What I'm Playing: Namco Museum DS

This week I am playing Namco Museum for the DS - a thoroughly nondescript title that came out recently and hides a very pleasant surprise.

Namco Museum didn't receive much fanfare on its release. Not surprising. It is yet another in the long list of collections of old 8-bit video games redone and repackaged for more recent systems. There must be hundreds of them out by now. (I have another Namco Museum title for the Gameboy SP.)

This time around, the DS incarnation of Namco Museum is a good title. It avoids the pitfalls of many previous 8-bit rehashes. It has a better-than-average selection of games (not just 15 variations on one famous game) including both famous and cult favorites. And, more importantly, the emulation is excellent. I started with Galaga, an old favorite, and the controls, sound, and graphics are spot on. Ditto the other games I've tried so far. They even include a "Library" so you can listen to the soundtracks without the distraction of space aliens shooting at you.

The only drawback to the Museum is the screen size. Most of these games were originally designed for vertical presentation on arcade machines. On the DS, Namco has chosen not to try using both screens (with the resultant issue of what to do with the gap between them) and show the game on the top screen by default. but the DS screens are oriented horizontally.

So at first, the game is stretched across the screen. This makes it visible, but hard to play since the relationship of horizontal to vertical movement is distorted. To make up for this, the game lets you choose a variety of different screen layouts: bottom screen instead of top screen, unstretched graphics, as well as several rotated versions.

I switched to the original aspect ratio, which eliminates the stretching but uses only about half of the screen. The emulation is perfect. The problem now is... its just way too small! Its like watching a video game played on Mars through a telescope. Next, I tried rotating it so the game is shown with the top of the screen to the left. Now, this is definitely the best video setup! It is glorious 8-bit color graphics at their best! Mind you, I have to hold the DS on its side and play with both hands on the left side of the screen. Not as uncomfortable as it sounds, but it is awkward.

The fact is the DS screen is simply too small and in the wrong orientation to play these old games well. Namco has done an admirable job to make it as playable as possible -- great emulation, flexibility on screen layout, but there just isn't any option that provides a completely satisfactory sensation.

What is interesting is that I ended up using different layouts for different games. For games I was familiar with from my youth (Galaga, Pac-man, Galaxian) I put up with the discomfort of holding the DS sideways so I can play it rotated fullscreen. Dig-Dug II, which has a color background (rather than dots on black) I don't mind playing on the small default layout (although I still switch to the correct aspect ratio). And for Xevious, which I never played before, I actually found that rotating the screen but not rotating the DS resulted in a very entertaining side-scrolling shooter that was easier to control (rather than the bottom-up layout it is supposed to have).

Its still fun, but ultimately even with the best emulation, these games play better on a bigger screen.

But the old games aren't why I bought this title. What I bought it for was Pacman Vs.

If you have never played Pacman Vs, which was originally sold as a bonus disc for Pacman World 2 on the Nintendo Gamecube, you have missed out on some serious fun. Pacman Vs was created as a technology demo by Nintendo to show off the connectivity between Gamecube and the GameBoy Advance. In the game, one player plays the character Pac-Man just like in a regular game of Pac-Man (except in 3D). The trick to the game is that the other players play the ghosts! The "Ghosts" only see a small area of the game board near them while "Pac-man" see the entire board (giving him or her a necessary advantage over the three opponents). Pac-man gains points for eating pellets and ghosts; ghosts gain points for catching Pac-man. Once Pac-man is caught, a different player is picked at random to become Pac-man and the game repeats until someone reaches a predetermined score.

A very simple game mechanic (rumor has it the game was created in two weeks), but the result is fast-paced chaos, with plenty of opportunity for strategizing (quickly) or just crazy running around, with lots of yelling and shouting. For all its simplicity, Pac-man Vs is one of the best multiplayer games around.

The reason it did not get attention originally was because you needed 2-4 people, a Gamecube, a GameBoy Advance, and a GBA link cable to play the game. But now with the Namco Museum, all you need is the game and a few friends with DSes. And, believe me, it is well worth it!

