Over the past fifteen years the globe has been privy to the wildest uncontrolled burst of communication technology growth ever seen. From global mobile phone network coverage, blogs, social networks, the digitisation of entire libraries; the list goes on and on. We as a civilisation are addicted to the creation and distribution of information--or at least what we perceive to be information—and our addiction is growing exponentially.
Where does this explosion in available information leave us? It reminds me a lot of an old episode of the Twilight Zone; there’s an old man who spends all his time reading books and wishes that he had all the time in the world to just read; one day he is miraculously granted this wish only to drop his glasses, break them, and be virtually blinded. We’ve been granted the wish of unlimited quantities of information – and along with that the ironic fact that we have a tremendously difficult job of finding it.
So what is the story like within the confines of a company network? Like lemmings off a cliff many companies have taken the holistic approach of replicating Google by indexing absolutely everything from the intranet to the kitchen sink (A small company I spoke with recently had 17 terabytes of data that they wanted indexed!) This brave approach to death by data is almost always destined for failure. Why? Because of badly managed enterprise search projects or faulty software? Not necessarily. The fundamental reason that little white search box on the top-right-hand corner of the intranet homepage is destined for failure is that it doesn’t actually solve the root problem: Finding answers and solving business problems.
There are hundreds of providers of enterprise search solutions on the market including Fast ESP, Autonomy, Sinequa that provide enterprise search solutions. However what many implementations fail to realise is that search, much like a highly tuned supply chain dedicated to solving the issue of the right component at the right time, must evolve within a company to provide the right information at the right time. We’ve moved on from the one-size-fits-all approach to Search, technology on its own is not the differentiator. Companies that have a well executed strategy around Search will quickly see how they can fix their glasses and focus on actually helping people get the answers they need, ignorance may never be bliss.