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Data Management: Four Criteria for Ranking Search Effectiveness
Despite the advances i nsearch technology, companies still struggle to quickly locate and retrieve information that they’re searching for. A survey from MindMetre Research and Smartlogic estimates that 52 percent of senior managers and directors at US and major European of organizations aren’t able to quickly locate the documents and information they’re looking for because the information has been poorly or incorrectly classified.
When these managers were queried about what they perceived as being an acceptable amount of time to search for data, 65 percent indicated that they shouldn’t need to search any longer than two minutes. 90 percent said that searches longer than four minutes were totally unacceptable. 27 percent said that four-minute-plus searches were routine for their organizations.
Jeremy Bentley, Chief Executive at Smartlogic, says: “This research shows that much of the work generated by most enterprises remains unlabeled and therefore invisible. The result is that a great deal of employee time is lost fruitlessly searching for information assets, many of which are never found, and the costs are huge. This and other studies have shown that this wasted labour can add up millions of dollars, pounds and euros in lost wages – equivalent to maybe 10% of the total salary bill for a large organisation. And in the end, most organisations are still failing to leverage their most valuable information assets.
The Smartlogic research then turned towards specific industry segments to compare the efficiencies of search by industry. The industries were graded against the following four criteria:
Enterprise Search Effectiveness — a measure of how easy it is find internal documents and files
Information Categorization Effectiveness — a measure of how consistent the organization is in assigning tags and metadata to documents
Fragmentation of Information Systems — a measure of how centralized information management in the organization is across departments. Considers number of systems, databases and formats.
Categorization and Search Progress and Investment — a measure of how the organization is attempting to improve the findability of their information
The industry rankings are as follows. The higher percentage is a better score and represents better efficiencies in the ability to locate information:
- 49 percent – Extraction Industries
- 41 percent – Law and Order / Emergency Services
- 41 percent – Insurance and Financial Services
- 40 percent – Education
- 40 percent – Government
- 39 percent – Healthcare
- 37 percent – Manufacturing
- 37 percent – Inforamtion and Research
- 34 percent – Banking
- 33 percent – Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals
- 32 percent – Aerospace
- 32 percent – Hi-tech and IT
The report notes that the more an industry tends to rely on unstructured rather than structured information, the lower their score and the more difficult it is to develop a program or system for searching their information.
