Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

you’ll be struggling against the cultural tide as long as you are working on findability. First, most companies do not understand how to be effective content producers. In fact, most companies don’t believe they are publishers. They think they make diesel engines, software, or chips or sell fashion or building supplies. However, most companies have publishing operations, just as they have HR, accounting, and logistics operations. People have lots of mental models and role models for these core competencies, yet they have little idea how to be content publishers. Of this, there is widespread ignorance and even opposition. Without the habits and structures that support content publishing—and findability—your information collections will not be in tidy shape. In fact, they will be a mess, so people won’t find the information they need (and they won’t understand why). What’s far worse, people do not understand the tasks and roles that must be funded in order to achieve the findability that the organization needs and, as a result, attempts to secure funding will fall on stubborn deaf ears. The second issue is as much environmental as cultural. Search is an arena undergoing tremendous change. For the past 5 years, there has been great change in search usage: what people use it for, what questions they expect to answer, what kinds of information they index, what sorts of people use search, and in what context they use it. Expectations have risen steadily as search engines have become more competent. We are on an event boundary, and search engines are about to blossom into every application you buy. This will have a phenomenal impact on user productivity, but it will also drive expectations and demand. The bottom line is that it is impossible to guess who will use the search service you are building and what questions they will expect it to answer. Nailing down requirements becomes extraordinarily difficult: pilgrims in pursuit of the unknowable. Project and Program Lifecycle Pain Points Search projects follow a classic life cycle. But if search projects are to deliver great search, they need to become, or be supported by, search programs. Search projects are like planting grass. Search programs are like getting the grass to grow, keeping it mowed, and controlling the weeds. My life cycle addresses the search program life cycle, which typically starts with a successful search implementation project. Following the implementation, the search program kicks in, with the ongoing activities of monitoring and managing quality and findability. The concluding step, expanding the program, occurs when your program is successful. Your monitoring and analysis indicate what needs to be done, and your metrics prove the worth of doing it. In the search project and program life cycle, there are four phases that we observe to be particularly difficult with search, each with its own problems, which are summarized in the accompanying table. 38 ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOURCEBOOK 2008 The solutions to these problems are not simple or easy to perform. You can’t solve them alone; they require a range of talents and roles. However, we can offer some insights into how to deal with each. Vision The earliest mistake in your search project or program is virtually unrecoverable—the failure to establish and communicate the right vision. If you fail at this point, the project will not succeed, and you will probably not be able to resuscitate it. In establishing your vision, you must set a significant, desirable, achievable goal. To communicate it, you must present a simple, familiar, and evocative story that helps anchor people to the project, tell them what to expect, and help them think through what will happen and what it will mean. Here are some examples: • Customers will find the best product for their situation in less than 5 minutes. • A customer will be presented an answer to a product usage question in 1 minute. Ninety percent of these usage questions will be answered online by 2008. • A customer with a problem will be on the path to resolution in 2 minutes or less from our website. Forty percent of resolutions will be unassisted in 2008, growing to 80% by 2010. • Eighty percent of employees will use the internal knowledgebase at least weekly. • Notice the metric attached to each vision. This will come in handy later. Mistakes During the Search Program and Project Life Cycle LIFE CYCLE STEP Establish and Communicate Vision Analyze Requirements and Select Technologies Establish Findability Policies and Procedures Postimplementation Phase BIG PROBLEM Fail to set significant, desirable, achievable goal Fail to think broadly enough; settle for simplistic technology Fail to manage findability across the organization Fail to establish clear, value-driven metrics that will gain commitment to further investment; fail to invest in getting greater value from search

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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