Search Done Right

Since the downfall of the economy, many CEOs around the world have been discussing the “new normal.” They are advising corporations to adjust to the new reality of reduced labor forces, smaller budgets and tougher regulations. As I reviewed some articles about this idea, I find that many corporations are now challenging their executive teams to come up with new and innovative ways to increase their top line while reducing their bottom line—all with reduced budgets.

Brian Babineau, Senior Consulting Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently published a paper entitled “Expanding Information Access Initiatives with Embedded Search.” He points out in the paper that:

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’?”

Every organization employs individuals, whose main responsibility is gathering, evaluating, creating and sharing knowledge throughout their organization.  They are the knowledge workers.  Within consulting companies the knowledge worker makes up around 90% of the workforce, in manufacturing they might comprise 30-40% of the overall workforce.  Regardless of the percentage, there is always an initiative around knowledge workers to better understand their role and increase their overall utilization.

I finished up my spring tradeshow season at Enterprise 2.0 this week in Boston. The event is unlike many others I attended this year because much of the technology being discussed is still in its infancy. Instead of listening to debates on best practices for portal or document management rollouts, I was hearing about the latest features around communities, micro-blogs and avatars. The exhibit hall floor was an interesting hybrid of traditional software vendors (Microsoft, IBM, EMC, etc.) with new and emerging organizations (Telligent, Altassian, Jive, etc.) 

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I was at the Gartner Portal Content and Collaboration conference last week and was reflecting on some of the points Gartner’s Whit Andrews mentioned during his discussion. Most of the presentation was around the need for improved federation and conversation within search. I had some arguments against federation as a be-all end-all search solution, but agree with him that conversation is a must in delivering better search within enterprises.

As my whirlwind conference travels continue, I attended the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit last week in Orlando. I was most interested to hear what Whit Andrews had to say on search. In May, he was quoted advising clients who were looking for low-cost information access solutions to consider federation. I was curious to hear what he had to say on the topic during his live presentation.

Andrews began by claiming that search has been a failure and that today workers spend more than five hours a week just trying to find information. He cited a number of reasons outlined for this, but the two dominant themes were:

Last week, I attended the Forrester IT Forum, which focused on a variety of IT trends, from knowledge management to security to IT infrastructure needs. Forrester was able to bring in some great speakers from very large organizations such as BP, Levi Straus, the National Football League and more. I attended most of the breakout sessions on knowledge management, discovery and collaboration.

Last week, I attended the Enterprise Search Summit in New York City. By the end of the show, I could not help but feel bad for the attendees who have not yet implemented search. If I were evaluating enterprise search for my organization, I would have walked out of the event more lost than when I started. All week I heard repetitive pitches from vendors, case studies that start to blur and a feedback from a mix of users – both satisfied and unsatisfied. With so much noise, I couldn’t help but wonder how an attendee was supposed to walk away with a clear plan for evaluating and implementing search.

Last week, I attended the 2009 Knowledge Management Conference hosted by the 1105 Government Information Group. The conference was focused around empowering government agencies to build out their knowledge management practices for improved knowledge transfer and decision making.  (All presentations are available for download here.)

The most interesting talk at the conference for me was the keynote by General Peter Chiarelli the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff. The discussion focused on the concept of the “strategic corporal.”  In his talk, Chiarelli stated that: