Craft a Cohesive Strategy

A cohesive search strategy does not mean that enterprises need to have a single search platform or a single content index. "It's OK to have several implementations for different purposes and business units," Brown says — though the enterprise should map out distinct needs, to ensure that information that should be widely accessible isn't mistakenly compartmentalized.

For example, it makes sense to have an independent search engine for a company's public-facing Web site, to ensure that internal data is not included, and it can make sense to have specialty search engines for log analysis. But it typically doesn't make sense for sales and customer service to have separate search platforms, since that lets customer information fall through the gaps of the two systems.

That realization led Harris, a communications equipment manufacturing company, to implement several search technologies, each handling distinct tasks, says Janice Lindsay, director of supply chain management. For example, Harris uses a Google search engine to give employees access to documents and intranet HTML pages, so employees can do quick searches on specific information. But when the company decided to use search to help ensure that product engineers and manufacturing staff could find which parts had the best prices and highest quality ratings and which came from preferred suppliers, it developed a search platform using Endeca's high-end search technology.

That's because the engineering search needs to direct engineers and others to the best or preferred answers to questions such as: "What components meet these engineering requirements?" The results returned are filtered and ranked based on as many as 200 criteria, Lindsay says. The search engine taps into ERP, manufacturing, product design and other systems, as well as into some supplier systems and industry databases to have the context needed for the search engine's rules to make the recommendations.

The need to integrate with other enterprise systems is a sure pointer toward mid-range and high-end search offerings, analysts Brown and Andrews say.