Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 21 of 61)

Research, analysis, and news about enterprise search and search markets, technologies, practices, and strategies, such as semantic search, intranet collaboration and workplace, ecommerce and other applications.

Before we consolidated our blogs, industry veteran Lynda Moulton authored our popular enterprise search blog. This category includes all her posts and other enterprise search news and analysis. Lynda’s loyal readers can find all of Lynda’s posts collected here.

For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.

Embedded Search in the Enterprise

April 24, 2012 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

We need to make a distinction between “search in the enterprise” and “enterprise-wide search.” The former is any search that exists persistently in view as we go about our primary work activities. The latter commonly assumes aggregation of all enterprise content via a single platform OR enterprise content to which everyone in the organization will have access. So many attempts at enterprise-wide search are reported to be compromised or frustrated before achieving successful outcomes that it is time to pay attention to point-of-need solutions. This is search that will smoothly satisfy routine retrieval requirements as we work.

Most of us work in a small number of applications all day. A writer will be wedded to a content creation application plus research sources both on the web and internal to the enterprise in which writing is being done. Finding information to support writing whether it is a press release, marketing brochure or technical documentation to accompany a technical product requires access to appropriate content for the writer to deliver to an audience. The audience may be a business analyst, customer’s buyer or product user with advanced technical expertise. During any one work assignment, the writer will usually be focused on one audience and will only need a limited view of content specific to that task.

When a search takes us on a merry chase through multiple resource repositories or in a single repository with heaps of irrelevant content and no good results, we are being forced into a mental traffic nightmare, not of our own making. As this blog post by Tony Schwartz reminds us, we need time to focus and concentrate. It enables us to work smarter and more calmly; for employers seeking to support workers with the best tools, search that works well at the point of doing an assignment is the ultimate perk. I know how frantic and fractionated my mental state becomes as I follow one fruitless web of links after another that I believe will lead me to the piece of information I need. Truthfully, I often become so absorbed in the search and ancillary information I “discover” along the way that sight of the target becomes secondary.

New wisdom from a host of analysts and writers suggests that embedded search is more than a trend, as is search with a specific focus or purposeful business goal. The fact that FAST is now embedded with and for SharePoint and its use is growing principally in that arena illustrates the trend. But readers should also consider a large array of newer search solutions that are strong on semantic features, APIs, integration options, and connectors to a huge variety of content that exists in other application repositories. This article by James Martin in CIO, How to Evaluate Enterprise Search has helpful comments from Leslie Owens of Forrester Research and the rise of connectors is highlighted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe in this post.

Right now two rather new search engines are on my radar screen because of their timely entrance to the marketplace. One is Q-Sensei, which has just released their version 2.0. It is an ontology-based solution very much focused on efficiently processing big data, quick deployment, and integration with content applications. The second is Cambridge Semantics with its Anzo semantic solutions for analyzing and retrieving business data. Finally, I am very excited that ISYS was the object of an acquisition by Lexmark. It was an unexpected move but they deserved to be recognized for having solid connector/filter technology and a large, satisfied customer base. It will be interesting to see how a hardware vendor, noted for print technology, will integrate ISYS search software into its product offerings. Information retrieval belongs where work is being done.

These are just three vendors poised to change the expectations of searchers by fulfilling search needs, embedded or integrated efficiently in select business application areas. Martin White’s most recent enumeration of search vendors puts the list at about 70; they are primarily vendors with standalone search products, products that support standalone search or search engines that complement other content applications. You will see many viable options there that are unfamiliar but be sure to dig down to understand where each might fill a unique need in your enterprise.

When seeking solutions for search problems you need to really understand the purpose before seeking candidate vendors. Then focus on products that have the same clarity of applicability you want. They may be embedded with a product such as Lexmark’s, or a CAD system. The first step is to decide where and for whom you need search to be present.

Researching Enterprise Search System Integrators

March 1, 2012 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

When looking at job postings on the Enterprise Search Engine Professionals Group on LinkedIn shows positions calling for developers with specific programming skills or knowledge of specific products. It may be a faulty assumption, but it appears that enterprises on the path to a new or upgraded search application implementation are paying less attention to the other professional skills needed on a successful team.

Knowing how to implement, tune, administer and enhance search outcomes has more to do with understanding business needs and content management than writing code. You need the expertise of content management professionals who understand the importance of (and how to leverage) metadata. You definitely need people who know how to build and maintain the controlled vocabularies that make metadata valid and valuable within the context of your organization. These professionals are not traditionally found in IT groups; they are more likely to come from a business function, or information science background, preferably with a deep knowledge of the enterprise and how it works.