Unlike the 8-bit classics, Pac-man Vs was designed for a TV screen -- horizontal orientation -- so on the DS it can fill the upper screen. And since the game narrows the focus (zooming in on the characters) it still looks fantastic on the smaller device. If anything, this incarnation of Pac-man Vs is better than the original because there are no cables to get mixed up when passing the GameBoy Advance back and forth. It is fun with 2 people; it is outstanding with 3 or 4.

At $20, the Namco Museum for DS is a steal for Pac-Man Vs alone, one of the best portable multiplayer games around. if you have 2 or 3 friends with DSes, consider it a must-have. Oh, and you get some nifty old 8-bit games thrown in as a bonus. Frankly, I don't know why Bandai Namco doesn't advertise it that way...

ROI: the Sad Case for KM

More and more frequently I hear calls for proof of the "ROI" (Return on Investment) of knowledge management. I hear it within my own company; I hear it from KM practitioners in other companies; I even hear KM consultants espousing the importance and benefits of calculating ROI to demonstrate knowledge management's contribution to the business bottom line.

This concerns me. Not because I don't believe KM has value -- it obviously does! -- but because ROI is a specific type of business measurement that overemphasizes the direct-to-bottom-line component of KM while completely ignoring (and discrediting) the rest.

KM certainly contributes indirectly to the bottom line, as it contributes to many other aspects of the company's fiscal and intellectual diversity and health. But that is not its primary goal. This call for ROI is part of a larger tendency within corporations today to "align" KM with business operations. By that I mean making KM a tool used by business management to ensure the optimal and efficient exercise of business processes.

Now, I have no objections to KM supporting business processes. Clearly, that is the primary use of knowledge and the company wants to encourage anything that contributes to the bottom line. But that is not all that KM is about. KM also significantly contributes to the breadth of knowledge, experience, and expertise of its employees. It contributes to the resilience and responsiveness of the company to changes in the business environment by strengthening its core intellectual capabilities. It impacts business processes both direct and indirect. And it establishes a culture and channels for distributing business intelligence at lightning speed.

The problem is the measuring. Managers don't measure things for intellectual stimulation. They measure them so they can make changes and confirm the results. Managers also tend to think high-level. If ROI is what you are measuring, then that is the goal (not a goal, the goal). That is not a slam against managers, it is just an attribute of their job: to think clearly and succinctly and not get bogged down in details.

The results, if you are not careful, can be both dramatic and unfortunate. The analogy that comes to mind is college. If you see the goal of college being to get a job (your ROI), then there really is no need for English, history, languages, or even science -- depending upon your target profession. However, if you see the goal of college as expanding your knowledge and broadening your character, not only will it have a strong indirect impact on your employability, but your opportunities will be far more flexible and adaptive to the business environment when you graduate. Business opportunities fluctuate on a cyclic basis. At one point, there was a strong need for engineers. But if you went to school specifically for that career, the market was pretty much saturated 4-5 years later when you graduated. Ditto MBAs and other focused degrees. I pity the poor Cobol programmer trying to break into the web era. Or Algol, PL/1, Pascal...

So just as the goal of college is to teach capabilities, not specific skills; the goal of KM is to facilitate knowledge development and transfer, not solely to apply knowledge to the product pipeline.

Another problem with ROI and similar types of business measurement is that it starts to infiltrate your thinking. In a recent discussion among KM professionals concerning assessing the value and success of communities of practice, several members of the list argued that you had to use the business objectives for the CoP to measure against those goals and calculate success. (In other words, did the company get what it wanted out of the community.) Again, companies don't sponsor Communities for altruistic reasons, but people participate in those communities for personal and professional reasons and it is the participants who ultimately determine whether the community succeeds or fails. I've seen a number of cases where companies tout the success of their CoP programs while at the same time complaining how hard it is to get members involved. Say what!?!

The success or "return" of a KM program is the cumulative benefits -- both short and long-term on the company and its employees. This is a very hard concept for line-of-business managers to grasp. They understand it when they feel its absence -- the recent rebirth of KM within American companies runs a parallel course to the enthusiasm for the business fads of downsizing, rightsizing, and outsourcing in the late 80's and 90's. Many companies followed the trend only to find that the intelligence of the corporation had left with its employees. The need for knowledge management became apparent.

