The Curse of Enterprise Search and How to Break It by Maish Nichani.
From the post:
The Curse
Got enterprise search? Try answering these questions: Are end users happy? Has decision-making improved? Productivity up? Knowledge getting reused nicely? Your return-on-investment positive? If you’re finding it tough to answer these questions then most probably you’re under the curse of enterprise search.
The curse is cast when you purchase an enterprise search software and believe that it will automagically solve all your problems the moment you switch it on. You believe that the boatload of money you just spent on it justifies the promised magic of instant findability. Sadly, this belief cannot be further from the truth.
Search needs to be designed. Your users and content are unique to your organisation. Search needs to work with your users. It needs to make full use of the type of content you have. Search really needs to be designed.
Don’t believe in the curse? Consider these statistics from the Enterprise Search and Findability Survey 2013 done by Findwise with 101 practitioners working for global companies:
- Only 9% said it was easy to find the right information within the organisation
- Only 19% said they were happy with the existing search application in their organisation
- Only 20% said they had a search strategy in place
Just in case you need some more numbers when pushing your better solution to enterprise search.
I wonder how search customers would react to an application that made it easy to find the right data 20% of the time?
Just leaving room for future versions and enhancements. 😉
Maish isn’t handing out silver bullets but a close read will improve your search application (topic map or not).
[…] the enterprise search bar is at 9%, the Internet search bar is even […]
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