Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about adoption. The concepts and the ideas that you’re talking about have been around. After doing three startups, I did 10 years of consulting before I started One Million by One Million. Even in the early 2000’s, there were companies that called themselves knowledge management companies that did exactly what you’re doing with exactly the same value proposition. They had a very hard time gaining enterprise adoption. What is happening now? What is the state of the union in enterprise adoption today with your technology?

Dave Copps: I think you’re seeing a real transformation happening. I’ve been in the space a long time too. I think knowledge management is a term that has been around for a very long time. I don’t think anyone knows what it means anymore. In essence, knowledge management in the past meant search. Every search engine called themselves a knowledge management system. I think the concept of search is dated. If you think about the way search works, someone puts in a keyword and that keyword is then matched to every document that might have that keyword, and they bring back all the documents. That whole strategy is dying. We can’t have as much data as we have today without some kind of a learning system. The state of the art system can’t be putting all the documents in a Big Data index and hack at it with keywords. We’ve done very static methods for connecting people with knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: It depends on what your use case is. One of the areas where knowledge management has actually found a very concrete use case and lots of adoption is in creating customer support knowledge base. There are a whole bunch of companies who have upgraded in that space. That space has used knowledge management very nicely. Even when people are on the phone responding to customer support questions, they use these knowledge bases to find the answers. Then, there are automated systems where the answer comes directly from the system based on keyword searches or natural language search. In that use case, search works quite well.

The use case you are describing is more a collaboration use case – intraprise collaboration use case where there are people and expertise. It’s almost like expertise location and expertise-oriented collaboration is the use case that you’re talking about, which is a different use case.

Dave Copps: In a controlled environment that you described where there are answers and there are nice concise paragraphs that have keywords in them, that’s a great place to do keyword search. What I’m talking about is there are bigger problems than that, where global corporations have tens and millions of documents that no one knows what’s in those things. It’s not like a customer support system. We have to go find these things. Sometimes, it takes a long time just to get access to the data. Connecting tens of millions of documents is a lot harder.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace
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