The list might be a bit long in tooth, but valuable nontheless to see it laid out explicitly. My current organisation is one of Martin’s customers and to pick up on his comments, we have recently had presentations from many vendors (environmental scanning) – and they all answer that question with “we have a customer who is XXX big, and is searching a corpus of XXX TB and manages with 1.5 FTE administrators” – totally missing Martin’s point ref taxonomy, content management, ‘user liaison and training’ etc in other words the ‘organisation’ bits of Information Organisation and Access.

Can I emphasis the comment you make in #1 in your excellent list. I have seen so many companies install a search application without any understanding of what it takes in staff terms to implement it.

My view is that the skills needed are a) a search manager, b) someone with the IT skills to maintain and optimise all the technology, c) someone who is going to work through the search logs and d) someone who is going to provide user support and training, and run usability tests. Depending on the application you may also need taxonomy/meatadata management support.

At a recent conference I sat next to a sales person from FAST Search who said that I was way over the top and just two people would be needed. When he presented the latest technology from FAST later in the conference he had a question from the audience about whether FAST could assist in developing taxonomies. He replied that the organisation would have do to that work. So who was going to actually do it – fairies?

I would go so far as to say that if there is not the commitment from the organisation to provide the support team up front at #1 then there is no point in doing any more of the steps.

Until search vendors come clean on what it takes to make search work, and organisations invest in a search team, all the prior work so clearly set out in your 12 steps is going to be wasted.

Martin White