Resolving the 80/20 dilemma
Jinfo Blog

29th May 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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End users are spending less time on gathering the information they need – but their search failure rate is going up. Competitor information is their top unmet specific requirement – and certain categories of information figure so strongly in their wish list that information managers could invoke the 80/20 rule, satisfying large swathes of need by concentrating on just a few categories. These are some of the fascinating findings of Outsell’s End-User Update for 2009 (purchase details at http://digbig.com/4ythr) which also comments that, credit crunch or not, 70% of the respondents’ organisations still have a library or information centre. Well over a third of end-users see making information available to the desktop as the centre's main role, although a significant minority still wants to know that intermediated research by information professionals is available when they need it. Spending constraints and information overload are leading to a new measure of control at enterprise level, Outsell reports – reflecting the fact that, despite organisations’ focus on better enterprise search and intranet tools, users are still failing to find what they need more than a third of the time. So findings from another consultant – Gartner – that some organisations could reduce their enterprise search licence costs by $250,000, if they were prepared to compromise on functionality and comprehensiveness, leave organisations with a dilemma. Designers of enterprise search systems are frequently instructed to make web sites, intranets, portals, document libraries and data stores as simple as possible, Gartner explains (http://digbig.com/4yths). But, it adds, extending such capability across unmanaged data is often expensive to implement and rarely includes extra set-up funding. Instead of implementing a universal search platform, Gartner recommends saving money by using tactical alternatives such as federation, application service providers and inexpensive software and appliances. Reducing redundant indexes will cut storage costs, allowing enterprises to incorporate disparate data sources without investing substantially in the intelligence necessary to calculate comparative relevance scores between differing data types. But there’s a catch. ‘The costs of such a strategy are reduced success in the relevance of searched information and, in some cases, increased load on subordinate search engines,’ Gartner acknowledges. So – universal end-user access or cost-effective discovery? Outsell’s and Gartner’s combined findings should be meat and drink to information managers.

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