“Know what you don’t know … but should”

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball that provided comprehensive answers to all of your business queries? Wouldn’t it be nice if that crystal ball could also make available all related information to the question, depending upon scope and context, without having to ask or even knowing what to ask for? Just think about it; never having to fear missing a crucial piece of data during an audit, or knowing that every decision made has been optimized by the evaluation of a 360° view of available structured data and unstructured content organized in such a way as to facilitate exploration and discovery in an intuitive manner.

Most organizations have relied on keyword search or business intelligence technologies in order to satisfy specific business queries within specific data repositories. Traditional portals, search engines and enterprise search tools are good at retrieving a large data set, but poor at quickly sifting through the results to get to the specific information required. Traditional business intelligence technologies can provide an effective approach for navigating and analyzing structured data but have challenges in keeping up with the stress imposed by ever-changing dynamic unstructured content. A new approach is emerging that provides the ease and flexibility of search combined with the power and depth of business intelligence without the associated downsides. This approach is based on dynamic navigation technology.

With navigation, people do not need to know how to ask for information they need (like they do with Google) because relevant content is presented to them in facets, and they immediately get a sense of all the content that is available on a particular topic, illuminating previously unseen relationships. Navigation is the perfect marriage between the “bird’s eye” perspective and “bug’s eye” view of business information in order to optimize decision making.
Imagine a bookstore or library with no visible inventory, and only a clerk to ask for assistance. In this example, which demonstrates the inherent limitations of traditional search, a shopper is not aware of the kinds of books the store carries or specializes in, whether it has books on the shopper's desired topic of interest, and how many books relate to that topic. All the shopper can do is to provide the clerk with a few descriptive terms, which at best results in a list of the most popular books, not necessarily the ones most suited to the needs of the consumer. In contrast, with a navigational experience that spotlights the full scope of available items, shoppers quickly get a sense of the store's organization, characteristics, and quantity of material available for selection as soon as they enter. The clerk becomes only one way to find what is desired. A shopper can freely move from one area of interest to another, such as looking for books available on a topic, identifying what other books the author has written, and finding whether there is a paperback addition of the desired book.

NAVIGATION, EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “navigation” as “the act of navigating” and “navigate” as “to steer a course through a medium.” The digital equivalent of navigation in the real world is dynamic (or faceted) navigation. It answers two questions for the user: 1) What’s here? And 2) How do I get to where I want from here? Search doesn’t answer these questions very well.

Traditional search has been revolutionized by dynamic navigation today, allowing organizations to intelligently find and act on information they need to make business decisions. Navigation-based solutions aggregate data from different sources and format and organizes it, allowing users to navigate content from a “bird’s eye” perspective – a big picture view of all the information available – to drill down to the “bug’s eye” view – the specific dataset users are looking for. This gives the knowledge worker a perspective on what they don’t know that they should. Ultimately “knowing what you don’t know” adds significant value to the individual knowledge worker as well as the enterprise at large.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “exploration” as “the act of exploring” and “exploring” as “to investigate, study, or analyze.” Dynamic navigation breaks down the distinctions between: free text search and database “slicing and dicing”, finding and discovering, search and analytics, text retrieval and fact retrieval. Navigation delivers context and scope for exploration and discovery. The true value of faceted navigation can be realized around the following business issues:

