Last week I began this entry, re-considered how to make the point and tucked it away. Today I unearthed an article I had not gotten around to putting into my database of interesting and useful citations. Lisa Nadile in The ABCs of Search Engine Marketing, in CIO Magazine, hits the nail on the head with this statement, “Each search engine has its own top-secret algorithm to analyze this data…” This is tongue in cheek so you need to read the whole article to get the humor. Ms. Nadile’s article is geared to Internet marketing but the comments about search engines are just a relevant for enterprise search.
I may be an enterprise search analyst but there are a lot of things I don’t know about the guts of current commercial search tools. Some things I could know if I am willing to spend months studying patents and expensive reports, while other things are protected as trade secrets. I will never know what is under the hood of most products. Thirty years ago I knew a lot about relatively simple concepts like b-tree indexes and hierarchical, relational, networked and associative data structures for products I used and developed.
My focus has shifted to results and usability. My client has to be able to find all the content in their content repository or crawled site. If not, it had better be easy to discover why, and simple to take corrective actions with the search engine’s administration tools, if that is where the problem lies. If the scope of the corpus of content to be searched is likely to grow to hundreds of thousands of documents, I also care about hardware resource requirements and performance (speed) and scalability. And, if you have read previous entries, you already know that I care a lot about service and business relationships with the vendor because that is crucial to long term success. No amount of “whiz bang” technology will overcome a lousy client/vendor relationship.
Finding out what is going on under the hood with some imponderable algorithms isn’t really going to do me or my client any good when evaluating search products. Either the search tool finds stuff the way my client wants to find it, or it doesn’t. “Black art,” trade secret or “patent protected” few of us would really understand the secret sauce anyway.
My last blog was in reaction to two recent vendor experiences. One had just briefed me on an enterprise search offering; the other had been ignoring my client’s efforts to get software support, training and respond to bug reports. The second blogged a reaction with a patronizing: “So Lynda should not feel too bad. I know its (sic) frustrating to deal with vendors but not all vendors are the same and she certainly hasn’t tried us all.”
With dozens of vendors offering search tools, it was fair to assume that I haven’t tried them all. However, having used search engines of all types since 1974 both as a researcher and analyst I have a pretty good sense of what’s out there. Having evaluated products for clients, and for embedded use in products I brought to market for over 20 years, it doesn’t take me long with a new product to figure out where the problems are. I also talk to a lot of vendors, search users, and read more reports and evaluations than I can count. The evidence about any one product’s strengths and weaknesses piles up pretty quickly. “Searching” for stuff about search has been my career and I do make it my business to keep score on products.
I’m going to continue to hold my counsel on naming different search tools that I’ve experienced for the time being. Instead, in this blog I’ll focus on keeping buyers informed about search technologies in general. My work as a consultant is about helping specific clients look at the best and most appropriate options for the search problems they are trying to solve and to help guide their selection process. Here is some quick generic guidance on making your first search tool choice:
> If you have not previously deployed an enterprise search solution in your domain for the corpus of content you plan to search, do not begin with the highest priced licenses. They are often also the most costly and lengthy implementations and it will take many months to know if a solution will work for you over the long haul.
> Do begin with one or more low cost solutions to learn about search, search product administration, and search engine tuning. This helps you discover what issues and problems are likely to arise, and it will inform you about what to expect (or want) in a more sophisticated solution. You may even discover that a lower cost solution will do just fine for the intended application.
> Do execute hundreds of searches yourself on a corpus of content with which you are very familiar. You want to learn if you can actually find all the content you know is there, and how the results are returned and displayed.
> Do have a variety of types of potential searchers test-drive the installed product over a period of time, review the search logs to get a sense of how they approach searching; then debrief them about their experiences, and whether their search expectations were met.
It is highly unlikely that the first enterprise search product you procure will be the best and final choice. Experience will give you a much better handle on the next selection. It is certainly true that not all vendors or products are the same but you need to do serious reality-based evaluations to learn your most important differentiators.
I had a briefing from a vendor that is a strong contender for a piece of the enterprise search market this week. The offering is impressive, other reviews have given it high technical marks and the pricing model is reasonable. But because I am currently immersed in the deployment of another enterprise search engine with a client, the issue of vendor client relationship is foremost in my focus.
