Prince Sverre Magnus – Screenshot from the Norwegian Royal Families website.

Lately, there have been some parties. For example yesterday, when we celebrated the 17th of May – Norway’s day of independence. Then we sat down, after hours of parades and sausage eating and suddenly realized that we couldn’t remember the name of the youngest member of the Norwegian Royal Family. “Magnus-something-or-other” was the closest we came.

Then the solution was, as usual, to pick up the iPhone and search for “the Royal Family” on Google. Not only did we find out that his name is Sverre Magnus, but we also got to see pictures, his birthday, what his sister is called, and so on and so forth. Also the complete list of the royal family gave us new topics of conversation and maybe more answers then we did sought.

And why do I use the blog to share an uninteresting, private Royal-Family conversation I had at the 17th of May? Simply because I every day see how important good search is as a problem solver, and a way to find the answer we’re looking for.

In a workplace, we have lots of information available: both internal information and information through, for example, Google or Bing. How much time do we spend talking about things we cannot find the answer to? Or how much time do we spend sitting alone wondering? Or how much time do we spend digging through old documents, presentations, customer records, and so on.

If we have good internal search at work, we can quickly find answers, find richer answers then we were looking for, and find colleagues that can give the answer to us.

And the search should be as easy as my 17th of May-solution, to grab the phone out of my pocket.

What is your experience with internal search?

That’s just one of the reasons why an in-depth understanding of user requirements and behavior is important.

Search is rapidly transforming into something that we expect to be everywhere. A functional commodity, that you expect to be around wherever you are. Compare it to printing a sheet of paper, almost wherever you are in your favorite OS, you can always send whatever you’re looking at to the nearest printer. That’s how Search should be, and will be. And that’s why you should stop thinking about it as an isolated product. It’s core functionality by definition, and wherever the user is, it should be readily available.

On the web, we’re seeing more and more of this. Search bars are everywhere, in Google Chrome there’s even one right in your address bar. But if you ever worked in a big corporation, you’ve probably learnt the hard way that behind the lock-down of the corporate firewall, it’s a whole other ball-game. Different systems don’t talk to each other. You find yourself keeping a long list of bookmarked URLs to esoteric internal systems. Each with their own awful design, each with their own terrible full-text search implementations. You know what I’m talking about.

That’s why Enterprise Search matters. And that’s why you should stop implementing it as a one-off isolated project. It’s an integral part of corporate information and knowledge management, and it should be treated as such.

Imagine if you had a common front-end to all those esoteric systems. A solution that lets you search everything at once, with proper tools to dig around in the result set. Even better, a solution that lets you act on the results, without actually having to go to those esoteric underlying systems. You find whatever you’re looking for, and you act on it immediately.

This is not a CIO’s far-fetched wet dream, it’s around the corner. There are surely many problems to solve, but we’re getting there: to the corporate mashup.

flickr.com/sean_oneill

When we started Comperio 6 years ago, many of the search projects were limited to one or two objectives. The goal was often just to “fix” search on the web site and/or the intranet. With the tools and solution concepts we had available at the time that was demanding enough.

Today, however, the success of the first wave of search solutions have led our customers to ask for “more search”, “more access” and “new insights” into their vast amount of information repositories. While the idea is not new, we are now seeing innovative and true new enterprise-wide indexes or information marketplaces being established. Structured data is at the core and the solutions are more centered towards Information Access than the previous search-only focused solutions. These solutions include every digital content and data repository that the enterprise possesses and even additional external sources that potentially bring new insights. The use-cases and business purposes has become more comprehensive and thus requires a more flexible way to service customer-, partner-, authority- and/or employee-facing applications.

Enterprise Search is maturing and that’s good news: think of all the new opportunities this opens!