But there hasn't been major corporate gaffe such as downsizing for several years and management tends to have a short-term memory. The current business fad has shifted from business process re-engineering to supply chain optimization and process refinement -- squeezing the last penny out of the business pipeline. And KM is beginning to feel this squeeze. It is hard to tell what the outcome will be.

But for the time being I believe it is the responsibility of KM professionals to avoid the rush to ROI and make sure both the direct and indirect "returns" of KM are recognized and re-established as objectives.

What I'm Playing: Picross

This week I am playing Picross, from Nintendo. Picross is a puzzle game: each puzzle looks like a crossword puzzle, with a square grid you fill in, but instead of words and clues, you fill in the cells based on numeric clues. For each horizontal row and vertical column, they tell you how many consecutive spaces are filled. So "2 5" indicates there will be 2 cells filled in and then 5 cells filled in, with one or more blanks between them. the resulting image, once you fill in the puzzle properly, is a picture that then becomes colorized -- such as a fruit or animal -- and has some cute animation associated with it.

Picross is definitely addictive, and I have been thoroughly enjoying it. I haven't reached hard mode yet, but easy and normal have provided a sufficient and growing challenge enough to keep me hooked. I am not a Soduko fan, but I do enjoy crossword and spatial puzzles (such as tanagrams) and Picross has much the same appeal.

The Picross puzzles are timed and you get a time penalty for marking the wrong cells, so there is the ability to challenge yourself against a deadline. But there is no hard stop; no game-ending timeout as in the more frenetic puzzle games such as Tetris. So the timer is only there as encouragement.

In this respect, Picross should be ideal for me. I do not have lots of time for game playing (I squeeze in what time I can during coffee breaks or lunch) and I am often interrupted. So having a game that I can play for 5-10 minutes or pause without losing "momentum" really matches my current game playing style.

In fact, that is becoming one of the two minor deficits for me when playing Picross. The puzzles are preset, not automatically generated, so there is only so much of the game to go around. You can create your own puzzles or "compete" against others on a time challenge, but quite frankly those modes do not appeal to me much. (I do not have the artistic wizardry to create a puzzle I would find rewarding or an interest in solving a puzzle I know already because I created it. And although I enjoy playing competitive games with my sons, timed puzzles are not as interesting as the many racing, sports, and adventure games we already play.) So I have played through easy mode and most of normal, and have now reached the 15x15 grids, which -- to be honest -- take me more than 10 minutes to solve. The puzzles are beginning to exceed the time available to me for "casual play". So from now on I am either going to have to spend more dedicated time with the game or put up with extended breaks while working on individual puzzles. And I am not sure I have sufficient interest to do that.

The second issue I have with the game is -- as addictive as it is, and it is -- I get the feeling I do when solving crossword puzzles from the same source too often (such as the New Yorker, or NY Times) that a large part of my time is spent filling them out mechanically. With crossword puzzles, you begin to recognize certain clues and answers that are used repetitively. Similarly, in Picross, there are certain opening moves that you start doing by rote. A 15 block row requiring 10 in a row will always occupy the middle 5 blocks, etc. It is still addictive, but the brain isn't working as hard as it did when I started the game. Ultimately, this is why I stopped doing New Yorker crossword puzzles. I figure I will probably finish Picross before it gets that far, but there is a decreasing level of mental challenge vs. puzzle challenge as the game progresses. And ultimately the satisfaction of solving a puzzle has a tinge of guilt that you just wasted your time. Not enough to stop you, but just a tiny twinge.

Despite that (and the shift from brain challenge to learned behavior is a danger in any type of puzzle), Picross is an excellent game and at $20 I would recommend it to anyone who likes puzzles.

P.S. Another puzzle game I would recommend is Honeycomb Beat. I bought this game as an import from Japan last year and thoroughly enjoy it. Like Picross, Honeycomb Beat has a puzzle mode with some 200+ pre-defined puzzles. The basic mechanism is there a field of hexagons (hence the honeycomb), when you click on one hexagon, all of the immediately adjacent hexagons "flip" from light to dark or vice versa. The goal is to turn the entire field one color in a certain number of moves. (There are other complications later in the game, but they all play off this basic "flipping" mechanic.) The pre-defined puzzles start out very simply (too simply?), but somewhere around puzzle 40 or 50 they become wickedly difficult.

