attivio data dexterity: apps & the future of search

W H I T E P A P E R

ACTIVE INTELLIGENCE

DATA DEXTERITY APPS & THE FUTURE OF SEARCH

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading”— Lao Tzu

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DATA DEXTERITY: APPS AND THE FUTURE OF SEARCH

Read this if...You are a search manager or architect, or a CIO, seeking a more efficient way to develop, deploy, and maintain solutions that involve search, discovery, and navigation to deliver information, or

Recent search-based solutions have been running over budget, past deadline, and below user expectations, or

Your user community is losing interest or confidence in existing search-based solutions, or

You’re finding the demand for new search-based solutions is growing faster than your ability to deliver

This paper proposes a behavioral reason for increased user demand and expectations for search-based solutions. It proposes changes to process, resource and technology that can alleviate these challenges.

“ … you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stoneFor the times they are a-changin’ “ — Bob Dylan

Authors

Will Johnson, Attivio, CTO

Will Johnson is the CTO and co-founder of Attivio. He has an extensive background in information retrieval and analytic applications gained during his time with Attivio, FAST and AltaVista. A graduate of MIT, Will has worked on many of the largest and most complex search applications both behind and beyond the firewall. He has been involved in all technical capacities across his career including professional services, sales engineering, solution architecture and product development.

Hadley Reynolds, NextEra Research, Principal Analyst

For 35 years, Hadley has a trusted researcher, thought leader, and advisor working with leading innovators on technologies and best practices for leveraging the value of unstructured information. Most recently he was senior analyst in the Search and Digital Marketplace practice at International Data Corporation. He was VP and Director of Research at Delphi Group, with a decade-long focus on knowledge management, search, content & collaboration management, and business process automation.

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At a GlanceTimes are changing fast for search in the enterprise. Users want software that they enjoy, that works, that makes them feel comfortable, that helps them get things done. Is that true of the enterprise search services at your firm?

Today’s business professionals have gotten used to the fast and attractive software that they use on their mobile devices. They look to palettes of icons to initiate actions in their consumer lives—why not the same conveniences with the software they use at work?

Enterprise IT now faces the challenge of reconsidering the several search investments they have put into place, many of which are not widely used or appreciated. Going forward, users expect a technology environment that has the same kind of streamlined, attractive, and effective capabilities that they have become used to through their consumer apps.

The good news is that the model for developing and deploying successful apps is already firmly in place on the web. IT need look no further than adopting several of the proven approaches pioneered by the consumer software leaders: purpose-centered design; agile development techniques; rapid iterations of release and enhancement; continuous tuning of analytics and user interaction models.

In this transition to the app economy, there is every opportunity for search to transform from a long-standing problem for IT to a unique resource for the enterprise. This is because search services can bring value-added enrichment throughout the portfolio of business functions and applications already in use. Business demands contextually relevant interfaces to streamline professionals’ performance. A properly empowered IT search team can harness modern search technologies to deliver apps that break the bottlenecks of today’s monolithic systems.

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Simply … Supply& Demand Providing search tools across the organization can be one of the most visible services in the IT portfolio. Yet in recent years, too many significant investments in search technologies have had to be written down or are experiencing diminishing returns. To understand why and what needs to be done, let’s recall some basic economic forces driving search-related investments by IT.

On the demand side for search-based solutions, every business professional now leads a double life as an information consumer outside the borders of enterprise IT. Daily, they experience highly attractive web- and app-delivered consumer solutions, coveting their simplicity, speed, and effectiveness. The result is a rising set of expectations for simplicity, relevance, and portability in the solutions they use. Jump to the next section for more on the influence of apps on demand.

On the supply side of search—IT search teams have tried for over a decade to make the traditional, single search box serve the requirements for customers asking for deployments across functions from Accounting to HR to Sales to Service. Generally, search projects have raised as many problems as they have solved. The resulting imbalances with demand have created today’s challenges. Explore the supply-side in further detail in the “Best Practice” section below.

These points beg the question: “What are we doing wrong with search?” Part of the answer is to re-orient toward tighter context and user design focus. Part of the answer is to appreciate the value inherent in a search service platform that can adjust effectively to serve the requirements the many apps IT has deployed and will deploy in the future. The recent success of the app model for delivering long-life, consumer solutions hints at a clear prescription for change. Adopting practices from app-centered design paradigms puts new demands on search platform technology and search teams, but together these development areas offer a new direction for IT to address today’s shortfalls in search.

