We at Findwise host Findability Day to raise awareness of the importance of enterprise search and search in business, big data and to share best practices in implementation and management as well as inform about technology developments. Attending and being part of Findability Day this year was a real energy boost for all of us at Findwise. We were about 200 attendants all with focus on search and big data.
On stage, we had some very inspiring presentations. Martin White explaining the journey of search and pointing out its future direction showed how the principles of search have been around for decades. What we use it for and how we approach it is key along with enabling technology. Martin has also written a blog post about his impressions from the event, read it here.
Ravi Mynampaty of Harvard Business School showed how the search journey has evolved within Harvard Business School. One take away was the importance of step by step implementation and ensuring satisfied stakeholders along the way. Christian Finstad of Meltwater explained how they connected business values with technology to convince their clients. I think an internal decision within an organization needs similar argumentation in order to win acceptance.
Johan Johansson gave a thorough presentation about the search project at the Municipality of Norrköping. This was a tight budget project with strong deliverables. One thing to remember from Johan was his talk about “you need to try it out yourself – do the most common searches and experience it”.
DJ Skillman from Splunk, Troels Walsted Hansen from Microsoft and Daniel Bergqvist from Google gave some interesting insights into new technologies. How Splunk can be used to just harvest every imaginable data type, just bring it in and worry about using it later. How Google want to align enterprise search with consumer search and Microsofts Facebook inspired developments within graph search.
We also had some great breakout sessions with Jonas Berg, Svensk Byggtjänst who showed us their partner search application, Martin Öhléen, SKF who talked about mobility, Sebastian Forseland, Husqvarna who gave an expert lecture on master data management and Niclas Lillman&Nicklas Eriksson, Scania who talked about their journey towards a common search solution for all their knowledge workers.
If you weren’t there or if you just want to see it again we have posted videos of the presentations and most of the slides here.
We would like to thank everybody who came to the event – you made it a real success. A big thanks also goes out to our sponsors Google and Splunk who made this event possible.
The networking possibilities at the location were great and really demonstrated how the Search industry is growing. We are very happy with the event but there is of course always room for improvement for next year. Make sure to be there!
