Buscar, sugerir y personalizar

By Angel Maldonado

Enterprise Search strategy needs to evolve and innovate by applying the successful Social Media principles of the Web.

An Enterprise user is boomed with frustrations when interacting with Enterprise information and knowledge at the corporate environment. While the same user on the web can find mostly anything needed and be easily updated on friends activities and thoughts.

For the retrieval part of Enterprise assets great progress has been made and yet, in my radar, only a very few set of companies tackle it successfully.

For the being updated on peers activities part, there is so much more that the Enterprise shall do and learn from the success of Social Media on the Web.

Taking Social Media success to the Enterprise decision making.

Such initiatives are already taking place empowered by collaborative platforms, internal communication tools, complementary micro-blogging apps or merely developed additions like allowing a user to populate the now classic “what are you working on?” field on its profile, work-space, and the like.

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By: Angel Maldonado

Information is increasingly coming to us through our peers, friends and colleagues rather than we having to search for it. This represents a fundamental disruption in the Search market where search will be replaced by user’s suggestions first and by automated algorithms secondly.

The challenge of finding information is generally dealt with search. This is the least bad solution as information continues to be discriminated when it does not match a query or some given ranking.

Information is complex and searching is simple, perfect recall through search is unreachable whether it uses legacy, semantic or probabilistic means.

The massive growth in social networks of professional or personal nature is measured by their interactions, those interactions are increasingly satisfying the needs of finding information.

Is not about search, is retrieval

More often such limited view of the information location problem is changing to a more reasonable perception of its complexities. Search represents one of the possible ways to reach information. In every case it can be retrieved through many other complementary and, with regards to suggestions not just complementary but alternative ways.

In fact, one can argue that the most commonly known search tools like Google, do not depend on search but more importantly on rankings. In Google’s case these rankings are based on determining what is popular on top of what matches a query.

The future of retrieval

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Borja Ramirez

I post below my comments re:enterprise search software in the cloud, say in SaaS mode, taken from the LinkedIn Enterprise Search Proffessionals Group.  If you´re not yet subscribed, I highly recommend doig so.

Interesting conversation….my answer re: cloud based search is that it is a good fit for site search, but not so good for intranet search. Nevertheless, all enterprise search software companies will be obliged to offer their product line in a SaaS basis in order to be competitive in the near future.

I´ve read all your comments with great detail, and I agree with most of you in the sense that an enterprise search through a SaaS or IaaS approach shows many pros or cons…my personal take on this is that most site search projects will tend to live in the cloud very soon, and in the other hand most corporate “behind-the-firewall” search projects will tend to be managed and hosted internally. Some of you have already highlighted the underlying criteria for hosting corporate access infrastructures internally (internal compliance re: corporate data hosting, not being able to have all security control settings such as direct synch-ups with user directories & doc ACLs living outside the company, having control over indexing processes, scaling hw when needed, fault tolerance, etc..), these are too many hurdles to cross for an internal secured access platform to be externalized to the cloud.

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Angel Maldonado

Had a chance to enjoy Gartner after three years of absence, it stroked me that every company has adopted the role of the CIO as well as the increase on the participants awareness of the information retrieval challenges.

In my view, Gartner affects the market with regards to Gartner’s strength first, supplier’s competition second, IT budgets of major companies third and ultimately, the compelling sharing of ideas of the IT departments while being entertained.

There is nothing new on this view, this chain of benefits has been and will be standard on any tradeshow where many fascinating conversations are finally ruined as the prospect requests a gift (anything) while the supplier rips the participant’s details pointing the scan and the red light towards the batch while beeping to update the database of prospects for further actions.

Who manages IT budgets? Is it the new CIO role that everyone has adopted so suddenly, sharing nothing else but a remarkable phonetic likeness with the other CXOs roles?

Evidently budgets are and will be managed by the head of finance or CFO who is loyal to the CEO strategy and the reality of numbers at the same time. Rapidly, generally and evidently speaking, the CIOs report to the CEO of the value and risk of key innovations so these are taken to consideration.

As said above, the increase of awareness of the participants on the information access was more than noticeable,. I have chatted with over 50 different people (-and scanned-) on the matter throughout 2 days only, mostly everyone was aware of the basics and many, many had already some initiatives to tackle the issue which lead them to even a greater level of awareness with regards to the complexities and constant changes.

I would just have changed one single thing; there was too much talk on technology and fewer of methodology, too much on what you do that others don’t. Is not about your tools which can always be more and better, is about your problem, its shape and form, its specific demands and how these map to technology features, but first comes the understanding of the problem, second the available technologies.

Borja Ramirez

David Muñoz, my work colleague, just pointed me to this article from Finantial Times. I think there area a few interesting bits, I wanted to highlight. Why is enterprise search such a different animal as consumer search? I quote Colin Hadden, UK country manager for Sinequa, a small player in the enterprise search arena:

“First, [entreprise internal] data are not designed to be found, are of irregular quality and they aren’t linked.

“Second, enterprise users search for people as well as content – they want to find the author of a document as well as the document itself.

Third, security is essential – it may be a legal requirement and certain individuals may only be allowed to look at certain documents.

“And fourth, the data are stored in a variety of places and formats – documents, e-mails, the internet, databases, spreadsheets and, more recently, audio and video material.”

I also pinpoint an interesting quote from  Mr.Glotzbach, head ofproducts for the enterprise in Google:

“One fallacy is that enterprise users want to search in some fundamentally different way from consumer users,” Mr Glotzbach says. “They don’t. We, as Google, have trained the world at large how search is supposed to work: there is a single interface, not 10 interfaces for 10 kinds of content; you enter a couple of words and in less than a second you get the right result.”

I partially agree with his vision. Of course, search should be as simple as Google is in the consumer search business, but let me ask you Mr Glotzbach, why are the results from your enterprise search solution GSA so different to the ones obtained through Google in the web? The quality of the results (i.e. Relevancy) we get in GSA is so much more inferior than the ones from Google in the web. Is that because the principles of PageRank (i.e. linking primarily) do not work inside the enterprise? Enterprise data (i.e. documents, emails, etc) lack a linking structure. I still wonder.