ENTERPRISE SEARCH AND ITS VALUE TO THE ENTERPRISE

Lee Atkinson

or why search and retrieval of ‘relevant’ information is only the start in meeting the business need

Introduction

A business view of enterprise search and its value to the enterprise. What are the issues? Is there a common problem domain that needs to be solved in many large organisations when trying to put in place a single 'view' of their business and then find what they need, when they need it.

The presentation will examine the issues found in three main areas in realising enterprise search and extracting real business value from it;

Find it

We will focus on a practical example of where simply having the ability to 'search' and be more 'relevant' has limitations in finding the right information at the right time, in the right context and enabling the information to be used.

We will then go on to look at how search needs to encompass ALL of the data held in the enterprise and how certainty and completeness of results, more than relevancy, are the key requirements.

Business Applications

Organise it Use it

The Problem DomainThe ‘reality’ of technology in large organisations and has led us to build a set of pre requisites that any solution has to be able to be deployed in and work within that ‘reality’. Organisation beyond the department level is unusual

Chaos is part of a dynamic business, technology’s ability to support it always lags

Data silos are a fact of life and wholesale replacement is not going to happen as a big bang.

Even organisations that think strategically, deploy tactically to succeed

Legacy applications are embedded in the heart of most global business

Adapt, not rebuild where the end product achieves the same outcome.

Integration and business change are the major problems in delaying the implementation of new technology.

The more systems the more overhead in data reconciliation and mapping.

What search based solutions offer as an enabler

Search based applications offer a different approach, one that can sit above the chaos and bring organisation to it.

Relevancy and semantic search based business solutions offer a means of pulling together information into a common structure and not require changes to existing processes, systems or data storage and classification approach.

Search can work with whatever is in place - silos, data quality etc - and create the information structures within the application without the need for any manual intervention.

To the end user there is no difference – they get comprehensive information when they need it, how they need it.

But most search based solutions are focused on the web and technology

FIND IT

Generic Search

•Harder and harder to differentiate•Focus on sources and extraction•Relevancy at the margin – so what?•Increasing commoditisation

Enterprise search

Open source competitive delay

• Completeness of internal information is fundamental •Being the most relevant, is not• Structured and unstructured is one and the same.• Having a relevant results set is not enough. • Near real time information gathering becomes a pre-requisite•Business process change is not an option if rapid deployment is a need

Focused on web and new informationsources

Search as an information consolidator and organiser but on its own an enabler

Case study as an exampleLarge Business – 14 offices, 1000+ people, each office different – but teams often from multiple offices, departments work on a single projectProblem domainNeed to collaborate across offices, no common structure or collaboration capabilityImages, CAD and unstructured data 90% of their information needsDMS purchased, but business change and information migration overhead meant that never implemented

Around an entity- Customer- Project - Supplier

Search OptimisationClassification, Dictionaries (manualand automatic)

Organisation against predefined categories and sub categories

To be able to build inter relationships between categories such as;Type of cavity wall, projects it appeared, suppliers, customers, costs etc

May also require combination of data mining with information retreival

Detection of new terms and entities from within corpus and expansion into taxonomies and entity lists

Relevancy is the start point to information organisation5/15/2007

Daft V1

Need to be able to organise aroundentity

Enterprise Issues – once information is organisedNeeds to be near real time – critical systems, means upto date positions

Needs to be complete information set, with audit trail and reconciliation

A results set on screen fails the Business Value Proposition test

Simply being smarter, quicker and more relevant is hard to build an ROI to business users

Focus on business application to unlock value

ORGANISE IT

Piecing it together

•Integrated single results set•Defines results in context of entire data set (what’s not there)•Semantic, contextual, file types etc are commodities that defined the scope of the applications possible

Takes search results as a start point •Adds business taxonomies

•Customer•Projects•People•‘Entities’

Business Applications

Delivers Business Framework

•Pre determined ‘end state’•All information applications -

•No difference between structured and unstructured

•Combines information into•Business Process•Analysis against rules•Exception based event management

Business context

Business Applications

Business Applications

Business Applications

Business Applications

Rules

Business Application

USING IT AS A CORE BUSINESS RESOURCE

Rules Engine

BusinessApplicationReal time

MIS

BusinessPortal

Collaboration

Portal

SAN

Business Processes

Business Architecture

BusinessApplication

Project View

BusinessApplication

Business View

BusinessApplicationCompliance

BusinessApplication

Research

BusinessApplication

Search based business architecture – unlocking value

1 Information stays where it is5 min updates

2 Blend DB and documentsIts all information

3Business rules define analysisInformation enrichment

4

5

Multiple business applications

Single business viewSingle customer view

ENTERPRISE SEARCH AND ITS VALUE TO THE ENTERPRISE

Lee Atkinson

or why search and retrieval of ‘relevant’ information is only the start in meeting the business need