Polyspot examines benefits of enterprise search

Marc Quantrill, UK manager of Polyspot, has examined the advantages of web 2.0 and enterprise search and how each should form an integral part of business productivity.

Where does the word 'quid', slang for the British pound, originate? In unison, the office replies: 'Google it'.

In some areas of business the Google effect has contributed to the widespread and mistaken perception that search is little more than a white search box adorned with the occasional appealing graphic highlighting a specific festivity that is being celebrated on that particular day.

However, in reality, and when working within the enterprise, the Google approach really doesn't work.

We want access to information that isn't based just on simple page ranking of what other people have asked for, looked for or perceive as relevant, as this usually is of no consequence.

We need to find that unique piece of information that we are seeking and the search engine really has to try to interpret our purpose.

All in all, we want the simplicity of web search, but applied to very complex and security sensitive enterprise information.

We want it to be located through a user-friendly interface for easy and efficient access; we want it better organised for us; and we want to have the ability simply to select filters in order easily to drill down to the very crux of what we're trying to find.

But, by itself, the search function has limited value.

Searching within the enterprise isn't just about finding information; in reality that's just the starting point.

To be valuable to a business, an employee executing a search within the enterprise does so with the intention of doing something significant and profitable with the information being sought and found.

Enterprise search also has to be an integral part of business productivity.

Enterprise search has opened the doors to content.

The next step is to provide tools to make sense of the overwhelming amount of information.

Enterprise search has already made the transition from departmental uses to enterprise-wide adoption across many industries.

Long gone are the days when only specialised information professionals carried out enterprise search.

But enterprise search is often criticised for failing to deliver.

Now a growing number of professional users, all of whom have diverse needs and expectations, have become everyday searchers.

However, these users are now demanding far more than just search.

Yes, a key factor is that users want to find specific documents, pages, reports and so on, but they also want to contribute.

This new wave of users is often described as 'digital natives', people who have grown up using and are experienced in digital technology.

These users are now entering the workplace and have a high expectation of information technology being collaborative.

The emergence of collaborative tools such as social tagging, social networking, wikis and other web 2.0 phenomena is having a profound impact within the enterprise.

Gartner reported that by the end of 2007, 30 per cent of all large corporations had web 2.0 applications enabled within their organisations.

But as the adoption of web 2.0 functionality hits the enterprise, a question still remains: how can enterprises effectively integrate these web-based tools into their corporate infrastructure to increase employee collaboration? Many enterprises are now debating how to, or whether to, bring social networking to the enterprise.

The simplicity and interactivity of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia have changed the nature of users' interaction with information, so users are demanding such services within the enterprise.

However, many corporate IT decision makers are frightened off adopting such initiatives as they fear the potential of wild and unruly wikis, blogs and social networks impacting the normal conservative approach in corporate IT, and therefore often highlight such initiatives as too risky for the enterprise.

IT functions must start to understand that Enterprise 2.0 (web 2.0 inside corporates) is not only unavoidable but a necessity, and plan how to manage, harness and gain value from these technologies.

Applied in the right way, enterprise implementations of web 2.0 type technologies have enormous potential business benefits.

One of the key benefits seen is the ability to bring people together and to share information.

Users are empowered as key contributors of information and knowledge.

This approach fosters a sense of ownership, collaboration and community - key factors that enterprises continuously try to encourage in the workplace.

In the realm of collaborative, user-generated information resources, good information handling is critical.

Without a guiding hand, wikis, blogs and social networks can become competing, contradictory and even libellous sources of information.

The right tools create links automatically to relevant content, alert authors to similar information elsewhere, reduce de-duplication of users' efforts, detect modifications to content, interpret conceptually the meaning of the information in order to flag potentially damaging views and thus ensure good corporate policing, reducing the risk to business.

Added to the challenges and expectations set by web 2.0, users now expect a more seamless and consistent experience over every touch-point, be it a physical store, online shop, mobile device, website, contact centre or intranet.

Information synchronisation between these channels is essential to avoid any inconsistencies that might be damaging to the business.

A multichannel user experience can increase retention rates, cross-selling and customer satisfaction, cutting the costs and boosting revenues.

The technical issues of trying to keep all channels updated can be easily resolved through powerful tools such as automation and real-time indexing and processing in addition to the unique opportunity of accessing the same content through multi-channels.

The foundation and fabric of a business today is information: the amount of information that we consume, as well as the data that is generated, is growing even more rapidly than expected.

This rate has been quantified at about 40 per cent per annum.

The information explosion in the workplace has imposed new performance pressures on employees, who now work with an overwhelming amount of data and struggle to make sense of what they find.

Enterprise search isn't simply about investigating content, it's about being able to apply the knowledge gathered and using it to benefit the business you're driving.

It's about real people, needing the right tools, to help them get their jobs done more quickly and efficiently.

Today's technology users are demanding easy-to-use interfaces, not only to find information, but to be able to act on it.

They are starting to extend the user interface model into the user experience model.

For too long the large enterprise search vendors have ignored the rapidly evolving needs of businesses.

Ease of use is just as important, and in some cases more important, than understanding the algorithms cranking away at the back end.

The focus should always be on solving customer problems first, raising overall organisational productivity and working together effectively.

While underlying technologies may be able to access many sources, it's the ability to present information effectively and then act on it through simple and intuitive user interfaces that makes an enterprise search provider stand out.

It is perceived by many IT analysts that enterprise social software is an early stage market that's in the process of emerging.

However, many information access and content management vendors already provide platforms which support features for social software.

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