Search Done Right

As my whirlwind conference travels continue, I attended the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit last week in Orlando. I was most interested to hear what Whit Andrews had to say on search. In May, he was quoted advising clients who were looking for low-cost information access solutions to consider federation. I was curious to hear what he had to say on the topic during his live presentation.

Andrews began by claiming that search has been a failure and that today workers spend more than five hours a week just trying to find information. He cited a number of reasons outlined for this, but the two dominant themes were:

The focus at this week’s Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit seemed to be less on search than in past years. But a presentation from Bud Miyahara of Procter & Gamble was a noted exception. (Full disclosure: P&G is a Vivisimo customer.)

Miyahara explained how P&G, a global consumer goods powerhouse with 18 billion-dollar brands, struggled with finding information. Interestingly enough, the company didn’t immediately recognize it had a search problem. Users were just constantly complaining that the information they needed were hidden from them. In fact, it topped the list of employee complaints – leading to a less efficient work force. A lack of a strong, centralized search solution led individual department owners to seek their own search product for their disparate sites. That’s a story we’ve heard a lot lately.

I’m in Amsterdam this week for the Global Benchmarking Group’s Intranets and Portals Forum. Although it’s not a search-specific show, it’s a good event for organizations across Europe to discuss the challenges they’re facing from intranets, websites and Web 2.0 technologies.

There were presentations from some top-tier multinational corporations – and each told a remarkably similar story. These companies were faced with no single corporate intranet, but rather hundreds of disparate (and some even rogue) sites run by individual departments or product lines. There was, of course, no consistency in the look and feel of all these sites.

Last week, I attended the Forrester IT Forum, which focused on a variety of IT trends, from knowledge management to security to IT infrastructure needs. Forrester was able to bring in some great speakers from very large organizations such as BP, Levi Straus, the National Football League and more. I attended most of the breakout sessions on knowledge management, discovery and collaboration.

After reading the latest blog entry on meetstan.com, I was excited to attend a session at this week’s DoDIIS conference in Orlando on “DoDIIS Collaboration.” Since collaboration is one of the hottest buzzwords in both the commercial and government spaces, I figured I’d hear all about the great technologies that are enabling agencies in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to share the information they’ve gathered.

I quickly learned that collaboration is in the eye of the beholder.

The headline was my father’s reaction to the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “answer engine” from Wolfram Research. My father did not like the fact that in many cases WA rewrites your query to find something it can actually answer.

The problem my father has highlighted is that WA can only answer a small portion of the questions asked of it. A lot has been said about its limitations in NLP but I actually see WA’s limitation more related to the data – how it collects it and how it uses it. WA relies on “curated data” and not on the overall web knowledge. It is purely rule-based and not statistical-based.

Last week, I attended the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City. By the end of the show, I could not help but feel bad for the attendees who have not yet implemented search. If I were evaluating enterprise search for my organization, I would have walked out of the event more lost than when I started. All week I heard repetitive pitches from vendors, case studies that start to blur and a feedback from a mix of users – both satisfied and unsatisfied. With so much noise, I couldn’t help but wonder how an attendee was supposed to walk away with a clear plan for evaluating and implementing search.

As an executive, I appreciate the visibility search provides me into what is going on in my company: what employees are working on, what new products or features we are developing, what is said in our wiki, our website or our blogs.

So when I read this article, it dawned on me that the same technologies that are giving insights to executives at Fidelity Investments or Procter & Gamble could prove invaluable to the leader of a certain government.

Here’s the letter I wrote to him. I’ll let you know if I get a response.

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As I was driving through my hometown of Boston last night, I was reminded why it is called the city of five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter and pothole. When you don’t invest in infrastructure, you are going to pay sooner or later.

The same is true for corporations. While most of them don’t have to worry about paving streets and repairing major bridges, they have made a significant investment in information. Given that there is no government-subsidized economic stimulus package to upgrade technology infrastructure, IT organizations instead face the reality of declining IT budgets combined with continued pressure to demonstrate improvements. The answer is enterprise search, which allows a broad base of users to easily discover and navigate information across numerous internal and external sources. Enterprise search technology has now matured into an application that is both low risk and easy to deploy.

Last week, I attended the 2009 Knowledge Management Conference hosted by the 1105 Government Information Group. The conference was focused around empowering government agencies to build out their knowledge management practices for improved knowledge transfer and decision making.  (All presentations are available for download here.)

The most interesting talk at the conference for me was the keynote by General Peter Chiarelli the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff. The discussion focused on the concept of the “strategic corporal.”  In his talk, Chiarelli stated that: