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Enterprise Search: By Any Other Name…
A Gartner analyst at a recent conference said that “information access technology will locate and analyze more than 90 percent of data in more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises” by the end of 2012.
Information Access Technology (IAT) is a broader term that Gartner has been using since 2005 when they changed the name of their “Enterprise Search Technology” Magic Quadrant to IAT. IAT includes these technologies:
- Enterprise search
- Content classification, categorization and clustering;
- Fact and entity extraction;
- Taxonomy creation and management;
- Information presentation (for example visualization).
Gartner is emphasizing that there is more to finding and processing information then keyword search. Categorization and Classification are two big components missing in standard Enterprise Search. While search is more explicit and keyword driven, classification techniques are hierarchical and promote finding information by drilling down into the structure of related data.
The term IAT has been used by Gartner for a few years now, but hasn’t really caught on. Enterprise Search seems to be more descriptive.
But Gartner is not alone in trying to brand a new space. AIIM, originator of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) acronym has its own term. They are calling Enterprise Search “Information Organization and Access (IOA)” and identify core elements as follows:
- Content Architecture
- Content Intelligence
- Search & Retrieval
- Findability
But whatever you call it: Enterprise Search, IAT or IOA — the components are key technologies of Knowledge Management (KM).