I asked the CEO of this relatively new offering, what are the fundamental assumptions his company makes about customer technology environments (e.g. the mix of software applications, hardware environment) and the competencies required to integrate his software with that environment. His answer was given strictly in terms of what the IT staff needs to know to bring the product online. My question did have several levels of complexity and was probably badly phrased but I was trying to make a point by asking it.
There are three specific elements missing from search vendors:
> Documentation or explicit models for deployment in environments where there are numerous technological variables to be considered
> Availability of training that takes into consideration the context for enterprise search in a specific customer’s organization
> Frank discussions with customers that set expectations about deployment and implementation, potential bottlenecks, and the need for experienced searchers, search analysts and subject matter experts on the team with the IT group
Downloading software and using automatic installers has become routine; with the launch of a menu and a few simple clicks on boxes on an administrative screen, vendors can claim “out-of-the-box” functionality. Never mind that what you find when you first search your targeted domain is nonsensical, the software finds “stuff.” The IT guys are happy because it was easy to install, met their architecture requirement and, knowing little about the actual corpus of content, they are satisfied that everything works.
I am in a bit of a pickle with the current project, software from another vendor, because:
> What the documentation says will happen when I make certain choices in the set-up does not, in fact, happen when a search is executed
> My attempts through email and phone to schedule training have gone unanswered
> My messages to the support service citing problems also get no response
I’ve only spent two weeks trying to get this software working but three weeks ago, on a holiday, I got a briefing from two executives from this firm because they were “going to be in the area” and wanted face time with a search analyst. Knowing my role as an analyst and as a client you would think they’d answer my phone calls.
What is it that makes the customer experience so easily ignored? All these products look great in demos; what is under the hood is often technologically wonderful but, boy, getting them to work in my environment always seems to be one long nightmare. I wish I could find out what I really need to know. A terrific search engine might help.
A tough truth about complex and integrated software applications is the lack of expertise and professional depth available to implement and maintain them. This explains a lot about why small business units and project teams often find and deploy their own software tools to get work done.
I am particularly concerned at the lack of will by organizations to fund implementation of applications like enterprise search to aggregate at the retrieval-end the content stored within disparate applications. No rational business planning can justify having workers sift through multiple repositories, each with a separate sign-on, search interface, and search engine protocols just to find a single document. True, organizations need highly competent professionals to meaningfully implement, tune, and administer enterprise search engines. They require the expertise of search analysts, taxonomists, librarians, IT specialists with security, platform, and software development training. However, developing a team of six to twelve “search engineers” to give workers in a thousand person company quick access to relevant content is an ROI no brainer when we know workers waste significant (5 – 15%) amounts of working hours hunting for stuff.
This week’s Information Week article by Nicholas Hoover on Web 2.0 contained a comment about Wells Fargo “…on another Enterprise 2.0 front, integrated search, the company has limited employees’ ability to search across data repositories because of the complex authorization schemes needed to keep people from accessing information they shouldn’t.”
Today’s (Feb. 27th) New York Times headlined with a story about Microsoft buying “a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers,” Medstory, Inc. The story goes on to cite comments by Esther Dyson who refers to the technology as “an ontology engine.” This underscores another truth about quality semantic (natural language) search; it depends on the existence of meaningful, topic specific vocabulary and concept maps to work well, a complexity in narrower markets.
Finally, we have seen the recent shift of companies like FAST moving from a strategy of selling solutions directly to enterprises for the purpose of aggregating content through a unified search portal to focusing on niche markets and highly tailored search architectures.
These are just three cases of a shift among search companies to leverage their search technology IP in more lucrative offerings. The losers will be organizations that really do need to deliver content more holistically to workers through a single search engine. Yes, security is a concern, and skilled search technologists must be hired and dedicated to delivering search options that tie directly to business operations.These efforts are not one-off projects but need to be sustained as permanent infrastructure. If you are in a position to influence search procurement solutions make your case for the most suitable software that will really help deliver the best retrieval option company-wide. Be realistic about funding and staffing; then go for it. If Enterprise Search is what you need, make sure that is what you get and deploy.
