Innovative Vendor Search Summit

Recently I had the pleasure of attending an internal "search summit" organized by a highly innovative global company. More than 300 people came for talks on authoring standards, tagging, how to get indexed, querying tips & tricks, and of course the future of search.

A highlight of the event for me was the opening keynote during which the CIO of this company discussed how critical search is, and then went on to identify security and access to multiple silos as challenges for their existing solution. They have large volumes of technical design content, including highly structured metadata and numeric performance data, that needs to be fused, and search has to be supplemented with faceted browsing and visualization of content. Relevancy was noted as a particular challenge because of inconsistent tagging. Right now, most content is gathered via crawling, as access to database and other repositories is not available from the "black box" vendor. An equal issue is the fact that the company-wide tagging system is in a separate index, so it must be queried separately.

The second keynote was delivered by a leading analyst and information access consultant. He spoke eloquently on topics ranging from findability analysis to the value of alerts and mobile access. Careful to question most every attending vendor on at least one difficult topic, he did a great job of laying out the areas where many companies seek to improve.

Following this was a lively panel consisting of myself, the analyst and product managers from two extremely large search vendors.

The analyst challenged us to show that we were really technically different; time didn't really allow some of differences in features to really get out there, but the variations in approach to problem solving couldn't have been more stark. In the end I summarized my view by saying I was happy to work for a young company that focuses exclusively on the problem of unified information access in the enterprise - it is not a second or third tier business for us - and haven't yet come to believe that a one-size-fits-all approach, even if successful in some domains - applies to a multi-functional, information fusion problem such as this company faces.

For an innovative company, with a dramatic gallery of patents displayed in their lobby, the right solution requires flexible technology, a partnership that offers access to real expertise and that is committed to ongoing, customer-influenced innovation. The volume and quality of patents this company has achieved aren't generally generated by just following "best practices". They are the things that define them, after all. Anyway I'm not sure the other vendors agreed with me on this point.

During lunch I staffed a booth with my colleagues and we showed demos and screen shots, handed out whitepapers, and generally had a great time talking about particular challenges and solutions. We built a series of demos showing how to make search more effective by presenting unified information summarized in dashboards, with a supplemental stream of update notifications - a sort of "Facebook News Feed for your enterprise life". As the dashboard shows you what's new. it then lets you search or navigate to learn more, drill-down and generally find all the information about something of interest.

Afterwards we met with representatives from several different departments and helped them envision how UIA could be applied to solve their specific challenges. It was really a remarkable event. Kudos and many thanks to the folks who organized it!

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