Search Done Right

Recently, Aberdeen issued the report “Enterprise Search – Discover the Next Opportunity for Growth” which interviewed 175 organizations asking them to define what “best-in-class” meant for organizations making use of search within their enterprise.

Within the report I was not overly surprised to learn that companies that offer “best-in-class” search claim to have a high level of information connectivity, improved productivity, increased usage statistics and are heavily used in support scenarios. My question though is, “Does that really define ‘best-in-class’?”

I think one of the failings of enterprise search has been the way success is defined. Success is often defined by the reduction of zero hit results, search usage statistics, decrease in employee complaints, etc. None of these directly impact the business, so why are they used to define successful implementations?

The American Chronicle published an article that starts to identify those business drivers of information access. They claim that poor information management and access solutions lead to “lost revenue, poorly managed expenses, lost confidence, compliance problems and customer dissatisfaction.” These are not productivity issues but both bottom and top line revenue challenges for organizations.

I believe that any organization will have a difficult time proving they have “best-in-class” search until they begin to quantify the real value search delivers to its business. Only when business goals are outlined and quantified can organizations begin to define and then measure success as it relates to search.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 7:48 am 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.