Making the Business Case for Search

Intuitive—End user experience is paramount. A common, simple and familiar interface is key to user adoption, allowing the delivery of the timely, relevant content required by employees to do their jobs. While the search engine will scour many repositories with different search tools, details of each repository's personality should not show in the returned results.

Responsive—The search solution must perform well if users are to accept it. This means that the solution should pre-index and pre-store results and provide rapid return of search results.

Secure—The search solution should search all accessible content and only display results appropriate to the role of the viewer with the same level of controls in place.

Expandable—The search solution must provide for the seamless addition of capabilities to access and index new repositories and new data better.

Cost-effective—The search solution should not require complex administration, be hard to use or be expensive to deploy. A turnkey solution requiring minimal maintenance is often preferable. While the amount of enterprise storage now grows exponentially, the cost of search should not do the same.

Scalable—Scalability goes hand in hand with cost-effectiveness. Increasing search volume should not result in higher cost. Boosting capacity should require minimal hardware, and the process of adding that hardware should be undetected by the user community. Systems that require intermediation—tagging, classifying and organizing information—tend to be harder to maintain and not scalable.

Robust—As an enterprise utility, the search solution should be highly available and tolerate disruption of the surrounding infrastructure.

Integrating Search Into the Enterprise
Deploying a basic search solution for the enterprise can be as simple as installing it on the organization's network, pointing it at an intranet repository and turning it on. The target user community will realize immediate benefit with minimal configuration and customization. However, large-scale deployment across complex organizations with database retrieval requires consideration of other issues to truly unlock the value that can be provided by search solutions, specifically:

• The search solution should interact with existing knowledge management systems. A search solution can deliver the greatest value if it complements existing knowledge management tools. Interfaces should leverage existing investments in content management. Regardless of how much work may have already been completed within an enterprise, search solutions will provide incremental benefits to the existing solution.
• Search results returned to an individual knowledge worker should be highly relevant to the task they are trying to accomplish. A critical component for broad adoption will be how effective users find the actual results of their search. Providing as much relevancy as possible through mass customization will be a key component.
• The search solution should integrate with heterogeneous system s for retrieval of key information and make data available to the search tool as it is dynamically updated. A good search solution will recognize various file types found within the organization. This offers the potential to obtain information from a wide range of structured and unstructured data sources, creating a comprehensive search environment.

Obtaining this information frequently requires:

• Custom adaptors—Search engines can find and index many types of information, but extracting information from enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and other systems requires additional software. Information must be extracted in a way that preserves the integrity and security of underlying data, while providing access to people with the need to obtain it.
• Database feeds—Enterprises need to make selected content of key databases readily accessible through search solutions. This data, which is typically dynamic, is made accessible through standard interfaces, such as extensible markup language (XML) feeds, without affecting the source system and network response time.
• Search tools should fit into the organization's overall information architecture. A good search solution should be deployed so that it effectively and efficiently integrates with the overall enterprise IT environment. Two key areas of concern are security and disaster recovery:
• Security—Searching the enterprise highlights a range of security challenges related to consolidating information and presenting that consolidated information to users. The nature of these challenges depends on the compliance and regulatory issues of specific industries and the current security practices of the organization. Enterprise security must be evaluated in the context of today's rapidly changing environment.
• Disaster recovery—Because it does not store user data, a search solution may not fit the profile of a typical database or application system in disaster recovery strategies. However, a catastrophic system failure or data loss in the enterprise would compromise the effectiveness of search. A suitable disaster recovery strategy, encompassing the search solution for the enterprise, should be implemented.

Realizing the Benefits of a Search Solution
An effective search solution for the enterprise can deliver many benefits. For end users, it can increase productivity by making relevant information easily accessible and retrievable. Workers can focus on using information, not on finding, storing and organizing it, gaining the full value of the enterprise's new search capability.

The use of a familiar interface also can reduce the need for training and dramatically increase the level of adoption by the user community. A search solution also can support significant operational improvement and lower IT expenses by reducing dependency on numerous systems and integration points.

Once enterprises fully understand the benefits of leveraging search solutions to improve the productivity and effectiveness of their workforce, they can then begin to explore the opportunities to transform the ways they use their information as never before possible.

That sounds like a real winning formula!