[Sigia-l] Re: ROI for improving search (daniela meleo)

[Bryar Family]

Daniela:
You may be able to get some ROI data from NewsEdge (now Dialog) in
Burlington, Massachusetts. If not, I may bve able to provide some.

A year or two back we did a great deal of research on the subject as we
wanted to understand the degree to which the customer benefitted from rather
granular subject categories (that pre-collected content on a narrow topic)
vs open query searching.

We found lots of pieces.

There is an extant study covering the degree to which poor searches FAIL and
the cost of those failures in terms of global productivity.

We found studies suggesting that, even today, users are far from
sophisticated about the query terminology they use (which was our rationale
for creating LOTs of categories, as a guide)
Most of the studies we found showed that while the easiest rationales for
ROI came from supposed savings in library costs, the largest costs to the
businesses and institutions we surveyed were generated by information not
found, either because the searcher did not discover it, or because the
searcher was so overwhelmed by the quantity of  irrelevant data that he/she
was unable to find the useful needle in he haystack.

To develop an ROI analysis from that point is a dependency of the type of
business you are involved with, and the value of the information your
clients are trying to retrieve.

BTW:

We found as does anyone who studies the subject , that there is little you
can do to make the average researcher more effective, especially if they are
casual users of your system.
Search effectiveness is vastly enhanced if you know something of the context
of the searcher, (job function/business vertical/geography) the context of
the content, (trade publication/technical study/general interest
publication/.internal documents) the context of the likely search
expectations (Most commonly cited/"best" data,/most timely data, etc) , and
you build your querying system with these elements in mind, and without
having to ask too much of your user. So your response, suggesting they first
better profile their user community,  is absolutely right

Jack Bryar
Knowledge Management Practice Leader
IGNYT Consultants , Toronto
http://www.ignyt.com

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 14:03:44 -0700 (PDT)
> From: daniela meleo <danielameleo at yahoo.com>
> To: sigia-l at asis.org
> Subject: [Sigia-l] ROI for improving search
>
> Hi, I've learned much from lurking on this list, so
> now it's time to plunge in...
>
> I've been asked to help a (federal government) client
> with a potential project to improve search on both
> their intranet and on their external sites.
> "Enterprise search" is a term being much bandied
> about. I'm suggesting they spend some time getting a
> clear picture of the users they're serving and
> identifying specific search needs before they start
> getting into vendor screening etc.