Is enterprise search the next killer app?

There are many business advantages to having better access to enterprise information, but challenges remain in getting the right information into the right hands at the right time.

This flow of information impacts virtually every process of the modern enterprise; from invoices in Finance, contracts in Legal, onboarding in Human Resources, design documents in Manufacturing and Engineering, and on and on.

Virtually everyone would agree that enterprise search is a key component of optimizing this flow of information – some would say the single most important component. In fact, an AIIM1 study found 71 percent of the organizations polled to have said search is vital or essential to the productivity and effectiveness of their employees.

The not so good news

Yet that same study revealed the enterprise has a long way to go in achieving true enterprise search:

Only 18 percent have some kind of cross-repository search capabilities. For the vast majority, 82 percent, enterprise search is limited to within disparate repositories (aka silos) or only basic search tools across silos of content.

And, overcoming the challenge of incorporating more content repositories for searching is not getting any easier. Besides the increasing volume of enterprise data, more and more customer information in particular resides in rising amounts of unstructured data from social media channels like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., flowing into and out of the organization.

The study suggests that the success of content search is hugely dependent on the degree of content management in place. To me, this doesn’t go quite far enough. There are in fact an abundance of content management applications: Sharepoint, ECM systems, web content management, even content management systems born out of enterprise departmental functions such as salesforce automation, ERP financials, marketing content management, etc.

Most of these applications include some form of search mechanism specific to the way they index and store information; indeed, it is these systems that give rise to the silos of information in the first place! Some, like SharePoint, can be extended to connect to multiple content repositories. But these applications are not designed to be unified search solutions across disparate repositories, and rarely can they accommodate all company sources of information.