Sinequa: Estimating Once and for All the Value of Search
November 8, 2021
Vendors of enterprise search systems have struggled for decades to explain the “value” of their systems and software. The task is a difficult one for several reasons:
- Search is a term which is difficult to define in a satisfactory way to each person, unit, department, job specialty, and executive in an organization. Why? Search is personal. Chemists don’t want what lawyers want; marketers don’t want what invoice clerks want.
- Search is perceived as either built in (Microsoft and Oracle provide crude tools to find items) or free (bright computer grads know about Solr).
- Search over the last 50 years has fragmented into specific tools for specialist jobs because the one-size fits all has demonstrated it does not work, produces financial meltdown (Convera, Entopia, Delphis, Hakia, etc.), creates legal hassles (Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer), and crazy marketing hyperbole which does not deliver on time, on target, or within the budget (Dieselpoint, Endeca, Teratext, etc.)
I read “Sinequa Develops ROI Calculator for Determining the Benefits of Enterprise Search.” The write up asserts:
The new online tool has been designed to assess a company’s productivity and predict the potential productivity gains achievable with the company’s recently released Insight Apps deployed with Sinequa’s Intelligent Enterprise Search platform.
Might be worth a look, but I have learned that it is better to have a specific problem regarding information retrieval and then spell out what’s required. Then one can go looking for a system which delivers. Being sued? E-discovery. Hunting for information on your local machine? Everything. Information related to a law enforcement case? Datawalk.
Stephen E Arnold, November 8, 2021
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