Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Making search work – critical success factors
- 1 Search must work
- 2 How search works
- 3 The search business
- 4 Making a business case for search
- 5 Specifying and selecting a search engine
- 6 Optimizing search performance
- 7 Search usability
- 8 Desktop search
- 9 Implementing web search
- 10 Implementing search for an intranet
- 11 Enterprise search
- 12 Multilingual search
- 13 Future directions
- Appendix Search software vendors
- Further reading
- Glossary
- Subject index
- Company index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Making search work – critical success factors
- 1 Search must work
- 2 How search works
- 3 The search business
- 4 Making a business case for search
- 5 Specifying and selecting a search engine
- 6 Optimizing search performance
- 7 Search usability
- 8 Desktop search
- 9 Implementing web search
- 10 Implementing search for an intranet
- 11 Enterprise search
- 12 Multilingual search
- 13 Future directions
- Appendix Search software vendors
- Further reading
- Glossary
- Subject index
- Company index
Summary
In this chapter:
The evidence that search can have a significant impact on business performance
■ A brief history of the development of search technology
■ Understanding how people go about searching
■ The potential for the role of information discovery manager
Searching but not finding
In July 2005 the Quarterly Survey from McKinsey Consulting1 reported on the Global Executive Survey that the company had conducted among 7800 executives in 132 countries, a fifth of them at Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or Chief Information Officer (CIO) level. Overall, 29% of CEO/CIO-level respondents and 40% of other senior managers reported that it was difficult to find information on which to make company-wide decisions. This is a very worrying finding. Companies are flying blind, and making highly risky decisions without being able to find information that they have already created and stored.
Among many others was a survey carried out in 2004 by Vascom Bourne on behalf of Inxight Software among IT Directors in the UK financial services sector. According to the survey:
■ 73% of respondents said that the main barrier knowledge workers face in sharing corporate information was not being able to use one information retrieval tool to capture data across several repositories.
■ 58% of respondents also said that their company's search tools were ineffective at sourcing information quickly and efficiently.
■ 66% of the companies interviewed said employees were regenerating information simply because they were unaware that the documents already existed.
For a number of years Susan Feldman and her colleagues in the Content Management and Retrieval Solutions research group of IDC (International Data Corporation)2 have been surveying the time taken to undertake a range of office tasks. Their latest analysis indicates that, on average, an office worker spends 9.5 hours a week searching for information, but, of this time, 3.5 hours is wasted in not being able to find the information required. As a result, either this information has to be recreated or a decision must be made on the basis of inadequate information.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Search WorkImplementing web, intranet and enterprise search, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2007