Search is pretty useless. After all, there is not much point in searching for something unless you actually find what you are looking for. So we should really call it Enterprise Find rather than Enterprise Search, shouldn’t we? Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, the term Enterprise Search seems to be here to stay.
So what is Enterprise Search anyway?
I think of Enterprise Search as the technology that can help you find information stored within your organisation. Historically this internal information may have just been Intranet content and documents, but being able to quickly find people, expertise and even structured data (such as information stored in a relational database) is becoming more and more important to the knowledge workers of today.
This means that Enterprise Search has to operate in a fundamentally different way to Internet Search, even though there are also some similarities between the two.
Differences to Internet Search
One of the main differences is confidentiality. Most web site content is there because it is intended for public consumption, with the intention of being found. In fact, most webmasters compete aggressively for their sites to appear in the top results of popular search engines by engaging in “Search Engine Optimisation” (otherwise known as SEO).
Within the organization, the approach to confidentiality may be somewhat different. Many pieces of information need to be kept confidential, and therefore should not be found if someone is looking for them. The classic example would be HR documents containing sensitive information … not exactly what you want valued employee number 217846 to be able to find.
Of course on the Internet you also have highly confidential sites such as your online banking, but the banks are very aware of the risks of Internet security and take the appropriate precautions. These are highly secure sites, with no risk of someone stumbling onto your last month’s mortgage statement by accident as a result of doing a web search on live.com (surely nobody would use another?).
Naturally, internal portals and sites should have equally stringent security measures, but often they do not, or the information that is extracted from secure internal systems gets placed in a non secure place such as in someone’s Outlook calendar, a shared collaboration site or a file share, just because it was easy to put it there at the time. Many of us are guilty of this bad practice, and instead we should be securing our document sharing portals by setting the permissions at a granular level, ensuring that only the correct people have appropriate access to the content.
This is where some organisations have burned their fingers in the past. If the search engine runs under a specific user context that has admin privileges, it may be able to index the secure site and a regular user could find something “interesting” by accident. Even if the actual document is still secured, the title may give away more information than desired, for example “Due diligence for XYZ corp acquisition.pdf” or “October 2007 redundancy list.xls”… even though I cannot open the document to see who is going to be made redundant, I know that there will be a round of redundancies in October 2007. It is imperative that whatever search tool you choose, is able to assume the user context of the person doing the search, and therefore not return more information than required.
Not all information, however, is intended to be kept confidential. After all, the main point of a portal is to share information. Webmasters of Internet sites use Search Engine Optimisation techniques in order to ensure that certain “keywords” appear in the results of popular search engines. SEO is a vast topic in itself that is out of the scope of this article, but what is the approach for doing SEO inside of the organization? Unfortunately, this is usually a neglected area within the Enterprise. It’s very important to provide employees with the most relevant matches within the first few pages of results, preferably on the first page. We have all grown accustomed to finding what we’re looking for almost instantaneously in the world of the Internet, and we have the same expectation when using an Enterprise Search technology. The relevancy algorithm of the search engine is pretty important here, but what is often overlooked is the importance of ensuring that documents and content are tagged correctly and that the correct metadata and “keywords” are included so as to make them more findable.
In addition to confidentiality, another major difference is the importance of finding people and expertise. In fact, document and content searching is just soooo last year…. Expertise search is where it’s all happening right now. Microsoft is a very knowledge-dependent organisation. We have more experts than you could throw a stick at. These range from experts in our own technology, to experts in the history of the Boeing 747 or the art of making a perfect espresso. Some experts may be useful, others maybe not so much. Many people also change jobs as often as once every two years, which is a good thing because it keeps them fresh, but it does also mean that their expertise could change fairly regularly as people take on new challenges in different areas.
We often need to find some information that is related to a product, but we need the most up to date information, presented to us in the context that is relevant at that particular time. Yes, we may be able to find this information in a boring document somewhere, but wouldn’t it be better and more exciting to get the most up-to-date info from inside someone’s head? Now I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no, we haven’t filed a patent for a new technology that indexes people’s grey matter… we’re still old school on this one, and unfortunately we actually have to communicate with them by word of mouth (preferably over VOIP or video call – or heaven forbid a face-to-face encounter). However, before the aforementioned communication can take place, we actually need to find the person. Given that we have over 70,000 employees worldwide, it could take a while if a trial-and-error approach was adopted. Instead, I can use our Enterprise Search tool (based on SharePoint 2007 of course) to find people. I don’t need to know their names, which is a good thing because if I knew them already I probably would need to do a search for them. All I need to do is look for the expertise and perhaps their location to narrow it down a bit. For example, I can search for “Groove UK” and it will return the results of all people who have something to do with our Groove product in the UK. If I left the “UK” bit out, it would find me Groove experts from all over the world.
With presence integrated with the search results, I can start an Instant Message conversation, phone them or even start a video call right then and there. This is very different to the world of Internet search where you are primarily looking for content. The exception would be the advent of social computing tools where you can indeed search for people (that’s the point of the social network), but it is usually from within that particular social network, rather than from the web search environment. With Enterprise Search tools, you should be able to find content or people from within the same environment (usually the main Intranet site).
So what’s the business benefit?
For Microsoft, our Enterprise Search on our Intranet saves us time and makes us more productive. We’ve worked out that most people spend a lot of time looking for customer information in our Siebel CRM system. By integrating a “customer search” into our Intranet portal, we reduce our time to find the relevant information by more than 15-20 minutes. Personally, it used to take me at least 25 minutes to find out who the account manager was for any particular customer in Siebel, look up their contact details in Outlook, phone them only to get their voicemail, send them a mail instead only to get an Out of Office message, go back to Outlook to find out who else in their team may be able to help me, repeated until I find someone.
Using our new customer search tab on the Intranet, I can now get the customer details including the account manager, alongside presence information such as Out Of Office status, and a list of colleagues who may be able to help, all within the search results, delivered in a few seconds. If I do that a few times a day I’ve saved hours of time… which leaves me plenty of time to work on perfecting my espresso making skills.
