Enterprise Search – Challenge or Opportunity?

As companies move toward digital transformation and consumerization within the enterprise, search becomes critical to the overall employee experience. In addition to key word matches, we see industry trends focusing on expanding the search experience to ideas like knowledge sharing, social facilitation, data integration, inclusion of varied content types, developing key relationships in contexts and expanding searching capabilities to support user intents.

Industry trends suggest a need to leverage a people-centric approach to designing an enterprise search experience that provides several user experience (UX) benefits:

• Findability: Expand the range of information that is accessible and present it in a meaningful and efficient way – don’t make the employee hunt for what they are looking for!
• Context: Add a layer of context to frame the results and provide information aligned to the employee’s intent and business’ objectives – ultimately answering the employee’s question!
• Relevancy: Leverage knowledge about employees to allow for a more personalized experience – don’t show employees what they don’t need to see!

In today’s world we see that many companies are still on the journey of establishing a meaningful and relevant enterprise search experience. Some companies are ahead of the curve while others are still catching up. That said, we often observe similar challenges across many companies that impact the evolution of the enterprise search experience:

• The role of search within the overall employee experience is not clearly defined Search is often perceived as a utility when it should be really considered the other half of the employee experience. We believe that search goes hand in hand with the traditional ways of navigating and browsing the solution. Ultimately search should be an employee preference that yields the same exact experience.

• Search experiences are still siloed  While companies leverage enterprise search, the scope of what’s searched often does not extend fully across the ecosystem. This means there still siloed search functions (e.g., job search) that need to be rationalized to create a unified search experience.

• Finding the right information is difficult without structured and tagged content

  Providing a more relevant and contextualized search results requires that content be structured and tagged appropriately. Structured content helps to support and lift the search experience through snippets and other search-optimized content types. Tagging content using controlled vocabularies helps prioritize and organize search results.

• Employee expectations for how search should perform Google has set the standard for search expectations in the consumer space. We hear it all the time from employees, “Why can’t it just work like Google?” We believe that a design approach for enterprise search needs to balance consumer grade expectations with relevant scenarios and situations in which employees leverage search specifically in the enterprise context.

At Logical Design Solutions, we understand the complexity of enterprise search and its relationship to the overall employee experience. That’s why we consider enterprise search an important factor in the overall user experience strategy of our solutions.