Generally, search projects have raised as many problems as they have solved. The resulting imbalances with demand have created today’s challenges.

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The Emergence of Apps & A New Demand for SearchOver 85 Billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store. This does not count the comparable number of Android apps in play in Google’s constellation. These apps are winning users because their tight, contextual focus inherently increases the precision of the information they provide. Search in the enterprise should learn from this model. In fact, search is the glue in many of the consumer apps, from travel to finance to media & entertainment.

As a daily consumer of information, every business professional has direct experience with good, and poor, solutions to finding things. Increasingly, these experiences occur on every possible device (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and hybrid ‘phablets’)—creating a seamless, “anytime, anywhere” way for them to find relevant information. Concerned that your organization’s professional staff is becoming your best-qualified and harshest critic? Don’t be—what they admire as consumers is your design guide for developing better applications of search.

As consumers experiencing an explosion of services through the digital marketplace, one of most popular innovations we’ve adopted is the app. At the click of a smartphone icon we check flights, find restaurants, research stocks, avoid traffic, plan travel, play tunes – our lives as consumers have taken on an entirely new shape. Our enthusiasm for this platform has propelled apps across multiple devices, through multiple ‘stores’, across multiple customer generations – faster than any solution framework of the modern Internet era. Apps, especially those for mobile devices, have become the solution format of choice for solution developers.

Is Enterprise Search Really Dead?

Hadley: Stephen, you and I have seen multiple generations of search software introduced into the enterprise. It seems that the death of search is being announced more loudly over the past several years. But when you look closely, search seems to keep breathing and raising its head again—reminds me of the famous W. C. Fields quote; “The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.” What do you think, should we be putting flowers on the tomb or preparing to put diapers on the new kid?

Stephen Baker, CEO:I think that enterprise search was dead on arrival. It’s just

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Apps are successful for several reasons. First, their tight, contextual focus inherently increases the precision of the information they provide. Second, their simplified, navigational model for finding information reduces the error and uncertainty associated with traditional inquiry methods. Third, their methods of development and delivery facilitate iterative, frequent revision and update. App users get specifically what they want/expect (nothing confusing or extraneous), with reduced user-error (either expertise- or mistake-induced), and if it’s not just right, it can be fixed quickly and seamlessly. How does this experience compare to the search experience inside your organization?

There are many lessons suitable for learning and adoption here. Focus on specific tasks. Iterate frequently. Curate your information for context. Pinpoint what’s relevant. Navigate to discover. If the number of well-reviewed books on app/mobile development (e.g. check Amazon) is any indication, these and other guideposts point to a very different framework for future solutions that rely on search.

Best-Practice: Supplying Search Apps

High performing developers operate at 10x and more above the average of their peers. Bringing a team of experienced search developers into a center for excellence can similarly raise the quality and success of their projects and perpetuate search skills in the DNA of the organization.

There is always the opportunity to tune your search team, development methods, and technology—keeping a sharp eye on your ability to:

• Combine content and data with widely different structures,• Deliver extremely relevant results to app interfaces, rapidly• Add new content, of any type, without disruption

that nobody noticed for a long time, because it was a shiny new thing to try to help users that couldn’t find anything. One search box for all. Automatic everything. Roll in the appliance and solve the problem. But it was like the emperor’s new clothes: as soon as people in the enterprise woke up to the fact that what was being sold for search just didn’t work in their information universe, the race was on for some kind of alternative.

Hadley:Yes, I think once Google search finally got really smart on the Web and helped people be truly productive, the “consumer” searching experience rocketed past what they experienced at work. The enterprise search products simply were at a loss to keep pace. I think about all those buggy whip manufacturers when the

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The best, high-performance development teams find a way to optimize three elements of their environment—the process, or methodology, of development; the structure of the development team; and the underlying technology architecture for addressing a problem. This is as true for search-based solution development as it is for any other IT development activity.

For search, mature organizations have established search architecture and management functions. Their experience in describing and managing the evolution of search-based solutions qualify them as key, incumbent members of an app-focused search team. In particular, their understanding of the context for search among solution users is essential, for identifying relevant content and for defining the most common scopes of inquiry. In some cases, these search professionals are organized as a center of excellence or expertise, available to business and technical teams alike.

