After speaking with Brainware this morning, I’ve been left with the question “is enterprise search an application in itself, or just middleware (or a feature) for other applications?”
Remember Enterprise Search?
About a year ago, every major software company (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, etc., not to mention all the medium and small ISVs) came out with an enterprise search product. Essentially, the product replicated Google behind the firewall, giving you a search box that allowed users to search over content behind the firewall. Sure, there were adaptors to previously “dark data,” security to limit access to sensitive search results, and the number one cliché use case of any new enterprise technology (a favorite of mine), the geo-cyborg salesperson:
so, you’re a sales guy in the bay area, and you have some spare time. Why spend that time on your own when you could opportunistically find other clients to pester and visit. You just type in your address and - BAAM! - it shows you the movement of clients in a 5 block radius. Look! That guy crossing the street is a client! Go human-spam him! Sell! Sell! SELL! (Hey, those 24″ inch monitors aren’t gonna buy themselves, code-monkey.)
Enterprise Search vs. (Just) Search
I’ve had a long history with trying to figure out enterprise search. The obvious, easy win that any Google mini (or whatever) will take care of is just fixing your intranet search. Intranets are littered with endless web pages and having one way to search over all of it should be required now-a-days. You know, for simple stuff, like, “what are the company holidays for 2008.”
You, dear readers with intranets (of any size), should do an experiment and see how long it takes you to find that info: no cheating if you have saved on your desktop or know how to directly click to it. Pretend that you have no idea where it is and can’t email or ask someone. How long does it take?
Other than simply searching over intranet pages, though, I haven’t heard too many stories of enterprise search being used as an application on it’s own, or even as critical a part of daily corporate work as Google is to daily public web work.
Hierarchical work drives category-think
Enterprise search as a Google-like drop in doesn’t seem to be taking off at the moment. I’m wide open to being corrected, in fact I’d love to be as I always have big hopes fro search.
There are numerous (possible) reasons for this (see an extended discussion from my SAP TechEd 2006 coverage, but at the end of the day, my current theory is that enterprise users just don’t think, or want, to use search as their primary tool. People are very siloed and categorized at work, and I think that mind set trickles down into an employees want to categorize things rather than search for them. As psuedo-metaphor: I’m sure more people - more “civilians” (non-powerusers) - use email folders than just search for their email amongst a pile of messages.
Search is Big with Breakin’ the Law
There is an exception here: search is big for workflows involving illegal activities. That is, lawyers love search for looking over emails for court cases, search is great for auditors and compliance. Basically, if you’re trying to “figure out what happened” when the law or regulations were broken, you love search.
While GRC is a lucrative field now-a-days, in the context of this discussion, I’d say it’s niche.
Search as a Feature
The alternative, which Brainwave spoke to, was the notion of search just becoming a feature in other software. Rather than being the start of a work flow - you go to search.yourcompany.com - it’s embedded in other applications and work flows.
This is certainly the way I experience search in my daily life, on my OS X laptop. I search in my email, my calendar, on my blog (to look up past articles), and other silos. The distinction here is that I first go to the data silo in question and then search, instead of searching and then narrowing down to the silo.
So, the open question to you, dear readers, is just that: do you see enterprise search being used as the first part in workflows, that is, as a stand-alone application? Or do you see it being used more as a part, or feature, of other applications? And, to put it in the future tense, which of the potential uses seems better?
Previous Topic
