More than 200 people, primarily from Europe and North America, have responded to the Enterprise Search and Findability survey, providing a unique insight into how search is currently being managed, or rather is not being managed, in the best interest of the organisation. However, to get a deeper understanding in how search is used and managed at a regular basis in an enterprise context, search vendors and integrators have been excluded in this report, resulting in 170 unique responses from 28 countries globally.

A few findings

The survey has shown that the majority of the respondents find it difficult to find relevant information within the organization. To be more precise, 59.5 % of the respondents expressed that it is very/moderately hard to find the right information. Only 11.2% stated that it is fairly easy to search for information and as few as 2.8 % consider it very easy to find the desirable information. The ease of finding the right information clearly has a connection with the size of the organization. When looking at organizations with less than 1000 employees, one can see that 30.9% of the respondents feel that it is moderately/very hard to find the right information, while the corresponding percentage for organizations with 1001 or more employees is 77.3%.

The larger the organisation, the more information, and the more cumbersome it is to search and use the right information at the right time.

Video

Kristian Norling presents the findings from the global survey on Enterprise Search implementations. Presented at Enterprise Search Summit #ESS12 in New York, Enterprise Search Europe #ESEU in London, #IKS Workshop in Salzburg and Findability Day 2012 #findday12 in Stockholm. The slides are available here.