Tuesday, May 15, 2012

New technologies, corporate mergers and acquisitions, changes in user expectations, and internal resource allocations can all affect enterprise search implementations and maintenance. What are the trends affecting search? What are the disruptive forces at work? What does the past tell us about future trends?

This expert panel reflects on the state of search, both as expressed in the opening session and as revealed by the enterprise search survey. Contributions from attendees are guaranteed to animate this conversation.

The information needed by pharmaceutical and medical device companies is mission-critical. Merck, a leader in prescription drug and vaccine manufacture, as well as animal health and over-the-counter medications, shares its strategies, challenges, and wins regarding enterprise search. For Medtronic, a single portal to search and leverage internal information with external purchased data and web feeds contributed to improved decision making.

Search based applications (SBAs) are able to improve the speed, amount and sources of information that can be accessed.  Some SBAs go beyond search by enabling knowledge management capabilities that empower end users to access, find and act on pertinent information for more effective business decisions.

Increase knowledge worker productivity by reducing time spent searching for relevant information. Conduct topic-related searches and view search results while in any SharePoint document, without having to leave the document you are currently viewing. Users can now view content from a variety of file formats without needing to load the client application.

A hot topic in the corporate legal environment is e-discovery. Companies are increasingly being asked to produce information for legal reasons, but traditional search models can create significant barriers to generating results that satisfy the increasingly stringent requirements of litigators and the courts. One paradigm shift, from reactive to proactive e-discovery, is focused on information unification. In this session, these experts outline what is necessary for efficient and effective ediscovery search. No one wants to believe their organization will be the object of a legal action, but it’s good to be prepared for that eventuality.

An array of providers claim to offer semantic search. If only they agreed about the meaning of “semantics.” Indeed, techniques that include concept search, natural-language search, and related searches—with clustered, faceted, and aggregated results on full-text, XML, database, and semantic web sources—all qualify as forms of semantic search. But no single search engine or toolkit harnesses every semantic-search technique, nor should universality be a goal. Capabilities are useful only to the extent they match business and technical problems, the nature of source materials, and user needs. Applied correctly, however, they make search more direct, accurate, and usable, helping searchers move from information retrieval to higher-value information access. Seth Grimes provides an independent definition of semantic computing and presents a systematic overview of a dozen approaches to meaning-based, semantic search for web and enterprise. He discusses a road map for broader adoption of semantic search in years to come.

Information governance helps to enable desirable behavior for the creation, searching, archiving, and deletion of corporate information.  It incorporates privacy controls, prepares content for the demands of e-discovery, helps storage optimization, and can innovate metadata management.  By considering the entire lifecycle of records across multiple repositories and jurisdictions, enterprise search becomes more effective and relevant. Yet long-term preservation of digital information presents challenges, especially in healthcare, insurance, government, banking, and energy/utilities. Storage media degrades; hardware, operating systems and application software become obsolete; decryption algorithms and passwords lose their effectiveness; and the migration of ESI (electronically stored information) can cause the loss of its metadata and encumbers future recovery. Learn how information governance can amplify the accuracy and relevancy of your search environment.

The widespread adoption of internet-connected mobile devices has been widely heralded. Yet savvy smartphone-slinging, tablet-toting consumers are also employees who, not surprisingly, expect to use their devices for work as well as leisure. Enabling staff to search business applications at any time and from anywhere is fundamental to every successful enterprise mobility strategy. In these talks, Tyler Tate outlines how to design search-based applications for mobile users. Colin Jeavons sees the unveiling of Apple’s Siri utility as a “horseless carriage” moment that opens the door to explore new ways to build stronger relationships with consumers and to create new paid search ad models.