The fields are small (generally no more than 15-20 cells) and the number of steps limited (under 10), so if you know what you are doing, any puzzle can be solved in under a minute. The trick is knowing what to do. Unlike Picross, where you slowly work your way through the puzzle to the end, in Honeycomb Beat you try, fail, try again, until you get it.

So far I have not encountered any slackening on the mental challenge. the game also fits very nicely within my limitations. It is very easy to play for 5-10 minutes because you can try a puzzle as many times as you like. Since any one attempt is so short, there is no harm in turning the game off and coming back to it later. If you don't get it in 10 minutes, you can spend the rest of the day thinking out possible alternatives so you are eager to get back to it and try a new angle next time you get a chance to play. (When I say it gets difficult, I encountered one puzzle that took we three days to solve, and I haven't been able to recreate the solution since!)

In addition, the game has a challenge mode which plays much like Tetris, where rows of hexagons come down the screen and you remove them by filling an entire line (or group of lines). If you don't work fast enough, the screen will eventually fill and stop the game. I find challenge mode at least as fun as puzzle mode, but in a completely different way because of the time limit.

It was never advertised much and I am surprised how negative the reviews have been. Consequently, at the moment you can pick up Honeycomb Beat for around $15 new. So I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys puzzle games. Pick it up when they go to get Picross!

My Computer is Dead

My computer is dead. This should not be a surprise to anyone. That's what computers do; they die.

In this case, my desktop was about a year old. I had never really liked it from the beginning. It was a mid-level machine of a major brand, but everything about it seemed a little "cheap" -- gaps at the seams, flimsy plastic facade, loose keyboard with too many keys. All around too many features with almost no value.

So I shouldn't have been surprised. We have had a four or five power outages in the past few months. But each time the computer would come back up. Until Monday. I had shut it down for two days, came back, pushed the power button and... nothing. No click, no whir, no nothing.

No, I shouldn't be surprised. Especially since over the past month or so the fan had started to sound more like the little engine that could than a European sports car. A sure sign of strain. No, I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

I am irked. All symptoms point to a bad power supply. So I could pay to have it replaced. But then again, it might be one of the other devices. I could spend several hours fiddling and trying to track it down, but there is no guarantee that after 4 hours and probably a hundred dollars of parts, I would be sure to have solved the problem.

What is most irksome is that this is about the fifth desktop machine I've owned. My last one, a Sony, I loved and was a workhorse for 3 years. I replaced it because it was getting old and slow; not because it failed. I would have got another Sony except they don't make desktops anymore. Before that, I had 4 Macintoshes: 3 gems (all still operable), and one lemon from the day it arrived. Oh, and a Power Computing Mac clone. Now that was a machine! It failed three times and was fixed -- under warranty-- three times.

So I have seen failure, but I also loved that Mac clone -- there was nothing that compared. But this is different. My current PC is a commodity, expendable, replaceable.

Computers die, and when they die they take your data with them. So I am going to take the "easy" way out and get a replacement -- bigger and faster than before -- and I'll spend 1-3 days reinstalling all of the software I need and doing disk-to-disk copies of my data.

Will I be happy? Well, sort of. I'll be happy to be back online. I'll have the simple pleasure of something new, shiny, fast... But I also face the tedium of digging out all my installation CDs and installing (and restarting) for hours at a time... and no guarantee I won't have to do it all over again in a year. In fact, I am almost guaranteed I will have to do it over again in the next 1-4 years. Because computers are fragile.

Which brings me to my point. (There's a point to this? I hear you asking.)

Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to waste 1-3 days rebuilding my new PC with all of the software and data I had on my now defunct machine?

Since computers are a commodity, why does the operating system insist on binding your data and applications to this fragile hardware? Sure, my data is in My Documents and I can recover that fairly easily (assuming that the disk isn't fried). But what good is the data without the applications to use it or even see it?

