Making More Sense of Enterprise Search

But Fernando is also one of the stalwarts of HP’s compliance command. And that says a lot. “We do compliance for business all day, every day. We do that for a living,” he says. That surprises me a little, but for Fernando it’s a no-brainer. “For example, here at HP we have total control. You’re right. It’s partly an IT problem and it’s also partly a compliance problem. For example, in the financial services market, where I am quite likely a broker/dealer,
if I send an email, we need to do the categorization, we do the supervision… we make sure it’s protected. We do that all day, every day.”

It’s a simple argument. “Compliance is simply about what’s being said, or what’s being written, and then making some kind of decision about the risk associated,” he says.

Enterprise search has become an interesting world for Fernando. “For me it has segmented into several pieces over time. For me, the most interesting piece is the application-building side. But you also have the ‘powering-portals’ side, etc., which is the text analytics side, which is very cool. But for me, the most interesting piece has always been the ability to bring together the entire information space of the enterprise and then ‘connect the dots.’ There is no other solution besides enterprise search that can do that,” Fernando insists.

I get that. Connecting the dots between the various content repositories is the new definition of enterprise search. It’s not like you have a universal enterprise search platform; it’s more of an integrated symbiosis of the many search platforms you already own, and they need to speak to one another. Correct?

It was at this unfortunate moment that Fernando’s phone cut out. It was especially unfortunate because he was about to spill the beans about enterprise search. He came back on in a few seconds. Overseas cellular communication; what can I say?

“I was in the middle of a very passionate statement when that happened,” he said. And it’s true. “We were talking about having a single point of access, you can ask one question, and if the criteria matched, you could get information independent of where you work. Today, though, cloud and services mean that we’ve blended the cloud and SharePoint and social media platforms to the degree that I don’t want people to just ‘get their stuff’… I don’t want it to be a search box … I want to make it a service…” That is now the business model. According to Fernando, and “everyone should be tapping into it, everyone should be creating applications, it should be empowering departments.” The idea is to bring information together for everyone in the organization. Not an alien concept, but also not a usual practice. Nice to hear Fernando explain it in clear terms.

Human Information

“We think in terms of human information.” Which makes sense to me. But Fernando likes to think that information can be mechanical AND human, all in the same place. Which means, to him, there’s more than search, but you also have analytics and analysis in the same place, and that’s a game changer. But it’s hard for companies to understand how to build those capabilities in unison.

“Going back to your original question, ‘what is the biggest change in enterprise search?’ I’d have to say that it is the human information,” he says. “We believe in augmenting human intelligence. The person who runs the business has to have the right stuff in context at their fingertips. But the big data and analytics also have to be at the fingertips of the user.

“From my perspective, it’s a tool which is required if you are rich in information. By virtue of being rich in information, it is going to live in a lot of different places. If you have a lot of information, it needs to be bridged together.”

He uses SalesForce as an example. “We have no desire to replace SalesForce. But wouldn’t it also be amazing to connect the dots between 10 salespeople who are working on similar projects and colliding with each other all day?” Fernando asks.

You have to think about the happiness of the user today. “We think we should be a real complement to a human being.” That sounds about right to me.

Please continue reading this KMWorld White Paper on the subject of “Enterprise Search and Information Access.” There are many new abstracts the vendors have found to address this subject, as I suggested earlier. And it changes every day. Please take the opportunity to learn from the experts, and take advice from the experts who know. I do, every day.