On October 8, 2009, Microsoft & NLC hosted a seminar on the importance of Enterprise Search within all organizations. Over 30 people attended this seminar to better understand how they could make search a priority within their business. With the exploding volume of diverse content in today’s workplace, employees are finding it increasingly difficult to locate the information they need to do their job effectively.
The first part of the seminar focused on a presentation by Shannon Ryan, President of non~linear creations (NLC). He discussed a recent IDC Report called the Hidden Cost of the Information Worker, that discusses the productivity and monetary loss related to search. According to IDC, a company with 1,000 knowledge workers loses $5.3 million per year because of the inability to find information.
Importance of Enterprise Search
Shannon reiterated that no matter how well you design and implement your overall solution if people cannot find the information they need, it does not provide any business benefit. As internet users, we have become accustomed to the convenience of searching the Web. Now, we expect the same immediate access to information at work.
To stay competitive, it has become imperative for employers to integrate search functionality to maximize investments in business productivity infrastructure.
The second half of the seminar featured Paul Loefstedt, a Technical Solution Specialist within Microsoft’s Enterprise Search Practice. Paul’s presentation was on the different capabilities of MS’s answer to search – Microsoft Search Server and Microsoft FAST ESP. He also demo’d the solution in action. His presentation gave great insight on how invested Microsoft is in the Enterprise Search space.
Microsoft Enterprise Search – featuring FAST ESP
The comment that stuck with me most during the seminar – is that most enterprise organizations do not have someone that “owns” enterprise search. As a result, because it is technology related it falls to IT. But Enterprise Search is not a technology issue, it is a business problem that impacts all organizations. One gentleman in the audience said that he recently measured the amount of productivity lost within his company of 50 employee’s – and he calculated it at 2 million dollars.
This is not an IT issue – it is a business issue. NLC offers a series of offerings to help your business recognize the importance of search. Don’t wait until the search starts losing your company millions.
Shannon made a great statement during his presentation – be the hero – save your company dollars and increase productivity – simply by strategically implementing a search solution.
NLC Enterprise Search Offerings
Strategic Planning
Ensures your search initiative has clear business drivers, that the problems are well understood, and that everyone agrees on the expected outcome
Requirements gathering
Determines what content users are searching for, what keywords they’re using, how precise their results are, what content is easy to find, and what content requires better metadata or search configurations. Determines what content you need to search and whether it’s accessible from a search product and whether metadata is necessary
Physical implementation and configuration
This stage includes installation, configuration and infrastructure planning—including looking at redundancy and backup plans and integration with existing systems (i.e.: databases).
Governance
Implementation of systems to improve search over time, including regular analysis of logs, the inclusion of “best bets” (or other similar product features) and the capacity to add to regular metadata.
