Enterprise Software Vendors Hold the Key

Imagine you’re a salesperson. In your day-to-day work, you need to rapidly track down a wide variety of information residing in multiple repositories—ranging from enterprise applications, to file shares to the Internet.

Let’s say you’re preparing for a meeting with a key account. You have to get all the relevant facts and figures together fast. In an ideal world, that would go something like this: You call up your enterprise search solution, type in the company name and press the search button. In next to no time, you have precisely the information you need—including full contact details from your company’s CRM system, plus records of all recent communications with the customer.

But your software doesn’t stop there. It also proposes related information stored within and outside your enterprise. This is displayed in the form of direct links alongside your hit list. These might take you to customer presentations and quotes stored on your desktop, sales history reports from your business intelligence system and Dun and Bradstreet details from the Web.

And because you very often need to act on your results, the hit list also includes links to related actions—allowing you to jump directly to a specific business transaction or workspace. So your search tool provides a point of entry not only to information, but to a wide range of tasks—from modifying contact information to creating sales orders.

Reality Check

That’s the ideal—rapid access to structured and unstructured information via one, easy-to-use tool. But the reality of today’s enterprise search is generally very different; frustrated information workers are fighting a losing battle to track down business-critical details via multiple search tools. So what kind of solution would it take to enable quick-and-easy access to the right facts and figures? And what kind of expertise is needed to make that solution a reality?

To support that scenario, an enterprise search tool has to provide a user-friendly, role-based single point of access to structured and unstructured content—across multiple systems, both within and beyond your company walls. And because that information includes sensitive data, the software has to be secure. If a solution can fulfill these criteria, it will be a true gateway to the enterprise—just as Google has become the gateway to the Web.

One challenge is bridging the divide between unstructured and structured information in a way that meets real-world business needs. There are currently plenty of effective tools for searching unstructured material. However, these have serious shortcomings in an enterprise setting, where users are generally looking for very specific details in line with their particular role within the organization.

The difficulties really begin when users need access to structured information stored in enterprise applications. Backend systems contain a vast amount of valuable data that employees are often unable to tap into—partly because they lack the necessary skills, and partly because conventional tools simply cannot support the deep searches required to pinpoint relevant data.

The Role of the Enterprise Software Vendor

This is where the enterprise software vendor comes in. It goes without saying that no one knows business applications better than the companies that develop them. More specifically, the vendor has a firm grasp of the three key factors in searches for structured content—user roles, interrelationships between business objects and security. And that knowledge can be mobilized to create solutions that not only enable effective queries in backend systems, but also allow users to zoom in on the unstructured information needed for their day-to-day tasks.