Social and Enterprise Search capabilities are
becoming very important for the Enterprises.
While Enterprise Social capability enables
employees across different groups to collaborate and share knowledge, Enterprise
Search capability enables employees to search digital content & data spread
across different isolated systems and applications
Success of an Enterprise Search capability
not only depend on the technology /platform that is leveraged but also on other
key factors such as:
- Content
Sources
Analysis of the
sources from which content will be searched and made available for the end user
consumption. If the source systems are not analyzed properly in terms of
content volume, Meta data of the content, then there will be miss match between
what is expected by the end user and what the Enterprise Search capability
shows as search results. If the content in the source systems are not marked
with proper metadata or if the metadata in the source systems are not
understood properly leading to wrong mapping, then it will result in irrelevant
search results.
- Security
Access
restrictions on the content in the various sources; every source will have its
own access restrictions on its content / data like which group of users will
have access to view , update & delete. It is important that when these
content / data is made available as part of search results, same access (view) restrictions
are to be carried out ; Mechanisms employed for achieving access restriction will
vary from one content source to another and they have to be understood and
accordingly search capability is to be planned
- Scheduling of
Search Crawls
Content in
different content sources will get updated in different time intervals and
there will be also variations in update frequency. This has to be taken into
consideration when finalizing schedules when various content sources will be
crawled by the search capability. Improper scheduling of crawls will result in old
/ irrelevant data surfacing in the search result.
- Personas
It is important to
understand the different personas of an enterprise who will use the search
capability and their intent of search. For example, search results that is
expected by an executive from the finance department of an enterprise, for a
given query word will differ from that is expected by an executive from the
sales department.
- End user
awareness
Success of an
Enterprise Search capability also depends on how end user’s expectation are met.
Every user is already exposed to the internet search capabilities such as Bing,
Google etc. and their expectation on Enterprise Search capability will be on
similar lines. But dynamics of Enterprise Search capability differs from
internet search capabilities in terms security, content relevancy based on user
persona, freshness etc. and enterprise end users are to be educated accordingly.
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