CRM - March 2008 - (Page 34)

ENTERPRISE SEARCH search to make sense of data while it remains spread throughout the enterprise. “One of the drivers for [enterprise search] is that when paper was king and not a whole lot was digital, you could find things online fairly easily because there wasn’t much there,” says Guy Creese, research director for the Burton Group. “Now we’ve moved from information scarcity to information overload…. It’s a huge issue when the document you’re looking for is one of tens of thousands.” “Search is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s an absolute have-to-have,” says James Waters, vice president of global marketing for enterprise search vendor Coveo. “There’s a lot more to the data scene than there was even two years ago…. Think of the content that’s coming: Forget PDFs and Excel spreadsheets—think of email, voicemails that go to email, wikis, blogs, audio and video, and all the Web 2.0 applications that are not currently searchable.” And yet, as the importance of search within the enterprise grows, many companies, especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs), have been slow to adopt the technology, the specifics of which are often vague to outsiders. “It’s not a market that people are very welleducated about,” says Matthew Brown, principal analyst for Forrester Research. “I would guess that if you went to SMBs and asked 100 of them if they knew what enterprise search was, and if they’d bought a product, maybe five to 10 would know what it is—and [only] two or three would have bought a product. So there’s a huge opportunity there.” quality, not just the most popular. “If we one is searching for is generally assumed talk about search in a generic fashion, to not only be present online, but genone of the difficulties is that humans are erally available to everyone. Enterprise involved—and, especially in tech search, search, by contrast, must include the abillanguage is involved,” Creese notes. ity to search for documents that only cer“ATM” means something different to a tain people should have access to, such banker than it does to a programmer, and as trade secrets and salary information. search needs to take that into account in A successful enterprise search tool will make those documents available to the order to provide relevant results. A search application borders on useless people who need them, but will not even if it requires users to invest time to tag let them appear as a result in a search by their own documents for later retrieval, unauthorized personnel. Sorting and catso enterprise search offers speedy, auto- egorizing information in this way prematic metadata retrieval from multiple sents an added challenge on top of comdisparate sources, with no manual input piling documents in a searchable way. A key part of selecting an enterprise from users. Several search solutions rely on technology developed by Teragram, a search solution that’s right for you is figmaker of language-processing products uring out what capabilities you’ll use. that automatically generate metadata for Regli says she often sees smaller compaenterprise search. Using software to scan nies buying powerful and expensive documents and tag them based on the enterprise search engines from compainformation they contain, the technology nies, such as Autonomy or Endeca, that makes it easier to organize those docu- provide simply more software than is ments—and to search for them later needed. “The real message is you don’t want to buy a six-burner stove to boil using an enterprise search product. Even so, search engines have trouble water,” she says. “At the same time, you grasping natural language, so a big part of don’t want to use an electric hot plate to implementing enterprise search involves cook a six-course gourmet meal.” Some vendors have developed niches cleaning up content, says Theresa Regli, principal at the analyst firm CMS Watch, that make their solutions ideal for certain which produces The Enterprise Search Re- types of companies, Regli says. For inport. That involves coming up with de- stance, Recommind is designed for law scriptive names for data and making sure firms and specializes in searching legal files of the same type are structured the documents; Endeca is very strong for same way. Regli says she advises compa- businesses with catalogued merchandise. According to Regli, nies considering an enmany businesses are terprise search solution familiar with enterprise to focus on cleaning up A search search, but willingness to their data first—before application jump in and start looking going shopping. Otherborders on for a solution depends wise, they risk reaching on size. Major Fortune a point where the search useless if it 500 corporations, for the solution gets stuck and requires users most part, have already the data will require embraced search—for cleanup anyway. “Ento invest time to some, in fact, it’s become terprise search has been tag their own an integral part of doing trying really hard to documents for business. Smaller busiovercome the messiness nesses may know about problem, but I haven’t later retrieval. enterprise search, but seen anyone who’s really they find the cost and imbeen able to it,” says Regli. Security is another issue that becomes plementation process to be daunting, highly important in enterprise search. In despite some relatively low-cost and easya typical Web search, all the information to-use solutions on the market for SMBs. www.destinationCRM.com UNDERSTANDING ENTERPRISE SEARCH There are several important differences between Web search and enterprise search, not least of which is the fact that enterprise search is inherently far more difficult. Web search is based on algorithms that analyze naturally occurring metadata, such as the title of a site and how many other pages link to a given page. With no organic metadata to work with, enterprise search is a different and more complex animal, particularly since users want information that’s of the best 34 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | MARCH 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - March 2008

CRM - March 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Re-shoring Contact Centers NetSuite’s Sweet Ride Takes Another Turn SaaS X.0? destinationCRM Dashboard Retailers Dream Big Detroit: Driven to Distraction Required Reading The Markets Within the Masses In Search of... Selling CRM to Your Sales Force Quixtar’s Quick Fix Travelocity’s New Traveling Companion Chasing Down First-Call Resolution Governing Better Marketing Secret of My Success Re: Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - March 2008

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