As development methods continue their drift away from traditional ‘waterfall’ approaches, search-based solution teams with supportive search platforms are uniquely positioned to adopt Agile methods with differential success. Search solutions, as we saw above, are very susceptible to ‘drift’, losing their relevance and their value—as the nature of both question and content evolve. They are the quintessential problem that’s partially understood—the kind typically best suited for using Agile methods.

The final element in creating a search-based app ‘factory’ is the inherent architecture of the search platform. With a more comprehensive, analytic, and extensible search platform, the faster optimization of development process and structure can proceed. Best-practices in mature organizations increasingly deploy multiple search-based apps that derive results from a single search engine—minimizing administration and change management costs when apps need updating.

automobile came along. They went down hard, but in fact the business that they were really in grew more strongly than ever before! It’s just that now it was called the accelerator pedal, and a fast-growing OEM manufacturer supplied it in the millions to the Big 3.

Stephen Baker, CEO:That’s an interesting way to think about it. There are lots of important contributing components to your personal transport machine, but no horses any more. So in search, what we are seeing is that mashups of software components geared to specific business functions or problem areas become the key to a better search experience. It gets delivered as a specific application—it’s powered primarily by search, but users may not think about it as search any more. The single search box

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Why Apps Arethe AnswerWhat’s gained when IT adopts app-based design principles as a new direction for search development teams? At a minimum, expect an increase in user satisfaction with the delivery of critical enterprise information and a rise in the perceived value of your search implementations because you are:

• taking unfair advantage of context, • meeting and beating user expectations, • fostering speed of deployment and precision of content,• rewarding mobility• building engagement and loyalty

Take Unfair Advantage of Context

Your search apps have a unique opportunity. By carefully collecting and curating content that’s context-specific, you’ll increase the relevance of what’s found dramatically. Better context reduces precision-killing steps caused by poorly worded queries or differing word use in multiple contexts. Using context to focus your apps, you’ll improve the results your customers receive.

Reward your customers with rich visualization, pertinent ‘tell me more’ detail, or related (and maybe unexpected) material based upon the context of the app. Knowing the questions the app is designed to answer should translate to a richer user experience—creating a sense that the app actually anticipates their request. Meet and Beat Expectations

The experiences of business professionals and consumers with other apps really matter. Collectively, they establish a high bar for application ease, convenience, performance, relevance, engagement, and loyalty.

manufacturers, the simple search appliances, and so on, are falling by the wayside.

Hadley:There’s another famous quote, attributed to science fiction author William Gibson, who said: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet….” I think we can see the model for the future of search in the enterprise by looking at the proliferation of mobile apps on smartphones and tablets. This specialization and what looks like simplification may be the only way that enterprise search technology can become useful enough to become a high impact tool inside the organization.

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Design your search apps by approaching each of these objectives aggressively. Like it or not, today’s app market establishes the ‘gold standard’ for these in the mind of your professional-consumers. The value and lifecycle of your solution will be judged, increasingly, against other solutions they use.

Foster Speed and Precision

The emergence of apps as a preferred solution model arises fundamentally from reducing the universe of content to only that information that will be relevant to users of the app. Then search teams can organize the remaining relevant data of all formats into a model that will fit consumption preferences and usage requirements. Through this solution model, search-powered apps also offer reduced time-to-market and frequent revision-update possibilities. Every organization strives for a ‘virtuous’ cycle involving solution use, constructive feedback, and responsive revision. Apps, and the focused context they support, offer increased velocity and certainty of development —by reducing solution complexity, isolating feedback, and streamlining enhancements and modifications.

Apps that deliberately focus on a limited number of specific business tasks make that ‘virtuous’ cycle easier to achieve. Limit the number of functions and a successful app will evolve faster. Develop around context and a successful app will return more trustworthy and actionable results.

Reward Mobility

Since it’s impossible to accurately predict when or where your solution will be used, the best search-based apps support a mobile user population. Search apps should integrate seamlessly with mobility-supporting technologies, e.g. responsive design, visualization servers, and security. To the extent that mobility-related context, such as user location, are intrinsic to the solution, apps that travel are advantaged.

The explosion of smartphones and ‘phablets’ changes the game. Apps on those devices (and others) make finding information potentially time transparent.

Develop around context and a successful app will return more trustworthy and actionable results.

