Thanks for posting. Costs rule search. Just like the college student who can’t manage a credit card, search vendors and licensees don’t understand the implications of moving forward with a debt. Flawed ROI calculations work in the same way. With rumors of two more search vendors going out of business or reinventing themselves today, I think we need to wear T shirts that say, Cost First, Then ROI.

Stephen Arnold

Given that you’ve cited me in your homily I feel honour bound to comment. You’ve covered virtually all the bases but there are still perhaps two left for me.

I too have immense respect for the work of Sue Feldman (Disclosure – I am an IDC alumni and proud of it!) but there is a danger of assuming that a quicker search is a better search. If you are just looking for a specific piece of information or a speecific document, perhaps in a call centre/help desk situation, then finding it more quickly is good. Consider the case when your company is defending a patent infringement action. With a poor ‘departmental-level’ search engine you might spend two minutes and find a couple of documents. With a well-tuned enterprise search engine it may take you twenty minutes to work through a search but you will feel much more confident going to court. So with a good search engine productivity might reduce but the result will be a significant benefit to the company.

When my clients ask me to help them develop an ROI for their search investment I ask to look at the business cases made for the last upgrade of their HR, ERP or finance system. Very rarely are there any real numbers – the case is made by a combination of “cost of staying in business” and the fact that the Senior VPs of HR, Operations and Finance are all on the Senior Management Committee. No one is going to challenge them on their home turf and in any case there is a respect for person concerned to make an informed judgement. In the case of search there is no VP Information Discovery (there should be) and the level of knowledge of the average CIO/CTO about search is weak. It does not help that although the CIO/CTO might be coming up with the budget no one in IT will use the search engine as they will have their stuff squirreled away on shared drives. The end result is that I can say “I’ll come up with an ROI so long as I can see an agreed ROI methodology for all other major IT investments that has been applied consistently”. I’m on safe territory!

There are some very sound ways that you can use to justify investment in search, but to find out what they are you will have to come to my presentation at Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/west/ or later this year buy the book that Steve and I are writing. Now that will be a good return on your investment

Martin White
Intranet Focus Ltd.