Computers are designed on a very basic structure, a "stack" of abstractions:

Data

Applications

Operating System

Hardware

If the bottom layer of the stack -- hardware -- is likely to fail, you want to make sure your other layers are separate and recoverable. You could move the entire top three levels (i.e. replicate the C: drive). But in reality, the operating system is also a commodity. And if it is Windows, it is also designed to expand and clutter your available space with updates, restore points and other data that chews up all available space. Point of fact: I don't know anyone who has done a Microsoft Windows upgrade and been happy. The only truly successful upgrade is to replace both the OS and the underlying hardware (i.e. buy a new computer).

So, in fact, the most practical separation is Hardware+OS vs. Application+Data, because the OS is dependent on the hardware and the data is dependent on the application. (You can see this because the OS is bundled with the hardware; and although some apps are usually "bundled" with computers, they are usually pale imitations of the applications users really need.)

What you, the user, would really like would be for there to be separation at all levels -- so you could take the data, the applications (i.e. your working environment), or both to a new machine. But the way Windows is built by default, all three of the top layers are installed on a single drive, C:\. And although the data is separated into a folder structure by default (My Documents), the applications are bound in a death-like grip with the OS which is impossible to break without reinstalling. You can move C:\Program Files to a new computer, but nothing will work, because the actual application components are spread around and -- more importantly -- Windows encourages the applications to build in dependencies on entries in the OS registry.

The result is a system that cannot easily be deconstructed into its logical parts (if at all). The solution, however, is both simple and obvious -- given the proper attitude and efforts of the interested parties. It is:

• Redirect My Documents to separate media, not just a subfolder of one disk shared with the OS and applications. Preferably encourage more reliable and hardy flash drives for easy transport between machines. (2, even 4 gig flash drives are now a commodity, which is more than enough for most normal human beings. The 200-300 gig drives are primarily for the Windows operating system...)
• Load the Windows registry dynamically while booting, to pick up application settings from a separate configuration folder. Preferably, allow alternate locations, so users could define multiple configurations (Home, Business, Video Editing, etc.) that could be selected at boot time.
  
• Put the application files, configuration folder, and DLLs on a separate root, possibly separate media, so that the entire configuration can be moved from one machine to another en masse.
  

Squirrels Don't Need to Remember

As I was finishing off my post on Google, I came across an ad in InformationWeek that demonstrates the we-know-better attitude I was discussing in my post. The ad was striking not only because it is such an extreme example of what I was discussing, but for the glaring fallacy of its argument.

The ad said, in large letters:

Squirrels don't remember where they hide their nuts.

Then in smaller print:

They're not looking in the right places for what they need.
But you can. With proven information management software from SAS.

Say what!?! There are so many things wrong with the logic here it is hard to know where to being. Yeah, yeah, yeah... it's just marketing so you aren't supposed to think, you are supposed to feel. But it feels all wrong.

First off, I'm not sure if squirrels remember where they hide their nuts or not. After a short bit of scrounging around the web (using Google, of course, although my wife would use Yahoo! -- the results are essentially the same) it seems that naturalists and biologists are agreed that they do not remember. But at the same time, they don't need to remember because they use their sense of smell to find the nuts, whether they are the nuts they buried or another squirrel set aside. (Hey! That's not a half bad analogy for search itself...)

And I don't know about you, but where I live I don't see a lot of squirrels dieing of hunger. In fact, they seem to be flourishing without the assistance of any "proven nut management" software. So they have no problem "not looking in the right places."

The more you think about it, the worse it gets. If you follow the URL listed in the ad they come right out and say it:

In a complex business world, the information you need to be successful may be hidden in the most improbable places. Unlike the squirrel, however, you don’t have time to forage for answers.

What is this fear of having to spend five minutes finding something? Now, I know SAS is not advertising a search solution, they are selling business analytics. But the argument they make is the same, and the argument against it is also identical -- if I know what I will need to know, I can safely structure my content to fit the future answer (and there are cases where this is the case: budgetary information, business contacts, the output of standard procedures); but if I don't know in advance, messy information is not made less messy by applying artificial filters and strictures on its storage and access.

