01: Forget “Search” — It Is All About The “Virtual Aggregation” Of Data

I mentioned in a post late last year that 2010 would be the year of federated search, but now I think we need to go even further …

The number of record and content management systems that are coming onto the market (and the investment that is being made by vendors and customers alike) is simply staggering.  In isolation, a large number of these systems are good applications; some are even great … with some tremendous functionality.  But having spent time at the HP TRIM User Forum (TUF23) in Sydney last week, I can say they all have one thing in common – they require end users to know where content is in order to find it.

Think about this for a minute … if you know your content is in HP TRIM, then the search in TRIM will allow you to find what you are looking for, same if you know your content is in SharePoint.  However, no matter what role you have in an organisation, chances are you will interact with more than one of these data repositories.  From an enterprise perspective we cannot continue to expect our users to know where information lives.

The issue today is that data needs to live in different places.  These different repositories are purpose-built for the type of information that they contain.  The term “federated search” does not really do the concept justice … more accurately, what we are doing with federated search is providing users with the ability to find information by “virtually aggregating data” or allowing users to ask for some information that is likely scattered across multiple repositories.  

We can even take this one step further, following on from the commentary about “physical” data aggregation projects that are being embarked upon in Europe and the US after some high-profile information failures.  If you have a physical data aggregation project going on in your organisation, stop right now and see if there is a better way to accomplish the end result you are looking for. 

We can wrestle with terminology all we want (CMSWatch’s Theresa Regli recently presented some great thoughts on the related topic of “enterprise search” vs “federated search”), as long as we all agree that the true benefit of this technology is to locate and leverage information where it resides.

Posted in Enterprise Search, Federated Search

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 7:49 am and is filed under Enterprise Search, Federated Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.