Enterprise Search, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19. The Next Five Years

The primary reason for writing a second edition of this book is that so much has changed since I started to write the first edition in 2011. This is especially true of the search business, with many companies being acquired, others disappearing, and open source search being accepted as an enterprise solution. In 2011, we knew very little about how enterprise search was being viewed and used by organizations, but with the help of Findwise, and more recently AIIM, we now have a fairly good indication of the state of the enterprise search environment.

It is still in the early stages of development despite the fact that the core technologies date back to the 1960s. However, as a result of the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, many organizations embarked on major redundancy programs in an effort to reduce costs. The place they started was at corporate headquarters with staff in administrative functions without appreciating the role these employees played in being the corporate memory of the organization. They knew where information on past and current projects was stored, and they had excellent networks to tap into the knowledge of the organization. At the same time, the amount of information being generated and collected by these organizations was increasing rapidly. Storage costs were low, so no one worried about the vast collections of multiple versions of documents that were being established. Just press the Save button and let someone else ...