Enterprise Search

Chapter 1. Searching the Enterprise

It seemed like a normal day when you arrived at work and turned on your computer. Then, the phone rang. Colleagues of yours were just about to go into a meeting with a prospective customer, and they needed details about custom software they had proposed installing. You went to search for those details, and they weren’t in the standard specification sheet, nor were they in the release notes, nor were they in any of the first fifty results your company’s search tool produced.

Every Day Is a Decision Day

We have to make many decisions every day. Each of those decisions required enough information to make the decision as risk-free as possible. In many cases, though, we probably did not have the time needed to find all the relevant information. We probably prided ourselves on being good enough managers not to need information; our experience enabled us to make the decision!

Every day, however, people make the news headlines because they made the wrong decision. The financial meltdown on 2008 was arguably an information problem. Loans had been made to people purchasing homes without adequate security. The pressures of making sales targets led to an inadequate review of the circumstances of the people asking for loans and senior managers in the banks had no information about the scale of the problem. While your decisions may not result in you making the news, a failure to make the best decision possible on the basis of the best available information could ...