GRAPPLING WITH INFORMATION OVERLOAD ON THE WEB
Globally, banks and other financial institutions constitute an enormous industry with financial assets exceeding $20 trillion and upwards of 15 million employees. Consequently, there is an enormous amount of information available about this industry, which is generated by the financial institutions themselves as well as an army of consultants, vendors, regulators, and reporters.
This information is critical to financial institution managers and to the same army of consultants, regulators, and suppliers. It enables them to monitor events, research issues, and set strategies. An inability to locate or understand appropriate industry information can have devastating effects.
Huge quantities of this information are now available on the internet and can be retrieved from virtually every desktop. Six years ago, industry workers depended on a few trade press subscriptions, internal documents, and centralized access to content aggregation databases, which were usually expensive and difficult to access. In today’s world, however, millions of potentially relevant documents are at everyone’s fingertips.
These developments are very positive but have also created problems. The first is a decline of informational productivity as managers now spend at least an hour a day surfing the web, often unsuccessfully. The second is frustration when the expected documentation cannot be located. But the third and most important problem is overload. Simply put, there are so many documents out there, on almost every topic, that workers get lost. They are simply overwhelmed.
The value of the web
The web is like a view to the entire industry. Over 20,000 financial institutions now have web sites and the number grows every day. What these sites sell, their positioning, and their press releases and “about us” sections reveal much. Ask and it’s there – if you have the time to visit all these sites and know their URL.
Allianz is a great example. This global institution has 106 web sites from 49 different countries, covering 15 distinct lines of business, including multiple types of insurance, banking, and capital markets. These sites are written in 14 different languages and include about 50 different subsidiaries. Almost all the sites have information about the specific business or service carried on at that site.
Thus, opinions, strategies, and events can now be revealed through the web in ways never before possible For another example, proximity clustering can indicate whether positive or negative words are found close to an institution’s name, thereby revealing attitudes. Innovation in technology or product can be cross-referenced through the comments and opinions of many commentators, thereby assembling a consensus view.
The web is the greatest bazaar of free information ever seen. On every topic, every line of business, and every issue, someone somewhere has written something valuable – if only it can be located. Not only white papers, but market forecasts, congressional testimony, surveys, regulatory interpretations, speeches, CEO interviews, Fed Open market meetings, and much, much more are available.
Of course, not all information is, or can be, free. The hundreds of industry trade media, for example, must continue to charge for their work. But the issue is: can financial industry professionals benefit from an organized approach to viewing what is available for free on the web? We believe the answer is unequivocally yes.
Search tools don’t work
Search tools have become the standard for finding information on the internet. They are designed to maximize reach, or number of matching documents retrieved, and precision, or not returning off-topic documents.
Yet, search engines create information overload. Who has not been frustrated at a search that returns 300,000 documents? They also foster misinformation. For example, Google’s ranking system favors popular sites, which are usually consumer oriented. It may work against a site with industry information. Many of the truly best documents require free registration, which public search engines won’t do. Many documents contained in dynamic content management systems cannot be indexed.
Search engines depend heavily on word matching, which fails to account for multiple meanings or underlying concepts. Don’t know the right phrase for an industry topic? You’re out of luck. Moreover, real-life business issues take pages to explain and cannot be squeezed into a search box. Some portals have tried clustering results but the technology is too new to be effective. Most web users are not expert searchers and do not use or understand Boolean, for example.
Popular web directories are equally deficient and incomplete. They are becoming dominated by pay-for-placement, which will obscure or obliterate needed industry sites. Yahoo, for example, lists only five of Allianz’ 106 web sites Browsing is a very useful form of information discovery and cannot be conducted through a search box. Neither Yahoo nor the Open Directory categorizes industry sites using professional concepts and terms.
Most importantly, no search engine can say anything about the information itself. Which are the best documents on a given topic? What are the right questions to ask and what new topics are hot? Which sources are reliable and can be depended on? What is the “so-what” of the information? Only knowledgeable people can help with these.
What to do?
This phenomena of having millions of documents on everyone’s desk is new. Therefore, solutions for dealing with this information overload haven’t existed before. To create the solution, the following features are needed:
Eliminate poor or unneeded documents. Freedom to publish anything and everything can be a nightmare for the reader. Knowing where to go and whom to read is the solution. Every document with the word “bank” should not be retrieved. But to do this requires industry knowledge.
Stop duplication. About 75% of the web’s available documents are duplicates due to the almost automatic manner in which they can be captured from one site and re-issued on another. Even worse is the documents that aren’t exact duplicates but repeat the same message time and again. Filtering by humans is required.
Categorize documents on like topics together. Web documents are found on so many sites that proper categorization is difficult. Bringing them together allows fair comparison or an analysis of opposing views.
Cover the entire Global Financial Services Industry. The truly great thing about the web is its global reach and the fact that about 70% of all words on the web are English words. Readers can quickly become conversant with trends or issues all over the world. Too many bankers are somewhat trapped within their own institution when they could be looking outward at the world.
Focus on serving the business viewer. Public search engines are focused on consumers. They typically don’t use professional terminology and have no industry background. The thousands of meaningful, common industry terms are unused. The types of institutions, and their lines of business, are missing from virtually all web directories.
Synthesize the so-what? Once the best documents have been found, the bottom line on all information retrieval is to draw conclusions. Yet, almost all web documents refrain from doing this. Dozens or even hundreds of documents on the same topic cry out for consolidation and interpretation. The documents are there, but the extra value-added isn’t.
Fiducite
Fiducite is a new company focused on solving these problems by providing the actions listed above. We have compiled the first complete directory of all financial industry web sites. We have identified all of the best industry documents from any web source and have classified them so they can be found. We have developed a mix of automated and manual procedures to extract the meaning and the “so-what?” on any given industry topic from all web documents. In a word, we are dedicated to solving the information overload problem.
We believe the industry can only benefit from the web and from a far greater ability to track and monitor events. They say “Knowledge is Power” and the knowledge is available. All that’s needed is the correct tools and a willingness to use them.
Q.E.D.
