Discovery Architecture lives at the intersection of technology, metadata, user goals and business goals.
In order to be successful, you have to take all four aspects into account when you build a search /discovery framework.
User goals and business goals blend together into sets of goals and form a business strategy.
These sets of goals inform you about the direction you need to head. What they don’t do is tell you necessarily is how to get there. But have no fear! One of the great things about search technology is that it increases the number options available to you.
The obvious side of this part of the equation is that you have to understand how user and business goals fit (or don’t fit) together. A situation that I’ve run into where this can sometimes turn into a “gotcha” takes place when business analysts map out solutions (some very elegant) – without taking into account what current technology can support. In these cases, they are building a Discovery Architecture without considering other parts of the equation.
Look to your technology to shape your solution.
Technology will both enable and constrain what you will be able to implement – even if you have an unlimited budget for customizations. At the same time, your technology is also likely to open up opportunities that you may have not considered before.
So, I suggest to my clients, especially ones who have built solutions without an eye towards the technology they are using, to keep an open mind to consider how a given technology might accomplish the same goal but take different steps within its own framework. This will help keep down costs from requesting unnecessary customizations. To help keep your options open, ask these questions:
- What features does the technology offer that we haven’t requested that may be relevant to our goals?
- Are there places where you can eliminate unnecessary customization by leveraging the technology’s supported feature set?
Metadata is the foundation for the framework you build.
Let’s be blunt. To borrow an old saying, “You can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
No matter how sound the business strategy…
No matter how good your technology…
If you don’t have good metadata…
Your plan will fail!
