Enterprise distributor
Enterprise search strategy and modernization roadmap
Led the enterprise search RFP, vendor evaluation, and modernization plan that moved a legacy estate toward a modern search architecture.
Impact
- Produced an executive-defensible search strategy, a vendor selection grounded in actual workload characteristics, and an implementation roadmap that staged risk.
- Stood up an enterprise vector repository covering more than one million documents across multiple source systems, layered with OpenAI APIs for intelligent discovery and retrieval, as a secondary capability inside the broader strategy.
Business challenge
Enterprise search was a known pain point with no agreed plan. Multiple legacy indexers covered different parts of the business, none of them well, and every team had its own opinion about the right vendor. The risk was less about choosing the wrong tool than about choosing one without a defensible reason and reliving the same conversation eighteen months later.
Approach
Treated this as a strategy problem first, a technology choice second. Defined the workload characteristics that actually mattered (query latency, relevance tunability, content freshness, security model, content connectors), then ran an enterprise RFP grounded in those characteristics rather than vendor demo theatrics. Vendor evaluation produced a comparable matrix instead of a marketing reel.
The implementation roadmap staged risk by capability rather than by system. Legacy indexers were targeted for retirement in order of business exposure, not in order of org chart.
In parallel, and as a secondary technical layer rather than the headline, stood up an enterprise vector repository spanning more than one million documents across several source systems. OpenAI APIs powered intelligent document discovery and retrieval on top of that index. The AI capability was contained inside the broader search strategy, not the other way around.
Impact
The organization had a search strategy, vendor selection, and modernization roadmap it could defend at the executive level. The retrieval layer gave the business a path to AI-assisted document discovery without that work distorting the core search modernization plan.