Sinequa Reveals Users of Search Are Annoyed
April 9, 2008
— Enterprise Search’s Problems Exposed in a New Survey —
Sinequa (a business intelligence and search systems vendor based in Paris) has taken a bold and refreshingly candid step.
The company reported results of a survey of 200 office workers. The results run counter to the marketing blather about the efficacy of enterprise search, sometimes called behind-the-firewall search or Intranet search.
Competitors in the enterprise search space like Autonomy, Endeca, Fast Search & Transfer, and dozens of up-and-coming vendors rarely reveal data about installations gone wrong. Sinequa has exposed the massive failure of enterprise search by revealing the results of its study of 200 professionals using enterprise search at work.
These data suggest that nearly 60 percent of the workers participating in the survey said the tools their employers provide for search are “poor”. Almost 80 percent of the respondents reported that they would benefit from having access to timely information from across their organization.
The report in IWR (Information World Review, a unit of the VNU Network) said:
Despite 88 per cent of respondents’ employers investing in an intranet, none had looked at how to maximise the information on the intranet to help drive efficiencies in performance. In fact, just eight per cent of respondents have a tool allowing them to search information across the company using key search terms.
The lack of a search system that works has even broader implications:
In the past month alone 46 per cent of respondents said that they could count up to ten occasions when not having access to the right information had impaired their performance. 16 per cent could recall ten or more times when this had happened. A further 40 per cent said that finding the information to support the development of a business critical document takes two to three hours on average, with a quarter stating it could take three hours or more.
It’s easy to calculate the cost of a flawed search system. Take an average hourly wage–say, $50 / hour. This simple exercise converts search into more than an intellectual exercise. Search gone wrong costs a great deal of money.
A spokesperson for Sinequa is reported by VNU to have said that “businesses are seriously missing the trick”. Another VNU report of the Sinequa survey revealed:
Employees are struggling to find even basic information, which impacts their productivity on a day-to-day basis… The gap between what staff can do as consumers and what they can do as employees is causing employee frustration as well as limiting the value of corporate information.
These data back up the findings reported in Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work. That study reported results of a 2007 research project which found that two-thirds of the users of an enterprise search system were dissatisfied with the performance of their search tools.
Sinequa and Beyond Search reports of user frustration and annoyance seem out of step–particularly when viewed in the rosy light of the overwhelmingly upbeat reports of search success reported at such high-profile, search-centric industry events as Fast Forward (Microsoft – Fast Search & Transfer), Enterprise Search Summit (Information Today, Inc.), and the International Online Show (Incisive Media).
The clash of industry reports of success and the rumblings of user dissatisfaction raise serious questions about the reality of enterprise search systems in actual use. Search pundits and consultants rarely talk about systems that go off track. If the Sinequa data are accurate and if the data in the new Gilbane study about search are on track–the high-flying enterprise search sector may be running short of fuel.
This Web log will feature an interview with the founder of Sinequa on April 21, 2008, as part of ArnoldIT.com’s “Search Wizards Speak” feature.
Stephen Arnold, April 9, 2008
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2 Responses to “Sinequa Reveals Users of Search Are Annoyed”
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I have no doubt about the outcomes of the Sinequa survey. They match the survey of 170 organisations carried out in 2007 by Jane McConnell (http://netjmc.com) which showed that more than 50% or respondents felt that their search application was unsatisfactory.
Two other studies, which have not been widely reported, also confirm the bad news. In January 2007 Accenture issued a press release about a study of 1000 managers in the US and UK (http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4484) that reported that “Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them.” The full report has not been published.
A report that has seen the light of day was released in March 2008 by the UK office of Capgemini (http://www.uk.capgemini.com/news/pr/pr1605/ ) in which senior managers from 120 large UK companies were interviewed. Over 60% of those interviewed said that on at least five occasions each week they had to make decisions without the best available information.
Although both reports are not directly about search failure it is implicit in the results of the surveys.
I’m not sure that the fault lies only with the search vendors, or the presentations at conferences that talk about how well the installation went. If there was no search there before any search application will be impressive. The problem lies more with the CIO who has no knowledge of enterprise search, and so does not appreciate how much human effort has to go into tuning the search application.
This is where I do think the vendors are being less than helpful because I cannot find on the site of any search vendor a briefing paper on what it takes to make enterprise search successful. Look at any book store and there are a host of books on almost every aspect of IT. However in this century there has been just one book published on intranets, and two (mine and yours) on search implementation.
At the Enterprise Search Summit this year (http://www.enterprisesearchsummit.com/ ) I am giving the opening paper and you are giving the closing paper. Time for some plain speaking from both of us!
Martin White
Intranet Focus Ltd
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