It really is not surprising that a lot of new portal initiatives therefor start with what the companies have and are familiar with: the content and internal systems. In the early stages of a project we are often faced with the different department’s clear opinions about how their products and services should be presented to the customers, what information they want to publish and how they want to manage the customers and partners. If IT is involved we are also given a lot of guidelines about how the system should work.

These are obviously valuable premises for a successful new solution. One important aspect is, however, missing; the users!
The users tend to be a whole less interested in internal organization, product packaging, and the company’s need to inform the world.

So how do we incorporate the users’ interests into the solution? Well, we invite them in and listen hard to what they have to tell us. We engage them into the analysis and design process, and verify our solution concepts to see if we got it right.

When designing information access solutions for the future it pays off to keep an eye on the basics. Some things never go out of fashion.

Remember the old saying: “The customer is always right”? A good start is to ask what’s right.

Have a good day!

Jørn

flickr.com/sean_oneill

When we started Comperio 6 years ago, many of the search projects were limited to one or two objectives. The goal was often just to “fix” search on the web site and/or the intranet. With the tools and solution concepts we had available at the time that was demanding enough.

Today, however, the success of the first wave of search solutions have led our customers to ask for “more search”, “more access” and “new insights” into their vast amount of information repositories. While the idea is not new, we are now seeing innovative and true new enterprise-wide indexes or information marketplaces being established. Structured data is at the core and the solutions are more centered towards Information Access than the previous search-only focused solutions. These solutions include every digital content and data repository that the enterprise possesses and even additional external sources that potentially bring new insights. The use-cases and business purposes has become more comprehensive and thus requires a more flexible way to service customer-, partner-, authority- and/or employee-facing applications.

Enterprise Search is maturing and that’s good news: think of all the new opportunities this opens!

flickr.com/rustychainsaw

One of the pleasures of leading Comperio is that I get a chance to meet a lot of interesting people with exciting ideas. Their undertakings span from how to improve productivity through better information access in an intranet, how to boost revenues and profits in an eCommerce solution through supportive shopping guides and a customer-centric promotion and product placement strategy, to how automate surveillance and investigations on e-Crime for government agencies– to name a few.

What do these ideas have in common? The answer is at least two things; that they all leverage “Enterprise Search” to support new business models and they all show a high level of leadership in pursuing their ambitions. As you will see on our re-launched website the customers are greatly successful with Enterprise Search and the rewards are high for the company they work for as well as for their own careers.

Maybe it’s time for you to pursue your business idea? If you do we would really like to hear from you. In fact, we invite everyone to share ideas around how Enterprise Search can improve businesses to engage in our new blog.

We have exciting days ahead – join us in shaping the future of Enterprise Search!