Search Done Right

Since the downfall of the economy, many CEOs around the world have been discussing the “new normal.” They are advising corporations to adjust to the new reality of reduced labor forces, smaller budgets and tougher regulations. As I reviewed some articles about this idea, I find that many corporations are now challenging their executive teams to come up with new and innovative ways to increase their top line while reducing their bottom line—all with reduced budgets.

Reflecting on my experience as a corporate designer in technical industries, I am noticing the gravitation towards design thinking and innovation in business. Maybe this is because in today’s economy, it’s simply not good enough to be good—your company, products and services need to be great.  It’s not enough to offer a standard list of features and benefits. What your customers need to know is that you really understand them, their needs, their problems and frustrations. And you offer the right solution.

Providing useful search results is often not just a matter of displaying textual content but has grown to include graphics, audio, video and more recently mapped views of search results. This is useful for applications that focus on specific location information such as office branches and retail outlets in addition to applications centered on geographic regions. This feature is often referred to as geomapping, which is the presentation of data in digital maps.

We don’t have all the details about the latest terrorist attempt on our country but we do know one thing: it was preventable.

President Obama calls it a “mix of human and systemic failure”. Despite a clear warning coming from the terrorist’s father, the state department did not revoke his visa, the NCTC did not put him on the 4,000 people “no fly” list or the 14,000 second screening list and everybody ignored the fact that he was put on the big 550,000 “linked to terrorism” list. Humans, all too human, made a series of bad judgment calls.

After the slips and taboos of SharePoint discussed in my last two blogs, let’s explore the dreams.

In the keynote, one of the speakers demonstrated the following scenario:

1. A business user synchronizes his/her spreadsheet (of sales numbers) with an external database.
2. Offline that business user modifies the spreadsheet.
3. Upon reconnecting to the network, these changes get synchronized with the database which gets automatically modified.
4. These changes are then reflected immediately in charts and stats published on a multitude of web sites.

I was honored to attend last week’s Jobs and Economic Growth Forum (or Jobs Summit) at the White House, convened by President Obama to explore near-term interventions to decrease the 10% unemployment rate in the U.S., with comparable rates seen in the European Union.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Vice President Biden, and President Obama gave opening remarks to the 130 invited attendees and Administration staff, followed by breakout sessions in six groups, and then reconvened everyone into a final wrap up session.  Notably, President Obama personally attended two of the breakout sessions:  Green Jobs, and Infrastructure.

What was unveiled during the SharePoint 2010 conference has been dissected, commented upon, interpreted, etc. all over the web. So to avoid repeating what has already been said and delve deeper into the SharePoint psyche, after exploring the Freudian slips in my last post, I propose to explore the taboos: what was not talked about during the SharePoint conference?

I was supposed to go to the SharePoint conference but I did not go. I caught the flu. With a 104 fever, shivering under 2 shirts, 3 sweaters and 4 covers, I decided that spreading my germs in Vegas (and collecting some more) was not worth the trip.

Fortunately for me, Microsoft set up a comprehensive conference site with all the sessions, downloadable presentations and videos. It is almost better than being there (I sure hope I can’t get a virus from it). The cherry on the cake is that the site is built on SharePoint 2010 offering a firsthand user experience.

Brian Babineau, Senior Consulting Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently published a paper entitled “Expanding Information Access Initiatives with Embedded Search.” He points out in the paper that:

Recently, Aberdeen issued the report “Enterprise Search – Discover the Next Opportunity for Growth” which interviewed 175 organizations asking them to define what “best-in-class” meant for organizations making use of search within their enterprise.

Within the report I was not overly surprised to learn that companies that offer “best-in-class” search claim to have a high level of information connectivity, improved productivity, increased usage statistics and are heavily used in support scenarios. My question though is, “Does that really define ‘best-in-class’?”