I received an unsolicited email from jetBlue yesterday, one of many that I routinely receive from various travel providers. This one was different. I was not one of the thousands stranded by them last week and I have only traveled on jetBlue for one trip. They could have omitted this mea culpa letter to me in hopes that I had not already noticed all the media hype around their operational breakdowns and plans to recover from a faulty infrastructure. However, by calling attention to their lapses in such public ways this week, they have insured that I will include them in future travel planning.
Years ago as the President of a software company, I received a truly disturbing email lashing from a client sent after 6 PM on a Friday. The accusations about my company’s service were vitriolic and uncharacteristic of client reactions. I stayed at the office late gathering all the information I could find from the customer support database to learn what might have precipitated the outburst because I wanted to send a thoughtful, accurate and timely response. Without attacking the client I sent a chronology of inquiries and responses with a copy of a remedy sent to them weeks earlier. Then I went home with hopes that Monday would bring a more constructive dialog between the client and my company. The issues were amicably resolved, the client remained a good client, gave us high marks in referrals, and the matter was never mentioned again.
Unfortunately, personalization of client vendor relationships is missing in too many business relationships. A great amount of marketing copy appears describing how software tools and search interfaces support “personalization.” We know that SaS (software as service) or ASP (application service provider) models have come into their own. We also see the major search software vendors posting record growth and grand projections for even more. What this all adds up to is the convergence of a perfect storm of client disappointment as we experience a total disconnect between what vendors mean by “personalization” and “service,” and what customers want. Customers want software that is intuitively simple to personalize, and service that places the responsibility for software problems squarely with the vendor.
Based on my recent experiences with vendors, I see huge industry problems ahead. These are being exposed at all levels: discussions with sales representatives, exchanges with search company executives, deployment of software issues, documentation and training quality, and exchanges with customer support personnel.
Here is my list of vendor weaknesses:
> Lack of understanding by company representative how their software works
> Failure to really understand prospect needs, environments, and requirements
> Poorly written documentation and training giving no context for how the software might be deployed
> Technically sophisticated features delivered with no coherent path to deployment
> Inability to communicate honestly with clients
> Lack of clarity on what industry standards and terminology mean to clients
> Failure to use their own products by all employees in vendor organizations
> Inattention to building quality support infrastructures to service clients
I am not calling for a “customer bill of rights” for the enterprise search software industry. Instead, I am calling for you who procure software to take control of your own experience by doing a lot more than looking under the hood for technical specifications, features and functionality.
You need to:
> Look inside the vendor’s organization to see what kind of personnel it has, what the turnover is, how many people are supporting service functions compared to developers, etc.
> Listen to what you are being told; do serious validating research, on your own, to discover customers using the software. Talk to as many as you find; look at blogs and chat rooms to discover where the pain points and good experiences lie.
> Read documentation to understand how much time, effort, and expertise the deployment and maintenance will really require.
> Test drive products with your own data.
Every search company can’t grow 100% year-over-year for years on end. You will be suffering mightily for a long time if you make a big investment in one of those who ignore the customer experience. There is also a good chance they’ll be sold off to the lowest bidder once they realize their inability to service their clients and remain profitable. Take your destiny in your own hands; take enterprise search on in slow and measured increments so you will know what you are getting into.
No matter how small your organization or domain, you are going to need tools to find content sooner than you think. Starting with a small amount of content you should already be thinking about what its purpose is, why you would need to find it again and under what circumstances. Trying to retrofit a search strategy and structure to a mountain of disconnected content, is not only very difficult but it is costly. Waiting means that human intelligence, which could have been applied to organizing content well as the supply grew, must be applied later to get it under control. Adding meaningful context around old but valuable content is a very laborious intellectual process.
Growing an organization successfully means tending to not only the products you are creating and selling. It is also about creating an environment in which your growing work force is well supported with a knowledge framework that keeps them centered and confident that content they need to do their jobs can be found quickly, efficiently and accurately.
