EDS to Untangle Nobel's Web Site

Mar 28, 02:15 AM

Current Headlines: By The Dallas Morning News

Mar. 28--Alfred Nobel was a man of vision. But he didn't see the Internet coming.

So when the inventive genius behind dynamite, synthetic silk and manmade rubber arranged his will in 1895 to fund the Nobel Prizes, he failed to provide for a Web site.

For more than a decade, the nonprofit organization in Stockholm, Sweden, has relied on piecemeal funding and a staff of really brainy academics to build and maintain its global virtual portal.

The result: The world-renowned nonprofit group's Web presence is less than world-class.

By its own admission, www.nobelprize.org is huge and cumbersome, and much of the content is incomprehensible to ordinary minds.

Now Electronic Data Systems Corp. is coming to the rescue. Last week, the Plano-based technology services giant became an official sponsor of the Nobel Prize Series, which hands out the world's most prestigious awards, and the global technology services partner of Nobel Web. No, there won't be a tagline saying the 2007 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony is being brought to you in part by EDS.

But there will be one saying that the Web site is being powered by it.

And the company gets to use the Nobel logo on some of its collateral materials.

EDS is not getting paid for the IT work.

And while this three-year sponsorship may not have the public visibility of the EDS Byron Nelson Championship, Ron Rittenmeyer, EDS president and chief operating officer, believes it will hold considerable sway with customers.

"It's very exciting to be engaged with something that is so well-known and has such an important academic connection," he says. He and other top executives will be able to take chosen customers to hobnob at Nobel events. "It makes for a nice opportunity to allow clients to be part of this."

Simplify, simplify

Over the next three years, EDS intends to overhaul nobelprize.org to make its navigation simple and its information intelligible to those of us with less than a Ph.D. in physics.

In fact, the goal is to make it user-friendly and understandable to high school students.

"We hope to stimulate the idea that it may be better to have a Nobel laureate as a role model than Kobe Bryant," Alf Lindberg, chief executive of Nobel Web, says in a telephone interview from Sweden.

"Science is so important. We want to spread the gospel by making the site navigable and bringing the elite language of academia down to earth. This is where EDS comes in," he says.

EDS will help develop educational programs designed to spur interest in the disciplines covered by the Nobel Prize -- science, medicine, math and literature -- and work to get the programs on television networks.

Mr. Rittenmeyer wholeheartedly endorses the mission at hand. "What Alf is trying to do in reaching out to high school children is something that's very, very important to this country and other countries as well."

When the Nobel site was launched 11 years ago, it had one objective: to instantly inform the world when each Nobel Prize is announced during the first two weeks of October.

"Since then, it has grown to contain all of the lectures, all the informatics since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901," says Dr. Lindberg.

The fact that he chooses a word like informatics is an indication of how tough this task will be.

Dr. Lindberg is an expert in microbiology who served for eight years on the selection committee for the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He's the first to that admit he and his staff are not experts in Web design or easy speak.

"We have to be very much interested in the content," he says. "We are, for obvious reasons, not the world's best experts in how you communicate it."

Mr. Rittenmeyer contends that his employees are.

Nobel's "end of this bargain is to provide the fundamental content. Our part is to take that content and help convert it into something more usable, with ultimate goal of being a site that anybody can navigate."

Herding cats

EDS aired a Super Bowl ad in 2000 that compared its work to herding 10,000 wild cats. This project may prove to be more like rounding up 20,000.

A hands-on guy at EDS who's done a preliminary analysis of the site describes it as "monstrously huge" -- one of the largest the company has ever tackled.

Even Dr. Lindberg can't say how big it is. "There are tons of gig abytes because we have 700 videos now. There is more than 100 years of Nobel-related material. It draws 30 million-plus visitors a year without us advertising it."

Mr. Rittenmeyer sidesteps when asked how much EDS would charge a paying customer for this expertise. "We saw this as a partnership of doing different things together. We've never really put a price tag on it."

Dr. Lindberg is happy he doesn't need to know.

Industry sources say a redo of this magnitude would easily run several million dollars.

Guiding visitors

The first step is for EDS to do a highly detailed visitor perception survey, Dr. Lindberg says.

They know that most people find the site via Google using a name of a Nobel laureate. But after that, they often get frustrated because the information isn't where they expect to find it.

"We have done the site in a chronological fashion," says Dr. Lindberg. "EDS said, 'Why don't you turn it around and put the last guy first?' Most people are not historically interested in who got the first prize in 1901. We want people to get the information they're asking for with the first click."

The revamped site will require frequent updating, says Mr. Rittenmeyer. "Web sites have to be fresh and kept current."

And as new information is added, something else may have to go. "There's finite limit to all sites."

All of this is a big positive in Mr. Rittenmeyer's mind. "Challenges are exciting. We'll have a lot of people involved in this project who will really learn something from it.

"That's why we're excited to be there."

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Dallas Morning News

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