The Google Effect...and Doris...we all need one!!
Right so when you sit back and think of how business has been fundamentally changed I thought I would look at how human interaction has been immensely changed over the last few years. Lets take a simple scenario of looking to buy a holiday:
1. In the present day: You go to your favorite search engine and type in the words: 'holiday beach' and hey presto back come the following:
holiday beach Page 1 of 19,550,412 results
or
Results 1 - 10 of about 65,600,000 for holiday beach . (0.30 seconds)
Now, there you have it, all you need for any one of 65m holiday ideas! :)
2. 15 years ago: You walk into your favorite travel agent and sitting down opposite the young travel person you utter the words: "holiday beach". Now for reasons of explaining the story I shall call the travel person 'Doris'. In this scenario Doris wont be very likely to have a host of ideas squirming from her travel brochures - she certainly wont land 65m brochures at your feet, unless she was a very strong Doris indeed!
Now, how these two very simple scenarios differ, is that Doris will, through a set of well structured questions, define what type of holiday you desire:
1. With Children or child free
2. Cruise or island
3. Activity or relaxing holiday
4. Northern or Southern Hemisphere
5. Package or bespoke
.......you get the picture - however in the web enabled world there is no Doris, and the user would not be very happy with a form to fill out in order to start the Search or rather; their finding operation (because with 65m returns you really are just searching - think Sahara and pin)
Now how do you like to be treated when you indulge in a shopping experience - perhaps a well natured sales person or consultant who takes time to understand you and your likes and dislikes and marry that with local or regional trends? Maybe that person who understands you and is saving just the thing for you to enjoy on your two weeks holiday per year? Well in that case if you are looking for that particular experience we need to deliver the 21st century tools with the 20th century knowledge we used to impart in order to find our particular holiday kindly presented by Doris.
So how do we bring Doris to the 21st Century...we all need one! And more importantly, how do we ensure that Doris is enabled into all of our applications in all the ways in which we wish to find information wherever we happen to be working application wise. At this point the importance of categorisation and metadata tagging becomes incredibly important to businesses. A simple set of letters to one person means something very different to another, lets take CPE - would that be Customer Premise Equipment as in the telco world or Customer and Partner Experience as in Microsoft world or Charter Pan-European Trust Plc (CPE) for the Finance world which incidentally has the following financial results today:
189.98
|
So the importance of taxonomy is clear, perhaps one of the solutions I should share with you is the following business:
https://www.aprsmartlogik.com/who_we_are.html
A great business with a great future ahead of it - thanks to Jeremy CEO of Smartlogic for the analogy above though i have to admit, Doris was my invention! And now maybe time for some humour:
https://blogs.technet.com/photos/mike_p/picture461399.aspx
Enjoy!
https://blogs.technet.com/photos/mike_p/picture461399.aspx
Comments
- Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Surrounding this whole Search plan at Microsoft is a plan to link together a whole set of technologies