Consumer technology is increasingly making its way into the workplace, from VoIP to social networking.
Search is one such technology. Enterprise search, which despite the name is applicable to businesses of all sizes and aims to make the morass of data that exist on computers and long-forgotten servers more accessible. The idea is to make content stored locally in the workplace as searchable as the internet.
Jon Iwata, IBM’s head of marketing, says: ‘Managers spend on average two hours a day searching for information, and when they find it, fifty percent of it is useless,’ he says. ‘Furthermore, 42 per cent say they use the wrong data to make decisions on a weekly basis.’
Large businesses can afford expensive enterprise content management systems (ECM) with integrated search functions, but for smaller businesses the closest they get is the search bar in Windows – a very limited keyword search. Translating the functionality of a search engine like Google into the workplace is not an easy task.
‘It’s not like the internet, because information [in a business] is spread across depositories and 300 to 400 different file types,’ explains Dr Mike Lynch, founder and CEO of UK search company Autonomy.
Security is certainly an issue. Many companies have installed search technology only to find out that the first thing employees search for is the CEO’s salary. Good search technology, says Lynch, ‘checks for documents, then goes to a repository and checks the rules: can this person see this?’
Google, as the world’s most well-known internet search brand, has been selling ‘good to good-enough’ search functions to businesses for six years in the form of bright yellow plug-and-play boxes that slot into an office network and offer a simple search function that is instantly familiar to users.
‘The great thing is that it is simple for users, but [is also] a sophisticated technology platform in the background,’ says Dave Armstrong from Google’s enterprise division, explaining that large companies like Apple and British Airways use it for their customer-facing website search functions. ‘Apple even uses it to bias certain pieces of content on their search results,’ he adds.
