Enterprise Search Vendors: One Way to Move Past Failure
April 21, 2015
I just finished reading articles about IBM’s quarterly report. The headline is that the company has reported slumping revenues for three years in a row. Pretty impressive. I assumed that Watson, fueled with Lucene, home brew scripts, acquisitions, and liberal splashes of public relations, would be the revenue headliner.
How does IBM Watson’s unit, newly enhanced with a health component, respond to what I would call “missing a target.” Others, who are more word worthy than I, might use the word “failure.”
I read a blog post which lured me because at age 70 I am not sure where I left my dog, wife, and automobile this morning. Short term memory is indeed thrilling. Now what was I thinking?
Oh, right, “Embrace Selective Short-Term Memory to Move Past Failure Quickly.” The point of the write up is that those who have failed can more forward using this trick:
Rather than get caught up trying to emotionally soothe yourself, just forget it happened.
I have a theory that after an enterprise search vendor finds itself in a bit of a sticky wicket, the marketers can move on to the next client, repeat the assertions about semantic search or natural language processing or Big Data or whatever chant of buzzwords lands a sale.
Ask the marketer about an issue—for example, Convera and the NBA, Fast Search and the Norwegian authorities, or Autonomy and the Department of Energy—and you confront a team with a unifying characteristic: The memory of the “issues” with a search system is a tabula rasa. Ask someone about the US Army’s search system or the UK National Health Service about its meta indexing.
There is nothing quite like the convenient delete key which operates the selective memory functions.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2015
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