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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

You can read the full press release here.