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:
An interesting conversation has emerged across the blogs this week regarding how well—or not—enterprise search solutions perform at finding information to the satisfaction of the individual user within the confines of an organization.
The ball got rolling when Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google said that his company used its own solution for internal search, adding: “It’s not that good—I’m complaining about it.” (Ouch. Well at least he has those great cafeterias!)
I once joked with a boss of mine that everything bought and sold by businesses can be boiled down to having just one of two benefits—it either saves you money or makes you money. Last Monday, I was reminded of this conversation while sitting on a panel, “Enterprise Search: Running Your Own Search Engine”, with a few other folks at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. One of the panelists, Bill French, CTO from Myst Technology Partners, brought up statistics from IDC in his presentation, observing that employees may spend up to two hours a day searching for information, to illustrate the point of why enterprise search is so critical. Now these are not new numbers, they are the same figures that everyone in the industry has bandied about for quite some time as the reason d’etre for search—if enterprise search solutions can save each employee x amount of time, then multiply x by y (employee hourly salary) to get the theoretical dollar savings per employee search can provide. This is the “saves you money” argument.
I’m back in the office after a few weeks on the road presenting at seminars and trade shows where I was showing off the new social search capabilities in Velocity 6.0. The most common question I heard was about tagging search results with keywords – would employees really take the time to tag information?
Tony Byrne of CMS Watch addressed this issue in a recent post and discussed two relevant problems associated with enterprise tagging. The first is that many users can’t tag because they haven’t been given easy-to-use tools in order to do so (filling in 5 or more required metadata fields in a content management system doesn’t count as easy). The second problem is that of users who won’t tag – here Tony gives some good advice about creating incentives along with an institutional emphasis on organizing digital information.
