Enterprise Search: where do we go from here?

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?

As in most software market segments, there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution. There are many different information access needs, and most enterprise search tools only address a few of those needs effectively. So if you’re in the market for a search solution, it is important to understand where the strengths of the different solutions lie. Some might be very good for e-commerce initiatives, some more for classic public facing websites, while others show their strengths within intranet-style knowledge management platforms which require connectors to back-end systems. Some search vendors go even further by targeting vertical markets like legal, pharma, biotech or call centers andcustomer service departments.

Here’s a list of other trends we’ve been seeing in the search vendor market:

• Many content and document management systems come embedded with good search solutions (often Enterprise 2.0 inspired)
• Hosted search solutions have clearly seen a pick-up with major interest in cloud and SaaS offerings
• There is a surprising amount of free or low-cost search software that performs pretty well: from the usual suspects in the open source marketplace (Lucene, Solr) to search software from infrastructure players like Microsoft and IBM and dedicated search players like Coveo.
• There is also a whole new wave of search and discovery solutions on the verge of becoming mainstream: video and audio search, social search, visualization and personalization, augmented reality, mobile search...

But the most important lesson to be learned from the past, is that enterprise search is – again – not only a matter of choosing the right technology - but it is both a project AND a process. It’s a problem that’s never solved. Implementing an enterprise search engine platform is much more than installing a software package and having some content repositories indexed. Search projects need to be carefully prepared, and experienced search consultants can really avoid well known caveats like difficulties to unlock data or content silos, or difficulties with security and access control. The latter is a very complex problem to take into account, and it would not be the first time a search engine deployment is showing secuity holes in the IT infrastructure. Enterprise search should also be closely linked to your content management strategy. It should not be brought in as a way to hide the lack or failing of your content management practice.

The best way to make your enterprise search project successful, is by designing it with your users in mind. That’s why the involvement of a new breed of experts has proven to be successful: search designers. These specialists understand that search is mainly but not only about findability. Search is at its best when it’s an iterative, interactive process where we can find, learn, understand, share and act upon. So if you carefully select the right search tool and your search designers continuously (re)design with users in mind, you might see develop a wonderful search & discovery environment within your organization.