It's Time to Reimagine Enterprise Search
Massood Zarrabian, Chief Executive Officer
Wikipedia defines enterprise search as the “practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience.”
Notice it is about a defined audience and not necessarily having a solution for everybody in the enterprise. For the sake of using an example, and to provide context for re-imagining this decade’s vision versus how enterprise search has been implemented in the past decade, let’s use a sales organization as an example.
Team members in a sales organization will use a vertical application like Salesforce for a lot of their work with the company and customer. They also will often use a document management system which has other content that is required for them to do their jobs such as SharePoint Online, Teams to collaborate with others inside and outside the company, and Outlook for email.
So, in their daily lives they have four places to go to, four different searches and search locations, each with its own features and capabilities, to help them find the information they need to do their jobs.
Deploying an enterprise search solution to act as a work hub to help them find the information needed to do their jobs faster and better is critical to a productive and engaged organization. Historically, we think about this work hub as a centralized place to go to. It is kind of a destination and again, historically, most often their destination has been an enterprise search solution built on SharePoint on-premise, or in the last few years, SharePoint Online. But why continue doing it that way? Why not make enterprise search a work hub that is located directly within each application? Why not give them the ability to access information from the enterprise systems where they work? Why wouldn’t we want to have the “most used” business systems give the user improved search results from the applications they are in while also providing them access to other information that resides in other systems?
Why don’t we bring:
- Natural language query/search to each application.
- Search as you type, recent searches, and recommendations based on previous searches.
- Search analytics so we know what users searched for and what the results were. Information that can help administrators improve results.
- Autoclassification to tag information independent of where it resides, making it findable.
- Ability to preview documents, and with a single search, find the document(s) and the pages within the document(s) that contain what users are looking for, independent of where they and the information reside.
I hear from customers that Salesforce users complain about Salesforce search being bad. The same goes for Teams users, Outlook users, and ServiceNow users. How long do you think it will be before there will be investments made in these application searches to have them more closely resemble internet search? Forever!!!
Let’s reimagine enterprise search and make it available in as many places as we can. After all, we are in the third decade of the 21st century and should move on from the centralized ideas about enterprise search and start thinking about work hubs everywhere. For more information on this, please look at In-App search.
I look forward to your comments.
P.S. With remote work becoming a key ingredient for enterprises today, enabling work becomes even more important. Part of the challenge with remote work is narrowing the number of places users need to go to find information…and this becomes harder for new/newer employees.