Can search replace "the perfect secretary"?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Despite all the information available to them, companies are now taking longer to reach critical business decisions, a new report finds. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; a couple of other recent publications suggest that there’s a serious shortage of the skills needed to help turn data into action.

Almost half the businesses surveyed for the Economist Intelligence Unit report Game Changer say that the complexity of the environments in which they operate have forced them to extend decision making times over the past five years, with only about a fifth saying that times have fallen. They’re reasonably confident about collecting and analysing data, but much less comfortable when it comes to making decisions based on it.

But you have to wonder whether the confidence that companies profess in their ability to manage their data is actually misplaced. Veteran search expert Martin White certainly seems to think so.

In a presentation at last week’s Online Information 2011 conference, he threw out some pretty provocative challenges. Why do they call corporate IT heads chief information officers, for example, when they clearly know nothing about information?

But in Europe, bumping up your corporate information skills could prove pretty problematical, Martin implied. There are no undergraduate courses on information retrieval anywhere in the continent, so organisations can’t find the people with the skills to manage their information assets – and what’s more, Google has hired a thousand engineers in Europe so far this year, scooping up what potential enterprise search talent there is.

He also drew attention to MarkLogic’s sobering 2011 Survey on Unstructured Data. Two out of five respondents said that upper management were barely aware of the volume of unstructured data in their organisation, whereas front line staff had serious concerns about it (a finding also reflected in the EIU report).

The coup de grace came from Stephan Schillerwein of the Swiss-based Infocentric Research, publisher of The Digital Workplace: Redefining Productivity in the Information Age. Searching can take up to two hours of each working day, he said in his presentation, meaning that you spend the equivalent of October to December each year just looking for stuff.

There are lots of skill-related reasons for this, he said, but the root cause is that enterprise search doesn’t know what you’re doing. To illustrate this, he introduced a splendidly politically incorrect (and 1956-vintage) exemplar: “Gabriele – the Perfect Secretary”.

“Gabriele” provides the missing link because she understands the context in which her (cigar-smoking) boss works, Stephan explained. Enterprise search won’t be able to match the value she used to offer until it can do the same – working out by itself, for instance, that when you get back from a conference, you need an expenses form.

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