I'm not a squirrel, but there are plenty of times I'm looking for nuggets of information and with a decent search engine and access to the data (i.e. a "good sense of smell"), I can find it. There are also plenty of times I've been trying to get a nugget out of a "proven information management" system, that confounds my best efforts to answer the unnecessarily complex or irrelevant questions it insists on asking before giving me its "best answer".

Squirrels don't need to remember. And neither, thank goodness, do I.

Why Don't We Just Use Google?

I get this question about once a week. The reasons for not using Google inside the company I work for* are so numerous, I tend to shrug off the question now days. But it probably deserves answering fully at least once.

I understand why they ask: it seems so easy to find information out on the internet. Why is it so complicated and difficult inside the corporate firewall, where there are so many people (including myself) working to make it accessible?

Why Not?

The argument goes something like this:

• Much of our information inside the firewall is critical business data and is not made available to every Tom, Dick, and Harry (even within the company) so cannot be crawled by a generic search engine.
• We can't have our employees wasting their time searching through page after page of search results. We need to provide a "better search" tuned to their needs. This better search means:


1. Only indexing "quality" content -- that which is deemed part of the official corporate intranet -- not cluttering the results with unstructured information such as discussions, forums, blogs, personal sites, etc.
2. Qualifying certain content as "best bets" (or whatever you like to call them) -- so the right answer shows up first and highlighted.
3. Providing custom search interfaces for specific types of data -- such as customer testimonials, employee records, market data, sales collateral, etc.
• Much of the important business information is in special databases and applications, such as SAP, Documentum, SharePoint, Lotus Notes... name your favorite business app. Therefore, you must use that application's UI and custom search (see above) to find and access it.
  
• We've already spent significant resources in both time and money creating the high quality search environment we have (see above). We can't afford to throw away more money and start over.
  
• Finally we're not the group responsible for the corporate intranet and search, so we couldn't do anything about it even if we wanted to. Besides, we'd get our wrists slapped if we go buying and installing a competitor to the corporate solution.
  

OK. So that's the argument. Is it valid? Well, the part about restricted access and the Google Appliance** having trouble crawling content it cannot reach is true enough. It is a technical limitation that creates a problem for any proposed search solution (more on this later).

As for the "better search" argument, this is wrong on at least two points. The first is so obvious it barely needs stating, but perhaps it is its obviousness that makes it hard for the proponents of intranet search solutions to see. That is, if your custom search is so much better, why do people keep suggesting alternatives out of frustration?

Sure, there's always a certain number of naysayers to any decision, change, or technology within a company. But this isn't just nay saying. The people asking the question are honestly saying "I can do this better somewhere else -- better, faster, and easier. Why is it so difficult inside the firewall?" Answering "but we're better" may convince management, but it doesn't win over the users.

The second reason this is wrong is more complex. it involves the rationale for "better" and the assumptions that underlie it. They claim they are better because they get the users to the right answer more directly. Of course, if that were true we wouldn't hear so many complaints (point #1) but more importantly, there are two key assumptions here that deserve attention.

• The first assumption for this to be true is that they (the designers of the search interface) know what the right answers are. That in itself is questionable.
  
• The second assumption -- a priori -- is, if they assume they know the right answers, then they must also know what the questions will be!

These assumptions justify decisions like restricting what content is indexed and excluding "noise" such as forums and blogs. But from a knowledge management perspective, these "noisy" channels are where the true nuggets of wisdom and experience are shared! This is one of the longstanding dilemmas of KM: whether to focus on refined knowledge (often referred to as "explicit knowledge" or "best practices") or to support the messier knowledge-in-action of forums and distribution lists where tacit knowledge (the hard-won tidbits of wisdom from experience) becomes explicit through the interaction of practitioners.

By eliminating the "clutter" of unstructured knowledge, the enterprise search reshapes itself as a qualified but sterile channel for "approved" knowledge, not what the people need to answer specific questions that arise in their day to day work. And not what they have come to expect fro a global search engine.

I say it is a dilemma because it is not a matter of picking one over the other: explicit vs. implicit, structured vs. unstructured. Both have their place and need to be supported -- and findable. And when the "corporate" search solution excludes one or the other, it is very difficult for KM or IA to recover the necessary balance.

