Shared Insights: The Podcast from Upland BA Insight

Mark Christianson serves as Digital Experience Delivery Senior Lead, Global Services at Mars, Inc. Mark joins us on the show this week to talk about data — mountains of data — and the constant challenge to stay ahead of the needs of tens of thousands of business associates at the company to help them do their jobs better. From machine learning to natural language processing, Mark and his team are pushing their systems to unveil new insights, and he shares how his operational processes have had to evolve to support the work as well.

About Mars, Incorporated

Mars is a family-owned business with more than a century of history making diverse products and offering services for people and the pets people love. With almost $35 billion in sales, the company is a global business that produces some of the world’s best-loved brands: M&M’s®, SNICKERS®, TWIX®, MILKY WAY®, DOVE®, PEDIGREE®, ROYAL CANIN®, WHISKAS®, EXTRA®, ORBIT®, 5TM, SKITTLES®, UNCLE BEN’S®, MARS DRINKS and COCOAVIA®. Mars also provides veterinary health services that include BANFIELD® Pet Hospitals, Blue Pearl®, VCA® and Pet PartnersTM. Headquartered in McLean, VA, Mars operates in more than 80 countries. The Mars Five Principles – Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom – inspire its more than 100,000 Associates to create value for all its partners and deliver growth they are proud of every day.

For more information about Mars, please visit www.mars.com. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Today we're talking about enterprise search from the open source perspective. Joining BA Insight CTO Jeff Fried for this conversation is Charlie Hull, director and co-founder at Flax and open source search specialist. From the importance of test-based relevance and tuning in search, to the drive to help administrative teams understand the critical role search can play in business efficiency, Charlie and Jeff share their perspectives on the new renaissance of the enterprise search space.

What's more, Charlie introduces his new book, co-written with Udo Kruschwitz, Searching the Enterprise:

Search has become ubiquitous but that does not mean that search has been solved. Enterprise search, which is broadly speaking the use of information retrieval technology to find information within organizations, is a good example to illustrate this. It is an area that is of huge importance for businesses, yet has attracted relatively little academic interest. This monograph will explore the main issues involved in enterprise search both from a research as well as a practical point of view. We will first plot the landscape of enterprise search and its links to related areas. This will allow us to identify key features before we survey the field in more detail. Throughout the monograph, we will discuss the topic as part of the wider information retrieval research field, and we use Web search as a common reference point as this is likely the search application area that the average reader is most familiar with.

Searching the Enterprise is available from now Publishers.

Links & Notes

• Connect with Charlie Hull on LinkedIn
• Announcing our new book, Searching the Enterprise
• Flax — The Open Source Search Specialists
• A Lack of Cognition and Some Fresh FUD from Forrester
• Searching the Enterprise by Udo Kruschwitz & Charlie Hull, now Publishers
• The Search Immaturity Cycle — YouTube
• @flaxsearch on Twitter

Computers can do a lot, but they can't do it all. This week, Nationwide's Ted Williams shares platform stories, and the critical factor of human intervention in truly useful enterprise search. Ted serves as SharePoint Information Architect with Nationwide and is intimately familiar with what makes enterprise search tick, why it fails, and what he and his team are working on to make search smarter for their users.

This week on the show, BA Insight CTO Jeff Fried shares his perspective on the State of Search and BA Insight's strategy around the coming wave of change in the field. While technology is improving, the problems we're working to solve are becoming more challenging too, and the tools we have at our disposal to address them is forcing new paradigms in organization, access, and structure. From AR, to VR, to social and the cloud, your strategy for building a search platform — or replatforming — starts here.

Links & Notes

• Is SharePoint Search Dead? — SearchExplained.com
• The Search Immaturity Cycle and How to Create a Search Strategy
• The Search for Intelligent Search — Is it Delve? — BAInsight.com