“How much should the organisation invest improving the intranet search and will this be recouped in timed saved finding information on the internal web channel?”
There is general agreement that poor search cost organisations money in lost time. Quantifying this is tends to be based around simplistic extrapolation. For example: X Staff spending Y seconds each on searching for information equals ten zillion dollars in lost productivity. Therefore we should invest money in a new search application. Sort of fails to discuss the complexity of finding information or recognise that there are plenty of possible approaches in addition to just focusing on improving the search application.
As I ponder this within the context of where I work some thoughts have begun to emerge including:
- Quantifying the performance of an internal search engine is difficult and will probably be based around fuzzy qualities measures
- Without these it could be difficult to establish a benchmark in which to measure the effectiveness of various enhancements or optimisations
- Building a search based around lots of high quality metadata is resource intensive. It could end up costing the organisation more then it returns in productivity improvements.
- Is it more cost effective to rely on the built in power of a good search application and put the resources into improving content, fixing the IA, archiving out of date pages etc?
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