The ‘Rub’: Enterprise Data Does Not Want to be ‘Free’
by Joe McKendrick
“If our day-to-day jobs were buying DVDs, our jobs would be very easy indeed.”
With this thought, Chris Weitz, managing director at BearingPoint, cautioned attendees at this week’s FASTforward in San Diego that implementing search and Enterprise 2.0 approaches within enterprises will be a long-term, and often difficult challenge for IT directors and professionals. Public Internet search may be moving ahead in leaps and bounds, but enterprises are a slower slog. That’s because data is siloed throughout countless systems that have been built up over the past few decades, and most were not designed to be opened up to on-demand user access.
As Weitz put it:
“On the public Internet, information wants to be free. In the enterprise, information does not want to be free — it wants to hide.”
Many systems are inherently built to resist outside access, especially information relevant to national security, health records, and financial transactions, Weitz said. Corporate systems have been built around this model as well.
Then, there’s simply all those silos in every corner of the enterprise. Weitz said one client, a major aerospace company, needs to form task forces to locate the answers to certain questions, such as how many parts were shipped to a particular customer. There’s also a difference in the nature of public Internet search versus internal enterprise search, he added. “If I’m looking for a purchase order, it needs to be that purchase order.”
Ultimately, enterprises will move to an search service layer, with standardized interfaces, that abstracts much of the “rat’s nest” of incompatibility underneath. (Sounds a lot like a service-oriented architecture to me, though Weitz did not use the term.) It will take a number of years until enterprises sort this all out, but CIOs are interested enough to begin work on such projects, he said. And, very possibly, this capability will begin to save companies money.
This opportunity — or challenge — is not lost on vendors, Weitz also said. “Anyone who writes code for a living now thinks that search is their differentiator,” he said. “Middleware is dead, search engine indexes are the answer — there’s a rush to the middle.” He observed that Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft are all jumping into the fray as well. “Windows Vista might as well be called the search operating system,” he said. “There’s now this giant arms race toward search.”
