In my last post, I described the goals I have tried to achieve with my proof of concept people search function. Here I will describe the design and implementation of this proof of concept.
Given the goals above, here’s the general outline of the design for this solution:
Initially the web application directly queried the various systems used as sources when generating a profile for a worker. That is not scalable and also limits the amount of processing you can do, so I designed a simple SQL database to contain the data for this (implemented in MySQL). This database is essentially a data mart of worker data. The primary tables are:
With the implementation of this database, I also implemented a synchronization tool that updates the data in the tables from the source systems for the various types of activities.
By automatically pulling data from these source systems (which workers use in their regular day-to-day work), you remove the need for the workers to maintain data.
Now, how should the profile page for a worker be presented?
Initially, I put together a design that did two things: 1) provided a typical employee directory style layout of my administrative details and 2) provided a list of all of the activities for a worker, grouped by activity source. In other words, you would see a list of all of the Wiki articles edited by the worker, a list of mailing list memberships, a list of community memberships, project team memberships, task assignments, etc. Each activity source’s list would be separately displayed (in a simple bulleted list). (Before this would go into production, I always have assumed I would ask for some design help from our electronic marketing group to give it a more professional look, but I thought the bulleted list worked perfectly well functionally.)
This proved simple and effective and also enabled the profile page to provide direct links to those activities that are addressable via a link (for example, the profile page could link directly to a Wiki article I’ve edited from my profile page, it could link to each discussion post, etc.)
However, this approach suffered from at least two problems: 1) it lacked an immediately obvious visual presentation of a worker’s attributes, and 2) it exposed every detailed activity of a worker to anyone who viewed the profile (I found when I demoed this to people, some had the immediate reaction of, “Wow – anyone can see all of these details? I’m not sure I like that!” – a reaction that surprised me given that any of the details are generally visible to anyone who wants to look, but go figure).
After looking for alternatives, I found that the keywords for a worker (when combined with their weights) provided good input for a tag cloud – which is what I ended up using as the default presentation of a worker’s keywords (visible to everyone). This helps to highlight what someone is “about”, presents a generally attractive visualization of the data, and, if the default view of a worker displays this tag cloud (and the worker’s administrative data) and does not show all of the details, it alleviates the concern mentioned above.
I have found the implementation of the tag cloud to be the trigger that pulls people into this tool – it helps satisfy my goal #5 because, for most people who have looked at this, it provides immediate validation when they see words they expect to see in their own tag cloud.
Here’s a shot of what part of my profile page looks like (partially obscured):
I wanted to keep the initial proof of concept simple in order to try to test different ways of using the data from the activity sources. With that in mind, here are some details on how I’ve done this so far:
Some additional functions I have layered on top of the basic profile / search mechanism that I believe will make this a valuable solution:
The proof of concept has been very interesting to work through and has presented me with some (subjective) proof of the value of this approach, as simple as it is. That being said, there are some issues and additional areas I hope are explored in the future:
I have previously described what I termed the various generations of solutions to the common challenge of workers finding connecting with or finding co-workers within an enterprise. My most recent post described the fourth generation solution – which enables users to search and connect using much more than simple administrative terms (name, email, address, etc.) for the search.
Over my next couple of posts, I will provide a write-up of a proof of concept implementation I’ve assembled that meets a lot of the need for this with what I believe to be relatively minimal investment.
The follow represent the goals I’ve set for myself in this proof of concept:
Also, I wanted to say that part of the inspiration for this proof of concept came from a session I attended at Enterprise Search Summit 2007 as presented by Trent Parkhill. In his session, he described a mechanism where submissions to a company’s repository would be tagged with the names of participants in the project that produced the document as a deliverable. Then, when users were searching for content, there was a secondary search that produced a list of people associated with the terms and / or documents found by the user’s search. I’ve kind of turned that around and treated the people as being tagged by the keywords of the items they produce.
In my next post, I will describe the overall design of my proof of concept.
So we get to the exciting conclusion of my essays on the inclusion of employees in enterprise search. If you’ve read this far, you know how I have characters the first and second generation solutions and also provided a description of a third generation solution (which included some details on how we implemented it).
Here I will describe what I think of as a fourth generation solution to people finding within the enterprise. As I mentioned in the description of the third generation solution, one major omission still at this point is that the only types of searches with which you can find people is through administrative information – things like their name, address, phone number, user ID, email, etc.
This is useful when you have an idea of the person you’re looking for or at least the organization in which they might work. What do you do when you don’t know the person and may not even know the organization in which they work? You might know the particular skills or competencies they have but that may be it. This problem is particularly problematic in larger organizations or organizations that are physically very distributed.
The core idea with this type of solution is to provide the ability to find and work with people based on aspects beyond the administrative – the skills of the people, their interests, perhaps the network of people with which they interact, and more. While this might be a simplification, I think of this as expertise location, though that, perhaps, most cleanly fits into the first use case described below.
