Almost 20 years ago,
I took a role as a technical project manager in an IT shared services team at
the phone company, and got involved in the development and support of our
division's portal. A key part of the role was managing the front-end tools and
reports made available to our internal customers, with some data and reporting
capabilities consumed through our portal. As I began working with the many
different vendors and with my DB team to provide data and reports to our
internal power users, I was introduced into the world of search -- with all of
its nuances and limitations.
I can't tell you how
many meetings I sat through or conducted to determine how we would slice and
dice, dice, and format our massive data stores to meet the need of one of our
power user marketing campaigns. In most cases, those power user requests drove
what data was provided, and in what format, to the common end user (employees).
What made it particularly difficult was the limited controls we could place on
access controls and permissions. Most requests required one-off reports, as
giving access usually meant all-or-nothing permissions.
Years later, while
working with a client to redesign their internal systems, senior management
requested that we deploy what was then an early version of SharePoint. Having
worked with very large corporate portals and knowledge management platform
(most of which included very hefty price tags), I was not impressed with what I
had seen from SharePoint, and recommended a couple other solutions. But the
leadership team insisted, and I rolled out team sites. It was while trying to
develop a simple taxonomy and understand the basic indexing and search
capabilities that I caught a glimpse of the potential of SharePoint.
But this post is not
about SharePoint -- I just wanted to recap my personal experience with the
evolution of the search experience.
In my experience,
the end-to-end search experience is often the weak link in the chain when it
comes to knowledge management and collaboration platforms. Organizations tend
to focus their time and effort around one aspect of the experience or the
other, and then wonder why their efforts fail. For example, organizations may
build out complex taxonomies and information architecture frameworks, yet fail
to balance the frameworks against end user collaboration practices. On the flip
side, organizations may focus on end user functionality that does not
adequately capture and categorize content. In either extreme, search fails
because the organization does not balance their requirements for capture,
categorization, and correlation with the requirements of end users for a
process that matches the way in which they need to work.
As search continues
to evolve, we are seeing the integration of social capabilities helping to
bridge this enormous, automating many of the complex search requirements while
giving users a set of rich features that make their knowledge management
platforms useable.
Social is just
another layer of the search experience, but even with the latest wave of social
automation and social graphing making the administration of these capabilities
more of an out-of-the-box experience, it does not mean that organizations will
not need to understand their nuances search requirements and refine their KM
platforms. With the increase in capabilities comes increased complexity and
volume of data, which means now more than ever organizations need to think
about the end-to-end social experience. The days may be gone (thank goodness)
when a shared services team needs to slice and dice all of the company's data
to ensure end users have access to what they need (and only that which their
permissions should allow), but unless you understand your end user needs, they
may quickly become overwhelmed by the wave of choices available.