I am frequently asked by other consultants if I can give advice on how to organize personal files and records. This is hard to answer because my own methods fall short of where I want to be. But in any new project or venture, I try to get a good sense of how content needs to be organized. I do create metadata using a controlled list of terminology. I also have a couple of search tools that I leverage to produce readings for clients on a special topic, or to put my hands on a specific document, article or Web site. Early stage companies need to think about how to safeguard the results of their work and how it will be made accessible to workers on a reliable basis. There are inexpensive search tools that are great for managing small domains. Invest in tools, invest in someone to manage the tools, and plan to continue to invest in the resulting infrastructure of people and tools as the organization’s content and needs grow. Content management and search are overhead expenditures you must make early to prepare for growth and sustainability.
That reminds me, I keeping wondering how many enterprise search vendors use the technologies they build and sell to support their rapidly growing enterprises. That’s a great question to ask your potential search vendor as you decide what tools to procure for your enterprise. Get them to tell you how they use their tools and the benefits they see in their own enterprise. If they aren’t at least using their own search technology in their customer relationship management and technical support knowledge-base operations, think carefully about what that might mean concerning ease of deployment and utilization.
My silence last week had more to do with information overload than lack of interesting things to write about. Be forewarned, the floodgates of my brain are beginning to creak open. I just returned from Fast Search’s FastForward 07 conference in San Diego where their current and future visions for search technologies were front and center. While there seem to be no lack of innovations for how to make search engines smarter, faster, and more adaptable, the innovations being hyped at FastForward 07, and by others with only slightly less hyperbole, are notable. Search is becoming sexy and not just for the amount of money that Google and second-ranked Fast are raking in. In this arena search is the new business frontier, the marketplace-enabler, the marketplace-maker.
Consider this, search technologies have been business necessities for 35 years. For the first 30, search was strictly a support feature to many other kinds of finding mechanisms. In the earliest days search was performed by specialists as a service to other operations in the organization. Attempts to market search technology options to line managers, analysts, attorneys and R&D staff were marginal in their success. This is because search was not used enough for these groups to acquire the skill required for it to be really valuable. Once Web search engines exposed everyone to the possibilities of search in a far simpler modality, the innovation light bulbs popped off.
Suddenly search for use within the enterprise has become search for the enterprise’s marketplace, a major business driver that will put an organization’s products, services, and assets squarely in front of the right buying audience. What this means for those poor souls who still need to find the stuff mounting valuelessly in inaccessible silos remains to be seen. I am excited by what I saw but concerned by what I am witnessing. It is great that I may be able to find that weird audio adapter on the Web to let me connect to the sound system in the skating rink. But it is really awful when an engineering firm can’t put it’s hands on the schematic that shows how a circuit board was modified and delivered three years ago to a top customer.
Structured search (noun) was rooted firmly in the enterprise when publishers of print index resources (e.g. Chemical Abstracts, Index Medicus from the National Library of Medicine, GRA&I from the National Technical Information Service) became available on-line in the early 1970s. The Systems Development Corporation launched ORBIT developed by a team lead by Carlos Cuadra. Orbit was a command driven search tool accessible to professional searchers. In those days searchers were usually special librarians in corporations, large public libraries, government agencies and major universities. Using the ORBIT command language through a terminal connected by a phone line to remote large computers, librarians would type search commands to find data in specific structured fields. These remote computers held electronic versions of paper indices. Citations resulting from a query for specific chemical compounds, diseases, or government reports, would contain information needed to retrieve articles, patents or books from library shelves.
Corporations spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to access external specialized, and structured indices, and the journals, conference proceeding, patents and government documents to which the indices pointed. Hard copy (paper or microform) was the only practical way to read content. Computer screens were not accessible to most researchers and even if they had been, content could not be rendered on them in easily readable forms. Also, until computer storage technologies became cheap, indexing large amounts of text (full-text, or unstructured content) was not affordable.
Even with the advent of graphical interfaces, searching for non-specialists made only minor advances in the early-1980s when library systems offered index browsing to find citations. Library users still needed to read content in hard copy. It was only in the late 1980s and early 90s that full-text content began to be searchable by large numbers of library users on CD-ROMs. Users would go to a library computer, which held multiple CD-ROMs containing journals and other subscriptions, and use a menu to find content on the CD-ROMs by typing keywords that would look through all the content to find matches. This was the first routine use of full-text searching by library users.
