Boomers and Millennials: Implications for Enterprise Search
June 20, 2008
Enterprise Search and the Age Gap
Employees, contractors, and consultants are becoming younger. For enterprise search, aging boomers are leaving the work force and younger employees moving in.
En route from San Francisco to the less civilized environs of rural Kentucky, I made a list of the differences between Millennials and Baby Boomers. Millennials are all digital all the time. Baby Boomers have luggage stuffed with printed books, paper calendars, and blank notebooks in which one letter at a time can be written using a pencil. For simplicity, I will call the Millennials the younger workers, and the Baby Boomers the aging dinosaurs. Keep in mind that you may be 25 and as mired in books and microfilm as an ossified Baby Boomer. The categories are not absolute. The two part division is intended to make it easy for me to communicate my thoughts about the changes wrought upon search as as Baby Boomers become the minority in organizations and Millennials become the majority.
I want to alert you that any one under the age of 35 will probably be annoyed at my thoughts. But this is a Web log, and I am going to capture these notions before I pass out from the brutalities of a red-eye flight seated next to the lavatory. In short, another red eye, another Web log essay about enterprise search from a different angle.
The generational differences mark a clean break with key word search and retrieval systems of the past and point to more sophisticated and complex information access solutions more youthful enterprise system users require.
Seven Differences between a Young Professional and a Near Retirement Professional
Difference 1: Under 35s don’t read anything long. I have the impression that the under 35 enterprise search user wants short, chunky information from search systems. Systems that return long documents that have to be printed out, annotated, and studies are not what users of search systems want from their information access systems. Over 55s (yes, I am generalizing) may not like long documents, but I for one will slog through this stuff. There may be gold in those hills, I think.
Difference 2: Under 35s want to have search suggestions, assisted navigation, Use For references, and See Also hints. Over 55s like me don’t have much resistance to formulating a query, scanning results, reformulating the query, scanning results, and finally narrowing the result set to a useful collection of documents which can then one-by-one be reviewed. I love shortcuts, but research is research.
Difference 3: Under 35s seem to have the uncanny ability to do several electronic tasks at once. At the Gilbane conference I watched as professional journalists listened to a speaker, sent messages on a BlackBerry, and chatted with the person sitting next to her. I am lucky if I can listen to the speaker; forget the digital activity. Over 55s are less adept multi taskers. The reason the BART train was speeding and crashed into a stopped train appears to have been a young train driver who was chatting on a mobile and controlling the subway train. I prefer single task focus to avoid collisions.
Difference 4: Under 35s are cheerful in the face of digital disasters; for example, the content management system and the enterprise search system the 35 year old installed don’t work very well. I listened as this individual told a conferee, “It’s fixable.” Over 55s know that certain systems are not fixable and are willing to set aside fraternity rush good cheer and figure out how to admit there’s a problem and take steps to remediate the situation. Yes, some search systems are really bad but telling people “it’s fixable” is silly.
Difference 5: Under 35s are inventing things and explaining innovations that are not. At one meeting in San Francisco on Thursday, an under 35 told me, “I am going to learn about taxonomy. I never realized how useful this innovation can be to enterprise search.” Okay, taxonomies are newly discovered. Over 55s know that the notion of classifying and indexing has been around. Some over 55s used steel file cabinets and had to label folders to contain information and documents about that topic. The “new discoveries” that so excite the under 35s are revelatory about a certain shallowness that afflicts some of these high achievers.
Difference 6: Under 35s like the next big thing. Example: social software. I listened to a clear explanation of social software making it possible for a group of people to exchange information via the network in an organization. The idea was so fascinating to this person that social functions became more important than existing systems that perform similar functions like email, security which was dismissed as “you control who sees the content”, and cost which was not an issue due to the value of the social search system. Great idea but it may run into some administrative rework in certain work environments.
Difference 7: Watching for waves is more natural than diving for pearls. Example: the interest in software and systems that identify and alert a person to trends is increasing. Over 55s find trends and Top 10 lists interesting but not as substantive as in-depth research. Data are good. The surface ripples of data are not significant insights by themselves. I like the context. When trying to figure out how Microsoft’s new search innovation will give it a leg up on Google, I want to know who worked on the project, the backgrounds of those individuals, and context into which the innovation fits.
Now, let’s look at the implications of my assertions.
