your methodology,” Kehoe says. “Search is not a fire and forget technology.”