Enterprise search is critical to business success and is moving up the agenda in many organisations, as it becomes harder to find the right information for business needs, according to the preliminary results of a survey of global enterprise search practitioners, revealed at Enterprise Search Europe last week. However search is “not sexy” for many senior managers, said Kristian Norling, enterprise search evangelist at Findwise who implemented the survey.
Survey respondents were enterprise search practitioners from a range of public and private global organisations. 73% of respondents come from companies with more than 1000 employees, and 43% have more than 10,000 employees. 81% of respondents work for an organisation which uses one corporate language, but about half of the organisations have at least two languages supported by search.
78% of respondents agreed that finding the right information was critical to achieving business goals. But the survey suggests that this is actually getting harder to do. 63% of respondents said that it was 'hard' or 'very hard' to find the right information in their businesses – a 10% increase compared to 2012. 9% of respondents said that it was 'fairly easy' to find the right information - but this represents a 5% decrease from the previous year.
Obstacles include inconsistency in content tagging, lack of adequate tags, poor search functionality, how content is tagged, and more than one search application in use.