There is huge interest from clients in enterprise search, with the focus being how to create useful applications that go beyond documents or web pages.  Increasingly, we’re seeing organizations that have invested in metadata for regulatory compliance discovering the value of this asset using search technologies and techniques.

The original web experience was intended to be click-based navigating via a number of hubs to any point in the internet, but the last five years has seen the majority of users move to a language-based approach starting with a site like Google or Yahoo.  The example I often use is the rain radar, often when setting out to a meeting in a city I’ll check to see if rain is coming.  In Melbourne I can navigate from the www.bom.gov.au website to the radar but it’s faster for me to type “Melbourne weather radar” into Google, with the added benefit that I can use the same interface when I’m in Auckland, Singapore, New York etc..

At work, users are still in the late 90’s relying on incomplete intranets and a poorly maintained web of links.  The problem is primarily access to the structured repositories and even more importantly access to the structures of those repositories (ie., the metadata.

In many cases, banks have been the early adopters of metadata repositories followed by insurers and then the very large government departments.  The main driver for these repositories has been compliance and (for banks) risk (Basel II).  These repositories are enormously rich in content, but extremely difficult to interface to the rest of the organization’s information.  Search can be the solution and I recommend the following three steps:

1. Interface to metadata repositories
In a bank, a user should be able to search for “Risk Weighted Asset” and find not only the relevant documents but also a list of the systems and databases that contain relevant data as well as appropriate controls, processes and business rules.  It isn’t difficult to build interfaces between structured metadata and the search tools.

2. Interface to master data
The next step is to build an interface that allows the user to type “Assets Walmart 2005″ and find, via the metadata, appropriate queries which can then be launched in a BI tool (eg., Business Objects or Cognos).  This is part of my view that search should be the kick-off point for all information analysis.  Again, this sounds difficult but really isn’t, you can use the metadata repository to define the dimensions of search and emulate hints (ie., “Did you mean xyz”) to help if the user is almost on target.

3. Better analysis of the quality of search
The search index increasingly becomes an asset in its own right.  Using the techniques in MIKE2.0, we can use do constant health checks on the usability and relevance of the search index itself.