With the exponential growth in ‘big data’ information volumes within the organization, the convergence of traditional business intelligence, enterprise search, social media, text analytics, knowledge organization and machine learning has the potential to revolutionize how we search for and discover information and knowledge.
However, it appears to have become almost unfashionable to mention ‘people’ in this paradigm. Yet these new techniques and information volumes are likely to place an even greater reliance on underlying information flows, social interactions and information literacy.
The findings from this research study lead to a suggestion that practitioners and management might wish to consider moving away from ‘first generation’ Information Management (IM) and enterprise search & discovery capability viewpoints. These viewpoints have generally been dominated by reductionist (simple answers to complex issues), fragmented, technological and bureaucratic approaches.
A more enlightened ‘second generation’ viewpoint of IM and enterprise search & discovery capability, is one in which socio-cognitive elements are fully embraced in a proactive ‘systems thinking’ approach; where the organization is the information system, a complex, changeable and unpredictable system. Thinking in this way may lead management and practitioners to change tack and pull different levers to improve IM and enterprise search & discovery capabilities.
A Geodyssey - Enterprise Search & Discovery and Text Mining Research 
Leave a Reply