Why Point Solutions Miss the Point
I believe that some purchasers of enterprise search are making a mistake, understandable as it may be, which they don’t make in other purchasing decisions: they go for point solutions which will prove inadequate soon after deployment.
A point solution solves an immediate, specific need. Now, what could be wrong with that??
Let’s consider point solutions in daily life that few people would find satisfactory:
- Starting work at a company that will go out of business shortly.
- Buying a thumb drive that only stores 5Mb because it will store your current PPT presentation. But it won’t store three of them.
- Buying a business phone system that will handle 50 simultaneous calls max, which won’t be enough in six months as your company grows
- Signing a lease for a studio apartment when you’re about to marry and start a family
What is the analogous mistake in enterprise search? Selecting an enterprise search platform that becomes inadequate as soon as end users clamor for access to broader information sources than the key repository that you had in mind.
For example, you might think that your end users really need better ways to search your Sharepoint installations, and choose a point solution that solves the immediate problem.
But soon after deployment, end users start demanding access to other enterprise repositories, or external licensed sources, which the purchased point solution doesn’t accommodate well because of a lack of reliable connectors, or because the point solution can’t handle the inevitable mix of heterogeneous security models, or because the user experience lacks tools to deal with the potential information overload in the expanded search results.
So what to do?
Carefully consider the information that end users will need over several years, not just the immediate need, and choose an enterprise search platform that accommodates the growth. I would do an information audit, by interviewing end users or their managers to find out what information makes people productive. Then write your findings into the requirements document.
On our own intranet (see a previous blog post Do Vendors Use Their Own Products) we have had the experience of adding successive repositories to our own enterprise search installation (eating our dog food, we use Velocity). The most recent addition is our Salesforce.com content, whose content I find it especially valuable to search, for example, by querying a customer name to find out what’s been going on lately before I have a meeting or phone call.
Point solutions in enterprise search miss the point, sooner or later. Probably just after deploying one.
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