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Enterprise Search: Great ROI, but Few Takers
What with more than 50 companies offering enterprise search products, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo and others, you’d think that Search would be flourishing in the Enterprise. But numbers from InformationWeek paint a surprisingly different picture.
The fact is that very very few organizations are using any kind of Enterprise Search. The InformationWeek survey drilled into the numbers. Only 24% of companies have tried to deploy any sort of enterprise search, and less than 8% of those companies try to hook their search capabilities up across multiple repositories, whether it be ECM, SharePoint, CRM or email — which works out to only 2% of companies doing some sort of federated search.
With all the hubbub around enterprise search, the results seemed underwhelming. Without search, employees toil hours looking for data or pieces of information needed to do their job; and with search, search time is rapid and productivity skyrockets. Seems like a no-brainer. Enterprise search should bring with it great ROI, and you’d expect organizations to be all over it. But the problem is that nothing is ever that easy.
The InformationWeek report found that technology isn’t what’s holding organizations back. The problem is something that they term the 3 P’s: politics, privacy and perception. Despite the fact that many companys’ email policy is that email is owned by the company, companies are very reluctant to tread on the privacy of the email recipients. In fact, only 3 percent of companies are actually allowing some sort of email search across employees on the same project or team.
Many companies also worry about how to handle support for users when search comes up empty-handed. When something can’t be found, who’s responsibility is it to track down that piece of information? Or if it should have been in an email, why can’t it be found?
Maybe it is only a matter of time before companies will begin to realize the potential of Enterprise Search.
