Search and WorkForce Integration Initiatives: Two Paths

Increasingly I am seeing more projects focusing on “Search and WorkForce Integration“.    Search plays a key part in these initiatives.   The goal of search then is to provide accurate and timely information.  The gist of the business problem is this:

 

               If workers can’t find the information needed, 
               they either have to reinvent it or decide without it.

 

At some stage along the process of implementing a WorkForce Integration initiative, a company may find itself at a point where people are not using search because it “just doesn’t work right.”

 

At this point, companies respond by taking one of two paths. One path leads them out of the woods and the other gets them lost deeper in the forest.

Path 1.  The first path is a common IT response and that is to thow more hardware and software at the problem. This response can be valid if search is slow and unable to handle indexing multiple file formats, meeting security needs, and similar issues.   However, the problem is often not an IT problem but a business problem.   If you treat search as an IT problem, then search will likely to never work right.  You will just get lost deeper in the forest.

 

Path 2.  The second path is to understand that people’s jobs is NOT to search for information.   Their jobs are to complete various tasks such as analysis, evaluation, support, processing, etc.   They search for information to find out latest information, identify resusable resources, solve problems, provide answers.  If you want to know why people aren’t using search, the answer is straight-forward:

       An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is
       more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than
       for him not to have it.”  Calvin Mooers  (aka Mooers’ Law, 1959)

To solve the search problem, you must understand the business problem and search can be used to meet those needs – and make it easy for people to use the tool.

This is the area in which Davalen shines.  Our experience goes much further than the ability to install, configure and manage the OmniFind Enterprise Edition search application.  We know how to use the tooling to solve business problems.

 

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