In this day and age, there are very few questions without answers. They may not always be right answers but even the most well thought out Google query can lead you down a rabbit hole of theories, thoughts, and best guesses that help you craft answers to even the hardest questions like, “What is the meaning of life?”. The power of modern search engines has made the spread of information more equitable and trained us that any question can be answered via search.
But in reality, not all information is created equal, especially in the business world where proprietary knowledge and the free-flow of team- and company-specific information is essential. You can’t just Google, “How many of our orders shipped late last quarter?”
From Marriott to the Democratic National Convention to Yahoo!, significant data breaches have become practically normalized. This is, of course, nonsense; privacy is a fundamental right and the fact that major organizations cannot guarantee your digital privacy is an enormous problem. While compromised email addresses and passwords are one thing, the recent crack of data and analytics company Ascension’s Elasticsearch-based database spilled more than 24 million banking and financial documents onto the web for an all-you-can-steal buffet. For companies, this should be a giant flashing red light that says, “Ensure your security is up to snuff.”
Looking for a search solution that could power their e-commerce, Intranet, and CRM experiences, National Instruments wanted to optimize the online shopping experience and foster collaboration and engagement across the workforce.
National Instruments is among the innovators that put search at the core of its systems, including digital commerce, the website, intranets, and CRM.
Search at the Core of UX
Site search needs to offer capabilities that continually improve the relevancy of answers to search queries. It needs to consider language on global websites, and it must be personalized as much as possible to the visitor requesting the information.
You’ve got Big Data? Sure, everyone’s got it. But how many organizations have indexed it all? The volume, variety, and velocity of data in a typical enterprise has by far outpaced the ability to catalog it in an orderly, easy-to-retrieve fashion. Along comes automated big data profiling.
Your data lake needs a survey, along with the data warehouse and all the silos. Many enterprises “see” only about 10 percent of their data. The other 90 percent is hidden, dark. It goes unused because it’s too difficult and time-consuming to comb through the dark data and find the connections.
Naturally, everyone looks to IT. Why don’t they have a master index of all the organization’s data? Probably because most big data profiling is done manually, and that’s slow going. What’s also slow is the line of business users out the door who are just waiting for data sets.