Integrating content management systems (CMS), digital asset management (DAM), taxonomy, thesaurus or ontology management with enterprise search applications means understanding much more than coding. However, having a tight relationship with IT is imperative for good integration of components. In small and medium organizations it is rare to find experts across all areas and that is where a new breed of system integrators are bringing the most value as noted in the post in December, 2011.

As promised, here are some tips for finding and qualifying the right integrator for your organization. The first step is to identify service providers to consider. Use three principle discovery techniques:

Simple searches for “system integration providers”, “search integration”, “software” or “software integration” are all explicit phrases to use in web search engines
Vendor listings and directories such as those published by Information Today, and AIIM or “buyers’ guides” associated with specific product groups.
Conference exhibitors and conference attendees (consultants and vendors) who may attend or present but not exhibit at conference where the focus is a content management topic.

Next, qualify those you have discovered:

Scour their web sites by digging into links to Case Studies, Customers, Partners, and Press Releases. Each of these may lead to information about who the vendor has done business with and for, and the nature of their engagements.
Test-drive any public sites they have implemented and take a look at how their own web site has been implemented – How easy is it to find information on their own site?
Talk to people at professional meetings or in academic institutions who might have knowledge of system integrators and learn about their relationships, success and failures they have experienced. Talk to those vendors you trust and value that are suppliers of non-software products and find out companies they may have observed or encountered at their other clients. They can be a great source of “intelligence.”
Talk to people at their named client sites (non-referred if possible)

Five keys to purposeful and successful selection are carefully evaluating:

Fit for your industry and organization: cost, vertical experience, gap completion (providing competencies you lack).
Fit with your permanent staff: common communication behaviors, collaborative aptitude, willingness to teach, and share.
People who have done something as close to what you need for another organization, and will let you talk to their client before the project begins.
A service provider that understands the project, staging, and need for a clear exit goal (being able to clearly define what success will look like at the end of the project before they leave the scene).
What we commented on in the first paragraph on jobs for search engine professionals; scout potential service providers’ professional skill set to be sure they have people on their staffs who know more than just writing code.

Armed with these few guidelines as a checklist, you are ready to begin your search for a system integrator and solutions provider that suits your organization.

Helping Enterprise Searchers Succeed

January 31, 2012 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

I begin 2012 with a new perspective on enterprise search, one gained as purely an observer. The venues have all been medical establishments with multiple levels of complexity and healthcare workers. As the primary caregiver for a patient, and with some medical training, I take my role as observer and patient advocate quite seriously.

As soon as the patient was on the way to the emergency room, all of his medical records, insurance cards, medications, and contact information were assembled and brought to the hospital. With numerous critical care professionals intervening, and the patient being taken for various tests over several hours, I verbally imparted information I thought was important that might not yet show up in the system. Toward the end of the emergency phase, after being told several times that they had all his records available and “in the system” I relaxed to focus on the “next steps.”

Numerous specialists were involved in the medical conditions and the first three days passed without “a crisis” but little did we know that medication choices were beginning to cause some major problems. Apparently, some parts of the patient’s medical history were not fully considered, and once the medications caused adverse outcomes, all kinds of other problem arose.

Fortunately, I was there to verbally share knowledge that was in the patient’s medical records and get choices of medicine reversed. On several occasions, doctor’s care orders had been “overlooked” and complicating interventions were executed because the healthcare person “in the moment” took an action without “seeing” those orders. I personally watched the extensive recording of doctor’s decisions and confirmed with them changes that were being made to the patient’s care, but repeatedly had to ask why a change was not being implemented.

Observing for six to eight hours on several care floors, I can only say that time is the enemy for medical staff. When questions were raised, the answers were in the system; in other words, “search worked.” What was not available to staff was time to study the whole patient record and understand overlapping and sometimes conflicting orders about care.

It is shortsighted for any institution to believe that it can squeeze professionals to “think-fast,” “on-their-feet” for hours on end with no time to consider the massive amounts of searchable results they are able to assemble. Human beings should not be expected to sacrifice their professional integrity and work standards because their employers have put them in a constant time bind.

My family member had me, but what of patients with no one, or no one versed in medical conditions and processes to intervene. This extends to every line of business where risk is involved from the practice of law to engineering, manufacturing, design, research and development, testing, technical documentation writing, etc.

