Enterprise Search: Baloney Six Ways, like Herring
December 21, 2010
When my team and I discussed my write up about the shift of some vendors from search to business intelligence, quite a bit of discussion ensued.
The idea that a struggling vendor of search—most often an outfit with older technology—“reinvents” itself as a purveyor of business intelligence systems—is common evoked some strong reactions.
One side of the argument was that an established set of methods for indexing unstructured content could be extended. The words used to describe this digital alchemy were Web services, connectors, widgets, and federated content. Now these are or were useful terms. But what happens is that the synthetic nature of English makes it easy to use familiar sounding words in a way to perform an end run around the casual listener’s mental filters. It is just not polite to ask a vendor to define a phrase like business intelligence. The way people react is to nod in a knowing manner and say “for sure” or “I’ve got it.”
Have you taken steps to see through the baloney passed off as enterprise search, business intelligence, and knowledge management?
The other side of the argument was that companies are no longer will to pay big money for key word retrieval. The information challenge requires a rethink of what information is available within and to an organization. Then a system developed to “unlock the nuggets” in that treasure trove is needed. This side of the argument points to the use of systems developed for certain government agencies. The idea is that a person wanting to know which supplier delivers the components with the fewest defects needs an entirely different type of system. I understand this side of the argument. I am not sure that I agree but I have heard this case so often, the USB with the MP3 of the business intelligence sound file just runs.
As we approach 2011, I think a different way to look at the information access options is needed. To that end, I have created a tabular representation of information access. I call the table and its content “The Baloney Scorecard, 2011.”
Once again, if you are annoyed, please, stop reading this blog. If you disagree, don’t call or email me. Just put your comments in the comments section. We don’t do much filtering and criticism of a 66 year old who describes himself as the addled goose in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky won’t get his feathers ruffled.
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“Our system is optimized to handle your [insert problem].” Many commercial search systems are getting old and clunky. Get facts from existing licensees. 2011 content was not considered when older search systems were coded in the late 1990s. And real time? Don’t get me started on latency. |
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“Our system can scale.” Scale means handle more content faster and serve more queries per second at reasonable costs. Find out what costs really are. And what about that cloud. Amazon suffered a hardware failure in mid-December 2010. Is your vendor as capable as Amazon. Probably not. |
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“Our system can connect to any of your content.” Sounds good. But some content stores cannot be accessed legally or economically. Match your content to what the system actually supports. Some outfits will take legal action if you connect to their proprietary system’s content repository. |
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“We’re fine with a bake off among those systems you are considering.” Sure, but who pays for the test? How will the corpus be validated? Who will do the analysis? Bake offs sound so good but you may have a tough time getting your company to pay for a bake off that returns accurate results. |
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“Our system can easily be extended with new features and functions.” If open source, great. If proprietary, what is the time required? What are the costs? Who does the work. |
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“Our system is smart. It understands content, user roles, and context.” Easy to say and difficult to do unless there are adequate resources. “Adequate resources” is a code word for lots of money and skilled engineers with deep experience. |
We have collected more baloney examples, but these will get you thinking. I will start collecting items for Baloney 2011.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2010
Freebie. I mean who would pay us to prepare this type of feature?
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3 Responses to “Enterprise Search: Baloney Six Ways, like Herring”
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Thanks for sharing the Gr8 info
[…] – La tecnología ha dejado de ser un diferenciador en los proyectos de búsqueda. La gran mayoría de fabricantes ofrecen las mismas funcionalidades en sus productos, los cuales son ya casi una “commodity”. El factor de éxito de un proyecto de búsqueda no es la tecnología sino los conocimientos del integrador y su capacidad para sacar el máximo rendimiento al producto y saber adaptarlo al negocio (datos corporativos vs expectativas usuarios). “ The other side of the argument was that companies are no longer will to pay big money for key word retrieval.” Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search, “Enterpire Search: Baloney Six Ways, like Herring” […]
Colbenson,
Thanks. Here’s a rough translation of the Spanish portion. Don’t hesitate to correct my English version: The technology is no longer the differentiator in search projects. The vast majority of manufacturers offer the same functionality in their products, which are now almost a commodity. The success search project is, therefore, not technology. Success depends on the expertise of the integrator and that firm’s ability to take full advantage of the vendor’s product in order to match the search engine to the users’ expectations.
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2011