Archive for January, 2010

01: “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?

02: 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.

03: 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!

04: 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.

05: 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!