Search and you shall find

What are the biggest challenges currently facing companies as they seek to derive greater business value from their key information? Finding it in the first place. Connotate CEO Bruce Molloy explains further.

There are a number of challenges facing companies as they look to maximize the value of their information, both inside and outside the enterprise. The web represents more than 600 billion pages of information. Inside the enterprise, there are numerous silos of information – as many as 10,000 or more – that are difficult to access and that can’t be combined or utilized within the organization. And the cost of accessing those silos in a traditional fashion, such as heavy-duty integration, is implausible and expensive. So this information – and the productivity and the gains that would follow from accessing it – is lost.

Second, the information in the organization comes in many different formats; if it can be put into standard data sets or types, it can be made much more useful and valuable. Also, there’s often a lack of awareness of all the various data points out there within the organization. Take a pharmaceutical company, for example – someone doing research on a particular compound might not realize that there are a lot of good data points being created by a colleague over in the next office that could be useful. The notion of Web 2.0 has popularized the idea of like communities who share information and approaches, and this is now a key concept being embraced by business users too.

A third area where there are real challenges within the organization has to do with the timeliness of the information. A typical search platform will go out periodically – once a week or once a day, for example – to find and frame information before placing it into an index. When you search, it’ll bring back everything in that index – whether it’s relevant or not, old or new. But in the meantime, other information could have been added, or existing data could have changed. The challenge is that data will sit unused or unreferenced because the end-user doesn’t know it’s available. The problem here is the passivity of the data.

Intelligent software agents
This is where the Connotate solution provides a major advantage. The idea of our ‘Agent-based’ approach is to have individual processes that understand all the different kinds of data out there. Within the enterprise and out on the web, data is entirely non standard, and there are lots of different nooks and crannies of information. Using intelligent software Agents – ‘trained’ to do anything a human can to monitor, extract, process, deliver and integrate information from the internet, intranets, extranets and enterprise applications – users can access the data in these nooks and crannies that they can’t typically get at using a large monolithic approach. The user can go in and essentially hit a ‘Now’ button and get back the actual state of that data – not just the index – which makes a big difference.

Extreme timeliness and personalization
You can almost think of the Agents as being similar to nanotechnology. By having these small processes that really understand the specifics of the different sources of information, you get much greater precision, much greater timeliness of the data, and ultimately greater value. If you then marry together this idea of how precise and timely the processes of these Agents are, and put them together into larger groupings or libraries to form collections of Agents, wholly new capabilities appear. Agents can be trained to continually mine and monitor elements found on the web and across internal applications. They can be trained to perform these smaller processes and ultimately do the repetitive, tedious and time-consuming tasks on behalf of the end-user. It’s very powerful, and both philosophically and technically represents a very different approach to accessing information.

At some point in the near future, search as we know it will become a quaint relic of the past. But to get to the next generation we need a different approach. We need to get away from the idea of the search engine as a monolithic grinder, and replace it with the kind of precision, timeliness and nimbleness that the Agent-based approach brings. Not only can we access the information, we can share it, mash it up and make it available. If you empower your employees in this consumer-like way, you’re going to get enormous returns.