01: Early Warning Systems

As a mother of three, I read about the case of Angela Gordon recently and wondered how we could miss key warning signs in our social services work.  In my field, I see the obstacles companies face every day when it comes to leveraging their content, so I can understand, in part, the challenges of social services work.  But when information is this critical, I have to question why we appear to be banging our heads against the wall with half-solutions.

Since Sarah Payne’s abduction and murder (yet another high-profile failure), UK police forces have been trying to find ways to enable better access to all information that may be relevant, whether checking on someone applying for a job or investigating a crime.

The collection of various reported stories of neglect and abuse in children’s own homes has UK councils struggling to determine why social workers don’t have the information they need to pinpoint situations requiring intervention. 

To address the problem, some are building data warehouses with BI capability on the front end.  But this is a huge undertaking, expensive, lengthy and very difficult to get right.  What’s more, it doesn’t provide a short-term solution. 

Given our experience in working with police forces, we’ve seen search technology deliver immediate improvements in intelligence work, often serving as an early warning system for investigators.  In the very least, we should be looking as these capabilities in the interim to help stem the tide of costly missed warning signs.

02: Ben Franklin and the Evolution of Enterprise Search

Given how prolific he was, Ben Franklin could have very easily invented enterprise search in his day.  That is, if he hadn’t been so busy with everything else.  And even though he had an incredible mind, not even he could have fully appreciated what a game-changer electricity would be.  Today, we only consciously acknowledge electricity when we have none; otherwise it’s primarily an afterthought, despite the fact that harnessing and generating this power remains one of humankind’s greatest achievements.

Reflecting on this brought to mind a conversation I had with Sue Feldman of IDC some years ago.  During our discussion, she made a statement to the effect of, “Some day, search will be analogous to electricity.  When you turn on a light, you don’t think about electricity; you just focus on the fact that something has been illuminated for you.”  Perhaps others have viewed search in a similar fashion, but it’s an analogy that made perfect sense at the time and is even more fitting today.

While I can’t speak for the entire industry, the types of deals ISYS has been doing in recent months are more and more inline with this analogy.  Whether we’re talking about embedded search, or search as an application, slowly but surely search appears to be moving away from just a blank search box and into a world where search is primarily an enabling technology.  In that sense, enterprise search is neither the destination nor the journey … it’s merely the light that enables you to proceed with whatever it is you were doing in the first place.

03: “Need to Have” Profile in Enterprise Search

I ran across an August 2008 press release that seemed rather relevant given recent terrorist events.  Published by the House Science and Technology Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, the release focused on failures and mismanagement in one of our country’s most important counter terrorism programs.  Analysts from 16 agencies were supposed to have access to intelligence information intended to help them predict and prevent future attacks, but through program mismanagement they were left dead in the water.  One congressman commented at the time that “the program not only can’t connect the dots, it can’t find the dots.”  

Being the good salesman that I am, I immediately got on the phone with his office, because of our longstanding experience with providing an important function in “connecting dots.”   Namely, we find the dots and you connect them.  I  have worked with dozens if not hundreds of crime analysts and investigators over the years, and it seems every successful investigation begins with a skilled investigator following up on a hunch that prompts a search that uncovers  a dot … and another dot … and another … and so on, ad infinitum.

My fellow industry colleagues and I are always trying to relay the “need to have” aspects of our technology, and I’d be hard pressed to find a better example than this.  Am I just too close to the market, or are we as enterprise search professionals just not doing a good enough job of communicating the “so what” factor?

04: Visit Us at LegalTech New York

I’ve been to New York City more than a dozen times in the last seven years, and it never gets old, even in February.  ISYS, as a company, has been traveling to NYC for the LegalTech event since 1994, which means it has been 16 years since we first started connecting more deeply with law firms and other software vendors looking to round out their technology with embedded search.  If you’ll be in town for the event, please stop by Booth #329 and say hello to the team.

What makes LegalTech pretty unique is the commaraderie of the event.  Maybe it’s because our focus is on connecting with our fellow exhibitors, but we always leave the event smarter than when we arrived.  We’ve never approached it as a hard sales exercise; we’re there to learn as much as the next guy and gal, so from that standpoint it’s refreshing.  For those of you who have direct legal responsibilities, or for those who are on the periphery dealing with corporate compliance and risk issues, I’d love to hear what you’re looking to get out of LegalTech this time around.  From our point of view, we’re still quite focused on embedded search for traditional ISVs/OEMs as well as SaaS providers, but we’re also increasingly engaging in conversations regarding early case assessment with commercial organizations.

For an event of this size to still be highly relevant, it’s clear these issues remain quite acute.  As always, I’m looking forward to it, so we hope to see you next week.  As a reminder, the event is at the Hilton New York, from Feb. 1-3.  I believe the folks at American Lawyer Media are offering a complimentary exhibit hall pass if you want to drop in for an afternoon.

