The Enterprise Search "Essay Test"—Extended Remix

Andy Moore: Search can be described as a "universal solvent." Whatever your problem is, someone will tell you that "search" can solve it. To what degree is search THE solution? Or just PART of the solution?

Jason Hekl: Search is clearly PART of the solution. One of our customers had this to say about search: "deploy a sophisticated search solution, and it’s like cleaning a long-dirty window. On the one hand, it’s great to be able to see outside again. Then again, the rusting jalopy in the front yard isn’t that nice to look at." Point being, without good content (and what represents "good" is another essay in and of itself), search is completely meaningless. It was this core truth that prompted InQuira to expand its product line from a natural language search engine to a customer experience platform that is equal parts intelligent search and retrieval, content and knowledge management, and advanced analytics and reporting. All three are pieces of the same puzzle.

I look at it this way—information is proliferating, and people have less patience to filter through it all. Companies need the ability to: 1. harvest high-value pieces of information (not necessarily pages, or documents, but snippets of information), regardless of their origin; 2. make that information accessible to various user constituencies in the right situations; and 3. have a mechanism for determining if the information is presented and consumed in a way that empowers someone to act.

Many customers will implement search and analytics products first, in part to get a gauge on the quality of existing content. The search makes the content more accessible, and the analytics determines the content’s quality, effectiveness and coverage, which in turn informs the company’s content and knowledge management strategies. Some companies will decide to migrate just a portion of their existing content into a centralized knowledgebase; others may decide to start fresh. It could impact the processes and workflows companies adopt to harvest and create new knowledge. It could help define a reputation model to ensure that externally published content will be effective (many of our customers look at "reuse" in the contact center to determine which content will be published to the external knowledgebase). The search, knowledge management and analytics are all equally important in delivering the right information experience to users.

John McCormick: There’s no doubt that search technology has a vital role to play in many areas across the organization. Few would argue that an e-discovery solution for legal, a research and development whitepaper or a customer support center could be very effective without relying at least in part on powerful search capabilities. Search matters. There’s no doubt. It enables knowledge workers to find relevant information quickly and to navigate efficiently to the best results.

However, transforming content into intelligence is the goal. Search is an important first step in that process, but the value of search is maximized when insights are derived from results and applied to the business in some way. For example, when relationships among relevant search results are identified quickly—even visually—the voice of the customer can be heard more clearly, workflows can be triggered automatically, competitive maneuvers can be spotted instantly, market trends can be identified as they emerge and even game-changing visions conceived.

So why are content management vendors "STILL" on the market? Vendors like EMC are uniquely well positioned to enable knowledge workers to search for, categorize, extract and distribute relevant information in a secure, compliant and efficient manner. By providing automated tagging capabilities, smart navigation of search results, robust workflow options, and proven retention capabilities, ECM vendors can transcend application barriers, simplify the user experience and present a unified platform that scales and can be efficiently managed. Imagine search results that are effortlessly exported to a customized collaboration environment that is secured with rights management technology. In that scenario, search becomes an enabling technology—the start of the value chain. Transforming content into intelligence is what visionary content management vendors seek to provide.

Jerome Pesenti: Search is not about the generation or management of content, and is not meant to replace the tools performing these tasks. Interestingly, people used to see these tools as "universal solvents" as well, but they failed to be implemented as enterprisewide solutions. The main reason is that these tools are by nature non-universal and content-specific. Some content (like policy documents or technical or user manuals perfect for a system such as Documentum) require deep control and constraining processes, while other (like tips, FAQs and such) should be very open and enticing, more suitable for wikis.

Another misconception about ECM tools is that they allow for easy sharing and leveraging of information. Consider one of our pharmaceutical customers, whose powerful document management system contains more folders than documents so that only the people who created the content can actually find it. Or one of our financial services customers who implements stringent compliance and archiving processes but whose IT department is tapped out for several days each time they receive a request for production from their legal department.

