Search Done Right

As I was driving through my hometown of Boston last night, I was reminded why it is called the city of five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter and pothole. When you don’t invest in infrastructure, you are going to pay sooner or later.

The same is true for corporations. While most of them don’t have to worry about paving streets and repairing major bridges, they have made a significant investment in information. Given that there is no government-subsidized economic stimulus package to upgrade technology infrastructure, IT organizations instead face the reality of declining IT budgets combined with continued pressure to demonstrate improvements. The answer is enterprise search, which allows a broad base of users to easily discover and navigate information across numerous internal and external sources. Enterprise search technology has now matured into an application that is both low risk and easy to deploy.

Unlike just about every other IT project that has the possibility to increase productivity for every knowledge worker in an organization, enterprise search solutions can be put in production in six weeks or less. The reasons for quick and easy deployment include:

• No legacy data conversion – the data being searched, whether it’s application-specific, database-driven, or local or network file shares is typically crawled and indexed in place without modifying any data within the repository.
• Leading vendors also include integrated security including out of the box single sign-on integration for authentication and the ability to crawl and index permissions stored within each application.
• Vendors typically have out-of-the-box user interfaces that are easily and quickly customized and integrated into corporate portals.
• With the proper vendor solution, no application development is required for the overwhelming majority of customer solutions.
• Enterprise search solutions are typically web-based so there is no need to modify each end-user desktop. In addition, search solutions are familiar to users and don’t typically require user training
• Enterprise search is not an all or nothing proposition and can easily be phased in with additional data sources and repositories over time.

In this unprecedented economic environment IT staff and management can choose to make their jobs easier and more secure by demonstrating quick wins or they will risk making their job irrelevant. This is not the time to fly so low under the radar that even a NASA-supplied GPS system couldn’t find you. Becoming an advocate for enterprise search will allow you to be recognized as a positive force for improving corporate knowledge and efficiency.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.