Enterprise search 101: What it is and how it works

An Enterprise Search can be defined as the organized and coordinated retrieval of both structured and unstructured data within an organization. Assuming a successfully deployed enterprise searching solution has occurred, enterprise search will provide a user-friendly interface for accessing, inserting, classifying, and retrieving data securely and in compliance with internal and external policies and regulations.

What is an Enterprise Search?

It’s significant to note that the quality of any enterprise searching results relies upon the classification of the retrieved data, which will be defined by the metadata properties of the data. For example, an effective and powerful metadata property setting for a business presentation will describe, precisely and succinctly, what the presentation comprises, who delivered the presentation, the stakeholder audience that was present, and the key business topics delivered. Providing the metadata has been inserted for the presentation, an end-user can easily retrieve a copy by searching the relevant keywords in the enterprise search engine.

An enterprise search is far more sophisticated than simply entering a topic in a Chrome/Google browser. It’s more advanced than that notion.

An Enterprise Search: Four key categories

1. Locate and reveal

An end-user is aware there is an artifact they require for their current project/work task, and they need to retrieve a copy. User cases could comprise the following scenarios:

• I need a copy of mycompany’ss travel policy documentation for my upcoming business trip.
• I need to read and review a team meeting minutes document for the meeting I missed last week due to illness.
• I need a projectstakeholder’ss phone number to speak to them rather than use an email.

2. Uncover and unearth

An end-user is researching a work-specific topic for a special project they are undertaking, and they need intelligent and broad data search assistance for further information:

• What are ourcompanies’’ strategic plans for Natural Language Programming and Artificial Intelligence in the Fintech space? I need to prepare for a product review meeting next week.
• I need a list of compliance policies and regulations that I need to apply for my next project – for risk management purposes.
• What are our immediatecompetitor’ss newly released products, and how are they related to strategic searching capability? I want to understand how they are attempting to differentiate themselves within our market space.

3. Observe and watch

In this category, an end-user will identify a specific topic and capture all related content periodically for retrieval, and review when required (and they do not want to repeat the same enterprise search whenever they access the system):

• Any company strategic plans that will directly impact my department, I want to be made aware of – using internal and external resources.
• Every morning when I log in to my user account, I want to see a listing of all news articles and company notices related to my current project.
• When a researcher publishes new findings of the most recent machine learning robotics capabilities, send me a notification to my work email addres, and My Documents folder in my Office 365 account.

4. Investigate, inquire and analyse

An end-user requires a relevant portion of data based on their finite set of criteria. This input will feed directly into the searching analytical pathways, including machine learning algorithms and Business Intelligence tools, to generate a graphical array of useful information.

Typically, it’s in this category where a powerful enterprise search engine tool can truly shine, showing its merit and worthiness to an organization.

• I want to apply my Artificial Intelligence learning model theory algorithm to understand how these theories affect my customer list and are executed only in the testing environment. I also require a copy of all standard system-generated reports arising from the algorithm modelling.
• I need an extract of all European financial trades above USD 4 million within the commodities sector for the last three months. I need it displayed in a bar chart format, adopting a general Pareto system analysis.
• I need an extract of all sales figures related to our newly released product. I need min/max/median sales figures since product launch – subcategorized by state and region – shows the extracted data in a 3D pie chart, per state.

Enterprise searching can be as complex or simplistic as aspired. It all depends upon an organization’s requirements for data searching. Security and compliance are requirements that need to be considered, developed, and approved to be configured in the enterprise searching system. And as discussed previously, metadata classification should be addressed and configured by a trained enterprise searching expert.

Conclusion

An enterprise search is more than a basic data indexing tool. It’s a powerful and systematic search application tailored to suit an organization’s data and with an intuitive user interface. It will provide personalized search results, using internal learning and searching experience, to deliver the right data promptly.