Operational Intelligence, the New Enterprise Search
April 14, 2010
Worlds are colliding. Business intelligence, search, analytics, and business process are hurtling toward one another. No collider is needed. The impetus comes from managers who are struggling to keep their firms above water. Make no mistake about it. The economic climate may be improving based on government data and the self serving reports from global financial powerhouses. But just look at the number of empty buildings, the fraying infrastructure, and the desperation in the eyes of most employees in North America.
For those lucky enough to be thriving in a world gone mad for sending ads to individuals, life may be good. For people who are in more traditional jobs, the notion of finding information is an everyday struggle. Without the right information at the moment it is needed, organizations can make costly mistakes. These are not errors of judgment like magazine publishers who see the iPad as the font of new revenue or the dew eyed MBA looking for a job with a third string consulting firm. Nope. These visages reflect the person who cannot explain to a customer why an order was lost or an automobile was delivered with a faulty electronic gizmo. In fact, I see the effects of downsizing, the need to squeeze extra money from every transaction, and crazy decisions made by committees everywhere I look, regardless of the country.
What’s the answer? According to a sponsored white paper from the consulting outfit IDC, Teradata has the fix. Now you may not think that even bigger piles of data will help your business. I admit that I don’t believe the premise either. You can get the story in “Real-Time Operational Intelligence Gains Momentum in Europe: Teradata-sponsored business survey shows adoption details for ‘Active Data Warehousing’” and make up your own mind. Big data means big costs in my experience.
What I liked about this write up was the phrase “real time operational intelligence”. True, the acronym RTOI is a bit clumsy, but I think the phrase points to an important shift in search and content processing. RTOI delivers what many of the people with whom I speak perceive enterprise search delivering. The idea is that the information in an organization is available when needed to help people answer questions and make decisions. Hopefully the decision makers did well in school and have a modicum of common sense.
After thinking about this phrase and the acronym RTOI, I had several thoughts:
- Vendors of enterprise search may want to make this phrase their own. It is a heck of lot more compelling than “putting information at your fingertips” or “dashboard”
- Search, in this phrase’s embrace, becomes an enabler. Search becomes like butter in a recipe. Without the ingredient the dish does not work. Many vendors of search see themselves as the fish, vegetables, and spices in the meal. RTOI makes search an essential but supporting ingredient.
- The conceptual outcome of RTOI may be consolidation of what now are marketed as separate systems. For RTOI to work, an organization needs an integrated approach. Data are not enough. The various features and functions of analytics, retrieval, report generation, and business processes must be woven together into one coherent, affordable system.
Is RTOT the future? I am willing to float a tentative, “Yes.” Fragmented information centric systems are now a cost and resource challenge for many organizations. The time is ripe for a new approach. Maybe it will be fueled by open source software like Lucene? Maybe it will be the use of a system like Google’s? Maybe it will be a roll up following the trajectory of Autonomy or OpenText.
The status quo is not delivering and change may be coming. Teradata may not be the winner, but it has contributed a useful catch phrase in my opinion. The phrase “enterprise search” could be put to rest which would be a step forward in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
Unsponsored post.
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2 Responses to “Operational Intelligence, the New Enterprise Search”
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Thanks Stephen- I’ll check out the report.
I spent a lot of time with IT folks explaining the difference between Search (the tool/Means) and Find (the usable product/End). Maybe RTOI= Find will be the new equation, but I suspect the everyday struggle of end users (who recognize the Search/Find difference) will continue for awhile.
Steve,
In 2004, when I was at Ventana Research, I spotted a trend where BI tools, which were initially designed for biz analysts, were increasingly being used for daily operational decisions in addition to strategic decisions. Daily activities, like inventory and freight management, cash management, investment pricing, etc., were being supported by reports and dashboards built using BI tools. At the time the simplest term I could define to describe this phenomena was Operational BI. Active Data Warehousing was a marketing term invented by Teradata to propagate the use of their very expensive data warehouse appliance into the Operational BI trend. It seems that RTOI is a rebranding of that concept to fit the notion of real-time search into social media. The challenge, as I see it, is that traditionally BI/DW technology has been mostly about aggregate numerics – and offloading OLTP systems. Whereas search technologies have been about unstructured data. To say that search on unstructured data (and by inference, structured data) is now being replaced by RTOI seems… well… not exactly the right concept. I don’t see the purpose of search (and semantics) being replaced by aggregate numerics.
The heart of Teradata’s appliance was (and is) the ability to do really good intra-query parallelism for aggregate numerical calcs. Well, that’s kind of a common-place capability these days. I think the more interesting trend is technology that are the abilities to A) actually mine the Web in real-time, B) use semantics to organize data, C) provide query access without being encumbered by SQL, and D) an ability to present mash-ups of relevant data. Is that a star schema play? mmmm, perhaps not. So, yes, RTOI could be used to describe that capability, but Teradata uses it to market their data warehouse. So, to ascribe two very different technologies using the same term will ultimately be confusing the market. My $.02.
Regards,
Eric Rogge
Exalead