Search is the missing piece in these pictures. Search can be and should be universal; it can be the glue among all systems, leveraging and normalizing the ECM-added structure/metadata when available.

Search is also the best investment to allow people to share and act upon stored information. Newer social search functionality within search platforms, such as social bookmarking and networking and user tagging and rating abilities, gives workers the tools to add their own knowledge to information, share it with others, and tap into the collective wisdom of the organization within the search interface. Today, thanks to Web search engines, people across the globe can share their know-how better than people across the hallway in corporations. Social search within enterprises has the ability to change this.

Search does not solve all problems, but after all of the focus in the past decade on content generation and management by IT and KM professionals, it’s now time to deploy enterprise search to unlock the real value out of these investments. Search is the missing piece to enable true knowledge management, information sharing and collaboration.

Vijay Koduri: We can learn a lot from the consumer Internet world in the ‘90s. When Mosaic first came out of the University of Illinois and opened up access to the World Wide Web, information mushroomed all over the world. The hierarchical navigation of Yahoo! was the first real step in trying to organize the information, but within one to two years it became an outdated concept. Numerous search engines emerged, each with a different focus. Excite, InfoSeek and Lycos were general search engines.

AltaVista rose to prominence because of its thoroughness of search results. And GoTo tried the idea of paid listings in the attempt to increase relevancy. Further, niche search engines emerged, such as Northern Light, whose searches included journals and targeted scientific and legal communities.

But ultimately Google combined three simple elements—comprehensiveness, high relevancy and extreme ease of use. We are currently witnessing a similar revolution on the enterprise side. Initially, in the past few years, there have been numerous vendors, each approaching a different angle of the search puzzle. So while in today’s world we still have multiple variants of content-access systems, we are migrating toward a world where search will be the primary form of content access. And the search engine that offers the above three factors—comprehensiveness, relevancy and extreme ease of use—along with security, will be the clear winner in the enterprise world.

That said, it is important to understand that search cannot create content. There will always be a need for content authoring and publishing tools. And how companies choose to distribute the content, whether it’s in file shares, or wikis, or some other form, should be entirely up to the company. What search does is enable end-users to develop and maintain content in whichever tool they are most comfortable with.

Companies are starting to understand that the ROI in terms of productivity increases doesn’t come from the content management system; rather, it comes from high-quality search. And this is why more and more companies are reducing their investments in various point content solutions and increasing their investment and focus in search.

James Waters: There are many great business solutions out there. Trouble is, people need single-point access to multiple systems at the same time (e.g. SharePoint, salesforce.com, email). If you can’t hit them ALL at the same time, you’re wasting your time—and costing your company time and money. A good search solution gives your people a single view into the knowledge they need to drive better business. When was the last time you called AT&T and were put on hold while they found the answer to your question? It is because they had to access multiple systems!

Harald Jellum: We like to think of search as complement to case, content and document management solutions—not a replacement. These systems have a number of functionalities that search does not have and will not have. Examples are document revisions and case-status coding. These are functionalities embedded in the end-customer work-processes, with automatic actions tied to their status. Examples are automatic sending of letters with case-status change, and official document revisions tied to customer contracts. The challenge with these systems is not their functionality, but ensuring that organizations use them as intended. Anybody who has implemented these systems knows that they require discipline in use, and in particular with registration and tagging of documents and cases. Most find that the registration compliance rate is 50%-70% at best, and that leaves them with a big problem.

This is where search technology comes in and complements these systems. Search supports the end-users in finding all relevant documentation, even those that should be—but are not—registered in the case or document management system.

Johannes Scholtes: For many applications, "search" is a very important component, but "search" isn’t the whole solution. There are many application-context specific other requirements next to search.

When compliance became an issue, ECM was really addressing the control and workflow aspects of the new regulations. As a result, compliance turbocharged the ECM market. You will see the same thing happening now with the information access market; e-discovery will be the "turbo" on this market, since it is completely impossible to bring the exploding costs of corporate discoveries down without information access technology in all of its aspects. So I would say: information access is the solution, not just search.