Integrating operational data has long been one of the toughest IT problems. One choice is ripping and replacing legacy systems and consolidating on a single application platform, but that's neither affordable nor practical. You'll find a better answer in business integration convergence, a trend toward combining techniques including metadata repositories and discovery, data modeling and data quality services, ETL and EII, and integration with message brokers and ESBs for timely data synchronization.

Google-style search is all right for some, but greater accuracy in the enterprise demands a mix of techniques including content tagging and taxonomy development and technologies such as entity, concept and sentiment extraction tools.