• Dynamic Navigation: Ability to dynamically deliver scope and context as well as pivot and sub-setting for metadata instead of hard-coding navigation into all web and application requirements; deliver everything from a “bird’s eye to a bug’s eye view of information.”
• 360o View: Ability to aggregate internal and external data sources to provide a complete view of a person, place or thing delivering a visualization to previously unrealized relationships.
• Regulatory Compliance (eDiscovery): answering the following question: How do I find the information I need to meet various regulatory reporting requirements? With increasing regulation, enterprises need to retain an ever increasing amount of information and retrieve that data and supply it to regulators quickly and accurately. Further complicating the landscape for enterprise IT managers, is more complex storage requirements for the discovery of this information. Enter dynamic navigation, which gives the IT manager a view at all the data related to a particular request, plus the ability to pinpoint the specific data set needed.
• Communities of Interest: Ability to aggregate internal and external information sources in order to establish a “total topic-relevant view” for greater “brand stickiness” and/or “brand expansion.”
• Navigation Prototype/Development: Ability to rapidly (in minutes/hours not days/weeks) prototype and develop the selection, aggregation and organization of metadata for navigation into web and application requirements dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.
• Semantic Middleware: Ability to leverage industry standards (RDF/OWL) to serve as semantic middleware (aggregation, organization, navigation) engine between metadata sources and presentation layer dramatically cutting development time and resource requirements.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines also defines “discovery” as “the act or process of discovering” and “discovering” as “to make known or visible.” With navigation, which consists of a predefined list of categories and quantification for the information available within them, knowledge workers can solve two problems: discovery and scope. For many companies, satisfying business inquiries, meeting compliance regulations and minimizing risk is critical, but they can’t do this effectively and accurately without the information they need. What’s needed is a systematic approach to information discovery, no matter its source or format, giving enterprises the ability to discover information instantly whether it resides in the enterprise or on the Web. Also, by providing “bug’s eye” and “bird’s eye” views, navigation addresses scope. Without the full scope of information, knowledge workers don’t have an accurate picture of the data needed to make business decisions so the quality of decisions, creative output and productivity suffers. Most (if not all) knowledge workers have a preconceived notion of navigation but still find unrealized value in the ability to truly explore/discover what you need.

ILLUMINATE PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN RELATIONSHIPS
Ultimately it’s what you don’t know that you should that will negatively effect your business. If you don’t easily see the relationships between business information crossing multiple repositories, you will miss crucial decision making opportunities; or worse, fail to satisfy a regulatory audit.

Imagine the challenges a financial analyst at a bank catering to high net worth individuals deals with on a daily basis. They have access to customer databases, financial systems, trading systems, profiles, and market research in order to evaluate the health of their customer’s portfolio. The only relationships seen in the decision process include the state of the financial markets relative to the existing portfolio. Now imagine the decision power of an analyst using dynamic navigation software to aggregate all of this internal data along with readily available external data such as news headlines, websites, and blogs in order to take a more proactive approach to comparing ever-changing market and individual news for decision making.

Likewise the challenge of satisfying regulatory audits can be a daunting challenge as sometimes the relationships of information necessary to satisfy that audit are not apparent. With dynamic navigation every inquiry is answered with the full scope of available information, within scope and context, regardless of location or format. This ensures a timely, comprehensive analysis and response to every audit.

SIDEREAN SOFTWARE
Siderean Software helps people view and explore the full scope of enterprise and Web-based content available on a topic for thorough, fast and flexible inquiries. Our open, Web-based tools gather, analyze and organize all kinds of structured and unstructured digital content; presenting it in a single, unified navigation view that dynamically displays content in context. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures. For more information please visit www.siderean.com.

USER CASE STUDY
Environmental Health News (EHN) is a news site run by EHS designed to increase the public’s understanding of environmental issues and their effects on human health.

Before Siderean, EHS faced a significant information management problem as its archive of information grew to an unmanageable size of 70,000 articles. Before Siderean, this content was posted to the site and sorted and categorized daily by hand. Over time, it became extremely difficult to continue to sort, categorize, manage, and present this content to readers and journalists in a valuable way and users became increasingly frustrated by not being able to quickly find what they needed. This led EHS to look for a solution that traditional search could not address: improving navigation across the site; and improving how information was categorized and presented so it could be retrieved with pinpoint, repeatable results.

With Siderean, EHS now has improved navigation and tagging capabilities so journalists can easily scan the large volume of structured and unstructured content on their topic of interest before drilling down. With Siderean, EHS is also able to syndicate content for other web sites and publish its content to other sites, expanding its reach and usability as the premier source for environmental health information. Visit their site at http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/.

CEO Profile:

Robert Petrossian, CEO Siderean Software
Mr. Petrossian is a twenty-year veteran of the enterprise software industry, with proven track record in starting and leading high-technology software companies. He has founded two startups, leading them from inception to acquisition by publicly traded companies. He has served in senior management roles within several companies with responsibilities ranging from operations, product development, business development and sales.

Prior to Siderean, Mr. Petrossian was the COO of Integrien Corporation and the VP of Strategy and Business Development at I-many, Inc. (NASDAQ: IMNY). Prior to I-many, Mr. Petrossian was the co-founder and CEO of Menerva Technologies. Mr. Petrossian received his M.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.S. degree from Tufts University.