So, what about the rest of the argument, custom searches and special applications? Yes, it is true these exist. But why are these separate and mutually exclusive to global search? Even if these custom searches and UIs exist, why can't the standard corporate search also return appropriate results from these databases?

The answer to that question is two-fold. The first part goes back to argument #1: often these custom applications and databases have restrictive access permissions that don't allow them to be crawled. The second part is a conceit similar to the argument that the current search is "better"; the owners and developers of these applications feel their interfaces are better and see no need to expose their data for generalized crawling.

The problem with this attitude is that it puts the onus on the user to know that the data exists and to go find it. As a KM professional, I am familiar with many of the resources within the company, but that's my job. The average employee is pretty much in the dark. Why should they be expected to know the contents and whereabouts of every website and database in the company?

This severity of the problem was brought home to me recently. I am not responsible for corporate search, or for the content in many of these special repositories . But I am responsible for the knowledge architecture for my division and was aware of the problem our employees were having finding knowledge.

We couldn't "just use Google" and we don't have the resources to do a federated search (which would be another alternative). Instead, I built a simple javascript-based search interface that simply provides a text box and a pull-down menu asking which repository you want to search. The results are displayed in a frame so the search interface stays visible, in case you want to switch to search a different resource.

Very simple. Crude even. But amazingly popular. It doesn't consolidate results; it doesn't do anything more than many of our KM websites, which already list all these resources in one way or another. Except that it is small. concise, and it lets the user take action. I was surprised how enthusiastic our users were for this tool. Which goes to show how little would be needed to help them...

What if?

So, back to the point. If you hadn't guessed, I think many corporate intranets would be significantly improved if they used a commercial search engine like Google. But... But.. It is not as simple as just installing hardware and software.

The primary argument against commercial crawlers is a tiny bit technical and a large part cultural. And that is argument #1. The attitude towards information as "intellectual property" that has to be protected against misuse by the company's own employees (or contractors, or partners, or customers...). This attitude leads to an intranet that operates like a building full of locked rooms with no signs on the doors. (Funnily enough, not unlike the physical offices of many corporations I have visited...) It confounds the ability to use the technology, like Google, that makes the public internet the amazing resource it is.

To use Google, or any other commercial search engine, the company as a whole -- starting from the very top and going through all levels of management -- has to believe that information only has value when it is used, not when it is locked up. There is no inherent value in information, only in what you can do with it. And providing the mechanisms to make it accessible proportionally increase its value to the company. This includes:

• Making information read-accessible to all intranet users
• Making RSS feeds, XML representations and other open interfaces for databases and business applications as important as their own custom UIs, so the content can be crawled and reused on a broader scale
  
• Crawling all content, including content created by individuals through discussions, forums, personal blogs, etc.

Are these strictures a panacea? No. Other, more focused activities are also needed. (Notice that I didn't say abandon special applications and custom UIs, just open them up.) But search is such a fundamental, rudimentary activity for knowledge management, that crippling as is done so often sets you off on the wrong foot and puts far more pressure on the other solutions to "get it right". (Which, to be truthful, they are not likely to do on their own.)

And from a pragmatical level, is this approach even feasible? Perhaps not. Changing an entire corporate culture is an unlikely event. So this ideal situation is more likely to happen in small companies where top management has a clear vision, or in new startups.

Or Else...

So, what are the alternatives? If you can't change corporate culture (and that is a pretty tall order for anyone, including a CEO), what can you do to improve the situation?

Even small steps can have a significant impact, just as my crude javascript-based search consolidation did for the employees I work with. Some things you can do are:

• Start by getting the "noisy" stuff indexed. If they won't include it in the primary index, look into including it as a separate scope within the same interface.
• If your corporate search isn't working for you, notify your users of the alternatives. Make a list of all of the best resources you know of within the corporation for searching. As messy as the list might be, it will help somebody.
• Don't create any new silos! If you manage content, make sure it is accessible, work to get it indexed by the corporate search engine (and any other search engines you know of internally).
  

*Footnote: I am using the company I work for as an example, but I know for a fact from talking to other that the same questions plague large corporations around both nationally and globally.

**Footnote: Just as my company is a placeholder for pretty much any large corporation, Google is a placeholder for any good, commercial crawler-based search engine. Fill in the blank with your favorite...