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Always connected means you’re capable of using your apps to make timely, essential decisions—without traditional limitations of time or location. Innovation, competition, and Information wait for no one. Apps designed for mobility take professionals, and their organizations, out of the ‘waiting’ room and into the ‘operating’ room.

Build Engagement and Loyalty

Today, “App thinking” replaces “site thinking” for most consumer-professionals. An important consequence of this shift is the frequency of brand-contact and the loyalty that arises from repetitive brand exposure in apps. Developing an active and committed audience is important for any solution. With their ability to focus attention and find better results, apps win user loyalty and establish strong identity—key to creating a ‘virtuous cycle’.

Deployed as apps, search solutions build a strong association between questions and immediately useful answers. Frequent use, like practice, develops habits. Habits, in turn, reflect and drive loyalty. Just as organizations seek to attract loyal, repeat customers, IT professionals can use an ‘app strategy’ to build ‘user equity’ in their solutions, rapidly.

Transformation: From “One Box” to IconToday, IT organizations are still looking for the answer to the question: “how will the professionals in my organization find what they are looking for to get their jobs done?” New search investments must be made with an eye toward technology platforms that accelerate a move to search-powered applications. Bringing the right information at the right time is not a simple task, but platforms adapted to the app economy can dramatically reduce risk and improve performance compared to previous generations of search.

With their ability to focus attention and find better results, apps win user loyalty and establish strong identity—key to creating a ‘virtuous cycle’.

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A decade ago, many IT organizations tried what was advertised as a prefabricated, automatic search solution, complete with hardware, a brand-name search with a simple search box interface, and a service contract to last the job tenure of the implementers. The good news was that action was being taken to improve search for the enterprise. The bad news was that this action usually proved to be a failure. “One size fits all” turned out to be the wrong solution architecture for the times we live in. We believe that the successful search box of the future will be found throughout the smart app icon portfolio, and usually with no box!

As the legacy enterprise search software marketplace has consolidated, familiar platforms are now available from a small number of enterprise class vendors. As the new digital marketplace and consumer-driven software consumption models have proliferated, new companies in the search industry are innovating to support these new models.

In beginning the process of architecting a foundation for the organization’s successful search platform of the future, IT should review technology that supports the requirements of the app economy. Integration of all kinds of content and data is only the ante. Search development teams should be able to respond to application requests promptly, with rapid ingestion of multivariate, rich content and the ability to craft flexible, straightforward visualization options to meet application objectives.

Rapid prototyping and delivery of search-based apps favors search technologies enabled for query and content testing. Like all apps, the search-based app is likely to evolve. Connecting highly relevant results to an evolving mix of questions is essential. Tools that facilitate finding and delivering the right results in the right context with the right performance will make your team more productive and your apps more responsive.

Together, these high level capabilities indicate a clear bias for agility, and next generation search will seek to re-structure data, software tools, and development methods to favor the deployment of ‘app’ solutions that deliver immediately actionable answers.

Connecting highly relevant results to an evolving mix of questions is essential.

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Conclusion: Moveto Data DexterityEnabling IT search teams to achieve the ability and agility required to effectively develop and deploy search-based apps can offer organizations the opportunity to establish a strategy of data dexterity. Easy content integration, expanded solution possibilities, richer context determination—these are indicators of data dexterity.

The core capability of an app-supporting enterprise search platform must be the ease, speed, and precision with which it can organize information and make it available in sub-second response times when called upon by search applications. The Attivio approach to this requirement starts with a common, searchable object—call it a universal index. It implements a logical data design that can adapt (with the arrival of new content), adjust (to changes in data structure), and analyze (to identify context and meaning).

Search development teams can use this universal index to make available information from varieties of sources and types of content. Augmented by analytics that identify context and meaning, the resulting, enriched search object can form the foundation for a context-based search app strategy. The objective of the platform is to provide a one-stop-shop resource to enable search app design and deployment and to efficiently deliver precision experiences to users across the spectrum of business processes in the organization.

Moving to a strategy that leverages the emergence of search apps hinges on IT making technology decisions that increase data dexterity. In the words of Patrick Henry, “I know not what course others may take … “, but you should consider a future characterized by attractively packaged and popular enterprise search apps, designed and supported by a search development team using platform tools that support data dexterity in your organization.

Easy content integration, expanded solution possibilities, richer context determination—these are indicators of data dexterity.

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