Organisations’ ever-increasing dependency on digital communication and data exchange, and the subsequent need to respond rapidly to any customer, partner, supplier and internal user request for information, regardless of what the information is or where in the business it may be stored, is driving increased sophistication and flexibility in enterprise search technology.
The days of keyword-only search are gone, and there is now a heavier emphasis on ‘intelligent, in-context’ searching. The ability to trawl through information - not just at the meta/index level, but the content embedded within the document and the context of that document, to ensure search results are both relevant and accurate – so-called ‘applied search’ - has become key.
Furthermore, technology is now advanced enough to have made content more homogenous; it no longer is important whether a document is a TIF, PDF, Fax or web page, the technology can retrieve relevant data from it. Finally, there is now the ability to build up more intelligent classifications, or groupings of business content and analyse and understand what that content means.
In short, there is far more integration of content, context and flexibility & efficiency in how organisations retrieve information.
Organisations will continue to have disparate sources of information; whether that is on the web, on people’s laptops or in ERP systems.
The next step for Enterprise search will be to provide a level and sophistication of search capability, so that the source of the data becomes irrelevant. By implementing a centrally managed, highly integrated content management system, the user will not need to think about where the information they are requesting is held, whether that is within an accounts system or a CRM system. The search can then be dealt with intelligently, and the results produced in a meaningful way based around the user’s profile. This is intelligent classification, retrieval and presentation of content.
This ability is extremely powerful and supports the overall objective of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). You can’t have a good ECM system without ‘applied search’, and if you’re going to have good enterprise-level search capabilities then you need a good ECM environment.
Finally, one area that is going to help organisations to truly maximise their investment in enterprise search, and other areas of content management, is in integration. There are currently many players and providers of different content management products, and solutions, some of which need minimal integration – others of which, however, where a lot of integration work is required. I believe that moving forward, full ECM systems are the only way that full benefit will be achieved; integration is going to be key to this, and one area where we will see a lot of demand is the need for systems integrators and solution providers in the ECM space.