These technologies are just memories for a few of us, and unknown to most, but they do point to the differentiation between structured and unstructured searching. Both have been around for a couple of decades but it has taken Web search engines to put search in the hands of everyone. Only recently is frustration with retrieving buckets of unfiltered content pushing enterprises to reconfirm the added value of structured searching.
Technical and business users are appreciating the value of being able to search for a precise title, all documents contributed to a specific project, or all presentations delivered by the CEO in the past two years. Each of these searches requires a defined set of data points, stored with the content and retrievable with a search interface that can support the “structured” query.
Yes, librarians have been here before but, just now, the rest of the organization is learning how they managed to get such good search results all along. Structured searching is now a lot simpler than it was in the 1970s. It is only one aspect in enterprise search but it is an important requirement for most enterprise users when they need reliable and clearly defined search results. And, by the way, Carlos is still around building systems for enterprises to manage and search their critical proprietary content.
IBM just launched a very interesting suite of enterprise search products. I have yet to try it or examine the specifications but the marketing message is the right one for the small and medium business enterprise buyer. What I like in the message:
> Pricing ranges from free to reasonable to ? (sky is probably the limit).
> Deployment is simple, intuitive and clean.
> IBM knows that simple and easy is the right call for IT but also the way to keep costs down.
> The solution is scaleable from a departmental solution to the entire business domain on the same basic software platform.
For the short term, I am placing OmniFind on the long list of products to consider for enterprise search. Check out the Web site at:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/enterprise-search/omnifind-enterprise/
How smart is it that IBM and Yahoo have chosen to team in this way? It could be a great strategy.
Disclaimer: This is the first product mention in this very new blog. It won’t be the last; I have a lot of interesting products on my list on which to comment. There will be much backfilling in the next few months but I have to start somewhere. The marketing message resonated; I hope OmniFind users will keep us informed by posting case experiences on whether the product delivers on the promises.
I seem to be attending a lot of presentations because I think they are going to be about “enterprise search.” Instead they cover a new offering or positioning strategy by a search company seeking to help enterprises monetize their Web sites. There are great business models in this space as Yahoo, Google and Amazon have illustrated. These will morph to offerings, as yet, unimagined. The trouble is that for my audience, I want to help them understand offerings that will help them with searching content already in the enterprise or from outside that they can leverage for business uses: competitive intelligence, product development, supply chain improvements, marketing collateral development. That is what enterprise search is to most people working inside organizations. Admittedly, this is not a new or “sexy” market. I think that vendors of search may be so worn down by how they can make money offering their search tools for searching inside the organization that they may just be talking up other markets to stave off their own boredom with the “inside the enterprise market.” Horizontal markets are tough to deal with (more about that in a later blog entry).
To all you vendors who would like to cut and run, I respectfully ask that you stay. There is a crying need albeit a very big financial challenge in all of this. Enterprises have no idea what their true monetary loses are because workers can’t find “stuff.” There have been plenty of guesses put forth by analysts, but until we see search solutions that don’t take decades (OK years) to implement, who actually knows what gains could be made by really good and easy search tools that find both structured and unstructured content with a minimum of set-up. The pricing models of tools need to make better sense, including ways to chunk the expenditures incrementally with “quick start,” and low overhead options. Why do the search tools with the mightiest claims also come with the highest price tags for licensing but the least out-of-the box functionality?
To all you enterprise information technology seekers of “true enterprise search” you bear responsibility for some of the mess this market is in. You’ve got to write better specifications, learn to start small and demand small to get started, and come to the selection process with real users and professional searchers on the team who will test drive products before they are purchased. If a product doesn’t solve the specific search problem you are trying to solve, don’t buy it. May-be it doesn’t feel like your money when you purchase for your enterprise but it really is your professional responsibility. Would you buy a car that will only take you to the beach or a lake but not to the grocery store?
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Content and the Digital Experience
Manage • Measure • Mobilize • Monetize
December 3-5, 2013 • Westin Boston Waterfront
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