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Innovation im HR-Management “Inhaltlicher Abgleich von Profilen”

Bei meinem Besuch an der 9. Fachmesse für Personalmanagement „Personal Swiss 2010“ in Zürich schlugen mir bereits am Eingang Schlagwörter wie „Skills-Management“, „Talent-Management“, „E-Recruiting“, „Personal-Marketing“, „HR-Controlling“, „HR-Potenzial“, „Bewerber-Management“, „Bewerber-Matching“, „Job-Börse“, „Talentsuche“, „Management-Development“ usw. entgegen. Trotz der 260 Aussteller und über 3500 Besucher herrschte für mich ein angenehmes Klima.

Die Messe war auch mit Spezialbeiträgen angereichert, beispielsweise zum Thema Kulturassessment am Stand von wissen.org Katz & Partner oder mit einem Fachreferat von Stefan Marti über Kulturentwicklung in der AXA.

Mein Augenmerk richtete sich explizit nach Ausstellern, welche Produkte für das eigentliche Talent- oder Bewerbermanagement zur Vorselektion der geeignetsten Talente aus Tausenden von Kandidaten anbieten. Ich musste allerdings feststellen, dass die gängigsten Produkte primär auf die computergestützte Verwaltung der Dokumente ausgerichtet war, teilweise ergänzt mit einer Suche nach Stichwörtern.

Einzig am Stand von Infoniqa/Kendox konnte mit dem etwas versteckten Produkt InfoCodex eine eigentliche Job-Matching-Lösung gezeigt werden.

Durch einfaches Copy/Paste kann man eine komplette Stellenbeschreibung in das Suchfeld kopieren und die Ähnlichkeitssuche von InfoCodex findet sofort die am besten passenden Talente – und dies sprachübergreifend in Deutsch, Englisch, Französisch, Italienisch oder Spanisch (vgl. Innovation im HR-Management).

Die Lösung von InfoCodex überzeugt mich und wird neue Wege im HR-Management eröffnen.

2010 05 25 tko HR Management
InfoCodex
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Innovation in HR Management “Content Comparison of Profiles”

On my visit to the 9th trade fair for personal management “ Personal Swiss 2010“ in Zurich, I was confronted already at the entrance with slogans and catchwords like “skills management“, “talent management“, “e-recruiting“, “ recruitment marketing“,

“HR controlling“, “HR potential“, “recruitment management“, “recruitment matching“, “job market“, “talent search“, “management development“ etc. Despite the 260 exhibitors and the more than 3,500 visitors I felt at ease.

The trade fair was also supplemented with special contributions like “culture assessment“ at the wissen.org Katz & Partner stand or with a subject specialization from Stefan Marti about culture development in the AXA.

My attention was directed explicitly to those exhibitors, whose products were directed towards the search for the most fitting talents and qualified people out of thousands of candidates. I quickly came to the conclusion that the most popular products were dependent upon the computer-assisted management of documents, partly supplemented by a search for keywords.
It was only at the Infoniqa/Kendox stand that it was presented with an actual job-matching solution with the somewhat hidden InfoCodex product.

With a simple copy/paste operation, one can copy a complete job description into the search input field and the InfoCodex “similarity search“ found the best-fitting application candidates immediately, and did this over the 5 languages: English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. (see Innovation in HR Management)

The InfoCodex solution convinced me and I am sure that this is the way of HR Management of the future.

2010 05 25 tko HR Management
InfoCodex
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Does InfoCodex make a Document Management System (DMS) obsolete?

A Document Management System (DMS) is a database containing a collection of unstructured documents, supplemented by metadata such as customer numbers, keywords etc. for index-based search and retrieval.

It generates some structure in large archives of documents, but this structure is created and maintained by human resources. The organization of such system requires substantial human efforts and so does the daily filing of new documents (keyword setting etc. for subsequent search and retrieval). An additional problem is that today’s DMS structures do not necessarily fulfill tomorrow’s needs if the fields of interest change over the course of time (see, e.g.,  Wikipedia entry on Document Management System, ISO 15836:2009, SN EN ISO 11442:2006).

