Mastering the Challenges of Enterprise Search

Rapid access to actionable, up-to-the-minute information is essential for business success. But with the volume of data stored within enterprises rising by an estimated 70 percent each year, this is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge. Add to this the fact that companies generally store business-critical information across multiple systems – and in a wide variety of formats – and you have a recipe for major headaches. The answer to these problems is provided by enterprise search solutions designed to enable fast, user-friendly access to information, no matter where it resides.

Looking for a needle in the corporate haystack

To make sound business decisions, you need to find highly specific answers to highly specific questions. But that can be far from easy. Users often don’t know exactly where and how the facts and figures they need are stored. The nugget of information necessary to complete an urgent task could be in one of many locations – ranging from the company intranet and public Websites to document repositories, reports, and enterprise applications. What’s more, it could be saved in one of any number of different formats – from e-mail and widely used document types, such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe PDF, to files created using homegrown apps.

In an ideal world, enterprise search tools would provide a silver bullet solution, allowing users to simultaneously run queries across all these sources. However, the reality is very different – with employees frequently having to manually sift through each individual system. And even then, there is no guarantee this will yield the desired results. Small wonder, then, that staff can feel as if they’re looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Today’s solutions – and their drawbacks

Many vendors offer solutions designed to tackle these issues. The current focus is primarily on text-based search tools, which are well suited for websites and unstructured information. However, the vast majority of business-critical data today resides in enterprise applications – and text-based solutions simply cannot deliver the deep search capabilities essential for structured content of this kind.

More tools – less speed

In an enterprise context, conventional search methods have distinct disadvantages. First, they can be painfully slow. Querying multiple repositories usually entails switching between various tools, with different – often unfamiliar – interfaces. For users accustomed to the ease and speed of web search engines, this can be particularly frustrating. Worse still, the time-consuming quest for the right information seriously impacts productivity – with employees spending an estimated 30 to 70 percent of their working day trying to track down facts and figures.

More hits – less quality

Another difficulty is that today’s text-based tools deliver quantity rather than quality. Searches may generate endless hit lists – but on closer scrutiny, these contain little or nothing in the way of actionable answers to specific business questions.

Access denied

Even when workers finally locate what they’re looking for, they may find they are unable to access it – because they do not have the necessary rights or because they are unfamiliar with the system in which it is stored. This issue becomes particularly acute when employees require structured information stored within enterprise applications. Users may have the appropriate rights and authorizations, but find they lack the specialist skills needed to navigate the company’s ERP or CRM systems.

Stop-gap solutions lack scalability and accuracy

In an emergency, staff can always turn to power users within their organization for assistance. While this may work on an ad-hoc basis, it can hardly provide an enterprise-wide solution. Moreover, power users may know their way around your company’s IT systems, but they cannot be expected to understand the overall business context of a specific search – making it difficult for them to deliver the results employees need.

Does this sound familiar?

So how does this pan out in day-to-day work? Let’s say you’re a sales professional getting ready for a meeting with a key account. In theory, your PC is the gateway to everything you need for the visit. In practice, calling up that information can be far from easy. You’ve forgotten where you saved the presentation for this customer. And then there’s the quote you created a few weeks’ back. Two text-based searches later you’ve managed to track down these documents. But now there are higher hurdles to clear. You decide to query the status of open sales orders in the backend enterprise systems. The data is there – but you draw a blank because you have no idea which system it resides in. What about outstanding complaints? This time you manage to locate the information, but you lack the know-how needed to use the relevant system. By now you may be wondering if it’s even worth calling up your web browser to look for directions to the customer site.

Enterprise search essentials

To meet employees’ real-world needs and deliver genuine business value, enterprise search solutions have to:

• Provide an easy-to-use single point of access to structured and unstructured content across multiple systems and interfaces
• Focus on knowledge, rather than raw information
• Support role-based, personalized searches, with built-in context awareness
• Yield actionable results
• Deliver information quickly and securely, and
• Allow users to actively contribute to the value of search results

These attributes not only greatly accelerate the search process – they also shift the balance from quantity to quality.

