I had a chance to present today to a big crowd at the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City on the future of text analytics. Although I’ve spent many years on text search technology, it turns out that the same gizmos do a great job on text analytics, too. You can download my slides on the Search for Meaning, but I wanted to make a point here that many people misunderstand what these futuristic presentations ought to do.
I remember once giving a pitch about the future of something or other and being told afterwards, “Wow, you are really a visionary!” That was not good, because what it really meant was, “Wow, I don’t need to do a blessed thing about anything you talked about.”
Presentations about the future should never be about things that are so far in the future that no one needs to do them. What I tried to do today was to talk to the audience about things that real customers are doing now, but that are not yet mainstream. So the future of text analytics is that these kinds of applications that are newsworthy now will become mainstream in the future.
So, someday, many companies will be analyzing e-mails to test regulatory compliance by their employees. One day, many companies will be analyzing customer feedback from call centers, Web forms, and e-mail to find out what they are struggling with. And which parts of their product don’t work very well. It will become commonplace for health care institutions to analyze doctor’s notes to monitor which treatments correlate with poor patient outcomes.
That’s what these futuristic presentations need to be—not scenic vistas of some faraway day. If that’s what you’re talking about, then how can anyone ever check to see if you were right? If you wait long enough, almost everything happens, so who cares?
I prefer to talk about real things that most people don’t know about yet. Or things they believe are out of the reach. Or not possible yet. Then a pitch about the future could become your real future.
