Delivering enterprise search

Staff might well demand a Web-style interface that allows simple searching of all relevant enterprise applications, but it isn't as straightforward as it may seem. Some problems that come into play include accessing information from a variety of data sources, ensuring security and access rules of data aren't breached and, of course, actually delivering on the expectations of employees—Internet and enterprises searches are two very different kettles of fish and user expectations change accordingly.

Enterprise data generally exists in a variety of locations and has well-defined security and confidentiality requirements. "Mass-market search solutions are very broad in scope and are satisfied by search engines ‘spidering' Web sites to add indexed data to the engine. Enterprise data is housed in technology silos which are not easily penetrated in this manner," says Paul Beks, managing director for BI software provider Information Builders.

As hard as accessing information silos may be, security is the issue that causes the most problems. "The types of information that an employee may be searching for may be company-confidential or restricted in how it may be handled," says Brad Kasell, Asia-Pacific program manager for emerging technologies at IBM's Software Group. "Security, access controls, data formats and the like can act as significant inhibitors to data distribution. The recent rise in standards-based, service-oriented architectures (SOA) goes some way to addressing this problem."

A differentiator is that enterprise search is much more context-driven than the typical Google search. "Current enterprise challenges define requirements for search capabilities across multiple applications, using a common interface, but specific to the roles of the people performing tasks within the enterprise," says Information Builders' Beks.

Security requires a deep understanding of the roles individual workers play within the enterprise. "Role-based systems must take user goals into consideration and must also align with a complete understanding of workflow and how the user interacts with information," says Bruce McFarlane, managing director for information provider Factiva Asia-Pacific.

And lastly, employee expectations. "Mass-market users understand they are searching the whole Internet which governs their expectations around the results they expect," says IBM's Kasell. "Employees are more likely to be searching across a more limited set of data, usually bound up in disparate applications or databases, and trying to derive connections across those sources."

"Basic search approaches are useful and cost-effective for most corporate employees, yet they are seldom intelligent enough to achieve the relevance, accuracy and insight users demand when searching across complex information sources," Forrester analyst Matthew Brown noted during a teleconference in 2005.

On the other hand, business users have the advantage of often working within a better-defined domain. "Enterprises have the ‘luxury' of being able to manipulate their data in a much more controlled way, so are able to establish data warehouses and feeds of highly relevant transactional data that would be inaccessible externally," Kasell says. "To some extent, businesses should already know the type and potentially volume of search results and should tailor the technology to those objectives."

Technology is slowly evolving to meet better meed the needs of employees. Analyst firm IDC predicts that the first advanced language analysis tools will hit the market in 2006, providing a threat to current generation players that largely rely on basic keyword-driven searches. While many users enter so-called "natural language queries", most search platforms focus on the keywords in those queries and simply ignore connecting information, even though this may not produce the desired results.

"Mass-market search solutions are very broad in scope and are satisfied by search engines ‘spidering' Web sites to add indexed data to the engine. Enterprise data is . . . not easily penetrated in this manner." Paul Beks, Information Builders

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