“This has important implications on productivity at all levels of the business,” says Iain Fletcher, VP marketing for Search Technologies. “For example, a study by Aberdeen Group found that executives making good use of search tools to look for information saved six hours per week compared to those organisations not using enterprise search. This clearly has major implications, on both operational efficiencies and their ability to make decisions based on all the available information.”
Reinforcing a narrow siloed approach to data management, 70% of those polled still use databases and 44% basic file systems to store data, with only just over one third (35%) adopting collaborative Content Management System (CMS) solutions.
Over the past decade, a series of surveys by industry analysts such as IDC, Butler Group and MindMetre Research have shown how corporate salary costs are frittered away as half of enterprise searches continue to end in failure or frustration. “Though search engine technologies have greatly improved over this period, at the same time data volumes have grown exponentially, and so ‘findability’ has not moved forward for many organisations,” says Fletcher.
As part of the big data explosion, much of this growth has come in the form of unstructured data such as emails and social networks, which today can account for up to 80% of data within the organisation. “Technology from leading vendors and open source projects is now good enough,” he believes, “and in many cases the missing ingredient is attention to detail during the implementation process.
Unstructured content is fundamentally different to structured data and, in our experience, glossing over this difference is a key reason why surveys continue to find dissatisfaction amongst users.
“Big data projects which seek to derive insight from unstructured content face the same challenges, Attention to data quality, before it is indexed into the search engine for business insight application is a key part of the big data opportunity. This is critical, as appropriate data quality gives decision-makers the necessary confidence to take meaningful action based on the resulting analysis.”