Research: Enterprise Search
Enterprise Search 3.0: Overcoming Organizational Hurdles
Today we're talking Search 3.0. OK, we stole that from the Web 2.0 crowd, but bear with us. This isn't about pure search functionality—the technology to crawl, index, and slice and dice information stored on the desktop, network, and Internet is well beyond its infancy. Major players including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have expanded their search offerings, looking to challenge veterans like Autonomy, Endeca, and Vivisimo. All continue to invest heavily via new releases or acquisitions.
Rather, we're talking about creating a system that leverages the plethora of available searching, ranking, and indexing engines and combines them with a new business practice of monitoring and managing employee searches and modifying content, delivery methods, and results based on patterns of behavior. Think of how many places we ask employees to look for the data they need to do their jobs—in our InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Search Survey of 552 business technology professionals, fully 13 search tools registered double-digit usage levels. Very few are hitting across the spectrum; in fact, when we correlated the number of organizations that search all key data repositories, allow expanded e-mail search, support desktop search engines, and use a common Internet search engine, we got a big fat zero.
Implementing such a broad, federated system is technically viable right now, and it's worth doing: Enterprise search has the potential to dynamically alter how our people work and produce a dramatic boost in productivity. The holdup is about organizational change: A new level of trust and control must be given to IT, and that means rehashing old battles around privacy, information access, and the technologist's role. In this report we'll take a look at the challenges that must be overcome to implement a true enterprise search platform. The target: A utopian state of search that lets an employee query all the core information inside the network while also leveraging the external browsing and search patterns of fellow workers. Along the way, organizations will be able to map their current search capabilities and identify ways to ready their systems for the future. (360209)
Survey Name: InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Search Survey
Survey Date: November 2008
Region: North America
Number of Respondents: 552
Table of Contents
5 Author’s Bio
6 Executive Summary
7 Research Synopsis
8 Time To Take A Fresh Look At Search
9 Impact Assessment
13 The Desktop Search Impact
16 Tying In The Web
19 If It’s There, We’ll Find It
21 Data Selection: Unleash The Potential
24 The Mail Challenge
26 Security Concerns
29 User Acceptance
30 Google Vs. Microsoft: Cost Calculations
31 Cost Comparison Table
32 Comparing Apples And Oranges
34 Role Of E-Discovery
35 Anatomy Of An E-Discovery Request
36 Moving Forward
38 Tips And Recommendations
39 ROI Analysis: Enterprise Search
41 The ROI Conundrum
41 If We Build It, Will They Come?
43 Appendix
About the Author
Mike Healey is the president of Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and research firm focusing on maximizing technology investments for organizations, and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. He has more than 23 years experience in technology and software integration.
Prior to founding Yeoman, Mike served as the CTO of national network integrator GreenPages. He joined GreenPages as part of the acquisition of TENCorp, where he served as president for 14 years. Prior to founding TENCorp, Mike was an international project manager for Nixdorf Computer and a Notes consultant for Sandpoint Corp.
Mike has taught courses at MIT Lowell Institute and Northeastern University and has served on the Educational Board of Advisers for several schools and universities throughout New England. He has a BA in operations management from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MBA from Babson College.
He is a regular contributor for InformationWeek, focusing on the business challenges related to implementing technology. His work includes analysis of the SaaS market, green IT and operational readiness related to virtualized environments.
