Quote to Note: Enterprise Search As a Black Hole

October 19, 2016

Here’s a quote to note from “Slack CEO Describes Holy Grail of Virtual Assistants.” Slack seeks to create smart software capable of correlating information from enterprise applications. Good idea. The write up says:

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has an audacious goal: Turning his messaging and collaboration platform into an uber virtual assistant capable of searching every enterprise application to deliver employees pertinent information.

Got it. Employees cannot locate information needed for their job. Let me sidestep the issue of hiring people incapable of locating information in the first place.

Here’s the quote I noted:

And if Slack succeeds, it could seal the timeless black hole of wasted productivity enterprise search and other tools have failed to close.

I love the “timeless black hole of wasted productivity of enterprise search.” Great stuff, particularly because outfits like Wolters Kluwer continue to oscillate between proprietary search investments like Qwant.com and open source solutions like Lucene/Solr.

Do organizations create these black holes or is software to blame? Information is a slippery fish, which often find “timeless black holes” inhospitable.

Stephen E Arnold, October 19, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Enterprise, Enterprise search, News, Quotation, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.