Enterprise Search Europe 2014 is now less than two months away, and there is a lot to talk about. Last week I attended the IntraTeam event in Copenhagen where Jane McConnell gave a keynote about the findings in her new Digital Workplace in the Connected Organisation report fir 2014. The findings on the use of search remain very concerning given that they are based on 314 responses from a wide range of organisations and therefore are probably representative of the overall situation.
The headlines after over 20 years since the release of Verity (arguably the prototypical enterprise search application) include
- Only 25% of respondents have implemented enterprise search
- Just 11% of respondents are ‘Very Satisfied’ with search
- Information quality, poor user interface design and insufficient resources are all significant reasons for search dissatisfaction
- In only 20% of cases are business departments involved in search management and only 58% take the trouble to review search logs
Many of the delegates I spoke to said that their organisations still had not invested in an adequate level of search support and few understood the challenges posed by SharePoint 2013 search when used as a global enterprise search application. The papers from Peter Wallqvist and Agnes Molnar about SharePoint 2013 search were both excellent and quite a number of delegates were making detailed notes! Agnes will be speaking at Enterprise Search Europe.
Enterprise Search Europe offers almost 20 case studies on search implementation and plenty of time for conversations with the presenters in the breaks and at the evening Meetup on the first day of the conference. Add in workshops on open source search implementation, search user interface design and SharePoint 2013 implementation, excellent keynote speakers and two strong panel sessions and I hope that you will see ESE2014 as the best possible event to find new ways of increasing search satisfaction without yet another change of technology. The deadline for early booking is 21 March, which is 15 working days from now.
Martin White