Searching Through Time
April 7th, 2009
If you can believe it, it is April already. Time seems to be flying in 2009. This becomes a great lead into the topic for this month. This month’s topic is the time saving search appliance for business. The Google Search Appliance provides a great wealth of information in sub-second speeds.
An analysis of knowledge-workers’ time illustrates the importance of a fully-functioning search appliance for organizations. Without effective and efficient search, half of employees’ time is spent non-productively. This means that for every hour of work, thirty minutes is utilized on: gathering information for documents, converting information from other formats, unsuccessful search for documents, and recreating previously created content. From a management standpoint, knowledge workers should have the information in front of them instantly and be able to use the information productively.
In addition to the wasted time recreating content and changing formats, employees also spend 25% of their time searching. Successful enterprise search should give the users information and they should be spending, on average, 5-10% of their time locating essential information. Ultimately, this means that only about 25% of workers’ time is spent on the core task. Obviously, this is discouraging to any manager or executive.
The problem only gets worse though. With each passing day, month, and year of an organization, the amount of information is exponentially rising. Another study performed by IDC, says that most users do not attribute speed as a factor for their searches. However, with an increased content count and proprietary search slowing down as a consequence, users will drop the search after a few seconds. Users have become used to the Google.com sub-second response time, and assume something is wrong when these results are not produced.
This is not even to mention customer frustrations. When a customer goes to a site, they are expecting to find the product, service, or information quickly. But when a proper search is not in place, studies have shown that individuals will leave the site if search is timely or non-existent. Users will also abandon their searches if it takes too long to produce results. Thus, by decreasing the response time by 30%, an organization can effectively increase customer satisfaction and increase site traffic by 25%. These are impressive numbers.
Time is extremely valuable to organizations of all industries, verticals, and sizes. The more time wasted on searching for content, the less time using that content to create essential information for product launches, documentation of projects, and even customer sales. It is well understood in the global business market and with the speed of business, that both workers and customers know that sub-second results are possible.
If searching and recreating content takes time, and time is money…you can do the math. Happy Searching!
