Arrow, however, wanted to bring the service to another group: design engineers. Unlike line managers, designers seldom know what they are looking for ahead of time. They start with a wish list of properties for the perfect part, filter out candidates that come close but not close enough, and then find the best compromise by carefully comparing the remaining parts and fine-tuning their design. The very last thing they learn is the part number. Customers such as those require a very different set of searching tools.

In response, Arrow struck up a partnership with Endeca Technologies, a startup search vendor that specializes in "query discovery" software?searches that use the experience of navigating around, through and over complex category landscapes to help searchers figure out what they want.

After a development phase of about six months, the search application was ready for the design engineers. Today a user searching the Arrow database can organize results by several interacting categories. For instance, suppose she is looking at the power, size and price categories, and she clicks on a specific range of power (say, 10 to 20 watts). The listings in the size and price categories then automatically change to present just the sizing and pricing of the parts in the desired power range.

The new service started in June 2002, and its success has allowed Arrow to change Ubiquidata’s licensing model from seats to sites, says Chris Henry, Arrow’s vice president and global information business unit general manager. In other words, the database’s ease of use finds that enterprises now prefer to let anyone in the company?not just specific individuals?log on and poke around.

The Politics of Searching

Automatic categorization can do more than just expand markets. "It’s difficult for anyone to understand who hasn’t lived through it to appreciate how political categorization management is," observes Scott Lundstrom, CIO of AMR Research. "We had a category nomination process. We had a category retirement process. They all required long meetings." Maintaining and supervising a process consumed a full-time IT position.

Then AMR moved to an autocategorizing product from Autonomy, and things changed for the better. "Today we’re increasingly relying on the software to do category recommendations," Lundstrom says. "Everybody can see that it recognizes more relationships and that it isn’t biased." And Lundstrom got his developer back, which made the CIO happiest of all.

U.S. Robotics (USR) is hoping to extract efficiencies from a different source. "We make a low-margin product," says IT Director Steve Kossel. "One call to our support desk wipes out our profit on that sale." Surveys show that 90 percent of users calling technical support had visited the USR website before calling. While the jury is still out on USR’s experiment with autocategorization (using tools from iPhrase Technologies), Kossel believes that the products will improve the precision and responsiveness of support on the USR website sufficiently to cut the number of support calls by a third, saving the company more than $135,000 a month.