InfoCodex, on the other hand, automatically creates and maintains a virtual order according to
the current fields of interests reflected by the documents. Similar to a chaotic warehouse system where the physical location of items is irrelevant as long as a structured catalogue is maintained, InfoCodex organises large amounts of documents which can be dispersed across different sources (file servers, e-mailboxes, Internet, Intranet, databases) by generating a virtual, but highly structured information landscape. No manual input is required to organize the archives or to generate keywords or other search indexes. The user-dependent access rights are fully granted, and the virtual order is always kept up-to-date. The prerequisite is, however, that the documents at hand have real thematic content and are not just forms like delivery notes, invoices, vouchers etc.

Conclusions

  • For the administration of documents with real thematic content (business correspondence, business reports, contracts and written agreements, offers, research reports, news articles etc.), where the focus is on a targeted and fast retrieval of the documents, IntoCodex can certainly replace a costly DMS.
  • For the administration of process information with little thematic content (delivery notes, invoices, vouchers, bank receipts etc.), InfoCodex can be a supplement to a DMS but it cannot replace a DMS.
2010 02 24 wae DMS
Document Management System
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Internet Explorer 8 Performance Issue

Recently we experienced a severe performance problem with IE8 rendering one of our pages in the InfoCodex web interface. It was taking about 1.5 minutes (yes, minutes not seconds!) for the page to display.

All other browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Iron, Safari, Opera and even IE7, rendered the page within 1-2 seconds.

I finally tracked down the problem to be the many small, different sized images, that where centred in table cells (as used for our heat map representation).

After making the images all the same size, fitting the size of the table cell and some other tweaks, I managed to get it down to about 8 seconds, although it is still substantially slower than the other browsers.

Other IE8 performance problems reported on the Web: see

http://www.switched.com/2009/03/13/microsoft-declares-ie8-fastest-browser-world-laughs/

http://digg.com/software/IE8_Performance_vs_Google_Chrome_and_Firefox

http://news.techworld.com/networking/3202572/internet-explorer-8-runs-ten-times-faster-with-google-chrome-plug-in/

2010 02 01 bsi Internet Explorer
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Why cross-language semantic search technology is essential for Competitive Intelligence (CI)?

In today’s highly competitive marketplace companies are forced to be aware of important moves and developments of their competitors without delay. The overload of information freely available in the internet (news feeds, patent registrations, press releases, etc.) in a variety of sources and languages can only be managed with highly sophisticated automated tools which are able to understand the meaning of documents and to consolidate the gathered information into a comprehensive daily update for the intelligence officer:

  • Recognizing similar content from various sources: InfoCodex recognizes automatically the similarity of content (even across different languages) and returns a consolidated overview of the new information. Example: the launch of the new Apple iPhone was covered in thousands of news sources all over the world, whereas the effective content (the fact that Apple launches a new cellular phone) was the same.
  • Diffs: Sometimes details matter and, therefore, it’s important to have a monitoring tool which also allows one to recognize even smallest changes in specific sources. Example: price changes or feature enhancements (in these cases the rest of the content of the corresponding files often remains the same)
  • Automatic abstract generation: To scan new facts as efficiently as possible, InfoCodex automatically generates abstracts of the documents. By means of a user-specific filter and alert function, abstracts of particular interest can automatically be extracted or forwarded.
  • Analyzing the search results of Google, Yahoo or other search engines: InfoCodex creates a Heat Map based on content similarity of the documents, whereas Google or Yahoo will not recognize similar documents but just give you a larger result list. InfoCodex will group similar documents based on their content into document families. You can tell InfoCodex how many links it should follow (link depth) and how many documents it should analyze.
2007 09 14 mueller Competitive Intelligence
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Security Gaps in Search Engines

Theories and allegations are one thing – but it is functionality in practice that counts.

Suppose your documents have been indexed by Google Search Appliance. Make any search and note, e.g., the seventh search result. Then, change the access right for this document such that your user account has no read access anymore to this specific document. Now submit the same search again and see what happens…

Tell us your real life experiences!

