DOCUMENT Magazine - June 2008 - (Page 19) MS MANAGE & STRATEGY & a w The Intelligence of Search As workers look for the information they need to get their jobs done, the last thing they want to do is pause to consider how they’re going to get it. Yet, anecdotal evidence shows that everyone spends more time looking for information than actually using it. People’s high expectations that they should be able to find what they are looking for are driven mainly by the speed and intuitive nature of some Internet search engines. Thus, they expect to be able to pull up exactly the document or data table they need in a matter of seconds. So, IT departments hear this complaint over and over again: “Why is it so easy for me to find information on the Internet when I’m at home and so difficult to find anything at work?” Gaining Business Insight The problem is that within the enterprise, some information is structured and typically accessible to just a subset of the population via Business Intelligence (BI) tools, and some information is unstructured and accessible via a variety of search tools. Both technologies have their strengths and weaknesses: >> Search tools help you find information, but you have to figure out what to do with it. >> BI tools help you make sense of structured data, but leave unstructured content aside. Fortunately for information workers (and the corporate librarians, database managers and BI report developers who support them), the process of digging up desired information and actually putting it to use is getting easier as the worlds of search and BI converge. In fact, the technology is quite close to being able to capture the linkages needed to help decision makers avoid mistakes and make more insightful, effective decisions. The convergence of BI and search will help bridge the artificial system boundaries between structured data and unstructured content. It will not only affect the interfaces we use to search for, discover, analyze and report on what we need to know but help us learn more about what we don’t know. ith the expectations of high-speed data access from our customers, the burden of finding the right information quickly is a daunting one. But as the technologies of BI and search converge, it offers knowledge workers the information they didn’t know they didn’t know. The Offerings of Convergence Business Intelligence and search offer unified information access | By Boris Evelson Internet search is teaching people to request information from a little white box. While a white-bar search interface is also common in enterprise search, it is brand new to BI. Most BI vendors support search only for canned reports from a report repository. Skilled BI analysts must anticipate the information people will need and design reports on their behalf using a complicated interface. Thus, the convergence theme means that information access will become easier and information workers will get better insight into current “blind spots.” Specifically: >> Information workers will be able to execute data queries via a search box using natural language. Most casual BI users can’t translate a business question like, “What is the value of www.DOCUMENTmedia.com june.08 document 19 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.