The Art -- and Pursuit -- of Enterprise Search

by Dan Sullivan

For the past decade, integration has been a dominant theme in IT. Networks physically connect client and server computers, gateways allow heterogeneous databases to share data, and application integration techniques link software systems into coherent process flows. The benefits of integration are well understood: workflow processes execute faster in integrated environments than in nonintegrated ones, less intervention is required, and integrated environments can be more easily adapted to dynamic business requirements. Yet these benefits have largely been limited to systems that manage what is known as structured data -- data that easily fits into fixed formats -- such as database tables and spreadsheets.