Can Dashboards Be "Close Enough"?

Web searches are a fuzzy way to get information in that there is no objective right answer. When I've worked on dashboards for customers, it's always been a given that there is a single right answer to a question and that the dashboard fails if it doesn't provide that answer. I never really questioned it. But personally, I make far more use of the fuzziness of searches. I don't expect to always get the right answer and I'm usually perfectly ok with clicking around and scanning articles until I find what I'm looking for. Before Google, I did most of my internet searching using the hierarchical categories on Yahoo. Google and other open-ended text searches freed me from having to think in terms of a set path to the right answer.

Corporations seem to be opening their minds to those concepts too, based on efforts from Microsoft and Google to sell inside-the-firewall search tools. I just wonder how that will play with businesses that are accustomed to getting the one true answer. If I'm a CEO looking for the Q4 sales forecasts, I'm not going to want to hunt through a list of links to things that might be the Q4 sales forecasts. "Close enough" just isn't good enough for that kind of information. Yes, we've accepted the slight inefficiency of the Google search, but only because of the terrible inefficiencies of the alternatives. Just think back to a school research paper where you had to find an obscure periodical article in the library.

So for now, I think corporate search may work its way into dashboards and business intelligence tools, but only in situations where the fuzziness is offset by the inefficiency of the alternative. But it's possible that in a few years all business intelligence will be done via googling and I'll look back at this post and wonder how I could have been so naive. If I can find it, anyway.