Business Intelligence Power Play

Come forward, seeker of knowledge. You stand before BI, the great mystic oracle of information. Ask your questions and gain enlightenment.

Wait! BI is much too complex and arcane for one such as yourself to interact with the great one directly. You must direct your questions through one of the priests of BI, also known as the business intelligence analysts. These priests will make your queries pleasing to BI and also will be able to interpret BI’s answers for you.

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Business Intelligence & Search: A Marriage of Convenience

February 12, 2007 (Computerworld) — Often, a company’s most valuable information is squirreled away in various departmental silos, and it takes an IT or statistics guru to coax it out. But what if workers could get that information — whether it’s in the form of data tables or text — using an interface that’s as easy to use as a Google search box?

That’s the thinking behind the marriage of business intelligence (BI) software and enterprise search technology. It’s an especially powerful concept for a decentralized organization such as the National Education Association (NEA), a teachers union with 3.2 million members and 14,000 state and local affiliates. “We wanted software that allowed people, particularly at the state-level organization, to create and edit their own reports,” says Bill Thompson, the NEA’s director of financial and membership services.

The organization is setting up Fast Radar, a BI/search product from Fast Search and Transfer SA, to give users access to financial, legal, research and membership information that is contained in four separate data silos. A small pilot is being conducted with a few affiliates, and broad deployment is scheduled to start in May. Initially, users will gain point-and-click access to information in the four databases. Later, they will be able to conduct text searches of the BI and text data.

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Search the nascent giant of Enterprise 2.0

The role of search is expanding fast. As Web-type search moves from the Internet to inside the Enterprise for semantic analysis, it begins to identify facts inside documents, combines the information with structured databases, and provides true knowledge discovery.

As analytics are increasingly derived from search, users can relate concepts to enable people to make decisions and get completeness and overview — on the fly — to provide, in essence, search-powered business intelligence (BI). The mega trends of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and the Semantic Web give search more content to consider, and much more power.

Read the full story (Dana Gardner – ZDNet)

Google revs Enterprise Search Appliance

Google will expand the functionality of its enterprise Search Appliance, allowing corporate users to tweak the results of internal searches by giving added weight to content from specific sources or formats.

A new software update to the Google Search Appliance, launched in 2002, will allow for source biasing,enabling administrators to give search priority to content on certain servers or in document formats such as .pdf.

In addition, the software update will include results hit clusteringfor search results, with the search appliance grouping results into suggested topics. For example, if an employee searches for “customer” on the company network, a set of categories such as “customer support” or “customer contacts” will guide the search. Administrators would be able to customise the clustered results, Google said.

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BI for the Great Unwashed

Makers of business intelligence software are dreaming of a day when their products will run on every desktop. But will this ever come to pass? Quocirca’s Louella Fernandes explains.

The ultimate goal of business intelligence is to drive better business performance through providing the right data at the right time. However, implementing a business intelligence (BI) platform can be costly and complex to use and deploy. Traditional BI solutions are often only used by a small proportion of users – the analysts and power users – and even then, the tools can be difficult to use.

With Office 2007, Microsoft aims to address the unrealised potential use of BI in an organisation by applying its low-cost, high-volume approach to the market. But whilst Microsoft may indeed increase the awareness of BI tools, achieving mainstream BI adoption still faces many challenges.

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IBM and Yahoo Bring Free Enterprise Search Tool

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-cost, entry level enterprise search product developed to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to intranet and Web search. Unlike other enterprise search solutions that can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and implement, the new offering from IBM with Web search services powered by Yahoo! can be downloaded for free and is simple to install and use with existing hardware.

 ”Together, IBM and Yahoo! are delivering on the promise of making information easier to find, use and share while providing a better search experience for users,” said Eckart Walther, vice president of product management for Yahoo! Search. “This is a valuable tool for helping organizations improve employee productivity by enabling them to more quickly find needed information. By empowering customers and partners to quickly find information on the Web, we’re also able to reduce their support costs.”

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Business Objects updates tool set

November 06, 2006 (Computerworld) — SAN FRANCISCO — Business Objects SA today unveiled an update to its current tool set at its user conference here and provided a glimpse of its take on the role of BI in the burgeoning world of Web 2.0. The new BusinessObjects XI Release 2 Productivity Suite, expected to be available during the first half of 2007, is an update to the company’s tool set that is designed make it easier for business users to access the analysis and reports they need on a daily basis. The upcoming suite will not require users to migrate to new software but will be available as an add-on to XI Release 2, said John Schwarz, CEO of Paris-based Business Objects. The update includes added search capabilities, new visualization tools and a faster OLAP client.

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Microsoft Talks Up SharePoint For Search

First, slated for some stage time in Munich will be Office SharePoint for Search. The intranet search software was discussed at the Worldwide Partner Conference last summer, but there hasn’t been much detail disclosed around it, says Davide Vigano, worldwide market lead for Microsoft Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner group (SMS&P) Well, here are a few factoids: The software will index up to 1.5 million documents for $7,000 with no client access licenses (CALs) required. Microsoft’s goal is to unify desktop and intranet and Internet search where Microsoft lags far behind leader Google. For customers wanting to go beyond the 1.5 million document limit or to search line-of-business applications, will need to go to full-fledged SharePoint Server he said.

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Metadata, Analytics To Push Next Wave in Search

Searching and navigating through Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines to find specific content has never been easy, and experts agree it will only get worse before it gets better. Analytics and metadata are likely to become tools to assist people wade through the barrage of text, games, photos, music, and videos now made available through the Web. Within three to five years, specific categories and clustering engines will likely take into consideration the links users click on, said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and chief technology officer at video search site Blinkx Inc., speaking on a panel at the Digital Hollywood Fall in Santa Monica, Calif. on Tuesday.

Read the full story (Tech Web)

The search for meaning

Just don’t call it googling the enterprise. That is the advice to those researching the state of today’s enterprise search capabilities, from Mike Davis, senior analyst at research firm Ovum. According to Davis, US search engine Google does not appreciate its name being turned into that kind of generic verb.

Read the full story (Computer Weekly)