“Search” Versus “Access”
Making the (Current) Case for Enterprise Search
Don’t businesses have other requirements from a search tool? The ability to provide a prescribed solution to a contact center agent, for example? “Yes,” Chris Hall is quick to add. “We call it ‘an intentional answer.’ In other words, what do you want to push based upon what you hear? And that’s only going to be as accurate as what you understand the question to be. The luxury, if you can call it that, in enterprise search is that you own both the content side and the query side. But the secret sauce is not in those, but in the analytics, and the ability to roundtrip and understand why things are occurring.”
Richard adds: “In the current economic context, you need to come into a company with BOTH a ‘make money’ and a ‘save money’ argument. Both of these things can be achieved very effectively with a search solution. And they play into one another. If a trader, for instance, can make transactions more quickly (there’s the efficiency part), he can therefore make MORE transactions (there’s the revenue part). Same thing is true of professional services organizations: if their billable resources can work on more projects, they can drive more projects within a day,” explains Richard.
The revenue-generation driver seems to be more attractive to this group, I sense. “We like to talk to the CFO,” says Stacy. “Many organizations have made as many cuts as they can. They are focused on revenue-generating projects. That leads to the sales, marketing or customer-support organizations. Sometimes product development. Sometimes R&D.”
“Stacy’s correct, although it depends on the size of the business,” adds Chris. “If you’re talking about American Express, good luck talking to the CFO! But if you’re selling to the line-of-business, you’re going to be in a feature/function battle with all your competitors, and it’s really hard to differentiate. If you go to IT, you’re going to face ‘standardizing technologies’ questions. But when you go up to the CFO and other executive levels, then you’re getting at the major business drivers for that company. That’s the heart. If you can connect with that level of pain, you’re going to shorten your sales cycles. You will still have to check off all the feature boxes, but it’s a much more rewarding sale, and a much more enterprise sale. Revenue is what the C-level is interested in. You may be part of a cost-saving initiative, but if you can prove revenue- generation—not cost take-out—you’re going to be on the short list.”
Richard agrees: “Once you get a footprint in one department, a search engine is very well positioned to solve a problem elsewhere in the company. You can deploy a search tool that gets a crazy-fast ROI, then move it over to, say, the email archiving system. That gets the attention of the chief compliance officer... that’s typically the way these solutions move up the ladder. That’s why search vendors are moving toward ‘applications’ rather than overall platforms that save money. Helping traders make faster trades, consultants take on more projects... that’s where it’s going.”
Getting All Social
Our work lives are changing... fast. The “social networking” aspect of our business lives is beginning to overrun the common processes we’ve put in place over the years. And very quickly.
“That’s right,” says Chris. “There are now three types of search vendors: the enterprise search vendors; the knowledgebase-centric search vendors; and the new breed of social search vendors who use more ‘emotive’ filtering.”
Rajat adds that there are cases where search is not enough. “There are aspects of social networking that are entering the business search technology arena. For example, ‘user-added search results’ add expert opinions on top of specific results for specific queries. Over time these will have more impact on things like risk management as well... being able to determine who interacted with a document, when they altered it, etc....”
“The phrase I don’t know what I don’t know is very scary,” says Stacy. “When we talk to an executive of a company that has recently acquired five different companies... they may have compliance and governance policies, but they’re just not sure their employees are abiding by them across the board. They need to find duplicate data, outdated data, insecure information that they thought was secure...” She trails off, because it really is a nearly insurmountable problem, and it’s only becoming worse as businesses become more mobile, as Rajat points out, or as companies look to apply search tools to business applications such as customer service, as Chris talks about. And don’t forget, as Richard says, “A search solution doesn’t have ALL the required tools to play the complete role.”
What does? Well, that is the question. Read the following pages to learn more about the varied and critical role search DOES play... then come back later for a review. We’ll be here.