BI SEARCH AND TEXT ANALYTICS - The Data Warehousing Institute

BI SEARCH AND TEXT ANALYTICSa fairly advanced (and more costly) tool, and then devote far more development time than asimple implementation would require.• Complexity (49%) and cost (29%) are common concerns. Simple implementations of anenterprise search tool (where you install the engine on a server and point its crawlersat files and other sources) are straightforward and cheap, compared to other enterprisesoftware implementations. It’s the advanced implementations of search (which requirecustom development of lexicons, rules, and interfaces) that incur high complexity and cost.According to users interviewed in this research, integrating a BI platform with a third-partysearch engine is one of the highest risks. Therefore, users should look to their BI vendorfor guidance, since many of the functions discussed here are available now (or will besoon) directly from the BI platform. If integrating an external search engine is desirable orinevitable, users should stick to the ones that the BI platform supports explicitly through adedicated interface.What reservations do you have about applying search in a BI context? (Select five or fewer.)Figure 10. 1,417 responses from 370 respondents. (3.1 responses per respondent)Defining the scope ofsearchable contentis basic to all searchimplementations,including BI search.The Scope of BI SearchThe list of files, documents, reports, and systems (and their component parts) indexed by a BIsearch implementation constitute its scope. The scope of the implementation determines manythings, including what’s visible through the search index (all else is invisible) and what elementsof the indexed source are included in the index (which influences how users search and howrelevant result sets are). This definition of scope applies to both simple and advanced searchimplementations, and scope in a well-planned implementation will start small and grow over time.Hence, defining scope for multiple project phases is one of the most important steps in planningany implementation of BI search.With scope in mind, TDWI Research asked, “What reports and documents should be searchable?”(See Figure 11.)• Users want to integrate multiple BI systems via BI search. An overwhelming majority ofsurvey respondents said they’d like to index and search reports within all BI platformsacross an enterprise (76%), while considerably fewer would settle for just the reports withina single BI platform (29%). This is contrary to current practice, since most BI searchimplementations today index a single brand of BI platform, usually just a single instance. In14 TDWI RESEARCH