Chapter 10. Managing Search
No matter how good the search technology and how closely it meets user requirements without an appropriate level of investment in the search support team the chances of continuing to meet the requirements of the organization and the individual requirements of users are going to be close to zero. My main objective in writing this book was to get this message across as clearly as possible.
Implementing search should never be ‘a project’. The work of ensuring that users continue to have high levels of search satisfaction will never come to a close. Each week, and perhaps even most days, there will be something that needs attention. The role of the search support team is not just to be reactive but to anticipate when changes to the search application need to be made, or to identify a training requirement that will address an issue that is just starting to show up on the search logs and user satisfaction surveys.
The strange thing is that for other applications organizations seem more than ready to provide a high level of support staff. Research from Computer Economics Inc. in 2011 suggested that the median level of support for an Enterprise Resource Planning application is 75 users per member of the support team. Translate this into 20,000 users of a search application and the result would be a requirement for a support team of nearly 600 people! Research carried out by Findwise suggests that a median figure for an enterprise search team is probably 300 people! ...
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