Implications for Search and Content Processing
The table below provides a summary of the seven points, and I have boiled down the implications to a handful of words.
| Difference | Implication for Search |
| Short answers or brief text snippets | Long documents must be reduced; users want answers, not laundry lists |
| Search training wheels | Eliminate the need to type Boolean queries or formulate long written questions |
| Multiples functions at one time | A dashboard style interface to display multiple views or outputs in one display |
| Any system can be fixed | Upgrade and enhance even though core functions do not work as advertised |
| Functions that may be duplicative | Add features even though redundant to the system |
| New features often | Upgrade, enhance, add on |
| Depth of results returned | Provide alerts, easy-to-digest reports, two or three sentence summaries |
If I am correct to some reasonable extent, enterprise search systems have to match the informational behaviors and preferences of the users. In an organization with the majority of its employees under 40, enterprise search is not what the users want. Assume that an organization has half its employees over 50 and the other half under 50 years of age. The search system is the BRS Search from OpenText, a vendor of content and information access solutions. BRS is an old-line system, and you search using command line instructions. The approach will be inappropriate for the under 50 employees. In fact, the Boolean handcuffs will chaff the under 50 constituency. Furthermore, not many “youthful” employees will want to go through this procedure:
- Formulate a Boolean query
- Review results
- Refine the query
- Output bibliographic citations
- Find the source document in electronic or hard copy
- Read, review, or flip through the source documents
- Identify the documents that are germane to the query
- Extract the specific information needed.
The information access system is going to need completely different functions. The user will type a key word or two, scan hot links that provide Use For or See Also links, look at hints, and digest summaries and graphics that contain important information. The system outputs should be compact and offer a formatted report option. Data should be automatically converted to a graphic with the underlying data available with a mouse click. Choices should be abundant and ease of use paramount.
The expectations of the more youthful user of an enterprise search system point away from traditional key word search and to more sophisticated information manipulation functions. The search vendors who appear to be enjoying the most robust sales in today’s miserable economic climate in the US are vendors who:
- Deliver point and click interfaces
- Minimize the need for Boolean queries
- Generate Use For and See Also references along with entity extraction and on the fly classification
- Allow interfaces to be modified or swapped out
- Eliminate the need for training
- Output reports or formatted results so a user can query and distribute, not query and do traditional college-type research.
The differences then boil down to one key point: today’s information access systems are no longer search and retrieval systems. What the youthful online user of a behind the firewall system wants is an information application, probably an information application that adapts to whatever the user must do at a particular point in time and in a specific work context. Search is one tiny part of a far larger, more diverse, and necessarily complex information access system.
If you are under 35, please, set me straight. I am drifting farther and farther away from the noise and excitement of Silicon Valley zeal. Keep in mind that you, gentle reader, will be 64 and look back on the changes in your life time, longing for the good old days.
Stephen Arnold, June 20, 2008
Comments
4 Responses to “Boomers and Millennials: Implications for Enterprise Search”
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A really excellent essay. You should travel on the red-eye more often! I’d like to suggest one further differentiation. For under 35s speed is everything. Over this age we almost like the idea that the system is a little slow – it’s working hard for us and that hard work will result in quality information. The most useless piece of data in the world is the speed at which Google conducted a search. A search for Enterprise Search in Google today found 1.9 million results in 0.16 seconds. Who cares it took 0.16 seconds?
The implications for search? Any performance degradation will be seen as incompetence. Drag-and-drop management of visual GUIs will have to work in absolute real time. Addressing these and other ‘speed’ issues is not just a server/network management problem but goes to the heart of bloated code that needs a serious reworking if only the vendor had enough customers who cared enough to pay for the revision. Even the under-35s will not pay for it though – they will expect it.
@Martin White
Speed isn’t everyting, the impression of speed is everything.
The search does not have to be lightning quick, but you will have to provide the impression that it is.
I have also noticed that for many users the question is not how to get the results, but how can they work with the output. If they are searching for a specific document, presenting them with a google style result list is brilliant, but many users wants to take the results and perform operations on the entire output of their searches.
And finally a question, How do you go forward to eliminate the need for training?
The users are already trained by Google to enter 2-3 keywords and click search. On the web there is about one document pr user, while on a intranet it is easily 10-50 000 documents for each user. Using keyword searches on the intranet results in very generic result lists.
Andreas
Andreas
Good comments. I agree with your ‘impression of speed’ but I think in essence we are agreeing. On the training issue there is just no way that users can be trained on an individual basis with typically 15%+ staff turnover each year. One of the problems is that search usability is poor and rarely provides a dialogue with the user. We focus too much on getting 10 hits on the first page. The pioneering work on this was carried out by Marcia Bates and there is a good blog on her current research, and on the information foraging work at PARC at http://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/2007/10/17/marcia-bates-what-is-browsing/
In terms of your second comment, and linking into the above, it always seems strange to me that search vendors do not provide multiple window / quasi portal options (Steve may know of some!) so that you can maintain multiple views of various sets of results rather than have to click endless back buttons etc
Martin
@Martin
We have multiple (paper) prototypes available for these unfortunately we have not found any clients willing to pay for developing the actual product, so our development resources are spent on other projects.
When it comes to minimizing the need for training, one option is to integrate search tightly into every aspect of the users routines, and invade their existing GUI.
A common request from recruitment companies are to export the list of possible candidates to other applications.
Andreas