I don’t minimize how hard it is for businesses and professional services to stay profitable and competitive when they are being pressed to leverage technology for information resource management. However, one measure that every enterprise must embrace is educating its workforce about the use of information technologies it employs. It is not enough to simply make a search engine interface accessible on the workstation. Every worker must be shown how to search for accurate information, authoritative information, and complete information, and be made aware of the ways to ingest and evaluate what they are finding. Finally, they must be given an alternative to getting a more complete chronicle when the results don’t match the need, even if that alternative is to seek another human being instead of a technology.

Search experts are a professionally trained class of workers who can fill the role of trainers, particularly if they have subject matter expertise in the field where search is being deployed. The risks to any enterprise of short-changing workers by not allowing them to fully exploit and understand results produced from search are long-term, but serious.

It is important to leave this entry with recognition that, due to wonderful healthcare professionals and support staff, the outcomes for the patient have been positive. People listened when I had information to share and respected my role in the process. That in no way absolves institutions and enterprises from giving their employees the autonomy and time to pay attention to all the information flooding their sphere of operation. In every field of endeavor, human beings need the time and environment to mindfully absorb, analyze and evaluate all the content available. Technology can aid but cannot carry out thoughtful professional practice.

Making Search Play Well with Content Solutions

December 14, 2011 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

In keynote sessions at the recent Gilbane Boston Conference, three speakers in a row made points about content management solutions that are also significant to selection and implementation of enterprise search. Here is a list of paraphrased comments.

From Forrester analyst, Stephen Powers were these observations: 1. The promise has been there for years for an E (enterprise)CM suite to do everything but the reality is that no one vendor, even when they have all the pieces, integrates them well. 2. Be cautious about promises from vendors who claim to do it all; instead, focus on those who know how to do integration.
Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group observed about Google in the enterprise that they frequently fail because Google doesn’t really understand “how work gets done in the enterprise.”
Finally, Scott Liewehr of the Gilbane Group stated that a services firm selection is more important than the content management system application selection.

Taken together these statements may not substantiate the current state of the content management industry but they do point to a trend. Evidence is accruing that products and product suppliers must focus on playing nice together and work for the enterprise. Most tend not to do well, out-of-the-box, without the help of expertise and experts.

Nominally, vendors themselves have a service division to perform this function but the burden falls on the buyer to make the “big” decisions about integration and deployment. The real solution is waiting in the wings and I am increasingly talking to these experts, system integrators. They come in all sizes and configurations; perhaps they don’t even self-identify as system integrators, but what they offer is deep expertise in a number of content software applications, including search.

Generally, the larger the operation the more substantial the number and types of products with which they have experience. They may have expertise in a number of web content management products or e-commerce offerings. A couple of large operations that I have encountered in Gilbane engagements are Avalon Consulting, and Search Technologies, which have divisions each specializing in a facet of content management including search. You need to explore whether their strengths and expertise are a good fit with your needs.

The smaller companies specialize, such as working with several search engines plus tools to improve metadata and vocabulary management so content is more findable. Specialists in enterprise search must still have an understanding of content management systems because those are usually the source of metadata that feed high quality search. I’ve recently spoken with several small service providers whose commentaries and case work illustrate a solid and practical approach. Those you might want to look into are: Applied Relevance, Contegra Systems, Findwise, KAPS Group, Lucid Imagination, New Idea Engineering, and TNR Global.

Each of these companies has a specialty and niche, and I am not making explicit recommendations. The simple reason is that what you need and what you are already working on is unique to your enterprise. Without knowledge of your resources, special needs and goals my recommendations would be guesses. What I am sharing is the idea that you need experts who can give value when they are the right experts for your requirements.

The guidance here is to choose a search services firm that will move you efficiently and effectively along the path of systems integration. Expertise is available and you do not need to struggle alone knitting together best-of-breed components. Do your research and understand the differentiators among the companies. High touch, high integrity and commitment for the long haul should be high on your list of requirements – and of course, look for experience and expertise in deploying the technology solutions you want to use and integrate.

Next month I’ll share some tips on evaluating possible service organizations starting with techniques for doing research on the Web.

Why is it so Hard to “Get” Semantics Inside the Enterprise?

