Barry’s guest blogger is Jeff Tash (aka ITscout).
Search is just search! Everybody knows that Google dominates the search industry. They’ve crushed all competitors — both large and small — including such formidable challengers as Microsoft and Yahoo!
Similarly, embedded search is just embedded search! Every application offers some form of embedded search capability. Yet Lawson, at its recent CUE conference, splashed lots of ink announcing its new enterprise search product. “Why bother?” you might ask. Because there’s still lots of room for improvement in how search engines can respond to people with better, more relevant results.
Indisputably, Google handles searches exceptionally well. Yet, its search technology is not the reason why Google’s market position is so commanding. Rather, Google perfected a way of making boatloads of money by matching relevant ads to search results. It sells about one-third of all online ads in the U.S. (by dollar amount — $23.4 billion). In 2008, Google derived 97 percent of its total revenue from online ads. Google’s seemingly altruistic behavior of giving away products often baffles observers. The reason they do so is that anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google. The more eyeballs on the Web inevitably leads to more ad sales for Google.
Although there are always seemingly multiple competitors (e.g., Microsoft Bing, Wolfram-Alpha) in hot pursuit of Google’s Internet business — all promising improved search algorithms, or more relevant results — Google never stands still in terms of pursuing innovations that can improve its own search effectiveness. Their users remain mostly satisfied because Google’s search engine is very good at returning relevant links that closely match search queries — and it does so incredibly fast. Most results are found in less than a second. But there are still some things that Google’s web search engine, by itself, does not do — but are still absolutely necessary. One of these is enterprise search. According to Wikipedia, “enterprise search is the practice of identifying and enabling specific content across the enterprise to be indexed, searched, and displayed to authorized users.”
Google’s Internet search engine dispatches innumerable intelligent, dynamic, autonomous crawlers out across the web to comb through billions of unstructured documents in order to find and index content. Crawlers discover and explore web pages (in multiple languages), images, news stories, patents, maps, etc. But that information is still just the tip of the knowledge iceberg. A huge limitation is that Google cannot send its crawlers into all of the secure databases and applications that only divulge their contents when executed.
Enterprise search extends the elegant simplicity of Google-style search functionality beyond the web to include unstructured data (e.g., word processing documents, slide presentations, email messages) or partially structured data (e.g., spreadsheets, address books, calendars, knowledge bases) that reside on corporate servers as well as on client desktops and laptops. Additionally, enterprise search agents scour structured data stored in databases or accessed through enterprise applications like ERP.
Consider Lawson’s ERP databases. There are perhaps 2,000 different tables. Can you imagine the complexity, not to mention the time that would be required, to write SQL queries to find information locked inside Lawson’s ERP databases? With Lawson Enterprise Search, on the other hand, relevant results get retrieved in an instant. For example, if a company needs to recall a product, perhaps like what happened during the recent peanut butter scare, it could use Lawson Enterprise Search to find and deactivate all items associated with a product in its inventory, in purchase orders, and in requisitions. That’s transformational.
Of course, from a security perspective, it’s mandatory with enterprise search that people are unable to view search results containing data that they do not already have the access rights to see.
Lawson Enterprise Search does not only find information stored in its ERP database. It also rummages through all the underlying files containing the data displayed in dashboards, reports, graphs, alerts, etc. In other words, when a user initiates an enterprise search in the Lawson suite, the system will respond by essentially googling all Lawson data. Suddenly, finding information in your Lawson ERP environment is as easy as entering a Google search on the Internet.
Just as Google transformed how people use the Internet, Lawson Enterprise Search will transform how people use their ERP system. Productivity will be affected by improving the speed and effectiveness in which people can perform their day-to-day operational tasks. Furthermore, the search technology will enable workers to handle ad hoc requirements that in the past were simply infeasible either because of cost, time or amount of effort.
Another pair of distinctive enterprise search requirements involves temporal and spatial context. Think of temporal context in terms of one’s own personal transaction history. For instance, someone might need to search for some specific data that he/she remembers looking at while performing some operational task yesterday, or a week ago, or perhaps last month or last year. Similarly, someone might want to see all transactions involving a particular vendor over some specific period of time. The notion of spatial context pertains to searching for content related to a particular field on a specific form.
The technology behind Lawson Enterprise Search is offered as a virtual appliance so it delivers characteristics similar to Google in terms of speed, context, syntax, and add-ons (e.g., spell-checking, synonyms, stemming, etc.). Anyone (and everyone) who intuitively knows how to use Google already knows how to use Lawson Enterprise Search. Specific search capabilities include support for wild cards, the ability to search keys, comments, descriptions and dates, save commonly used search queries, and search from any transaction field to find related information.
Lawson Enterprise Search (LES) is not intended to compete against vendor-offered enterprise search products such as Autonomy, Endeca, or the Google Search Appliance. Rather, Lawson offers LES exclusively to customers of its ERP suite. Being vertically focused and targeted directly at solving the needs of its mid-sized ERP customers, Lawson is well positioned to use its knowledge of the types of content, storage patterns and data usage to optimize search results by ordering data relevance better than any third-party enterprise search solutions.
The measure of an enterprise search solution is its ability to shorten the time to actionable data. I encourage Lawson’s ERP customers to try out LES in order to find out how this technological functionality can transform your business environment. Please share your experiences by commenting on this blog posting or by sending me an email at jeff.tash@us.lawson.com.
Until next time…
