InfoTools Survey Results

Yesterday, I gave a talk on InfoTools: Beyond Search at TiE Chennai. The slides of the presention are here. I think it went well, but I think, if I had cut down the slides and talk and gave more demos, it would have gone even better. Perhaps next time.

Before starting the talk, I requested people to give me (written) answers to three questions:

1. What are your information needs?
2. What are your problems with information?
3. What tools do you use to manage information?

The questions, perhaps were a bit vague. I realized that after going through the answers. They varied in their level of granularity (specific vs generic problems) and the definition of information itself. But here they are (slightly modified to reduce redundancy).

Here is what I got from the survey:

What are your information needs?

1. Potential customer info
2. Right info at the right time (whenever I need it)
3. To structure, unstructured web data
4. Technology and Process to manage large newspaper portal
5. Should be current, relevant (to my context. Should lead to (help?) actual decisions
6. I need reference (information) of various consultants relating to start of business viz cost, web, management etc.
7. Need for current information
8. Need (to handle?) information from multiple sources and formats
9. Collating information from multiple sources
10. Information about competition
11. About marketability and segments
12. Company address information
13. Company finance (annual reports)
14. Executives within the company
15. Trade details, products, services etc.
16. Sales leads
17. Knowledge enhancement
18. Learning about old friends/acquaintances/family
19. To learn to grow personally & business
20. Needs to be local search for providers near to me (for ex: a photo copier shop near to my house)
21. Technical solutions (day to day) for career and personal growth
22. My business is providing information based services, package with recommendations. So need for information varies.
23. Various technologies in market
24. Information about market situation
25. About stock/companies performance
26. Details/support to solve issues
27. Products available in the market for specifics(?)
28. Focused News
29. Similar business entity info
30. Public info of competitor
31. At a business level – market feelers about demand, ease of vendor options availability
32. At an execution/implementation level – latent trends in tech
33. Updated knowledge
34. Price information about products etc.
35. Information about technology
36. Looking for acquiring an IT company. Need info on the industry they are in (macro) and more about that company (micro)
37. Collect, compile for pattern understanding, plan for target customer
38. Top IT temp staffing companies in India
39. Total temp staff in IT in India
40. How do I know the customer needs
41. Scholarly articles on business entrepreneurship
42. Product information, addresses from www
43. Collecting/harvesting data from websites and collating, cleansing and delivering to clients
44. Where is the resource for information?
45. Where info is available, how to get data stream into our database
46. How cost effective, credible, valuable is the data
47. Accessibility
48. About companies wanting to enter India -setup operations, joint ventures
49. Companies in India wanting to enter other geographies
50. Consultants from outside India needing partners in India
51. Relevant, accurate data (specific to the task at hand)
52. Info about prospective customers
53. Info about vendors
54. Info about current market
55. Info about latest technology

Here are my list of information requirements (I took the survey along with others)

1. Leads
2. Trends
3. Best practices

What are your problems with information?

1. Locating the right data at the right time
2. At times info overload
3. Unable to get the right (specific) information
4. Sometimes get caught into loads of data, making it difficult to sift through
5. Credibility, cost and accessibility
6. Frequent website updates
7. Different formats of information
8. Gettting data from complex templates and grouping into finite categories
9. Precision, very difficult to get objective information
10. Currency of data
11. Comprehensiveness of data
12. Need continuous monitoring
13. Information overload and in such case, synthesizing & assimilating that information in a reasonable time frame is difficult
14. Old data, not accurate
15. Too much info
16. Not easily accessible
17. Irrelevant info
18. Filter out the actual/real info from a large pool of junk data
19. Do not have a scope to interact with peers in similar industries
20. Direct actionable information takes several searches, navigation
21. How to localize information (assume how to get local information) and get reliable info
22. How to segregate info from the web
23. Difficult to put together
24. If put together, not sure whether it is the updated info
25. If updated (up to date?) not sure about the integrity of the data source
26. Availability (sources), Reliability (sources)
27. Aggregation of data in a presentable manner
28. Too much information
29. Unable to identify precise locations quickly
30. Quality of inputs not high (always)
31. Too large varied and different
32. Formats (word, pdf, excel etc. ), hard copies, books, magazines
33. Difficult to authenticate, collate and organize based on requirement
34. I like websearch engines but I strongly believe that these search engines are at a nascent stage. I just don’t need a site coming up in my search because it is in wikipedia or yahoo
35. Inappropriate not timely
36. Have to go through lots of notes/documents/pages to get a single piece of information
37. Validating the information
38. Storing and organizing information
39. Time
40. Where to see (sources?)
41. Not a centralized reporting
42. Assimilation requires a lot of pre-formatting
43. Effective and speed search by everyone not followed
44. Not sure what to look for, where to look for and how to get it
45. Vast, use software to target timely, quick, on realtime
46. Not able to source the information in the web
47. We develop products based on blogs and emails. This is not enough.
48. Too much info
49. Info with noise

My List

1. Signal vs noise
2. Reliability
3. Authenticity

What tools do you use?

1. Blog, forums
2. Google, web search
3. Search engines
4. Reliable third parties
5. Friends
6. Regular expressions
7. Use bookmarking tools like delicious, share with team
8. Knowledge repositories (wikipedia
9. Books (online/printed)
10. Inhouse tools to capture through automation
11. Infosource – www, infoanalysis – spreadsheets
12. Search engines to identify information
13. Customized perl/php/vb.net programs to manage
14. Scrape information from the web and manage it
15. Search engines
16. Networking sites (LinkedIn etc)
17. Forums
18. Email
19. My brain power, word/excel
20. justdial and few others provide localized service over phone but it is not so accurate
21. Justdial
22. Hakia
23. None
24. Excel/Computer/Notebooks
25. Peer discussions
26. IE Favorites (browser bookmarks)
27. Bing
28. Primary Research
29. Internet, newspapers, meeting – software modules
30. spreadsheet, email
31. Internet, libraries
32. Getting logic from other tools and using our own tools or languages
33. Perl, regex
34. Paid portals
35. LinkedIn
36. Spoke
37. Ecademy
38. Xing
39. My memory (sigh)

What I use:

1. Social bookmarks (delicious, stumble upon)
2. Twitter Search
3. Facebook groups
4. LinkedIn Groups and Answers
5. Custom search
6. Blog/Feed Search
7. Twine
8. Semantic Search engines
9. InfoMinder
10. InfoStreams (feed aggregator/search)
11. InfoPortals (just started)
12. Tag clouds (generated)
13. Concept Mapping tools
14. OpenCalais
15. Zemanta
16. Wikis

This is a small sample (about 40+ people who attended my talk). But you can see some patterns. I think we have a long way to go beyond search.