Saturday, May 05, 2007

The Power of Search

Having powerful Search tools in place is one of the critical things that will change the way Information Managers have to work. Our work used to be about organising information, ensuring its availability, security and quality, now it is about opening up our internal infrastructure so people can look for themselves. Search is the key enabler for this.

But we are not there yet!
First of all there is still no 'out-of-the-box' solution that can easily cover everything. Although I must say Google has come a long way. The Google Search Appliance is about the closest thing you can get to 'out-of-the-box'.

I have evaluated the solution and below is my verdict:
+ Ups: it just works like Google on the WWW and therefore people love it & trust it. This is great for internal marketing and yes it actually unlocks a lot of hidden information!

- Downs: 1) it still struggles with internal Security ... Having powerful search in place requires a culture change in the organisation. It requires breaking down the walls between departments. 95% of all information inside a company is open, so why not share it?
2) The other thing is that a lot of information is very homogeneous in a corporate organisation and Google is not great at that (especially if there are no cross links). So therefore there is still work in educating the content creators to be specific about their content when storing the information on the network

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