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Search and the Enterprise: Making
Content Work Behind the Firewall - and Beyond |
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18 May 2004 |
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Information Today, Inc.'s Enterprise Search Summit is a
new forum for pulling together the rapidly evolving world
of enterprise search from the perspective of both
technologists and information professionals pulling
together content from behind the firewall and from beyond
the enterprise. It was a huge hit, well-attended and
stocked with expertise and insights from today's leading
suppliers and implementers. Key take-away: enterprise
search technologies are maturing rapidly, but so are the
outlooks of the professionals using search tools to provide
content value in today's institutions. The combination of
these two factors promises to provide a lot of value to
institutions over the next couple of years. |
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Content
behind the firewalls of major institutions is oftentimes a very
different animal from that found on the open Web. Institutions
grapple with a wide array of concerns, from corporate and
regulatory compliance to guarding intellectual property rights
to leveraging both powerful databases and mountains of
unstructured content, including content coming from channels
such as instant messaging and phone calls that oftentimes has a
critical impact on operations. If these challenges were not
enough, the technology needed to manage these forests of
content also responds to a very different scale of
requirements, in particular with content search technologies.
Information Today, Inc.'s Enterprise Search Summit was an
excellent and well-attended forum in which to explore these and
other key issues confronting the enterprise's state of the art
in assembling content from internal and external sources in a
comprehensive and effective manner via search technologies. All
of the major players in enterprise search were
represented in the panels and displays, as well as experts with
sometimes piercing insights into what really does and doesn't
work in major content deployments. Overall the message of these
pros was highly encouraging: adding value to content via
Web-based enterprise searching has emerged confidently from its
early stages of weak and simplistic tools and overwhelmed
deployers to an era in which both tools and deployers are able
to manage a wide and sophisticated array of requirements from
users trained by open Web search technologies to be highly
demanding of any Web-based content experience. Time does not
allow me to give you our usual "blow-by-blow" coverage of this
event, but there were some important themes that emerged to
consider:
- Enterprise searching is maturing
into a wide array of content location services. Now that
search engines are a given in all major institutional Web
infrastructures, the second, third and fourth generation of
enterprise search solutions are coming much closer to
fulfilling the vision that the Knowledge Management (KM)
movement has been promising for years. Federated searches are
bringing together content from sources with different
indexing requirements and capabilities far more effectively
and features provided in search products are becoming more
concierge-like in helping users find needed content. Verity
demonstrated the importance of presenting related content
that may be of interest to users and selections from
like-minded users, Amazon-like "finding" features that help
to improve the contextual value of a search result page as a
launching point for learning as much as a point of answer
delivery. Integration with open Web sources is also
increasingly important for users who are used to the Web as
an authoritative and "go to first" source for content.
Whatever the specific "point solution" may be, it takes a lot
more sophistication and ability to work with the human
element in mind to make search succeed in today's enterprise
search environment.
- Big-name technology is not always
bringing the results that people need. The crew from
Google crowed about the profitability of their rack-mounted
enterprise search tool compared to many of the more open
solutions being offered, but Google and other major names in
search weren't necessarily the ones that were registering
with the professionals in attendance. Steve Arnold of Arnold
Information Technology puts search technologies through the
wringer at his private labs and came up with an interesting
short list of recommended offerings: Endeca's Guided
Navigation - a relatively new offering for the enterprise
from a well-established Web search technology firm - iPhrase,
Inquira, Vivisimo, Mondosoft and Blossom (no relation). While
there are many competent players in this space, the truth of
the matter is that many search technology providers have been
concentrating at least as much on marketing and features as
they have on improving search technologies over the past
couple of years. That's not altogether bad, but it's
important to bear in mind that not everyone in this space is
willing or able to make significant changes to their core
technology offerings that are likely to offer companies the
most value out of their content.
- It's not always about the money -
or the technology. In an increasingly bottom-line
oriented world, major incremental improvements in efficiency
are oftentimes the key to measurable success. Oftentimes this
means working with infrastructure that's governed by an
organization's IT department. In the instance of Air Products
& Chemicals, Inc. this meant working with a Microsoft
SharePoint solution already in place and using dedicated
staff to apply all of the best practices available for
content organization and interface design, along with
Inxight's SmartDiscovery technologies to assist in content
categorization and indexing. A key factor was their providing
easy ways to communicate with info pros when search results
came up nil and turning around needed answers within two
hours. Two thirds of users agreed that the new design was a
definite improvement, 44 percent were finding what they
needed in less than five minutes (19 percent in less than ten
minutes) and no-results searches dropped from 22 percent to 7
percent - improvements that owe at least as much to the
intelligent application of human resources as any additional
technologies. Search technologies need not be expensive,
either: open source search solutions are beginning to loom as
important and competitive offerings for institutions, and
inexpensive solutions such as Northern Light that can
integrate premium content along with enterprise content
efficiently (packages start at USD 2,500).
Having implementation budgets that allow
for a generous dose of input from local information
professionals to bring the human element into search solutions
is at least as important to success as the widgets that you
roll out, but technology remains the central stage for success
in enterprise search. Enterprise search is maturing rapidly,
and in the next couple of years should reach a point where its
ability to delivery and manage
vContent in a wide
variety of settings using wiser and wizened information
professionals as a key component in its success. InfoToday
struck a nerve in this new conference series, one which should
prove to be interesting for some time to come.
-
John Blossom
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