Enterprise Search – Fighting a War on Both Sides
The search technology market is in the limelight once again. Power struggles and alliances between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft continue to make news. These market giants understand the power of search in the information age, and the business models it supports.
But while the search battle wages on outside the firewall, another battle continues inside the firewall. As Dan Keldsen and I begin wrapping up our research for the upcoming AIIM Market IQ on Findability, and its accompanying webinar on June 26 (register), we have obtained a new appreciation for the struggles of the enterprise search soldiers on the home front. Users are frustrated by their enterprise search experience (see press release). 49% of the polled users felt that finding information inside their firewall was difficult and time consuming. As is often the case with our research though, the single data point was not the valuable finding. What adds to user frustration is a similar belief among those polled that search outside the firewall (Internet-based search) is far more effective. Indeed, respondents also agreed that the experience outside the firewall is driving increase demand inside the firewall.
Why the rift? Or put a different way, to paraphrase what I have heard many users ask "Why can't we just get Google on our intranet?". The answer to that question is the focus of our Market IQ and webinar. But the answer we offer is not - "Well just go buy Google for the Intranet." That's way too easy, and not going to render the end result users are expecting.
We titled our Market IQ "Findability", purposely not search. The user experience of effectively extracting content from a library is not about search alone. Its about Findability, which includes a search engine, but one that is integrate with tagging, navigation, ranking and a host of other technologies and functionality. This is the impetus for the rift between suers' experience on the internet and intranet with "search". The internet is a somewhat closed environment. I know it is hard to think of it that way, but while it is open to virtually any user and content, the basic model remains the same, albeit at a high level. For this reason, providers of search functionality can fine tune the interface and ranking algorithms and tags to suit their needs and the needs of the user. Algorithms to support ad words, link popularity and common misspellings are strategically deployed and leveraged, resulting in a "more effective" user experience.
While this type of functionality is available in enterprise search tools, they have to be fine tuned. Anyone who has tried to simply apply Google web search inside the firewall can understand that. Indeed, anyone that has deployed a search tool without undergoing any fine tuning or optimization knows that. FIndability takes a concerted effort to get it right. The intersection of content, community and context must be explored and well understood so that a host of Findability technologies can be strategically integrated and adjusted to provide effective and timely retrieval of content.
So if the issue is known, why have so many organizations not taken this approach to provide effective findability, at least at a level of effectiveness of that provided on the Internet within the firewall. There are a few reasons. In most organizations, no one own this problem. There are few individuals that straddle IT and business that specifically look at findability. Those that do however can position enterprise search as a business asset, a source of competitive advantage. In the information age, the ability to quickly and effectively find information is the key to unlocking the potential value of the content.
The big guys fighting the Internet-base search war get it. More internal business and IT strategists need to get it as well. So - please join us on the upcoming webinar and download the Market IQ report if you are interested, and fortify your troops.
