Enterprise Search-Splaining: Obfuscating Cost and Value Yet Again
April 8, 2015
When a bean counter tallies up the cost of an enterprise search system, the reaction, in my experience, is, “How did we get to this number?” The question is most frequently raised in larger organizations, and it is one to which enterprise search staff and their consultants often have no acceptable answer.
Search-splainers position the cost overruns, diminish the importance of the employees’ dissatisfaction with the enterprise search system, and unload glittering generalities to get a consulting deal. Meanwhile, enterprise search remains a challenged software application.
Consulting engineers, upgrades, weekend crash recoveries, optimizing, and infrastructure hassles balloon the cost of an enterprise search system. At some point, a person charged with figuring out why employees are complaining, implementing workarounds, and not using the system have to be investigated. When answers are not satisfying, financial meltdowns put search vendors out of business. Examples range from Convera and the Intel and NBA matters to the unnoticed death of Delphes, Entopia, Siderean, et al.
Search to most professionals, regardless of occupation, means Google. Bang in a word or two and Google delivers the bacon or the soy bean paste substitute. Most folks do not know the difference, nor, in my view, do they care. Google is how one finds information.
The question, “Why can’t enterprise search be like Google?”
Another question, “How can a person with a dog in the search find search-plain; that is, “prove” how important search is to kith and kin, truth and honor, sales and profit.
For most professionals, search Google style is “free.” The perception is fueled with the logs of ignorance. Google is providing objective information. Google is good. Google is the yardstick by which enterprise search is measured. Enterprise search comes up short. Implement a Google Search Appliance, and the employees don’t like that solution either.
What’s up?
Inside an organization, finding information is an essential part of a job. One cannot work on a report unless that person can locate information about the topic. Most of the data are housed in emails, PowerPoints, multiple drafts of Word documents stuffed with change tracking emendations, and maybe some paper notes. In some cases, a professional will have to speak face to face or via the phone to a colleague. The information then requires massaging, analysis, and reformation.
Ah, the corporate life is little more than one more undergraduate writing assignment with some Excel tossed in.
I marveled at the “statistics” in “The Hidden Price of Weak Enterprise Search: Tips to Make Knowledge More Accessible across Your Organization.” Consider these data points:
- Workers spend 30 percent (more or less) of their time searching for information. The source is none other than a questionable analysis cranked out by the search “experts” at IDC. The number has been repeated so often it is a mantra like the Saturday Night Live catchphrase, “Duh Bears.” In the organizations in which I have had an opportunity to observe “work”, information comprises the bulk of the work day. In one Japanese client, the purpose of golf was to exchange, verify, and question information. Information, in today’s world, is therefore the muscle and nerves of work. Unless the Amazon warehouse employee knows what to do to fill an order, the worker will be faced with some hard choices and quickly. Did anyone ask this question about the well worn IDC “truth”: Is it accurate?
- An organization “with 1,000 knowledge workers wasting nearly $2.5 million per year due to an inability to retrieve information.” What a crazy generalization. If information is, as I have suggested, the muscle and fiber of the organization, the amount of money “wasted” is likely to be difficult to figure out. Fail to land that Department of Defense contract and lose the hundreds of millions it represents. Since a capture team may number fewer than 20 individuals, the penalty is severe. What about a trucking company whose driver goes the wrong way and drops a must have shipment at the wrong destination. The cost is lower, but it may be tough to calculate the cost of the information error because fumbles have an echoing effect. In short, plucking a number from a mid tier consulting firm is an example of reasoning from baloney. That happens frequently when analyzing enterprise search. Did anyone ask the question, “How the heck did you calculate this figure since most businesses are quite small so $2.5 million might be more than the company’s annual turnover?
- The third “fact” comes from another mid tier consulting firm: “10 percent of a company’s salary costs are lost as employees search for adequate and accurate information to finish assigned tasks.” That sounds low to me. If you have worked at a relatively sophisticated company, salary costs are punishing. A foul up can have more massive impacts. The “number” ponied around as rock solid is essentially baloney. Again the question: What was the methodology behind this number 10?
Annoying details. One company president of a search start up about $25 million in hock to a couple of funding sources, “We have been in business for five years, but we are a start up. We need time to implement our strategy.”
Okay, another 20 something getting ready to find his future elsewhere. I issued two test news releases. One was about a term no one had ever user before. The other was about a desktop search system that could scale to the enterprise. The search news release attracted only 25 percent of the opens that the made up term pulled.
What’s this suggest? I thought, “Maybe no one cares about search?”
I know that information is important, but it remains difficult to quantify and generalizations about the cost and value of search are, in my experience, specious.
How does one remediate or implement enterprise search to avoid the rampage of the accountant matching expenditures for enterprise search with the budget estimates?
The write up provides a list of three tips, and each of these is a truism. For example, what is the “collective knowledge” of an enterprise? In most organizations, information is housed in silos and access is carefully controlled as a standard management operating procedure. The Amazon warehouse worker or the Google ad sales person does not need to know what is part of the “collective knowledge” of other executives and professionals.
The idea that next generation search technologies will solve the problem. In my new monograph, CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access, I relegate search to the utility function. The methods embodied in next generation systems are not focused on traditional search. The history of search failures is long, rich, and not well understood. Search, in my experience, is not the solution. Search is a tiny portion of the next generation systems, and it is likely to become increasingly less of a factor as predictive methods gain acceptance.
Third, identifying “key information sources” is not going to work. Most professionals do not and cannot know what information is available. Silos do not communicate for personal, regulatory, contractual, or security reasons. Asking an employee what he or she needs occupies time and generates consulting revenues, but the outcomes are usually references to Google and to bafflement when the secret research facility is mentioned as the “place” where the hard to find information resides.
The “value” argument falls on its sword with its reference to “federated search” and “semantic search.” These functions have utility, but these are not solutions. Federation is tough because information needed by employees is for the aforementioned reasons not likely to be gathered in one place, updated frequently, and made available widely. The hoo hah about semantic search is yet another buzzword that sounds good but does not translate into value.
What concerns me is that sliced and processed generalizations are presented as methods for delivering value.
After decades of work, enterprise search vendors continue to struggle to close deals, generate sustainable revenues, and implement systems which employees find satisfactory.
Is it the technology? Is it the limited capabilities of the employees using the systems? Is it the nature of marketing? Is it a lack of understanding about what findability requires?
These are difficult questions, and ones that have to be addressed before making the leap to value.
A failure to consider information access means an uncomfortable visit with the person who has to reconcile the direct and indirect costs of an enterprise search system with the perceived value of the system.
Why not avoid that meeting and shift from a fixation on search to a different mindset? After 40 years of effort from enterprise search vendors, assorted consultants dim and bright, and hundreds of millions in funding—enterprise search remains a bit of a challenge.
Only one constant persists: The ersatz recycled to create explanations of value.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2015
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