Some common use cases for this type of capability include:
This capability is something that has often been discussed and requested at my current employer, but which no one has really been willing to sponsor. That being said, I know there are several vendors with solutions in this space, including (at least – please share if you know of others):
A common aspect of these is that they attempt to (and perhaps succeed) in automating the process of expertise discovery. I’ve seen systems where an employee has to maintain their own skill set and the problem with these is that the business process to maintain the data does not seem to really embed itself into a company – inevitably, the data gets out of date and is ill-maintained and so the system does not work.
I can not vouch for the accuracy of these systems but I firmly believe that if people search in the enterprise is going to meet the promise of enabling people to find each other and connect based on of-the-moment needs (skills, interests, areas of work, etc), it will be based on this type of capability – automatically discovering those aspects of a worker based on their work products, their project teams, their work assignments, etc.
I imagine within the not too distant future, as we see more merger of the “web 2.0” functionality into the enterprise this type of capability will become expected and welcome – it will be exciting to see how people will work together then.
This brings to a close my discussion of the various types of people search within the enterprise. I hope you’ve found this of interest. Please feel free to let me know if you think I have any omissions or misstatements in here – I’m happy to correct and/or fill in.
I plan another few posts that discuss a proof of concept I have put together based around the ideas of this fourth generation solution – look for those soon!
In my last post, I wrote about what I termed the first generation and second generation solution to people search in enterprise. This time, I will describe what I call a “third generation” solution to the problem that will integration people search with your enterprise search solution.
This is the stage of people search in use within my current employer’s enterprise.
What I refer to as a third generation solution for people search is one where an employee’s profile (their directory entry, i.e., the set of information about a particular employee) becomes a viable and useful target within your enterprise search solution. That is, when a user performs a search using the pervasive “search box” (you do have one, right?), they should be able to expect to find their fellow workers in the results (obviously, depending on the particular terms used to do the search) along with any content that matches that.
You remove the need for a searcher to know they need to look in another place (another application, i.e., the company’s yellow pages) and, instead, reinforce the primacy of that single search experience that brings everything together that a worker needs to do their job.
You also offer the full power of your enterprise search engine:
Below, you will find a discussion of the implementation process we used and the problems we encountered. It might be of use to you if you attempt this type of thing.
Before getting to that, though, I would like to discuss what I believe to be remaining issue with a third generation solution in order to set up my follow-up post on this topic, which will describe additional ideas to solving the “people finder” problem within an enterprise.
The primary issue with the current solution we have (or any similar solution based strictly on information from a corporate directory) is that the profile of a worker consists only of administrative information. That is, you can find someone based on their name, title, department, address, email, etc., etc., etc., but you can not do anything useful to find someone based on much more useful attributes – what they actually do, what their skills or competencies are or what their interests might be. More on this topic in my next post!
Read on from here for some insights on the challenges we faced in our implementation of this solution. It gets pretty detailed from here on out, so you’ve been warned!
This post is the first of a brief series of posts I plan to write about the integration of “people search” (employee directory) with your enterprise search solution. In a sense, this treats “people” as just another piece of content within your search, though they represent a very valuable type of content.
This post will be an introduction and describe both a first and second generation solution to this problem. In subsequent posts, I plan to describe a solution that takes this solution forward one step (simplifying things for your users among other things) and then into some research that I believe shows a lot of promise and which you might be able to take advantage of within your own enterprise search solution.
Finding contact information for your co-workers is such a common need that people have, forever, maintained phone lists – commonly just as word processing documents or spreadsheets – and also org charts, probably in a presentation file format of some type. I think of this approach as a first generation solution to the people search problem.
Its challenges are numerous, including:
As computer technology has evolved and companies implemented corporate directories for authentication purposes (Active Directory, LDAP, eDirectory, etc.), it has become common to maintain your phone book as a purely online system based on your corporate directory. What does such a solution look like and what are its challenges?
I think it’s quite common now that companies will have an online (available via their intranet) employee directory that you can search using some (local, specific to the directory) search tools. Obvious things like doing fielded searches on name, title, phone number, etc. My current employer has sold a product named eGuide for quite some time that provides exactly this type of capability.
eGuide is basically a web interface for exposing parts of your corporate Directory for search and also for viewing the org chart of a company (as reflected in the Directory).
We have had this implemented on our intranet for many years now. It has been (and continues to be) one of the more commonly used applications on our intranet.
The problems with this second generation solution, though, triggered me to try to provide a better solution a few years ago using our enterprise search. What are the problems with this approach? Here are the issues that triggered a different (better?) solution:
So there’s a brief description of what I would characterize as a first generation solution and a second generation solution along with highlights of some issues with each.
Up next, I’ll describe the next step forward in the solution to this issue – integrating people into your enterprise search solution.