2007 07 27 bsi Google Enterprise Search
InfoCodex
Privacy / Security
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Enterprise Search, Security and Privacy

Enterprise versus Internet search

The assumption that similar approaches could be used in enterprise and internet searches “turns out to be surprisingly faulty” (Marc Strohlein: Executive Guide to Search, BusinessWeek, May 15 2006; see also Alan Cane: The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look, Financial Times, March 28 2007). The most import difference is that internet search engines do not have to care about security at all.

As a consequence, it is not easy for search engines originally developed for the internet to satisfy the security and privacy requirements of an enterprise environment (see, e.g., Gartner Research: Manage Google’s desktop search now or lock it out, 16 Feb. 2006; or Gartner Research: Google enterprise search has its limits, 13 Mar 2006)

Access rights for enterprise document repositories (security)

It seems to be generally expected that a user of an enterprise search engine should see only those documents for which he has the necessary access rights. This means that a search engine must respect “File system security” that adheres to the access rights of the underlying network. This requirement is, however, not always met – even if the product supplier claims to have a “sophisticated security system”. A real support of “File system security” may have serious impacts on the performance (search speed) and corresponds to a ridge walk between “Scylla and Charybdis” (security and performance).

It might happen that the access rights of some files must be changed by the system administrator or by a user (e.g. because a search engine has displayed search results to unauthorized users). In such a case the enterprise search engine should react immediately to the modified access rights – a requirement that is seldom met (one of the very few systems supporting this feature is InfoCodex).

Highly sensitive data and privacy

Today’s systems for handling the file access rights in an enterprise network offer a great flexibility on various levels. But this means also that the administration has become really difficult – leading to increased human mistakes or negligences.

Enterprise search engines facilitate the discovery of information stored on networks, and relying on the “File system security” might not be enough in view of possible risks in the access right settings. For the handling of high data security and privacy, additional measures have to be taken. In the InfoCodex system, this is achieved by creating protected sub-domains for which selected users/groups own the full sovereign rights. Even system administrators have no access rights to the search and viewing functions in those protected sub-domains.

2007 07 25 bsi InfoCodex
Privacy / Security
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Cross-language Search: What is it all about?

The term “cross-language search” is used in many different senses:

1. Some search engine providers claim to support multilingual or cross-language search if they can handle and index documents written in different languages. They search for the exact appearance of the entered search terms, e.g. “war” finds English documents referring to military actions and it finds German documents containing “war” in the sense of “was” (i.e. a meaningless glue word).

2. Other search engines (see, e.g., www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/translate_20070523.html) provide a tool for the translation of a query into a selectable other language, and then, the query is submitted with the translated query text. This is certainly a progress and can be useful in some specific situations, e.g. if one is looking for a hairdresser in Paris.

Shortcomings:
- If one is looking for “member of the board” and “SAir Group” (Swissair) and searches for German documents, the translated query “Mitglied des Brettes” und “SAir Gruppe” won’t provide any results. If “member of the board” is replaced by “Aufsichtsrat” some documents are found but they do not correspond to the commonly used terms “Verwaltungsrat” or “Verwaltungsräte” in conjunction with the Sair case.
- For information research and intelligence services the above-mentioned method does not help because it is not able to compare and rank documents written in different languages.

3. A true cross-language search is possible only if the search engine is able to recognize the thematic content, i.e., if the system realizes that the English translation of a French (or a German etc.) document is equivalent to the original document. This advanced technique is implemented in InfoCodex (see www.infocodex.com). It simultaneously finds documents in all supported languages, without the need for a cumbersome (and arbitrary) translation into each other language. Because of the cross-language content recognition and a well-founded similarity measure, the documents can be ordered by their relevance with respect to the query.

2007 06 08 bsi InfoCodex
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i-expo Award 2006 for InfoCodex

InfoCodex won the i-expo Award 2006 for

“The best and most innovative Economic Intelligence tool”

The award was given to Organic Information Solutions (OIS), the French InfoCodex distribution partner, managed by Philippe Salle (Faucon) and Marie-France Ligeret (Paris).

2007 05 24 msi InfoCodex Comments (2) Permalink