November 10, 2011 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Semantic Software Technologies: Landscape of High Value Applications for the Enterprise was published just over a year ago. Since then the marketplace has been increasingly active; new products emerge and discussion about what semantics might mean for the enterprise is constant. One thing that continues to strike me is the difficulty of explaining the meaning of, applications for, and context of semantic technologies.

Browsing through the topics in this excellent blog site, http://semanticweb.com , it struck me as the proverbial case of the blind men describing an elephant. A blog, any blog, is linear. While there are tools to give a blog dimension by clustering topics or presenting related information, it is difficult to understand the full relationships of any one blog post to another. Without a photographic memory, an individual does not easily connect ideas across a multi-year domain of blog entries. Semantic technologies can facilitate that process.

Those who embrace some concept of semantics are believers that search will benefit from “semantic technologies.” What is less clear is how evangelists, developers, searchers and the average technology user can coalesce around the applications that will semantically enable enterprise search.

On the Internet content that successfully drives interest, sales, opinion and individual promotion does so through a combination of expert crafting of metadata, search engine technology that “understands” the language of the inquirer and the content that can satisfy the inquiry. Good answers are reached when questions are understood first and then the right content is selected to meet expectations.

In the enterprise, the same care must be given to metadata, search engine “meaning” analysis tools and query interpretation for successful outcomes. Magic does not happen without people behind the scenes to meet these three criteria executing linguistic curation, content enhancement and computational linguistic programming.

Three recent meeting events illustrate various states of semantic development and adoption, even as the next conference, Semantic Tech & Business Conference – Washington, D.C. on November 29 – is upon us:

Event 1 – A relatively new group, the IKS-Community funded by the EU has been supporting open source software developers since 2009. In July they held a workshop in Paris just past the mid-point of their life cycle. Attendees were primarily entrepreneurs and independent open source developers seeking pathways for their semantically “tuned” content management solutions. I was asked to suggest where opportunities and needs exist in US markets. They were an enthusiastic audience and are poised to meet the tough market realities of packaging highly sophisticated software for audiences that will rarely understand how complex the stuff “under the hood” really is. My principal charge to them was to create tools that “make it really easy” to work with vocabulary management and content metadata capture, updates, and enhancements.

Event 2. – On this side of the pond, UK firm Linguamatics hosted its user group meeting in Boston in October. Having interviewed a number of their customers last year to better understand their I2E product line, I was happy to meet people I had spoken with and see the enthusiasm of a user community vested in such complex technology. Most impressive is the respectful tone and thoughtful sharing between Linguamatics principals and their customers. They share the knowledge of how hard it is to continually improve search technology that delivers answers to semantically complex questions using highly specialized language. Content contributors and inquirers are all highly educated specialists seeking answers to questions that have never been asked before. Think about it, search engines designed to deliver results for frequently asked questions or to find content on popular topics is hard enough, but finding the answer to a brand new question is a quantum leap of difficulty in comparison.

To make matters even more complicated, answers to semantic (natural language) questions may be found in internal content, in published licensed content or some combination of both. In the latter case, only the seeker may be able to put the two together to derive or infer an answer.

Publishers of content for licensing play a convoluted game of how they will license their content to enterprises for semantic indexing in combination with internal content. The Linguamatics user community is primarily in life sciences; this is one more hurdle for them to overcome to effectively leverage the vast published repositories of biological and medical literature. Rigorous pricing may be good business strategy, but research using semantic search could make more headway with more reasonable royalties that reflect the need for collaborative use across teams and partners.

Content wants to be found and knowledge requires outlets to enable innovation to flourish. In too many cases technology is impaired by lack of business resources by buyers or arcane pricing models of sellers that hold vital information captive for a well-funded few. Semantically excellent retrieval depends on an engine’s indexing access to all contextually relevant content.

Event 3. – Leslie Owens of Forrester Research, at the Fall 2011 Enterprise Search Summit conducted a very interesting interactive session that further affirms the elephant and blind men metaphor. Leslie is a champion of metadata best practices and writes about the competencies and expertise needed to make valuable content accessible. She engaged the audience with a series of questions about its wants, needs, beliefs and plans for semantic technologies. As described in an earlier paragraph about how well semantics serves us on the Web, most of the audience puts its faith in that model but is doubtful of how or when similar benefits will accrue to enterprise search. Leslie and a couple of others made the point that a lot more work has to be done on the back-end on content in the enterprise to get these high-value outcomes.

