Dreaming about Enterprise Search: Hope Springs Eternal…
November 6, 2024
The post is the work of a humanoid who happens to be a dinobaby. GenX, Y, and Z, read at your own risk. If art is included, smart software produces these banal images.
Enterprise search is back, baby. The marketing lingo is very year 2003, however. The jargon has been updated, but the story is the same: We can make an organization’s information accessible. Instead of Autonomy’s Neurolinguistic Programming, we have AI. Instead of “just text,” we have video content processed. Instead of filters, we have access to cloud-stored data.
An executive knows he can crack the problem of finding information instantly. The problem is doing it so that the time and cost of data clean up does not cost more than buying the Empire State Building. Thanks, Stable Diffusion. Good enough.
A good example of the current approach to selling the utility of an enterprise search and retrieval system is the article / interview in Betanews called “How AI Is Set to Democratize Information.” I want to be upfront. I am a mostly aligned with the analysis of information and knowledge presented by Taichi Sakaiya. His The Knowledge Value Revolution or a History of the Future has been a useful work for me since the early 1990s. I was in Osaka, Japan, lecturing at the Kansai Institute of Technology when I learned of this work book from my gracious hosts and the Managing Director of Kinokuniya (my sponsor). Devaluing knowledge by regressing to the fat part of a Gaussian distribution is not something about which I am excited.
However, the senior manager of Pyron (Raleigh, North Carolina), an AI-powered information retrieval company, finds the concept in line with what his firm’s technology provides to its customers. The article includes this statement:
The concept of AI as a ‘knowledge cloud’ is directly tied to information access and organizational intelligence. It’s essentially an interconnected network of systems of records forming a centralized repository of insights and lessons learned, accessible to individuals and organizations.
The benefit is, according to the Pyron executive:
By breaking down barriers to knowledge, the AI knowledge cloud could eliminate the need for specialized expertise to interpret complex information, providing instant access to a wide range of topics and fields.
The article introduces a fresh spin on the problems of information in organizations:
Knowledge friction is a pervasive issue in modern enterprises, stemming from the lack of an accessible and unified source of information. Historically, organizations have never had a singular repository for all their knowledge and data, akin to libraries in academic or civic communities. Instead, enterprise knowledge is scattered across numerous platforms and systems — each managed by different vendors, operating in silos.
Pyron opened its doors in 2017. After seven years, the company is presenting a vision of what access to enterprise information could, would, and probably should do.
The reality, based on my experience, is different. I am not talking about Pyron now. I am discussing the re-emergence of enterprise search as the killer application for bolting artificial intelligence to information retrieval. If you are in love with AI systems from oligopolists, you may want to stop scanning this blog post. I do not want to be responsible for a stroke or an esophageal spasm. Here we go:
- Silos of information are an emergent phenomenon. Knowledge has value. Few want to make their information available without some value returning to them. Therefore, one can talk about breaking silos and democratization, but those silos will be erected and protected. Secret skunk works, mislabeled projects, and squirreling away knowledge nuggets for a winter’s day. In the case of Senator Everett Dirksen, the information was used to get certain items prioritized. That’s why there is a building named after him.
- The “value” of information or knowledge depends on another person’s need. A database which contains the antidote to save a child from a household poisoning costs money to access. Why? Desperate people will pay. The “information wants to free” idea is not one that makes sense to those with information and the knowledge to derive value from what another finds inscrutable. I am not sure that “democratizing information” meshes smoothly with my view.
- Enterprise search, with or without, hits some cost and time problems with a small number of what have been problems for more than 50 years. SMART failed, STAIRS III failed, and the hundreds of followers have failed. Content is messy. The idea that one can process text, spreadsheets, Word files, and email is one thing. Doing it without skipping wonky files or the time and cost of repurposing data remains difficult. Chemical companies deal with formulae; nuclear engineering firms deal with records management and mathematics; and consulting companies deal with highly paid people who lock up their information on a personal laptop. Without these little puddles of information, the “answer” or the “search output” will not be just a hallucination. The answer may be dead wrong.
I understand the need to whip up jargon like “democratize information”, “knowledge friction”, and “RAG frameworks”. The problem is that despite the words, delivering accurate, verifiable, timely on-point search results in response to a query is a difficult problem.
Maybe one of the monopolies will crack the problem. But most of output is a glimpse of what may be coming in the future. When will the future arrive? Probably when the next PR or marketing write up about search appears. As I have said numerous times, I find it more difficult to locate the information I need than at any time in my more than half a century in online information retrieval.
What’s easy is recycling marketing literature from companies who were far better at describing a “to be” system, not a “here and now” system.
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2024
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