Beyond Search: Unleashing the Value of Business Information
Author: Scott Davidson
February 2007
By Scott Davidson
Heartland Area General Manager
Microsoft Corporation Small and Mid-market Solutions and Partners Group
Search seems like such a simple idea: type a few words into a browser and you’re almost instantly connected to a vast universe of Web sites and documents. It’s a powerful concept that has revolutionized the way we access information and do business. But if search is so simple, then why do we spend an average of 9.5 hours per week at work trying to find the information we need, according to a recent study from IDC, a leading global research firm? Worse, why is that researchers find that we can never seem to find the documents we are searching for, costing up to $9-14 thousand per worker every year in wasted productivity?
The problem lies in the way businesses collect and store information. Consider where the information we need at work resides: in archived e-mails, tucked onto colleague’s hard drives, isolated in the peninsulas of team portals, and layered in structured solutions like ERP and CRM systems. And that’s just the stuff that exists in digital form: there’s also the information stored away in people’s heads. According to some estimates, this “tacit knowledge” makes up as much as 80 percent of the truly useful information and expertise within a typical organization.
To gather information from these areas requires a series of inefficient, time-consuming and downright frustrating processes that force people to leave one application, logon to another, find a single piece of data and write it on a piece of paper, and then return to their original application, all just to complete a simple task like sending an email to a customer.
Throwing money at the problem is a temporary fix and a losing battle. Companies pay to break through search barriers and enhance worker productivity —$28,000 per employee per year. And because researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, predict that the volume of digital data we store will nearly double in the next two years, companies can expect the price of knowledge and productivity to increase as well.
The industry has identified this conundrum as information overload and information underload. On one hand, we are inundated with so much information that it has become nearly impossible to keep up. But that is just the beginning of the problem. In business, it’s not enough to just find information. Data doesn’t deliver real value until it is transformed into insight that provides a competitive advantage. This is the issue of information underload: do we have both the right information and the right tools to enable employees to use that information effectively?
Recently introduced technologies now provide companies a new generation of innovation that will enable information workers not only to search the Web more effectively, but also to do something much more powerful and valuable: find the information they need no matter where it is stored, share it with colleagues and use it to drive intelligent decision-making.
Improved search capabilities will help organizations bridge the gap between people and information by making search integral to every aspect of the way information is created, managed and used by businesses. Instead of just providing an add-on toolbar or a search page on the Internet, business technologies are moving to a focus on weaving search into the basic fabric of business infrastructure.
Many companies are already at the starting point, having established a single, central location for storing and managing documents, making it dramatically easier to find and use critical business information. However, the critical next step is to deliver capability to search all types of structured and unstructured business content throughout the enterprise, from e-mails to information stored in line of business applications and data stored in corporate databases.
Combining search capabilities with collaboration tools that can appropriately access centralized data stores, can enable workers to streamline relevant processes, improve compliance efforts and help keep our information secure.
Business leaders are also reporting that these kinds of unified approaches to providing employees powerful search tools even enables mobile communication and information retrieval among social networks in an organization, so employees can quickly connect to people with the right skills, knowledge and relationships.
The bottom line: early adopters of emerging search technologies can create competitive advantage by giving their people faster access to the information they need to make more informed decisions.
About the author: Scott Davidson is the Heartland Area General Manager for Microsoft’s Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners Group, which consists of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
