Yesterday I wrote about social search and the Web. Forrester has provided an interesting new report, Enterprise Search: Six Key Trends to Watch by Leslie Owens with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi, and social is more positive here. Enterprise search used to be difficult and often unproductive. Now knowledge workers expect role-specific, contextual search everywhere they work and this is becoming more possible. The report notes that search technology is mature and stable; for the most part, bottlenecks regarding scale, security, and connectivity can be easily resolved. I was pleased to receive a review copy.
Interviews with thoughts leaders and results from surveys indicate that despite the fact that only 10% of IT leaders will upgrade or expand their information access implementations this year, search experts are optimistic about their ability to deliver search solutions that are both usable and useful. The report attributes this optimism to the fact that search technology is now well established, and the pervasiveness of Web search simplifies design decision and training.
As the industry standards for search evolve, vendors will change their products to adapt to new customer investment trends with changes in semantics capabilities and increased usage of search-based applications (SBA). I have also seen a rise in SBAs. Search vendors are making it easier to develop search based applications on top of their platforms via prebuilt components and templates.
Cloud and mobile will have an impact on search programs. However, plans for standalone enterprise search services in the cloud lag far behind cloud-based email or collaboration.
Despite this progress, ROI remains difficult to determine and prove. Usage metrics do not readily translate into bottom line figures. However, costs are coming down as Web services reduce the cost and intricacy of crawling enterprise systems. With W XML connectors are becoming easy or even not necessary.
Social media, especially activity streams through enterprise micro-blogging, is on the rise. The authors feel that as enterprise social computing grows, the knowledge and insight revealed on social platforms via technologies like micro-blogging will become strategically important. I certainly agree and have seen this happening in a number of cases. Organizations will use search to provide access to and analysis of the real-time flow of internal social content in forums and threaded discussions. This is an important source of knowledge capital that needs to be made accessible.
Social aspects will also impact search as more social features come into practice. The authors predict that knowledge workers will also increase their power over enterprise search as they tag, recommend, rename, and re-rank search results on their intranet. Social behavior like tagging and recommending will also become a signal for relevance calculations.
Search and social are very interrelated. I think this combination will continue to be more integrated. The report offers more and I recommend taking a look.
Check out www.pingar.com for an interesting take on enterprise search
Posted by: Andrew Parkinson | April 17, 2011 at 06:03 AM