London firms are information graveyards

Primitive corporate information search tools have caused a new survey to dub London's firms "information graveyards" for the difficulty its workers say they contribute to doing their everyday jobs.

More than half (59 per cent) of workers questioned by enterprise search vendor, Sinequa said the tools their employers provided for searching their own information systems were either 'poor' or 'very poor'.

One in three said that no best practices for sharing information had been put in place, making searching for information "time consuming and frustrating" and a further 46 per cent said that information searches within their organisation were "generic and not comprehensive".

And although 88 per cent of companies offered their staff an intranet, none had used them to increase operational performance by making information more easily available. While only eight per cent of had a dedicated tool that allows staff to search information across enterprise systems, like using key search terms.

Colin Hadden, Sinequa country manager told IT PRO the research also found that some staff can count up to 10 times in a day where their day-to-day duties are impacted by having to stop and search various databases and other data sources for information.

It's unsurprising therefore, that 40 per cent of survey respondents said finding the information to support the development of a business critical document takes two to three hours on average, with a quarter stating it could take three hours or more.

"There is increased pressure on companies to do something about the unstructured data they are continually creating and storing," he said. "Most companies have a broad set of data residing in content management systems, email, applications and fileshares. But enterprise search has not been a business priority."

The vast majority of individuals felt that company knowledge and expertise resides within people's heads rather than being documented and accessible to all. This view was exacerbated, Hadden said, by the expectations set by efficient searching at home, with internet search engines, to find information more quickly than at work.

The research carried out amongst 200 London office workers in March 2008, found that 77 per cent of employee's felt that they and their company would benefit from being to search and access relevant information in a timely manner from across the business.

Key benefits that respondents outlined included increased productivity (42 per cent), the ability to make more autonomous decisions (51 per cent) and gain more insight into the business (24 per cent).

"It may be that enterprise search technologies were too costly in terms of return on investment and business footprint in the past. But advances in linguistic and semantic technologies have been key to making them more lightweight, secure and affordable," Hadden said.

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