Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

The vision is based on rational decisions, but it takes passionate commitment to communicate the vision and convince people that it is important and right. Ideally, the project lead or program head is the proselytizer and the executive sponsor opens the doors for the pitch. Plan to deliver your pitch daily for the first year of your program and weekly for the rest of your tenure. If you’ve already gotten this wrong, this is a devastating mistake, akin to damaging your brand. The recovery will require beginning fresh with a new project, a new project name, and a new project leader. Search projects and programs follow a life cycle that involves planning, execution, monitoring, and improvement. Most projects tackle a step or two in the life cycle. Delivering great search really depends on programs that invest in search on an ongoing basis. Requirements and Selection Requirements are notoriously difficult to get right, for well-known reasons. The big mistake with search requirements is thinking too narrowly. Getting the vision right helps set the scope, but our two cultural issues come into play creating such a strong tide you can’t help but want to narrow your profile to swim against it more effectively. The breadth of the real search requirements can be overwhelming, and as a result, the most common mistake is to narrow the requirements too far. This is especially true if the project team’s purview only extends to a small cluster of information with no clout or even access rights to broaden the search index. You build the service based on the scope that you own and end up creating a service that no one wants to use. Still, to be practical, you have to start something that you can finish, and quickly. The best approach to this conundrum, then, is to act locally but think more globally. As long as you have an outlet from the narrow search service that will allow you to achieve the sophisticated, high volume, integrated search you are highly likely to need, then it is OK to start small. Ask, how does this service become the most sophisticated and scalable service you can imagine? How will you enlist more support for a broader service? Can the technology support the broadest goals? Will the technology integrate with all the other specialized search engines that the enterprise already owns or is about to buy? If you’re already underway with a project that is too narrow, you need to set the stage for an outlet or opening. Consider your seekers and their questions. You build a service for people.Who are they and what are their problems? What information is needed to answer their questions? Who owns the information? Start scoping out what is really needed for your audiences. Declare the requirements, costs, and so on. Tell people the shortcomings of the current project for their constituencies. Calculate budgets. Talk about vision. Start cultivating allies with other information owners and audience advocates to support a follow-up project. Technology selection is the other big mistake at this life cycle phase. It is very easy to buy search technology you’ll have to throw away. People mistakenly buy technology that is too simplistic, perhaps because they’ve taken too narrow a view of requirements. Very few search applications can be satisfied with keyword retrieval. Keyword looks great if you’ve got no search at all, but after even a few days of using it, people will be dissatisfied. You will need technology that identifies concepts, extracts metadata, clusters similar items, and supports navigation by successive refinement. Also, it’s important to understand that when you buy “search,” you need more than just indexing and retrieval. You need interfaces to manage synonyms, concepts, metadata, reporting, analysis, ranking, promotion, and merchandising. IT can’t build and maintain these interfaces and functions, despite the lure of simple, easy answers like open source Lucene. (For a detailed list of enterprise search requirements, download my Enterprise Search Planning and Evaluation Framework, www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=724.) If you’ve already got simplistic technology, your only choices are to scrap it or to invest heavily in content. Great organization and outstanding process can make up for lousy search technology. However, it is a good idea to track what it costs you to make content findable because this money might well be better spent on improved search technology. Make sure you don’t end up investing any more money on simplistic technology—for example, getting an enterprise license to a product that doesn’t meet your requirements. Lobby to buy smart search engines for every project. WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM 39 http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=724 http://WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM

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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