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October 30, 2005
Info value increases with sharing
According to Reuters, IBM is linking it's software for enterprise search with Google's desktop search tool. IBM's VP of content management claims the IBM software helps employees get at content that's not posted:
Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs.
That makes me wonder how much Google indexes of Sun's internal email archives would be worth. At Sun the formula for the elixir of eternal youth is probably right next to somebody's recipe for the philosopher's stone about 8 indentations down in some email thread that nobody can search out because that alias only got archived on individuals' machines.
The expansion of open source software grew with web search capabilities. That correlation could be like ice cream sales and deaths by drowning. Ice cream sales and drownings go up with temperature. Open source and web search usefulness go up with network accessibilty. But mere network access isn't going to result in heavy sharing for all sorts of new stuff. You have to be able to find out about it.
Today it's still often easier to learn about things going on outside the company, because you can stumble over them in a search. There's a tendency to want to protect intellectual property carefully, in the same way you do your financial information or customer relationship data. Perhaps there's a portion of that data in a state where you don't want to share it too openly. (Not sure what.)
But are we really benefitting for example from people posing (and then of course answering) the same question multiple times on widely read internal aliases because they couldn't easily find it with an intranet search? Are we benefitting from people tending to start their own solution to a problem doubtless already solved internally by someone else because they couldn't find it with an intranet search?
The value of the information in these solutions clearly increases with sharing. And those are just two things I can think of off the top of my head with the children fighting in the background and Tim wanting to push me away from the computer so he can use it.
Posted by Mark at October 30, 2005 09:22 AM
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