White Paper: Enterprise Search 2.0 - An Odyssey Toward Data Insight

Enterprise Search solutions held a great deal of promise when they were first introduced more than a decade ago, and as with many new technologies, there were challenges to their implementation and use. Since then, mergers and acquisitions have enabled the combination of many early solutions into platforms, and new best-of-breed providers have entered the market. A good percentage of companies adopted enterprise search solutions, often in response to worker demand for the same type of information access within the enterprise that they could find outside of it. And yet, all too often, IT has found these technologies less than well accepted by knowledge workers. Data from IDC shows that although use of enterprise search solutions has increased in recent years, satisfaction with many of these tools lags that of most other enterprise productivity tools.

It is the position of this paper that best-of-breed providers are today introducing Enterprise Search 2.0 solutions that are easier to implement, have much higher rates of relevancy, and expand far beyond a simple search box, to power new, usage-specific applications. Examples include customer support and service, investigations, expertise finding, and other dynamic mash-ups of enterprise data that provide composite views of related information specific to a certain area, such as sales or operations – in effect providing a new view of enterprise information that redefines business intelligence.