Enterprise Search - issues and trends to explore

The first day of the annual Enterprise Search Summit in New York opened today. (The sessions today touched on a number of topics that will be explored in the 2008 Global Intranet Survey - signup information here).

Among the topics and questions addressed by the speakers:

1. Do you have fundamental, guiding principles about enterprise search in your organisation?

Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd, proposed what he called the "Magna Carta" for search in the opening keynote. This slide extract shows the key points:

2. Do you have a search team in place?

One of the success criteria Martin listed was having a search team in the organisation to work on search, maintain and optimise it. As we know from the 2007 Global Intranet Survey, one of the major gaps in intranet or portal resourcing is in the area of search, where even a high percentage of very large organisations have one or fewer people dedicated to optimising search.  The slide below comes from my presentation this morning: "Enterprise Search Reality Check".

3. Will social search be relevant for enterprises?

Social search means there is user input to the search process.  A round table on social search "Is Social Search right for the enterprise?" led by Jean Graef, Montague Institute took us into the relatively new dimension of how user participation and 2.0 technologies enable people's knowledge, experience and opinions to be integrated into the search results.

This may be from sharing bookmarks, aggregating tags, topical search (Google Co-op and Rollyo) and voting systems.

Social search - in part - shifts the work to the end user communities. However, in theory  the results should be better. The users can surely tag information in more relevant ways than the "information professionals" of your organisation ...can't they? This is an open question....

Laurie Damianos from Mitre, talked about how tagging by users is beginning to converge into tagging "agreements". They make the tags used by people visible to all people, which tends to encourage others to use the same ones. They have also found that people, when given the choice to make their bookmarks public (internally) or keep them private, chose to make them public.

4. What do people want to find?

In the past, search has been very document-centric. Now people want to find other people. They want to know what people think about other people's content. How they use it. Etc.
They want to connect the "who", "what" and "why" as described by Oz Benamram, Morrison & Foerster, rather than the "where" and "when". For example, what people really want is to find the information in emails and documents (the "what"), be able to relate it to people and contacts (the "who") and to place it in the context of clients and projects (the "who").
Oz demonstrated a very impressive mashup, bring together information that already exists in the firms systems and various applications into a meaningful "contextual and searchable network".