An information superhighway with no road signs or maps
Brian Babineau of ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) recently published a research brief on enterprise search, including many statistics, charts and graphs that will help organizations produce a strong business case to executive management on the need to gain control of information.
He also makes one of the clearest and most compelling arguments for search that I’ve seen lately:
“Unstructured information is often not properly used because of what ESG deems a ‘budget misalignment.’ IT usually finds a way to budget for information infrastructure elements – applications, servers, networking, security solutions, storage, and the like. However, tools that make the information more accessible and useable, such as enterprise search solutions, find themselves on the discretionary portion of the budget – and we all know that there is a slim chance of funds trickling down to these types of projects in 2009. While this approach maintains a level of financial conservatism, ESG believes it is very myopic and could prove costly in the future. Think about a government that builds an intricate highway system, but does not create any maps of the roads or signs indicating where they go. The infrastructure is there, but no one can make good use of it.”
Brian spends a large amount of his time thinking about storage. And for the first decade of my career, I focused on computer networking. And I think it is fair to say that both he and I are a bit puzzled that such vast resources have been devoted to storing and transmitting information – the vast majority of it unstructured content – and almost nothing on tools to access this information beyond whatever rudimentary native search capabilities reside in applications. In fact, I’d argue that we’ve been so busy building an infrastructure to support the output of the “knowledge worker” that we’ve lost sight of … why we built the infrastructure in the first place.
You can download Brian’s entire report – Search in 2009: A Shift to Information Access – from the Vivisimo website.
Update: Since I originally posted this, I stumbled across this audio preview of a presentation given by Ramesh Harji of Capgemini UK will give at the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC on May 12, 2009 (I’ll be speaking on personalized search later in the day). He is making much of the same case that Brian is and has some interesting figures from a Capgemini study on how much poor information exploitation costs businesses.
Tags: enterprise search, information access, ROI
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