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I'm a curmudgeon. I'm a grumpy old man. At least it seems that way whenever I hear myself talking about books, movies, artists, musicians, etc...

Things are never good enough. Many of my favorite artists seem to have fallen and can't pick themselves up. Most modern art is, frankly, boring. New music is more noise than music (and this coming from an avid ex-Punker). Contemporary poetry is repeating the mistakes of the last ten years, and the ten years before that, and the ten years before that.... I seem to have a bad word to say about everything.

At the same time I can almost hear myself saying defensively “but I still like so-and-so...” or “such-and-such wasn't too bad....” But there's no real consolation in the words.

The fact is I wasn't so quick to judge when I was younger. It was all new to me and I took it all in like a hungry man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Mind you, I didn't like it any better then than I do today. But back in the day I'd cast off what I didn't like or couldn't understand with a shrug and move on. Perhaps it was too deep for me, too shallow, not my type of thing... Whatever. It was tried, discarded, and the next item taken up. I was in love with the search for something fine, something that captured the essence of truth and beauty.

My ability to suffer the search quietly has left me. Now I rail against the poseurs, the time wasters, the annoying wannabes. But still in the back of my mind, there is the fear that my anger and hardened skin not only protects me from failed art, but blinds me to the quiet presence of something beautiful. Something I won't recognize and will step on in my ignorance.

This feeling can be so pervasive, that it comes as a bit of shock when you get proof to the contrary.

The other day I was reading Ploughshares, one of the better poetry journals. If reading poetry is dangerous for the curmudgeon, reading poetry magazines is practically suicidal. The ratio of good poems to mediocre is always low. And because of the varying styles and voices, you really need to be open minded to sort the wheat from the chaff. (Unlike a single author's book where you have the time to recognize and learn to appreciate the poet's voice, for example.)

So, I was reading Ploughshares (Vol. 32, No. 4) and came across the poem “Recognitions” by W. S. Merwin. Now, I have a soft spot for Merwin's early work. It is cryptic, difficult, but very rewarding. However, in the latter years he has been one of the targets of my what's-wrong-with-older-poets rant. His mind seemed to get rich and soft somewhere around the 80's-90's. (Merwin is one of the few poets who seemed to achieve a comfortable and consistent level of fame through his ongoing publication in the likes of the New Yorker.)

The poem starts with an unsupportable premise:

a wave and an ash tree were sisters

This is the sort of statement drives a wedge between the author and the reader, forcing you to confront your “willing suspension of disbelief” head on. Why? How? And Merwin doesn't let you off the hook. He keeps up the fairy tale, straining the thin line of probability with each new image:

they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost

Even when the story attempts to draw a connection, it remains purely within the realm of fairy tale:

they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of
as family resemblances features they held in common
the sheen of the wave fluttered in remembrance
of the undersides of the leaves of the ash tree
recalled the wave as the breeze lifted it

And then the narrator interrupts to juxtapose the real and imaginary still farther:

and they wrote to each other every day

Unlike reading Charles Wright's poem and reluctantly having to reject images that ultimately have no support, here Merwin is deliberately – and charmingly – holding the bizarre image of the wave and ash tree up to your face and not letting you forget it.

So what is the outcome? While you as reader are busy struggling with the initial coupling of force and nature, Merwin secretly leads you to a part of the story you do recognize, understand, and believe -- the letters:

some of which have come to light only now
revealing in their old but familiar language
a view of the world we could not have guessed at

but that we always wanted to believe

And we do believe. We believe in the wave and the ash and – more importantly – we believe that the possibility of these tales and believing in them is more important than the tale itself.

Unlike the poem by Wright (and I am just using that one poem as an example, since Wright is an excellent poet and the poem is not really characteristic of his work) which leaves us questioning whether the poem is true, Merwin has challenged us, teased us, tricked us, and led us to believe in a poem of only 17 lines. It is sheer genius.

This is the type of poem that keeps you going for weeks, lets you forgive – even forget! -- the hundreds of bad poems you read to reach it. It is a work of art. And I guess I am not such a curmudgeon after all.