Martin White - Enterprise Search: Enhancing Business Performance

• 2015-10-09: First Release

No matter who they work for or what work they do, most people seem to want their internal search application to work like Google. When you ask what it is about Google Search that makes it so desirable, the response is usually about the very simple interface, the speed with which results are presented, and the high probability that the first page of results will provide at least a good start in the information discovery process. Thats quite an achievement for a company whose business is advertising and not search. The investment in research and development at Google reached $10 billion in 2014, and most of this is spent on nearly 20,000 staff. This effort was largely responsible for Google selling close to $60 billion of advertising in 2014. Does your organization spend 13% of its revenue on search?

There is more to the Google success story than technology. Website owners and contributors spend a considerable amount of time and effort to make sure that Google indexes their content and presents it at the highest possible position in a list of search results. However, internally, there are never any rewards for making sure that information is of the highest quality and presented in a way that will make it easy for the technology to work its retrieval magic. There is rarely more than one lonely person with the responsibility for supporting the search application and making sure that it is tuned to meet user requirements. Investment in search is never seen as a priority.

There is another aspect of Google Search that is not fully appreciated. For almost any search, the same information will be presented from multiple sources, be they restaurant reviews, airline flight times, or the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The real reason that people want Google is that they trust it to deliver something, even if not everything. For most purposes, something is good enough. If Google cannot find British Airways flight times from London to New York, then you can check out the airline or the airport or a multitude of other sources.

Inside an organization, information that cannot be found is information that, in effect, does not exist. It has vanished. Permanently. No one will ever see it again. There is a chance that a call to a colleague might result in a document with the anticipated title, but can you be certain it is the latest version? Something is not good enough. Meanwhile, the colleague might be annoyed to be interrupted yet again by other colleagues asking about the same document. In the course of writing this edition, I interviewed over 20 senior managers in a global business about their requirements for a proposed intranet upgrade. Within a minute of the introductions, without exception, they started to talk at length about the poor quality of the intranet search, and several wanted Google. I explained to them that the search application they had was significantly more powerful and had a wider range of functionality than a Google enterprise appliance. It came as quite a shock!

The fundamental problem is that organizations do not see information as an asset. They know how many desks there are, how much money is in the bank, the names of every employee and customer, and the depreciated value of buildings and IT hardware. They have no idea of the amount of information they have. The CIO might quote a total storage volume, but that is not the same as the amount of credible, trustworthy information. It is usually not until the intranet is migrated from a perfectly usable content management system (CMS) to SharePoint that the organization finds that it has perhaps 500,000 documents hidden (and I use the word advisedly) in the application.

CEOs, managers, and other leadership personnel are now beginning to appreciate that information that cannot be found and shared might well be putting their organizations at risk. All directors have a responsibility to minimize the risk profile of their organizations, but rarely does information risk appear explicitly on the risk register. If it did, the market demand for search would escalate exponentially. Information management and the currently more popular term of information governance are gradually moving center stage. Knowledge management still has a role to play, but as with Big Data, it is not easy to translate into improvements in revenues and profits. The impact of information is much easier to assess.

Google is certainly impressive, but it is not quite the information access panacea that it seems to be. Searching scholarly articles that have very few links is very challenging, which is why Google offers Google Scholar. Google knows that one size does not fit all, but that is a message lost on far too many IT managers. Entering search terms into the Google search box seems very easy, but why then are there books with several hundred pages of advice on how to get the best from Google? People need to be trained in how to search. Even Google is not totally intuitive.

This second edition is almost twice the length of the first edition, published in late 2012. The increase in size is not because there have been dramatic changes in technology, but rather, because in the previous edition I passed over subjects on search based on my own assumptions that they were already known. The feedback from readers was that I had skimmed over some topics, notably website search and user interface design. Moreover, both open source search and the search application in SharePoint 2013 have increased the awareness of what search can offer.