Finding, not searching is what really counts

Next month the folks at the Association for Information and Image Management, better known as AIIM, will release a study on how difficult it is for end users to locate data behind the corporate firewall. Carl Frappaolo, vice president of market intelligence for AIIM, previewed some of the, ahem, findings in a webinar yesterday, which he says underscores that search technology is a success in business, but what he calls "findability" is a failure.

Findability for Frappaolo means "the art and science of making content findable."

How hard can that be? Pour data through a search engine, index it, present it to the world.

Not so, it seems. AIIM's research shows that most good-size companies use around four separate search engines to locate enterprise content, a few as many as ten. To Frappaolo those numbers indicate that organizations are not taking the finding of data as seriously as the searching for it.

He says IT is "throwing a lot of good search tools at siloed content."

His survey, taken in May among 528 respondents, also indicates 52% of business users acknowledge that the enterprise search process has gotten easier over the past two years, but half of them (49%) still find it difficult and time-consuming.

That could be simply be because users are not savvy in search techniques or that they lack access rights to certain sources, but blame the search tools. It would not be surprising to learn that 49% of any given company's employees were clueless on advanced search techniques, like Booleans or even multi-term queries, and/or desirous of information desirous of information beyond their pay grade.

Still, Frappaolo argues that companies need to change they way they think about finding content. The first thing you need to do is confront the corporate cultural and political barriers that keep information in silos, he says, noting 69% of respondents to his poll said that one-half or less of company content was currently searchable inside their organization.

The main problem, Frappaolo contends , is that "nobody owns the strategy" for findability. The first step, then, is to identify someone willing to confront territorial-minded line-of-business managers, nervous chief information security officers, anxious compliance and risk managers, scary corporate lawyers, and overworked CIOs and herd them into agreement.

That's one tall order. Where on earth would you find such a person?