Enterprise Search: Is It Really a Loser?
November 5, 2014
I read “Enterprise Search: Despite Benefits, Few Organizations Use Enterprise Search.” The headline caught my attention. In my experience, most organizations have information access systems. Let me give you several recent examples:
- US government agency. This agency licenses technology from a start up called Red Owl Analytics. That system automatically gathers and makes available information pertinent to the licensing agency. One of the options available to the licensee is to process information that is available within the agency. The system generates outputs and there are functions that allow a user to look for information. I am reasonably confident that the phrase “enterprise search” would not be applied to this company’s information access system. Because Red Owl fits into a process for solving a business problem, the notion of “enterprise search” would be inappropriate.
- Small accounting firm. This company uses Microsoft Windows 7. The six person staff uses a “workgroup” method that is easy to set up and maintain. The Windows 7 user can browse the drives to which access has been granted by the part time system administrator. When a person needs to locate a document, the built in search function is used. The solution is good enough. I know that when Windows-centric, third party solutions were made known to the owner, the response was, “Windows 7 search is good enough.”
- Large health care company with dozens of operating units. The company has been working to integrate certain key systems. The largest on-going project is deploying a electronic health care system. Each of the units has legacy search technology. The most popular search systems are those built into applications used every day. Database access is provided by these applications. One unit experimented with a Google Appliance and found that it was useful to the marketing department. Another unit has a RedDot content management system and has an Autonomy stub. The company has no plans, as I understand it, to make federated enterprise search a priority. There is no single reason. Other projects have higher priority and include a search function.
If my experience is representative (and I am not suggesting what I have encountered is what you will encounter), enterprise search is a tough sell. When I read this snippet, I was a bit surprised:
Enterprise search tools are expected to improve and that may improve uptake of the technology. Steven Nicolaou, Principal Consultant at Microsoft, commented that “enterprise search products will become increasingly and more deeply integrated with existing platforms, allowing more types of content to be searchable and in more meaningful ways. It will also become increasingly commoditized, making it less of a dark art and more of a platform for discovery and analysis.”
What this means is that the company that provides “good enough” search baked into an operating system (think Windows) or an application (think about the search function in an electronic health record), there will be little room for a third party to land a deal in most cases.
The focus in enterprise search has been off the mark for many years. In fact, today’s vendors are recycling the benefits and features hawked 30 years ago. I posted a series of enterprise search vendor profiles at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles. If you work through that information, you will find that the marketing approaches today are little more than demonstrations of recycling.
The opportunity in information access has shifted. The companies making sales and delivering solid utility to licensees are NOT the companies that beat the drum for customer support, indexing, and federated search.
The future belongs to information access systems that fit into mission critical business processes. Until the enterprise search vendors embrace a more innovative approach to information access, their future looks a bit cloudy.
In cooperation with Telestrategies, we may offer a seminar that talks about new directions in information access. The key is automation, analytics, and outputs that alert, not the old model of fiddling with a query until the index is unlocked and potentially useful information is available.
If you want more information about this invitation only seminar, write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com, and I will provide more information.
Stephen E Arnold, November 5, 2014
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