The Go! Search module in IBM Cognos 8 V4 supports unstructured data, thereby expanding a searcher's reach while enhancing the BI user's self-reliance.
Recent articles raise the question about the positioning of enterprise search tools within or outside your ERP application suite. Regardless of how you might react to the dichotomy of search engine within or without, it raises the larger issue of enterprise search technologies and the growth of that market.
For some reason, the idea of Web-search technology is inherently interesting, perhaps because of the success of Google and all the unusual and interesting things a user might find at the end of an hour's search. On the other hand, the idea of enterprise search technology is inherently vapid and of such waterish interest that one wonders how anyone would have the courage to sell such a product.
Enter the government and the legal profession.
All of a sudden, the idea of actually being able to find what you are looking for in the sea of corporate document monotony takes on a whole new life. Why? Because when you get a subpoena shoved in your face, you start thinking about how much it's going to cost you to comply with this rude intrusion into your otherwise private activity of making money.
We ran an article a few months back on the need for email search and archiving solutions that, the author said, is being driven largely by the legal profession. There is a lot of evidence hiding away in electronic documents that lawyers want to discover in the course of pursuing or defending against a legal action. And there are compliance audits...ta da!
So enterprise search is a field that is growing, and the technology is evolving along with it. Because of different attributes between Web pages and corporate files, apparently it is actually more difficult to categorize and search corporate information than it is Web pages. Go figure. Supposedly, IBM is working on technology that can actually analyze the picture in a video file as a way to extract and index the relevant content contained within it. Most video indexing currently is done by spidering the closed-caption text contained within the "film."
The idea of enhancing search capabilities within business intelligence solutions has been gaining traction over the last two years, and IBM Cognos is one of the firms leading the charge. With the release earlier this month of IBM Cognos 8 V4, Go! Search now has even more useful features to encourage users to truly utilize the business intelligence system that their company invested in.
The appealing side-effect of this is enhanced user self-reliance that may well reduce IT workloads by transferring to a search engine the inquiries that would otherwise manifest themselves as formal queries and their resultant reports.
New IBM Cognos 8 Go! Search features in V4 include, among others, these:
• Search-assisted authoring
• Search-assisted exploration
• Full-content search
• Dynamic report creation
• Integration with third-party portals
If these terms mean little to those of us unfamiliar with search technology, they do mean something to people designing business intelligence systems.
What these features boil down to is the application giving users an ability to get a head start on creating queries while marking a launching point for further analysis. How many times has IT created a report only to be asked to do it over because the user didn't get quite what she wanted? Beginning the query process with a search engine not only can help a user refine his formal query, but may obviate the request altogether if he finds through a search that the same requested report was earlier created by someone else.
The features also mean that users will have an expanded field of information from which to extract answers to their questions. IBM Cognos Go! Search processes unstructured data sources through Composite Information Server (from Composite Software), and it can search all modern data sources, such as Web services or XML. Nor is this an engine that searches just titles or metadata but one that now indexes the full content of reports. It includes all relational data sources supported by IBM Cognos 8, including ERP data such as SAP BW, SAP R/3, and Siebel CRM. It also searches OLAP data cubes, including IBM Cognos PowerCubes, DB2OLAP/Essbase, Microsoft Analysis Services, and IBM Cognos 8 Planning.
Go! Search now integrates with other enterprise search applications and third-party portals so users can search the entire enterprise for what they need to better perform their jobs and make better decisions. A joint development project with Google has even allowed integration with Google's search appliance and Google OneBox for Enterprise.
In short, an enterprise or business intelligence factoid can run, but it can't hide!
For anyone interested in how IBM Cognos 8 Go! Search works, there are demos on the Web and an ongoing series of free seminars, conferences, and virtual events being held to demonstrate many new features in IBM Cognos 8 V4.
For those interested in experimenting with an enterprise search tool for free, you can download IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a no-charge, entry-level enterprise search solution useful for searching up to a half-million files on an intranet or file system.
Editor's Note: Part of this column first appeared in September 2007 in MC Showcase. We thought it appropriate to return to the subject in light of the recent announcement of IBM's release of IBM Cognos 8 V4 and upgrades to features in IBM Cognos 8 Go! Search.
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