"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday" - Pearl S. Buck

Information sources are proliferating rapidly, incorporating more and more forms of unstructured data such as emails, images and multimedia, with social and web-based content on top of that.

This escalation of data and of data types can be an enormous boon to a business, diversifying information and helping them to build a richer picture of their own organisational mechanisms, internal and external communications, and customer/client behaviours. However, with these advantages come many challenges, especially when it comes to managing and controlling data.

The power of any organisation comes from the thing that enables it to perform its role: namely, shared knowledge and specialist skills. However, unless that knowledge can be shared effectively within the organisation, giving it full ownership of and ability to recover and utilise data, the organisation can end up as less than the sum of its parts. There has to be a working model in place for knowledge to be pooled and made use of.

Having to search through various network drives and myriad files and folders to find one particular piece of data can be an inefficient and time-consuming process, as anyone who’s spent time fruitlessly hunting for a certain slide before a presentation will well know. Not only that, but as with any entirely human process it can’t be anything but fallible, however dedicated your staff may be; many people simply will not have the time, impetus, knowledge or attention span to hunt through all the files and folders necessary to find the one tiny kernel of information that they require. Even if they do persevere, the process of manual search is inefficient and time-consuming, leading inevitably to loss of capital; and perhaps worse, from a human perspective, it’s also downright dull.

Whilst creation of information and data (documents, spreadsheets, emails, data entry), is a necessary and obvious business cost (both financial and temporally), information access may not be so quick to spring to mind. However, it’s arguably as or even more important; there’s no point in having all this information on your intranet unless you derive some value from it, and if you can’t find the data that you need, when you need it, the information you own is practically worthless. It’s like owning a book that you’re not able to read, or a telly that won’t tune into any channels.

Having information misfiled, mislabelled or locked away on people’s hard-drives (or worse, inside people’s minds) is of no use to a company that wants to utilise that information; as far as they’re concerned, it might as well not exist. And as our concept of “information” becomes ever more unstructured and vague (who could have imagined ‘tweets’ a decade ago?), the ability to search across multiple sources within an organisation will become more and more important.

In other words, it’s only the ability to search – and more technically, the ability to find – which gives information true merit.

That’s where enterprise search comes in: software specifically designed to give companies and organisations the ability to search across their internal databases and networks, to sift out and discover the particular piece of data that’s required.

Information access technologies are no longer limited to simple enterprise search, however; the phrase is now used more and more often as an umbrella term, covering a collection of technologies designed to help to locate information. As well as enterprise search itself, these can include elements such as:

• Taxonomy creation and management
• Ontology and semantic search engines
• Content classification, including tagging and metadata
• Information presentation, organisation and visualisation

As technology grows, there are more and more types and sources of data to keep a handle on. This is particularly important considering the enormous growth in unstructured data, such as images, emails and multimedia files (where metadata and taxonomy will be of particular importance), and the oncoming second wave of unstructured data, which I talked about in my last blog and by which I refer to the huge influx of social media content (tweets, Facebook comments and so forth). These unstructured data sources can be of huge advantage to an organisation, but only if we can find a structured way to use and derive value from them.

To help you get the most out of your organisation’s data, Enterprise Search software should:

• Conduct search in a way that is accurate and powerful
• Be user-friendly, with a simple and clean UI
• Allow access to information in a timely and efficient manner
• Avoid incurring crippling costs

In today’s business environment, our two most important and precious assets are time and information; yet both of these are squandered needlessly every single day. Investing in some powerful information access technologies can go a good way towards rectifying that situation.

To find out more on what we think about Search Click Here.