Bad Search Costs You

For several reasons, CIOs should find search investments easier to justify than they would have a couple of years ago. Despite today's sophisticated IT efforts, many enterprise managers say simply getting to the right information can be difficult. "Enterprises see Google [search on the Web] and say: 'I want some of that'. The search box is now a dominant method of getting access to data outside the enterprise," says Whit Andrews, a research vice president at Gartner.

An Accenture survey released in January 2007 reveals that US and UK managers spend up to two hours each day searching for information, and more than half the information they obtain has no value to them. In addition, 45 percent of respondents say it's a big challenge to gather information about what other parts of the company are doing. Only 31 percent said that competitor information is hard to get.

Another motivator: Compliance requirements are making business and IT executives seek tools to find information quickly for regulatory filings, government investigations or discovery in legal cases, says Forrester's Brown. That's resulted in special-purpose search tools for, say, transaction log files and voice-mail analysis.

But enterprises should be careful not to adopt search in a piecemeal way, Brown advises. "The industry competition has made it difficult for buyers to have a cohesive strategy. For example, Google's offering is designed to be provisioned by a layperson, so companies end up with a lot of Google appliances churning away at indexing," he says. (Google's newest version of the Mini, 2.2, can index up to 50,000 documents in its $US1995 entry-level version, or up to 300,000 documents in its top-of-the-line $US8995 version. IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition can index up to 500,000 documents.)

Besides wasting network resources, naive deployment of entry-level search tools can both expose private information and hide available documents, says Gartner's Andrews. That's because such search engines will scan all servers and documents you point them to, and a server may have data that had been secured by obscurity — no one knew it was there, so it was safe — that is now available in the search engine. And these low-cost engines rarely offer accounts-based access that could restrict access to specific documents based on who's doing the search, he says.

Conversely, a naive setup could miss some servers with documents that you want to be accessible.