In 2012 I started publishing a series of Research Notes which were typically 10-15 pages long and covered a range of topics from search team membership to the management of virtual teams. The download levels were very good. Then in 2013 I launched the Search Circle, a subscription information service to search managers. Each month I released a Search Note similar in concept to the Research Notes. However there was no time in the month to continue the Research Note series. The Search Circle was not as successful as I had hoped and I closed it down in June this year. One of the benefits was that I had written over 60,000 words of text on a broad range of search topics and most of that text will end up in the 2nd Edition of Enterprise Search, which will be published in April 2015.

I have now restarted the Research Note series, and it will cover both search and intranet/information management topics. This month I have published a Search Strategy A-Z Topic List. I have struggled for some time to develop a structure for a search strategy.  Having written a number of them over the last couple of years it dawned on me that the structure was very dependent on the way that the organisation wanted the strategy to be presented but that the topics that needed to be covered were virtually the same in each case. Many surveys have indicated that only a minority of organisations have a corporate search strategy and my experience is that search managers, especially those in IT, seem to have a difficulty in deciding what to cover in the strategy.

The Search Strategy A-Z Topic List sets out 40 potential topics in 12 pages.  For each there is a brief annotation on why the topic is important and what should be included in the strategy. The list starts at Analytics and ends with Website Search. Included in the Topic List are two topics that I feel should not appear in the strategy but you will have to read the listing to find out what they are. At the end there is a table of all the topics with columns that can be used to note which topics need to be included,  who is responsible for a specific topic (strategy development is a collaborative task) and when the section has been completed. The Topic List can be downloaded as a pdf from the Resources section of this website. Comments on topics that I have missed would be appreciated as this Topic List will be the final chapter of Enterprise Search in due course.

Martin White