We’ll keep making the point until more adopters of semantic technologies get serious and pay attention to content, content enhancement, expert vocabulary management and metadata. If it is automatic understanding of your content that you are seeking, the vocabulary you need is one that you build out and enhance for your enterprise’s relevance. Semantic tools need to know the special language you use to give the answers you need.

Integrated Dynamic Schema.org Support in Webnodes CMS v3.7

November 2, 2011 / NewsShark

Webnodes has announced CMS to have dynamic support for Schema.org. The new feature has an intuitive vocabulary mapping user interface as well as a code API and Asp.Net controls to streamline the work for site developers. The Webnodes CMS ontology management user interface provides a separation between data, data model and presentation layout. Schema.org which is all about making search engines understand the meaning of your content is a natural extension to the semantic core engine. http://www.webnodes.com

Oracle Buys Endeca

October 18, 2011 / NewsShark

Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Endeca Technologies, Inc., a provider of unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions. A privately-held company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Endeca provides products that help companies analyze unstructured data, gain better business intelligence, and deliver a better customer experience. Endeca’s core technology, the MDEX Engine, is designed to enable enterprises to correlate and analyze unstructured data. Endeca InFront is a leading customer experience management platform that enables businesses to deliver targeted and relevant customer experiences online with merchandising and content targeting tools for web commerce. Endeca Latitude is a technology platform that enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications bringing information from many unstructured and structured information sources together. The combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together. The combination of Oracle ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. The combination of Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca Latitude is expected to provide a comprehensive business intelligence foundation and analytic applications, bringing together information from structured and unstructured data sources. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. http://www.oracle.com/ http://www.endeca.com

Why isn’t Enterprise Search “Mission Critical?”

October 4, 2011 / Lynda Moulton / 2 Comments

Why isn’t “search” the logical end-point in any content and information management activity. If we don’t care about being able to find valued and valuable information, why bother with any of the myriad technologies employed to capture, organize, categorize, store, and analyze content. What on earth is the point of having our knowledge workers document the results of their business, science, engineering and marketing endeavors, if we never aspire to having it retrieved, leveraged or re-purposed by others?

However, in Information Week, an article in the September 5, 2011 issue entitled “HP Transformation: Autonomy is a Modest Start” gave me a jolt with this comment: Autonomy has very sophisticated search capabilities including federation–the ability to search across many repositories and sources–and video and image search. But with all that said, enterprise search isn’t a hot, mission-critical business priority. [NOTE: in the print version the “call-out” box had slightly different phrasing but it jumped off the page, anyway.] This is pretty provocative and disappointing to read in the pages of this particular publication.

Over the past few months, I have been engrossed in working on several client projects related to taxonomy development, vocabulary management and integration with content and search systems. There is no doubt that every one of these institutions is focused with laser intensity on getting the search interface to deliver the highest value for the effort and dollars expended. In each case, the project involved a content management component for capturing metadata with solid uniformity, strong vocabulary control, and rich synonym tables for ensuring findability when a search query has different language than the content or metadata. Every step in each of these projects has come back to the acid test, “will the searcher be able to find what s/he is looking for.”

In past posts I have commented on the strength of enterprise search technologies, and the breadth of offerings that cover a wide array of content findability needs and markets. From embedded search (within content management systems, archive and records management systems, museum systems, etc.), to standalone search engines designed to work well in discrete vertical markets or functional areas of enterprises (e.g., engineering, marketing, healthcare, energy exploration) buyers have a wealth of options from which to choose. Companies that have formerly focused on web site management, business intelligence, data mining, and numerous other content related tools are redefining themselves with additional terminology like e-discovery, 360-degree views (of information), content accessibility, and unified information.

Without the search component, all of the other technologies, which have been so hot in the past, are worthless. The article goes on to say that the hottest areas (of software growth) are business analytics and big-data analysis. Neither of these contributes business value without search underpinnings.

So, let’s get off this kick of under-rating and marginalizing search as “not mission critical” and think very seriously about the consequences of trying to run any enterprise without being able to find the products of our intellectual work output.

Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 21 of 61)

Embedded Search in the Enterprise

Researching Enterprise Search System Integrators

Helping Enterprise Searchers Succeed

Making Search Play Well with Content Solutions

Why is it so Hard to “Get” Semantics Inside the Enterprise?

Integrated Dynamic Schema.org Support in Webnodes CMS v3.7

Oracle Buys Endeca

Why isn’t Enterprise Search “Mission Critical?”

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