Making Content Manageable

Knowledge workers are some of an organization’s most valuable assets. But through no fault of their own, these employees waste a great deal of time and energy inefficiently navigating the vast amounts of information available to them—both inside and outside of the content management repository.

In a recent survey of more than 600 companies, IDC asked respondents how long they spent at various content-related tasks. To no one’s surprise, searching for and accessing content consumed more than 24% of the typical information worker’s time.¹ Using conservative metrics for average workers, IDC estimates this cost at over $14,000 per worker per year. In addition, these workers often spend three and a half hours per week unsuccessfully searching for information, costing more than $5,000 per worker per year on unproductive work.²

Why is it so difficult for knowledge workers to find what they’re looking for? First, information volumes are exploding and information itself is becoming more complex. Finding business-relevant information—scattered across disparate internal and external sources such as file systems, Web pages, email systems, databases, document management systems, collaboration platforms, websites, search engines, content sources such as LexisNexis, industry and government sources and others—is extremely difficult and time-consuming. The frequency and scope of global business mergers and acquisitions, as well as consolidation, often make matters worse. And, to further complicate matters, information is often stored in multiple languages.

Insufficient search capabilities and a lack of integrated access to all enterprise collections of information are the source of this wasted time. As a result, employees spend hours searching for information (sometimes unsuccessfully) or often start projects from a blank slate, unaware of similar or duplicate work that has taken place elsewhere in the organization. In other words—they waste a colossal amount of time.

Organizations are seeking a better way for knowledge workers to find the information assets they need to work effectively. According to Gartner, more than 70% of enterprises will want a unified desktop and enterprise search product by the end of 2008.3 To effectively deal with these challenges, IT organizations must combine content management and search solutions in order to: effectively reuse their existing IT assets; easily adapt to changes, both internally and externally; enable discovery of relevant information by knowledge workers; and allow knowledge workers to put that information to use efficiently.

Solving the Search Problem
The need to connect workers to relevant information is not going away. Most large, knowledge-intensive companies, such as those in the financial services, healthcare, professional services, software and telecommunications industries, have invested in solutions for content storage, development, access and collaboration. And many are now implementing or considering enterprise search capabilities.

Traditional enterprise search solutions create a static repository or index by crawling information sources. This approach creates problems and limitations: information must be duplicated in order to create the index; search results do not reflect changes made to the source, delivering incomplete or outdated search results; and the repositories or indexes have their own security and access control requirements, creating additional hoops for searching.

A simpler, more comprehensive solution is needed to provide knowledge workers with access to content across changing organizations and repositories, while preserving critical authentication and security mechanisms to manage access. Adopting the right search solution requires consideration of the following goals:

• Accessibility: Does the solution connect knowledge workers securely to all the relevant internal and external information sources they need to perform daily work processes?
• Productivity: Does the solution enable knowledge workers to put information to work by automating query and delivery of information within work processes?
• Efficiency: Does the solution leverage the existing IT infrastructure to meet evolving information discovery requirements?

Improving Business Performance
Enterprise search solutions can greatly improve business performance if they provide powerful search capabilities without disrupting the existing IT infrastructure. Specifically, these solutions:

• Deliver increased employee efficiency through dynamic, real-time searches (as opposed to queries of static index databases) that are easier to perform, more comprehensive and that return relevant, well-organized results;
• Provide secure access across disparate systems;
• Reuse existing IT resources; and
• Provide content analysis through clustering, classification and categorization.

The following industry examples illustrate the ability of enterprise search to improve the performance of today’s businesses:

Legal search and e-discovery—Applying enterprise search technology to legal search and e-discovery processes enables organizations to create responses to regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure faster, cheaper and with greater accuracy. An enterprise search solution allows professionals to search an extremely broad set of sources with a single query. Not possessing this capability can cost organizations millions both in fines for late or incomplete searches and the cost of paying outside sources for days, weeks or months of billable search assistance.

Product development—Utilizing enterprise search to help research, develop and launch new and updated products in ever-shortening cycles can help organizations in industries such as pharmaceuticals, aerospace and high-technology to avoid the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of lost or delayed revenue that can result from a single day of delay.

Enterprise search gives clinicians and other product developers single-query access to myriad information sources without the disruption of various search tools, security controls and retrieval tools. Business performance can be improved through: the ability to consider similar research which may be in heterogeneous information sources; accelerated research and development results through reuse of development capabilities and expertise; improved competitive position through the use of third-party competitive information providers; and the ability to keep pace with changing regulatory requirements during product or service development.