Typically when people think of retrieving information from their
intranet or enterprise portal they think of the ‘corporate search
engine.’ And often the frustration and inability to find information is
directed towards the search engine itself, leading the user to conclude
that search engines ‘suck.’ Search engines, in fact, don’t ‘suck’-
they’re just not built to do everything we expect them to do and they
are heavily dependent on human input.
"Many organizations focus their enterprise search efforts on
making it easier for users to find the information they need," states
Jeffrey Mann, META Group. "While this is a laudable first step, as they
move toward the real goal of implementing contextual collaboration,
organizations must try to make content find the user." In a recent
article, entitled 'Finding Content and Data, or Making it Find You',
Jeffrey continues, "Providing tools to users can make individuals more
productive. However, real improvements require that the system
understand the task a user is doing and automatically provide the
functions, content, and reports needed to complete the task."
In order to efficiently retrieve information from the enterprise,
we have to use the specialized systems that were designed for specific
types of information. The trick is to bring all of these tools together
to produce a 'super search' tool: the composite application (we’ll get
to this in a moment). First, let’s take a look at some specialized
applications in an enterprise environment commonly used for retrieving
information:
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Content management systems (CMS)
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Document management systems (DMS)
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Customer relationship management systems (CRM)
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Accounts Receivables systems
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Business Intelligence tools
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Composite applications
These systems have all been created with specific and advanced
functionality to retrieve, process and analyze data from their
respective data stores and feeds. Within this environment, search
engines are good at retrieving static documents and data that have no
specialized application interface or retrieval mechanism, such
as:
Many search engine companies have excellent tools for organizing
and working with this sort of information. However, they are
unable to work with the sorts of specialized systems described above to
leverage their expertise in finding, retrieving and using information.
Consequently, search engines are only doing part of the job required to
deliver users accurate and useful results.
So how then does a user retrieve business information from these
disparate, specialized systems if not by using a search engine?
Users can go into each system, retrieve the information they need
and then aggregate it to generate some global relevance. The problem:
users often cannot find the information because they don’t know where
the information resides, how to use the software application that
produces it or even if the information exists. In any event, very few
employees have the skill, patience or time to do this consistently and
reliably. Consequently, they make decisions based on incomplete
data.
Composite Applications for Information Retrieval
Composite applications offer solutions to these types of
problems. They draw on the capabilities of a collection of other
applications in order to satisfy a business need. Simply put, a
composite application acts as a conductor, instructing specialized
systems to deliver certain views of information that it can either
display to a user or, in some cases, pass along to another system for
further processing.
Composite applications can be manually configured to interact with
specific systems. So based on a known business need, the composite
application is set to interact with known applications in specified
ways. For example, a composite application could be built as a portal
page or workplace that shows information about a client from a number
of specific systems. This is effective when a company has a limited set
of clients and a limited number of systems that hold information about
those clients. In such cases, user information needs can be predicted
and composite applications can be configured to retrieve the relevant
information from different systems to fulfill those needs.
These simple composite applications enable business systems to be
aligned for a particular need by deploying front-end integration vs.
costly back-end reconfiguration or data consolidation. It’s
faster. It’s cheaper. And in many cases, it’s much easier than
training a whole bunch of employees to use entirely new systems.
Mark Walker, CEO of Blanketware, creators of Instant Workplace for
enterprise portals highlights the value of composite applications to an
enterprise. "Creating composite applications to fulfill new business
needs not only makes companies more nimble and responsive to change, it
enables them to get even greater ROI out of their existing enterprise
systems."
If, however, a company has many different users, each with
different, often unpredictable needs and a host of disparate systems,
the administrative burden of configuring composite applications for
every possible need becomes prohibitively overwhelming. In cases where
enterprise portals are deployed, the inability to deliver users highly
personalized and customized workplaces leads to low adoption and use.
According to Jupiter Media, “Without end user adoption, portal ROI does
not exist. 40% of companies who deployed a portal report adoption rates
of less than 50%. Over half of companies report performance problems,
even for internal users.
To address this particular problem, a new kind of composite
application has emerged: dynamic composite applications for information
retrieval.
Dynamic composite applications
Dynamic composite applications can automatically respond to
unknown needs such as a user ‘search’ request. They identify the
relevant enterprise systems and applications on the fly and interact
with them, effectively instructing them to deliver precise ‘slices’ of
information that match each user’s specific needs. Users receive the
personalized view of information they need without requiring any
additional work on the part of the administrator.