Actionable Search Jargon
May 17, 2009
I recall interviewing Ali Riaz in my Search Wizards Speak series here. He founded a company called Attivio, and as I recall, Attivio is derived from the Italian word “attivo” which means “active”. Imagine my surprise when I read “Actionable Search – From What to Why?” here. The Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog has in my opinion inadvertently given Attivio a bit of a PR boost. Actionable search is not too far from what Attivio’s team has been selling in the last year or so.
The Microsoft spin on “actionable search” is interesting in three other ways.
First, the idea is that “no frills” search is not what folks want. Considering that two thirds of the users of existing search systems are not too happy with those systems, I am not sure “no frills” is sufficiently broad to handle the wide range of use cases the research for Martin White’s and my Successful Enterprise Search Management revealed. There are many types of search, and not all of them are “actionable”. Some are pretty important, if mind numbingly dull research tasks, such as looking through email for a smoking gun in an eDiscovery process.
Second, the notion of “directly” is interesting to me. For example, a client wanted me to provide some information about the growth of digital content in a typical organization. One company presenting at the MarkLogic user conference which attracted about 430 people compared to the 90 or so at the search summit held at the same time experienced a 4X growth in digital information in a single year. In this presentation I learned that search and finding were hooked into many core processes; for example, one system automatically needed information from another system to update information in case that data might be needed. I suppose one can stretch this notion of interprocess XML exchange to “direct” but I prefer to think of these types of “search” functions as more fine grained. Rock hammers don’t do the job when it comes to electronic information.
Third, the notion of actionable information by itself and without context is in my mind more closely linked to business intelligence reports. Search may be an action free as learning in order to be confident in one’s knowledge. I suppose language is sufficiently malleable to permit stretching a notion to embrace Wrigley Field but that might not be too helpful to me. I want to know something for its own sake, not for its utility; for example, Nero ordered his mother to be put to death, according to Arthur Weigall in Nero: The Singing Emperor of Rome (GP Putnam: London, 1930). Agrippina, Nero’s mother, was not too popular. The Senate sent congratulations to Nero for his deed. Not much use to me but a neat anecdote about family harmony. See page 209.
In short, I struggle with the notion of simplifying and abstracting information retrieval and text processing. The need for precision has never been greater. In my view, the problem with most enterprise search deployments pivots on this notion of precision. Muddy thinking and the belief in silver bullets leads to mutli million dollar costs and may, in today’s economic climate, contribute to the failure of an undertaking, not help ensure its success.
Simple is good. Simplicity without precision is not too useful to this addled goose.
Stephen Arnold, May 17, 2009
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