Social Glass

Enterprise Search (the first “S” in SLATES) has long been heralded as the mechanism companies can use as a gateway to discover knowledge assets buried across the organization. I’ve discussed this topic a few times on this blog. Most enterprise search solutions integrate (at the API level) to line of business and reporting systems, meaning users can benefit from these systems without having to actually access them (try searching for “GOOG” on google.com to see how this works). Users who may not have known these systems exist now benefit from them.

But what of the other useful statistics enterprise search solutions can offer? Below I cover a few ways in which search solutions can enrich the Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management experience.

Trends

What’s hot? What are people within the organization interested in? What documents are viewed the most? These types of statistics help showcase the collective intelligence of the enterprise and provide valuable insight into what information assets are deemed valuable, or at least interesting, by the knowledge worker base. I can see an enterprise-ready application like Google Trends (see graph above) being used to analyze and provide this kind of business intelligence.

Correlation to Taxonomies

I discussed automated content tagging a few months ago, and search engines are certainly optimized to do this. They associate keywords (tags) to documents, and this inherently creates relationships between documents. So, from a knowledge management perspective, I can see tremendous value in enterprise search solutions providing business intelligence on the richness of information assets related to a corporate taxonomy (with an element in the taxonomy being treated as a keyword by the search engine). With such a solution an organization could automatically determine that, within its Information Management group, it has 1,745 knowledge assets across 7 business units and 6 countries pertaining to “metadata management”, for example.

Information Asset Age

Enterprise search solutions also store information about when a document was created or last modified. When combined with the correlation capability, this can be valuable information for a knowledge manager. For example, if an inquiry into information assets related to “web 2.0″ revealed that 75% of those assets were more than one year old, he’d know he’s in need of an update of knowledge about web 2.0.

Conclusion

Enterprise search vendors should take a serious look at packaging enriching business intelligence capabilities into their solutions.  Search engines have a wealth of information not only about information assets but also user patterns.  Why not expose this information?