Enterprise Search: Still Not a Reality For Most Organizations

The goals and benefits of true Enterprise Search still elude most organizations.   While Enterprise Search technology has made big strides over the last decade, most organizations either don’t use it or have introduced implementations that reach only into collaborative systems and the corporate intranet.  Surprisingly, a report by Forrester shows that of organizations using Enterprise Search only half have included content management systems and file shares in the realm of searchable data, and only 18 percent of organizations have included line-of-business applications as searchable content.  You might well ask then, what’s the point of implementing Enterprise Search?

The Forrester report shows that even in 2010 Knowledge Workers continue to complain that within their organizations that they are only able to find the information and documents that they are looking for about 50 percent of the time.  Many workers report that they prefer to search the Internet for information relevant to their job rather than use their internal search tools because it tends to be quicker and return relevant data more often.  Only 22 percent of workers say that they are using their company’s internet for finding and retrieving “team-only content”.

Forrester found that employees at large companies (>5000 employees) use enterprise search 30+ percent times more frequently than employees of smaller companies, but interestingly, both groups report spending significant amounts of time searching for information to perform their job.  Larger companies have more resources to build out the infrastructure needed for Enterprise Search, but even with Enterprise Search tools available, search continues to be a bottleneck for people to effectively do their job.

Not including all data stores into the range over which Enterprise Search can reach is one problem that impedes the effectiveness of search.  But there are also other problems that include out-of-date content and lack of information governance.  And perhaps the biggest roadblock to improvement is that many companies have still not made searchability of information in the enterprise a top priority.  While optimizing the findability of outward-facing web page data (SEO) is big business that many companies allocate large portions of their budget for, most companies do nothing to try to improve the findability of data within their organizations. Enterprise Search and Taxonomy projects are often at much lower priorities compared to other IT initiatives.  When IT managers were asked to rank the importance of various types of IT projects, Enterprise Search consistently ranked low.

So the problem may not be one so much related to issues in the technology.  Organizations needs to become better aware of the benefits that good search tools and information governance would have on both employee productivity and quality of work, and they need to make search a higher priority in their organizations.  And Knowledge Workers need to bring this to the attention of their employers.