Google and the Enterprise
March 16, 2008
On March 4, 2008, I delivered a short talk followed by open discussion at the AIIM Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The title of my talk was “Google: Disrupting the Traditional World of Enterprise Applications”.
The core idea of my talk is that Google is poised to offer more enterprise applications and services. Most of the attention is directed at what some journalists characterize as “Microsoft Office killers”. That emphasis is incorrect. The more interesting enterprise functions include map-related capabilities and data integration and management functions.
Unfortunately I do not reproduce the online sessions I access when talking in front of an audience. I do not reproduce all of the visuals I use in my PowerPoint deck. Some of these figures come from my studies to which the copyright has been assigned to litigious publishers, an evil breed indeed. If you want to talk to me about an in-person briefing, you can send me email here: ait at arnoldit.com. I’m cutting back on my travel, but I will give your request serious attention. You can also buy copies of The Google Legacy and Google Version 2.0 from Infonortics, Ltd., in Tetbury, Glou. and in April 2008 my new study, Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Search System Won’t Work from Frank Gilbane. Most of the information in this AIIM briefing came from these studies.
Transportation
The first example uses Google’s familiar Maps and Earth service. You can look at digital versions of maps, plot routes, and see the names of local businesses, among other well-worn functions. With a click, you can replace the map with a satellite image. New features make it possible for you to upload data, display thos data on a map, and perform a wide variety of manipulations. The audience continues to enjoy looking at Google’s examples as well as those from clever Google Map hackers. Here’s a St. Patrick’s day Google Map that gives you some idea of the ways in which multimedia data can be embedded in a Google Map.
So what’s this have to do with an enterprise, government agency, or association. Quite a bit. The example I used in my talk is that Google is in the transportation routing, management, and logistics business. Few know about its capabilities in this field. When I asked a Googler about it, the response I received was, “I don’t know anything about that function.” While not surprising to me, the response illustrates how Google’s employees often lack a “big picture” view of what the company’s technical engineers have created and other Googlers have sold.
My example is Google’s transportation routing system in use in San Francisco, California. A Google employee can use a mobile phone to SMS for a shuttle pick up. Google’s automated system receives the request, figures out when a shuttle can be dispatched to the Googler’s location, and SMS es back to the Googler when the shuttle will arrive. The Google system updates the routing information to the human driver of the shuttle who proceeds to the location.
In this way, Google can provide “green” transportation services without the cost and hassle of traditional bus routes. You can read more about this invention in Google patent document US20060149461.
What’s this have to do with the enterprise? The technology disclosed in the patent document suggests to me that Google can use the same sytstem and method to:
- Provide shuttle routing services to municipalities or to private operators of services such as airport shuttles
- Offer cloud-based routing services to trucking and delivery companies
- Apply the functions to broader logistics problems so that data and routing can be displayed in real time.
One of the fastest growing businesses at Google, according to my sources, is what is known as geo spatial services and applications. But Google’s capabilities give it the flexibility to move quickly and without warning into adjacent business sectors such as logistics.
The Google Search Appliance
This section of my talk described the GSA or Google Search Appliance. The enterprise group at Google has its own engineers and sales team. With each version of the GSA, the system improves. With more than 10,000 customers worldwide, Google’s GSA is arguably one of the most widely-used behind-the-firewall search systems. It’s no longer necessary to license a GSA to provide Web site search. Google’s free custom search engine can handle that job.
But the GSA is less interesting to me than the OneBoxAPI. In my talk, I showed several examples of how Google’s OneBox API makes it possible to use the GSA to federate information. (Federation means that a search system takes information from multiple sources and displays one relevance ranked list of results.) But I find laundry lists uninteresting.
The GSA goes “beyond search” as you can see in this Google screen shot I sucked down from the Web before the link went dead.
The tiny red and green bars in the screen shot graphic show the GSA pulling data about the query from a Microsoft Exchange Server. The traditional list of results is enriched with a dynamic view of the subject of the query’s schedule. In short, the GSA lets you pull a colleague’s phone number, schedule, and other related information by typing a first and last name into the GSA search box.
I find this suggestive, but I challenge the audience to tell me if a system can apply a certainty score to each result or provide a one-click way to determine where these data originated. The audience at my talk rarely speaks up, and on this occasion, a few people shook their heads. The others in the audience didn’t know how to query on certainty or lineage and let my question hang unanswered.
Google is working on a system that adds these types of queries to its search system. Information about this function is scarce, and I am now looking through Google’s public information to find more clues. So far, I have a buzz word uncertainty score and a name which may or may not be correct, Dr. Levy. Stay tuned on this subject. You will find a 10-page discussion of this fascinating extension to Google’s search technology in Beyond Search.
What’s this function bring to the enterprise? That’s a difficult question to answer. I think that it would be very useful to have a score such as 79 percent or 21 percent attached to each search result to indicate how likely the information were to be correct. Right now, few people looking for information give much thought to the reliability of data or to their provenance. This technology, if my research is accurate, would allow Google to expand its services to the enterprise for competitive intelligence. Law enforcement, of couirse, would be quite interested in knowing the likelihood of an item’s being accurate.
Wrap Up
Despite the small turnout for the talk, Information Week ran a short news item about one of the examples I used to illustrate my theme. You can read the story here. More information about a less visible Google enterprise application appears in the Entchev TIS Architects Web log. The New Jersey Transit Authority has partnered with Google to allow NJTA customers to plan their trips using Google. You can read this story here.
I’ve posted a PDF version of the PowerPoint deck I used to illustrate my talk. You will find that information on the ArnoldIT Web site on Monday, March 17, 2008. I have to jump through some hoops to create a usable PDF, so don’t look for this deck until Monday, probably about 4 pm US Eastern time.
Stephen Arnold, March 16, 2008
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