by Barry Murphy
Recently, I was contacted by an X1 user and fan and he asked me, “why isn’t X1 more famous?” His point was that X1 Search 8 solves a problem that every company has – people can’t find their information. They are unable to find that one email or document that they know exists, but that they just can’t remember where they put it. This X1 fan happens to be a consultant that works with many, many companies and reported that, no matter what client he visits, all have workers that constantly complain about not being able to find what they are looking for.
It can be a marketer’s nightmare to have someone ask why your product is not more famous, but it was a question I had already been giving some thought to. Part of the challenge when it comes to the “search market” is that most people think of Google when they think of search. Google is easy to use and helps everyone navigate the Internet much more efficiently. But, web search is a much different beast than search within a company. The reality is that 80% of what business workers are looking for exists in their email, file shares, desktop folders, or SharePoint sites. The worker knows the content exists, has an idea of what he/she is looking for, but simply doesn’t know where it is. But, when enterprise search solutions were first rolled out, they were built like web search solutions – as if someone wasn’t really sure what they were looking for.
The misperception that the Google search paradigm can apply within the enterprise resulted in enterprise search solutions improperly conflating several search use cases. But, web search and big data analytics – the new search du jour – are very distinct search types that require features and functions specific to their own unique workflows and use cases. Refashioning big data analytics or web search tools for enterprise search is a recipe for failure and certainly not an end-user driven requirement.
Big Data and the business intelligence (BI) tools built to address Big Data are hot topics. And BI can deliver some very good information to workers that are managing structured processes. Every company has deployed some kind of BI tool, but – as our consultant fan let us know – every company still has the problem of business workers not being able to find information. That is because, when it comes to business worker search, the human brain is the most powerful analytical engine for business productivity search. Other search solutions have sophisticated algorithms that try to predict things like document taxonomy classifications. That can be useful at times, but not to enable search for the business worker because the interface and workflow are not designed for business productivity search. Additionally, analytics-driven solutions require a lot of hardware to make those algorithms churn.
There is a more cost-effective way to solve the problem and ensure that business workers will stop complaining – deploy a search solution with a user-friendly interface that allows humans to use their brain to filter and sort through their information assets. X1 Search 8 can do that – and do it in today’s virtualized and Cloud-heavy environments. It is time to realize what business workers are really looking for when they turn to search tools – the one document they know exists that has the information necessary for them to do their jobs in any given moment.