Making the Business Case for Search

The performance of any organization depends heavily on how well its people use information to make decisions and do their jobs. First, though, they have to find the information they need.

And that's not so easy. It's estimated that knowledge workers spend up to half their time looking for actionable information—information they can use to bring value to the organization. This is hugely frustrating, especially to frequent users of Internet search engines who have become accustomed to the speed, power and convenience of widely available, powerful search technology. Increasingly, enterprise users also are demanding faster and easier ways to locate the information they need for decision making and task completion.

A Changing Landscape Driven by Users
Due to the increased availability of broadband communications, the general public and workers alike increasingly rely on the Internet for everyday tasks and activities. In fact, many users take for granted that the Web will offer services that are easy to understand, easy to use and accessible anytime, anywhere. At the same time, many public- and private-sector organizations are now using Internet software services as a way to reduce costs and deliver services to a demanding and physically diverse end-user population.

These influences, especially the rapidly changing expectations of enterprise users, are driving a major shift in the software landscape. Enterprise users now expect the same level of functionality, transportability and ease-of-use in the enterprise that they experience as consumers on the Internet. The hard line between consumer software and enterprise software is steadily disappearing.

As a result, software and solutions vendors must de-emphasize the old model of large, highly complex, monolithic systems (and integration projects) and create solutions that are rapidly innovated, Internet-based, modular and easy to develop and deploy. For companies to sustain this rapid innovation, speed of development and simplicity are critical factors to their success.

With the increasing demand for search capabilities in the enterprise, it is important to understand what type of information enterprise users need and want. Today, most users conduct two types of search in the enterprise, as described below.

Some knowledge workers spend most of their time engaged in specialized search. They log into a specific system either to update or use data. For example, an analyst may search within the finance system to recover all accounts-receivable records associated with a specific customer. An auditor looking for evidence may search within a messaging archive for all the e-mails sent between two people over the last six years. A government intelligence agency may search all phone records for a specific individual or organization.

In contrast, searching the enterprise is the generalized search for information in any location, within a department, across the entire organization and beyond. Searching the enterprise is like Internet search, which aggregates results from all available information sources into one unified result. It is different from specialized search, which has complex search strings and filtering of data sources. The source of information in a search of the enterprise can range from the general to the specific, from arbitrarily found Web pages to structured documents and databases.

Search solutions for the enterprise can be used for recovery, discovery and exploration, for example:

Recovery
°Where is the schematic for this part number?
°Where is the resume of that job candidate?
°What documents satisfy this audit request?

Discovery
°What are the current organizational policies?
°Who else in the organization or elsewhere has done something similar?
°Who has done something I can reuse?

Exploration
°What does the press think?
°What are our competitors doing in this area?
°What does/should it cost?

By improving individual employee productivity, search solutions for the enterprise offer a number of significant benefits. They can improve customer service by helping service representatives answer customer questions and solve problems more quickly, efficiently and completely. They can contribute to higher sales by making crucial information more readily available to the sales force. They can improve the quality of decisions by making the relevant information available.

Search solutions for the enterprise also can help improve an organization's agility and the ability to respond to market threats. They are a way to leverage intellectual capital by finding, rather than recreating, existing information. They foster innovation through improved information discovery and can contribute to shortening response and development cycle times.

Why It's Hard to Find What You Need
Why do people spend so much time searching for information? To start with, the number and complexity of sources of useful information are growing constantly. That means more data is stored in more places and is harder to find—in enterprise transactional databases and knowledge repositories, as well as in unstructured document collections both within and outside the enterprise.

As a result, searching for information today can be inconvenient, ineffective and time consuming. Users may have to log into different systems and use different techniques to drill down for what they need. Disparate user interfaces present data differently, creating inconsistencies and confusion. For the user, this means lost productivity.

The lack of effective search solutions can represent a huge hidden burden. Significant staff time is lost searching for information, time that could be reclaimed by enabling good search solutions.

Existing information portals provide some relief. But as the number of underlying systems grows, portals must be constantly expanded to keep up. Such expansion can lag the availability of data ready to be put to use, as well as be expensive and hard to scale.

On the other hand, general-purpose search solutions are not primarily focused on compliance or deep research problems, where every data record has significance. Although they can return all items matched by narrow and focused search requests, search solutions for the enterprise typically strive to satisfy efficiently the most widely needed types of requests for the broadest community of users.

To be effective, search solutions for the enterprise should be:
Universal—The home page of the search solution should serve as the general user interface to the organization's information. It will only become such a tool if end users perceive it as the best starting point. Even if, as is the case at the beginning of deployment, it does not encompass all available information, it should include enough to be immediately useful.