Posts Tagged ‘virtual data aggregation’

01: Embrace the revolution – Part 1

As a child growing up in the 1970’s, content was a state of well-being. Eating, playing with friends and watching TV in the evenings.  

Fast forward 40 years and content has become something you create, view, buy, sell, download, modify, store and share. There’s a huge amount of it. It’s everywhere and everybody seems to be caught up in it. We are in the midst of an information explosion. Except this explosion is unique, because the effects are multiplying by the day.

For enterprises, trying to maintain some kind of coherent structure over their information is a huge and ongoing challenge. It takes time and can cost a lot of money.

But however well-organized and structured the information is, it is today only a small part of the total picture. Why? Because of user-generated content – the stuff that individuals within (and outside) your enterprise create, duplicate and share every single day.

It is by definition unstructured. The outcome of behaviours, processes and activities that are often meant to foster creativity and add value. But which inevitably stretch and evolve established information boundaries and taxonomies.

Add to that the proliferation of storage locations beyond the desktop (e.g. tablets, phones, USB drives) and the issue of information ‘find-ability’ becomes increasingly acute. Think of this as finding precisely the needle you need in a haystack that is growing exponentially.

As enterprises, we need to be realistic about what information we can directly structure and organise. The balance has shifted and up to 90% of all content today is unstructured.

Regardless of where it might reside, we need to be able to (virtually) aggregate content together in a way that allows us to be very precise about what we are seeking; and to do something meaningful with what we find.

The Scout Motto ‘Be prepared’ has never been more prescient. 

The revolution is already here, so embrace it and maybe even learn to love it.

Accept that you can’t store, structure and classify everything. Instead, use the right enterprise search technology to virtually aggregate all the critical sources of information you need to help enable more informed decision-making.

By doing so, you might not have to go through that physical (and very painful) legacy migration exercise you’d been planning.  

If that’s not an option, you can at least do it at your own pace, so that users aren’t affected by the move because they still have a uniform, single point of access – regardless of where the information really ‘lives’.

More on that in Part 2…

02: 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.