Has Oracle discovered the Holy Grail? It’s all about the searching

Everyone wants to make searching for that elusive document quicker, simpler and more accurate, i.e. an intelligent contextual search engine. A simple request that results in the right version of the right file, from the right source being found within a beat of the customer’s request.

This dream has frustrated many, and Boolean searches have remained dominant. As users search by ‘and’ and ‘or’, or both, the frustrations of users as they continue to wade through search results just wastes time and energy.

Step up Oracle waving its ECM banner.

ECM (Enterprise Content Management) has had to adjust with the IT landscape – whether in the Cloud or a hard copy it has to keep documentation and software ‘under control’. Duplication and incompatibility can result in a business falling into disorder, and experiencing license rule breaking issues.

Forward-thinking businesses are accepting E2.0 as part of their IT strategy and understand that there is a way of utilising ECM to fine-tune paper-intensive processes.

Oracle IPM is the imaging platform for Oracle Applications and it automates paper-intensive invoice and AP processes by incorporating scanning, capture and imaging technology with workflow. Whilst its benefits are many (increased transparency, real-time reporting, less human error, greater efficiency and ‘procure to pay’ in days), can this solution really search for that elusive, badly referenced, file successfully?

Inatech is having more and more requests to configure Oracle IPM for contextual search, hence Sophiasearch, which, is the antithesis to the Boolean search. As it is contextual it can recognise appropriate meanings for a query and intelligently organise the results in structured thematic folders.

With some people estimated to waste one day in six searching for files, the goal is to make such frustration, and wasted manpower, a thing of the past. To re-educate a whole workforce on the pros and cons of data storage is too mammoth a task. So this technological search tool has to make up for all the misspellings, misfiling and data hoarding, within a company.

A powerful search is priceless – simply by eliminating duplication of effort and wasted time (born of data chaos), a business can bask in profit instead of failure.

Maybe not the Holy Grail, but definitely close, in search terms at least.