Righty ho, so it's a beautiful thing to be able to find the people and information you need within your business, but I don't need to simply FIND information. This may seem as a shock to you, but finding information is totally useless to me and or the business I work in.

What I actually want to do is the following:

1. Find Information that allows me to look more clever than I am

2. Find colleagues who help me to look good in front of my peers

3. Share and collaborate with these colleagues on projects where we all have a common and or shared goal (sometimes differs in business!)

4. Display that information and work with colleagues who need to interact with it in order to do their job better - be they internal or external to my business.

Now the finding of information is increasingly becoming the easy bit, whether on our technologies or those of IBM, Google, Endeca etc etc the simple task of finding information really isnt that hard to achieve in the business context. The tougher bit lies around steps 2 to 4 above. Once you add into that mix some of the business issues I have this starts to get really tough some of these are as follows:

1. Security around specific documents and compliance between and within businesses

2. Accountability for structured information and how documents can be updated and kept up-to-date to avoid duplication

3. Real time collaboration to enable shared ideas to be brought into life with precise output be they presentations, complex calculations or documents to brief agencies or sales bid documents

So in a business scenario, I wish for a research professor in Southampton to work with a research business in Bangalore and MIT in Boston. Together not just identify information, but collaborate on it and then allow me the 'dumb' user to be able to find their data and post questions, suggest refinements and model new ideas all in a collaborative environment that allows me to do so securely. After all I dont want to break compliance rules or give away secrets to the competition do I...

So Business Search and HPC - bringing the above together in a world whereby we can harness computing power that hasnt been available to the masses before, with software that allows you to not just find but also play, model, extrapolate, and share with colleagues within and outside the corporate boundaries - that's what I want.

So when I look at the business world today I see people who can deliver bits of this jigsaw but do I see businesses who can deliver the whole enchilada.....not today.....but I dont think it will be very long in coming. Those that do will be the ones to add real value to their customers and build real value back to their shareholders.

That's probably enough from me - thoughts and comments anyone? (BTW thanks for those who have e-mailed privately - all comments gratefully received)