About five years ago, Enterprise Search was really hot. It was on almost every CIO’s radar, and leading vendors like Autonomy, Endeca, FAST and Verity were in high demand. Everybody agreed that organizations were drowning in massive amounts of digital content - from within and outside the enterprise. Different studies even showed that knowledge workers were losing up to 8 hours a week by searching for information to do their daily job. This definitely was a problem that needed solving, and out went numerous Requests for Proposals to the Enterprise Search vendors. Five years on, findability still is a major issue: Enterprise Search projects have caused a lot of headaches and frustrations within many organisations.
So what could we have learned from all this?