3 years and a ton of learning & insights...a good milestone to take a pause, reflect on our experience, relook at the vision and rationale behind our venture and...get ready for the next dash. Yes..."Search & Insight Driven Computing" one of our prized incubations within the Information Management space turned 3 this year.
Now for the curious and the new entrants into this space, let me explain what this "animal" is
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Search as a "technology" is revolutionizing the way Information would be Organized Managed and Used within an enterprise.
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Search & Insight Driven Computing team is focused on leveraging this technology to build the Next Generation information Management Solutions.
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We are one of the very first System Integration firms to have a set up full-fledged service line in this space and that way we are ahead of the curve in this area.
We started this incubation almost 3 ½ years back and now this Service line has successfully moved out of its incubation phase with a bouquet of case studies, multiple account openings and very strong GTM relationship with the leading product vendors in this space
Now, you may ask what led us into this...A few trends that we saw in the Information Management space, almost 4 - 5 years back, caught our attention and those and, in a way, formed the key rationale for the formation of the Search Practice.
Let me try to recollect them for you...
Trend 1: Organizations had started to realize the value hidden in the unstructured information
It is a known fact that 85% of the information within the firewalls of an enterprise is in the unstructured form. It is more interesting to note that most of the IT investments over the last 4 decades and the entire information management industry had been focused on building solutions to address the structured information. The opportunity and possibility to open the vault of unstructured information and unlock the insights from that excited us and we were thrilled to envision the possibilities that would open up for an organization like ours.
Trend 2: The enterprise boundaries had started to blur
We saw the "post dot com" world slowly crystallizing around "consumers". Organizations were (and are) trying to be more "consumer-centric" or outward focused. The concepts of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 were emerging and with all these the information that is outside the firewall was becoming significant and there was a need to access and leverage that.
While these were going on there were some interesting development within the Enterprise as well
Trend 3: "Formation of Mini Internets within the Firewall"
Within the enterprise space, due to obvious reasons, we were witnessing the growing heterogeneity, replication and fragmentation of information. The enterprise information domain had started to behave like a "mini internets" within the firewall. For any information architect the challenge would be to see how the most relevant information can be provided to the business users comprehensively and at the right time.
And successful information management frameworks would be ones those are "aware of this chaotic situation and can address that"
Meanwhile on the Technology front a new kid had entered the block, changing the way we looked, accessed and managed information
Trend 4: Technology Trend: Search has transformed from a keyword lookup mechanism into a contextual information integration engine.
We see this as a journey that would involve
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Seamless Access to Information
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Enrichment of Information and User Experience
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Extraction of Insights &
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Applications on top of that
Based on our perspective the potential impact this approach would have on the Enterprise Information Management space is very similar to what RDBMS created 4 decades back.
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We look at Search as a unified information access platform that would lead the users to the right information
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Search as a virtual data warehouse will help users slice and dice information in a rather contextual manner
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Search can be your Knowledge Platform that would enrich information through contextual content association
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Search will eventually be the gateway for all user interactions and will have a pivotal role to play in user experience management
It is quite heartening to see how valid these thoughts are...even now and to move on with our onward journey