User-friendly, multichannel access: To avoid time-consuming multiple queries, employees need a single tool for searching and federating both structured and unstructured content. And for maximum ease of use, they should be able to work in their preferred interface – whether this be a portal, desktop productivity tool, RSS, and mobile or RFID device. This multichannel approach, embedding search functionality in the familiar work environment, makes for quick-and-easy information gathering.

Focus on specific facts and knowledge: Unlike the casual web surfer, business users generally want a specific answer to a specific question. For example, only one version of a customer presentation will be up to date. Only one figure will accurately reflect the actual number of spare parts in inventory. And a purchase order cannot have more than one status. To deliver the right results, enterprise search tools have to go beyond broad-brush text-based approaches and focus on relevant data only.

Role-based, personalized searches, with built-in context awareness: Even if a sales professional and an IT manager run identical queries, each requires very different results, reflecting their very different jobs. Accordingly, enterprise solutions should support personalized searches based on individual users’ roles, preferences (for example, frequently used transactions), and authorizations. The software should also take into account the overall business context – identifying the business process the employee is currently working on, automatically homing in on the systems involved in his or her specific tasks, and excluding all others.

Translate results into action: When business users perform a search, they generally want more than just simple snippets of information – they want a reliable basis for action. However, conventional text-based methods rarely deliver this kind of actionable insight. One way of adding value to search results would be to include links to activities – again based on user roles. For example, if a product manager ran a query using the name of his or her product, the tool would not simply return a long hit list; rather, it would propose various related actions – such as view sales orders, customer performance, or overall product performance. These would enable the manager to jump directly from the search results to a business transaction or workspace – without specialist knowledge of the systems involved.

Deliver information quickly and securely: To meet the expectations of today’s users, enterprise tools have to be every bit as fast and easy to operate as the search engines employees use on the web. But unlike these public tools, they also have to effectively safeguard confidential or sensitive business information, ensuring staff cannot access content they are not permitted to view. This can be achieved by taking the individual user’s authorizations into account and restricting searches accordingly.

Put the user firmly in the driving seat: At present, running a query is very much a one-way street – with the user’s role confined to entering terms and waiting passively for results. Another way of adding business value is to make this process more interactive, allowing workers to contribute to increasing the effectiveness of the solution. By applying Web 2.0 social networking principles, and enabling staff to rank and tag content, companies can greatly enhance the benefits of their search tools. Information that employees find particularly helpful in their day-to-day work would then move up the hit list, making it easier for colleagues to identify the most useful results.

Transforming theory into practic

A tool combining these capabilities is a lot closer to becoming reality than you might think. Over the past few years, SAP has been developing a solution that meets these requirements – SAP® Enterprise Search. Part of the software giant’s growing portfolio for information workers, the new application is intended to put powerful search functionality at the fingertips of employees throughout the enterprise – from the reception desk to the boardroom.

SAP Enterprise Search is essentially a meta search engine, designed to crawl, index and federate the results of queries against SAP and third-party systems. Based on the powerful SAP NetWeaver platform, it not only leverages SAP’s unparalleled knowledge of data within SAP enterprise applications, but also enables users to quickly and easily find both structured and unstructured content – across a wide range of SAP and non-SAP sources, within and beyond enterprise boundaries. What’s more, the functionality is available via a wide variety of channels, from portals to desktop widgets to mobile devices and e mail.

The enterprise-wide gateway to business processes

“SAP Enterprise Search reflects our commitment to enabling all information workers within an organization to actively participate in business processes,” explains Dennis Moore, SAP's general manager of emerging solutions. “Just as web search is now widely seen as the gateway to the web, so SAP Enterprise Search is intended to become the gateway to processes supported by SAP and non-SAP software. Our vision is to make all business intelligence and processes within an organization just one click away – increasing productivity and driving better decision making.”

Of course, delivering these search capabilities across all repositories and applications would be a tall order even for a player with SAP’s considerable resources. And this is where SAP’s extensive partner ecosystem comes into play. A beta version of SAP Enterprise Search is already available for download from the SAP Developer Network site – enabling independent software vendors to extend the reach of the central search tool by creating dedicated connectors for non-SAP applications.

Finding the needle?

SAP Enterprise Search will soon ship to the first pilot customers – as an appliance combining software and dedicated hardware. With this offering, planned availability in summer 2007, the days of searching for needles in haystacks could well be numbered.