After attending the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City on May 13 and 14, 2014 (#ESDNY), one theme became very evident: enterprise searches should no longer be considered simply a means to enable users to find documents, although this is still a valuable result. Big Data and the idea of Search Based Applications designed to solve a specific problem continue to evolve. The overall message is that organizations must start to understand that the massive amounts of data they produce every second of every day can teach them things about their organizations that they had never imagined.
This is done by leveraging the capabilities of search based technology to capture and analyze the information that already exists in large organizations. “Search” can be the solution to a problem that would have traditionally never been considered a “search problem.” Many of our clients are presently discussing ways to enhance their ability to manage and store documents and content. A tremendous amount of time and money is spent entering information “in” to a system. This is obviously a very important problem, as information continues to grow.
In the future, we need to start thinking about ways to understand how to extract data “out” of that information in order to make informed, accurate decisions in an efficient manner. The ability to extract data can often be found in search based technologies. However, Jeff Carr (@siftonpark ) reminded us in his presentation that search and findability is not simply a technology problem. Rather, it is up to us to develop innovative ways to leverage search technology in order to harness the power of data.
Mike Clark
Mike has spent his entire career in a sales and business development capacity. Prior to joining the team at Norconex Mike worked in the competitive IT staffing industry. His private and public sector sales and business development experience is a definite asset when positioning Norconex products and specialized professional services to existing and future clients.