”Search” vs. “Searching”: Bringing Enterprise Search Back to Reality

And when some of those “other information-gathering applications” are added to the mix and applied to business processes, you have a pretty busy intersection. “That’s right; adaptive applications are constantly managing the intersection of the user’s actions, with the possibilities of the business content AND any business rules. This is true in e-commerce sites, but also in enterprise systems. Any ‘directed’ or ‘guided’ search results must be delivered alongside of—not instead of—other results that the user has total control over. If not, the results are no longer trusted and user adoption drops through the floor.”

“There’s a conflict between needing a good complement of information architects and librarians versus the explosive growth of content in the enterprise AND from external sources. The more we require these specialists, the less chance we have to make a good ROI argument...the ‘ROI’ is always less when the ‘I’ gets higher!” says SAP’s Dennis Moore. “On the Internet, there’s tons of access, but very little organization. But in the enterprise, it’s the opposite: tons of organization (schemas, databases, etc.) but very little access.”

Jared Spataro sees the push coming from two directions: “Buyers of enterprise search solutions will deploy search as an infrastructure investment, and this group will increasingly want to see search as an asset that is integrated with their overall strategy for managing information. But senior line-of-business execs are always looking for new ways to drive revenue (and cut costs), and search-centric applications will increasingly become a tool in the toolbox that they’ll feel comfortable using.”

Just Make It Work

As usual, it comes down to the crush of business need seeking precise, reliable solutions. As Michael Schmitt puts it, “Companies that have a ‘nice-to-have need’ might look at technology. But buyers have an URGENT need. The most common urgent need these days is the desire to use intellectual assets you have, and do a more effective job of selling those. ‘Can I converge the information from archives that nobody’s looking at with information from the Internet, and add feedback from social networking in such a way that I can repurpose it and monetize it?’ That’s a compelling business driver.”

“There’s always a tradeoff between information access and information security,” adds Dennis Moore. “It may sound undemocratic to a consumer, but too much access to information can be a bad thing. That requires a lot of forethought and design. A lot of it has already been done by your normal information providers, in terms of security and access clearance. But there’s still a lot to do; it’s not something you can plug in and walk away from.

“A lot of barriers have been eliminated,” Dennis continues. “People don’t need to know or care whether the information comes from a document or from a report (which isn’t a document, but a snapshot of data). Users also want additional information provided that they DIDN’T search for; if you bring up a customer, it would be good to be told that this customer is behind on payments. Putting together search and BI is the key to democratizing without losing control.”

“It has been said that ‘the future is with us today, it’s just unevenly distributed.’ Nowhere is this more true than in search,” states Jared Spataro. “In the long run, search will become a common, well-understood interface to large (and/or complex) data sets for the casual user. Power users of any data set will want to invest the time and money it will take to learn (or develop) complex interfaces for access and manipulating information. But casual users will want a search experience. In this world, search will become not just the way we retrieve information, but also the way we start a business process and take action based on results returned,” he says.

The business context remains a solid theme throughout our conversations. As Paul Sonderegger says, “Search will become part of adaptive business processes that are NOT based on static things like fixed taxonomies or relational schema within databases. These new business applications adapt to the users’ context, and to what’s possible given the underlying data and content. And they adapt to any business rules that pertain to the current business process being conducted and the current decision that has to be made.”

That’s not to say that taxonomies are a thing of the past. “Not at all,” insists Paul. “It’s one view, but it’s just one view. There needs to be a way to cut across many views. You can use a static taxonomy to ask for ‘all the ducks in the world.’ But you also need to have a view that answers the question: ‘Show me all the animals that have bills.’ And you have to be able to include the platypus AND the wood duck...cut across taxonomies. That’s exactly the problem an auto manufacturer has with its parts inventory. You must provide ways to cut across taxonomies AND all other views in unpredictable ways.”

“Unpredictable” is right. Nobody would have guessed, even five years ago, that a simple, seemingly innocuous little desktop utility like “search” would mature in stature to become the fundamental element behind many of our most valued business processes.

But being astounded is what makes life fun, right folks?

It does it for me. Just when you think there are no more surprises in this world
of content and knowledge management, something will emerge to challenge the status quo, not to mention create new subjects for us to create White Papers for!

The following pages will further astound you by the sophistication and creativity the participants bring to the “simple” subject of search.

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Cast of Characters

Matthew Glotzbach
Product Management Director
Google Enterprise

Dennis Moore
General Manager
Emerging Solutions
SAP

Jerome Pesenti
Chief Scientist and
Co-Founder
Vivísimo

Michael Schmitt
CEO
Siderean

Dr. Johannes Scholtes
President
ZyLAB North America
LLC

Silvija Seres
VP Product Marketing
Fast Search & Transfer
(FAST)

Paul Sonderegger
VP Marketing
Endeca

Jared Spataro
Group Product Manager
Enterprise Search
Microsoft

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