Recently, I’ve been speaking at several conferences on Intranet and Enterprise Search. Some of them were SharePoint conferences, some were technology independent. But regardless of the audience or the main focus, each of these events had one thing in common: Enterprise Search has been a hot topic. More and more. Seeing this growth and evolution is great – but there’s even more there. It’s more and more apparent that the traditional Search Applications (“10 blue lines” or “Google-like search in the enterprise”) are not way to the future.
Here are the main reasons I can see today:
- Information Overload: Enterprise Search might be an excellent way to get good findability and discovery of information, but it gets harder and harder, due to the complex and enormous amount content. Finding a needle in the haystack gets harder and harder.
- Big Data: Volume, Variety and Velocity of the data we have to process also needs new approaches. Big Data tools are getting used in more and more scenarios.
- Business Intelligence: Analyzing and visualizing data is essential in order to help quick decision making.
- Social: It’s not a question – social features also get more and more important. We have to provide features for collaboration and knowledge sharing. In the bigger picture, these features have to be the part of our Knowledge Management and Search (or even better: Findability) Strategy.
Based on these factors, what I expect coming in the upcoming months (maybe years) is something that can be summarized with this picture:
The direction is obvious: the “new wave” will be a strong synergy between Search, Social, Big Data and Business Intelligence. I even expect some new concepts in this field that support these strong integrations.
What do you think? Is Enterprise Search dead?…
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