How Search 2.0 Will Impact the Enterprise
4. Consistent operational model, with a reduction of the complexity of the security model. As a central component, the access layer provides a single point which authenticates, authorizes and records access to information. It simplifies performance monitoring—the access layer and portal instances are built to run in high-volume environments and include operational performance metrics and tools.
5. Simplified rollout model, leveraging several existing processes that are already in progress, relating to corporate information access.
A search-powered consumption-oriented architecture does not involve replacing the current infrastructure. It is about getting a better return on past infrastructure investments, better infrastructure re-use and higher levels of abstraction that create value in delivering new business applications. It also enables real-time capabilities based on a scalable solution on top of the already existing infrastructure. This is an evolutionary approach to acquisition and unlocking of revenue streams through search.
Search 2.0 as New Architecture
After internal analysis, one of world’s largest telcos realized that it had several problems in the information access area: limited knowledge of customers, products and context, extended product development and delivery time, absence of an architectural strategy to deal with changes in the global online marketplace and poor customer experience on existing sites. As a consequence, they were unable to deliver relevant, personalized online experiences, leading to customer frustration and potential loss of sales, while lengthy, expensive time-to-market projects reduced their ability to introduce innovative products or competitive offerings rapidly in response to new market entrants. They decided to solve the problem by introducing a new “Information Access and Aggregation Layer,” an architectural pattern based on search 2.0.
In this pattern, the information access layer abstracts content ingestion, format and access from consumers, while enterprise services expose business entity operations such as creation, update and removal of customer data or product orders. The pattern ensures the following five basic properties of the system: 1. high performance, scalability and reliability; 2. low integration effort; 3. simpler change management; 4. clean operational model; and 5. consistent rollout model. Their new search 2.0-based system also introduces several additional capabilities: advanced matching and relevance, intent determination, personalization, content subscription and more.
The result: a significant competitive advantage based on better information access and flexibility of their highly distributed IT platform.
This enriched high-performance level of data access provides each user with information as it changes or as it develops from streams or transactions developing from multiple sources, offering the customer a complete 360-degree view. No matter how fast the information volume grows, search 2.0 solutions scale to support millions of simultaneous users—submitting thousands of queries per second—searching terabytes of data, while still delivering sub-second responses. Real-time indexing and alerting features in search 2.0 can now provide the foundation for a wide range of user-centered applications.
There are many reasons for enterprises to undertake re-engineering of the underlying information landscape: re-organizations, mergers, compliancy requirements, re-use of information, cutting operating costs or simply a need for a richer picture of customers or situations. As systems grow and their intended use changes over time, the architectural landscape must adjust, but without the consumption-centered architecture of search 2.0, this is slow, costly and error-prone. Modern enterprise search platforms help insure against this effect.
Agile Service Delivery Platforms
In the world of the Web, the evolution from Web 1.0 toward Web 2.0 has seen a global transition from monolithic services, centralized content models and managed communities, to a new democracy of empowered users, personalized information access, and user-driven communities. In this new ecosystem of information, evolution favors services that are mashups of component functionalities, resulting in complete interaction environments that are focused by user intent and customized to specific task or discovery goals.
This Lego-model of information sources and services opens up many new opportunities for service orchestration. Good service DNA now includes the ability to connect to open components to harness innovation, the ability to: track and utilize behavioral information across different applications; integrate components loosely to speed up the innovation cycle; bridge information between independent services; connect user experience to social networks; and provision these services through multiple channels as appropriate to the user. Approaches based on search 2.0 enable many of these capabilities.
In orchestrating these service delivery environments, search 2.0 is no longer a small box in one of many disjointed portals. Search is becoming the new driver for the user experience, joining, integrating and connecting many disparate information sources. Unlike their immediate predecessors, search-powered portal views are flexible and modular, they lower the barriers to information integration and reuse, and they lower the time from conception to the full integration of new services and new business based on these. The traditional portals were information gateways; the new portals based on search 2.0 are interactive, collaboration-oriented multimedia information discovery, delivery and analysis tools.
Search 2.0 in Service Delivery
A major publisher in Scandinavia has recently launched a local directory. From the start they were aware of the high-level competition from several financially strong
companies, and realized early that in order to win this market, they had to be best at managing local presence and being closer to the market, content quality and flexibility in local search development. They decided to compete through a complete set of information services, combining structured and unstructured content and merging all content into one search experience. This search experience was significantly enriched through cleansing and query analysis, and has resulted in a number of improved services, including directory information, TV programs, Wikipedia information, classifieds etc.
In short, their recipe for success includes collecting data from multiple sources, combining structured and unstructured data, moving data between internal sources (database to database, index to database, database to index, etc.), cleansing of data through linguistic analysis, fuzzy matching and approximate matching and exporting of data to partners. They based this strategy on search 2.0 tools and most updated data. The result: the data warehouse award of the year in 2006.
Key differentiators in this new service orchestration are the personalized user experience, with communities, tailored views and individualized discovery processes, atomic service integration, where atoms mix and match and enable variable channel delivery and precision and quality of searches, elevating data to insight and monetizing this insight. In all of these capabilities, search 2.0 is the core platform and enabler for orchestrated Web or enterprise service integration.
Search connects users to other people, to services, to useful knowledge. With search 2.0, it is relevant information that finds the user, not the other way around. The search process is becoming absorbed in the continuous process of the customer’s interaction with his environment, and the borderline between the implicit and explicit information provided by the user is becoming fuzzy. All information traces are relevant and important to the improved user experience. The single