The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Enterprise Search: Below the Mark
Almost half of enterprise workers (49 percent) say that searching for enterprise data is time consuming and frustrating. That’s according to a new study called Findability prepared by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).
Workers are spending about 10 hours a week looking for information, but aren’t successful about half of the time.
The market and need for enterprise search is there and the expectations are high, but vendors are having a lot of trouble coming up with an enterprise search product that meets people’s requirements. Or so it would seem — actually, digging deeper we see that a lot of the problem isn’t a software one, it’s more a problem of strategy and approach taken by many organizations.
Part of the problem is that most enterprises have not implemented centralized search or have limited the information that the search system has access to. Much of the corporate information is stored somewhere that’s not accessible by the rest of the organization. As much as 50 percent of enterprise information is not published for corporate-wide viewing.
Many organizations aren’t even aware that there’s a problem. Again, nearly 50 percent of organizations say that they have no formal goal to improve ‘findability’ in their organization. Only ten percent of those surveyed felt that improving ‘findability’ was a problem and needed to be addressed.
An IDC report on search in the enterprise found similar results. That report found that many users are frustrated with the tools provided by their organizations and often by-pass them by trying to search for relevant data on the web.
As with many new technologies, vendors are in a position now where they need to provide education for their customers to be successful. Until enterprises understand the problem and how best to address it, search systems will be missing the mark of people’s expectations.