05: Mobile Access Emerging

You’ve heard the phrase “eat your own dog food.”  At the risk of being too promotional, I’m increasingly liking the taste of this mobile enterprise search chow.  Late last year over the holidays, I was stuck at the airport because of weather conditions (snow, of which we’ve had plenty in Denver this season).  As is typical, I needed to access various content quickly on my iPhone, and in this case I needed to get to some key documents in an effort to help my sales and technical teams close a transaction and kick off the order fulfillment process.  It was a day trip, so no laptop, which meant I avoided the hassle that is known as the “laptop security screening dance.” 

Addressing this current need meant pulling in pieces of information from my email (on our hosted email service), Word documents (on my laptop back at work), as well as a PDF of the sales contract (on our corporate servers).  The fact of the matter is we’ve been talking about the mobile enterprise for a handful of years.  And while remote access and increased access points have brought us a long way, it wasn’t until we started bringing along these mobile enterprise search capabilities that I felt like the rubber was finally hitting the road. Perhaps a self-serving statement, but nonetheless true in my situation.

Long story short, my ability to search across these repositories from my iPhone, snag the key documents and act on them helped get me two very productive hours and a closed transaction with a new customer at the end of the quarter.  It beats playing Sudoku!

06: Open Source Search – Ready For Prime Time?

Well… it really depends on who you are and where you are. In the US, vendors like Lucid Imagination are making a business out of the support of Lucene/Solr. There are even commercial search vendors developing products off a Lucene base. Open source search outside the US is not as prevalent. We see it to some degree in Europe, but not in Asia Pacific. When IT budgets are tight, doing some prototype development with open source to prove the merits of a business case certainly has value. Just make sure you are clear on the end goal of that prototype. Turning a prototype into a final commercial product only works if the technology was selected correctly in the first place. A lot of prototyping technology is designed specifically to generate a prototype, and do it quickly. Moving to a final product requires something different again.

But back to the original question…it really comes down to a question of your company’s appetite for risk. At a recent conference, the CIO of a large financial institution was talking about her attitude to open source in general. In her words – when something goes wrong you can’t hold the open source developer community accountable; sometimes you just need a commercial entity in there with you that you can put some pressure on, the “one throat to choke” so to speak.

Now you may be in a company that does embrace open source and is willing to tolerate the General Public License (GPL) aspects. If this is the case and you have enough expertise in house to deal with anything that goes wrong, then perhaps it is for you. If you do go down the Open Source Search route, be sure to come talk to us about the ISYS File Readers. The availability of document filters is clearly a key area of open source search that’s not ready for prime time.

07: Security for federated search

Thank you to all those who commented on the recent post, and as a number of you pointed out, yes, security is a challenge in an environment with multiple data repositories. Stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper that will tell you everything you need to know about security in a federated search environment. We’ll do our best to have it out by the end of January!

08: 2010 – the year of Federated Enterprise Search?

How the landscape has changed…ten years ago we had many different file types, but not many places to store them. Today, we have fewer file types, but many more repositories – add the complexity of the different security models into the mix and clearly the focus of enterprise search is changing. It is good to see the issue of federated search finally being raised, witness recent articles in the likes of Information Week.

The question that enterprises need to ask is who is best placed to provide true federated search? My opinion is that it is not the owner of any one of the repositories —  it is those companies that have an independent view of data. We will be hearing more about this issue in 2010 as our customers demand better access to information, and don’t care what email system of document repository their data resides in.

09: ISYS Launches 2009 Enterprise Access Suite

ISYS Search Software today introduced its new 2009 Enterprise Access Suite by officially launching its ISYS Anywhere mobile enterprise search server.  As a whole, the 2009 Enterprise Access Suite is comprised of a core set of embedded search and infrastructure solutions for information access, management and reuse.  ISYS Anywhere specifically addresses the common pain of the mobile workforce … namely all the tools for conducting work remotely EXCEPT for the ability to search and retrieve key data from the field.

ISYS Anywhere is especially signficant as it merges all content repositories (from locally stored information to server data) into a single point of access.  This includes the ability to search email, individual PCs, business applications and more from a Blackberry, iPhone or any browser-enabled device.  Alternate solutions to date have addressed either desktop data or server content, but not both.

The full details of our new suite can be found via our official press release, via EContent Magazine’s coverage or in the technology section of our website.

10: ISYS Positioned as a Challenger

Today we announced that ISYS has been positioned as a Challenger in Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology.  As you might be aware, the Magic Quadrant is one methodology Gartner uses to classify players in a market.  A large number of organizations worldwide place a lot of importance on reports such as these, so we take great pride in being listed among the 12 vendors that Gartner considers either a Challenger or Leader in Information Access Technology.

You can read the full press release here.