The Enterprise Search Experience

Mindmetre Research, October 2011

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Smartlogic

• Hugely varied clients

• Recently acquired Schemalogic• Based in UK and USA

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MindMetre

• Independent Research

• Since late 1990s

• Arms-length fieldwork

• Business issues

• Global

• Web technology, marketing

technology, financial services,

healthcare, governmental policy

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Business Pressures

• More from information asset• Less information effort

• Information explosion• User dissatisfaction• Browse versus find

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Information Overload

• When Bill Clinton left office, the volume of information and documents concerning his presidency that had to be archived amounted to some 4 terabytes

• When George Bush Jr left office, the equivalent volume of information and documents amounted to around 80 terabytes

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The situation ten years ago• IDC study - "Quantifying Enterprise Search," May 2002• Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time

searching for information. • Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of

the time or less• Only 21% of respondents said they found the information

they needed 85% to100% of the time • 40% of corporate users reported that they can not find the

information they need to do their jobs on their intranets• 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating

new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists

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The situation today• Over 2,000 senior company managers surveyed

in US, UK, France and Germany• Derived expectation from a low quality

requirement (external web search)• Threshold of acceptability – “a good search

experience” – is two minutes• More than half of respondents said they cannot

find the information they are seeking using their own organisation’s enterprise search facilities in two minutes or less

• 2001 -2011 – FLATLINING?

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Why Flatlining?• Information overload has increased faster than the

massive efforts • External has more commercial imperatives than

internal (and therefore has received massive effort in metadata)

• Also highly visible measures (SE ranking, transactions)• Some exceptions – data loss prevention; regulatory

compliance and investigation management• Irony – enterprise search queries likely to be of higher

quality than external search queries• Similar/same technology requirements for enterprise

search as external search

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Enterprise search - commercial imperatives

• Reduce waste of time and task repetition (e.g. product development, research, marketing, analysis)

• More rapid reactions for competitive edge• Turn information assets into earnings• Be ready for regulatory inspections

• A March 2009 IDC study found that reducing the time wasted by dealing with information overload by just 15% could save a 500+ employee company over $2m per year.

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Enterprise search issues/ requirements• We expect google yet we fail to invest in it-• Search not connected to the site -Natural History Museum• Benchmark established as two minutes or less Blackberry• ‘Anarchy of the algorithm’ not acceptable -UNICEF• Enterprises and industries have context, language,

standards, authority lists, parameters -NASA• Content intelligence therefore required so that search (&

find!) understand the query in context and lead to the relevant information as quickly as possible – NHS Choices

• Content made intelligent through accurate metadata• So how are we applying metadata?

www.mindmetre.comAn ExampleBeautiful web page…

Search

www.mindmetre.comAn Example…tunnel-vision search

Search

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Algorithm anarchySearch

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Connecting user language to content

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Metadata driven

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Connecting to navigation

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Enterprise search - bottlenecks• 67% of enterprises surveyed say it is very

difficult to find information in their organisation, other than key financial or sales data

• 62% believe that information overload means that only a small proportion of documents are made easily available to management and staff

• 61% say the vast majority of documents in organisations such as theirs are never properly categorised for accurate and rapid retrieval

• Two thirds believe that cost is the main obstacle to effective categorisation

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Attitudes to automation• Manual categorisation is unaffordable in a

world of information explosion• Yet 7 in 10 respondents believe that automated

systems can perform effective categorisation• Tagging challenge • In fact, a level of manual analysis is always

required to implement contextual categorisation

• People know best, machines implement best• Human intelligence, automated consistency

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The tagging challenge

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Conclusions• Despite the efforts of information architects,

enterprise search is not yet satisfying its users, both at the individual or corporate level

• Enterprise search has compelling commercial imperatives, but they are not widely enough recognised by general management

• Content intelligence is the key to making all the investment in content management and BI translate into enterprise search that finds what people need ‘in a couple of minutes’

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DigitalAsset

Management

PublishingSystems

Social collaboration

eDiscovery

Document Management

ContentManagement

EnterpriseSearch

RecordsManagement

PortalInfrastructure

Process Management &

Workflow

ContentIntelligence

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• http://www.smartlogic.com/home/knowledge-zone/white-papers/1129-mind-the-enterprise-search-gap-white-paper