Search will change how organisations use information
Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Jan 2006
The way in which we create, access and search information has undergone a revolution in the past few years. The internet started the change in the nineties, and although the excite of the internet-era was real, it didn't prepare us for the innovation that would come in the mid-2000s with the innovation of various companies, and Google in particular. Google has been a tremendous success, both financially (if you were lucky enough to get in on the unusual auction IPO and owned some of the companies stock) and technologically.
Search has become the fastest developing and probably most important aspect of the internet when considering how we find and access information. It has been a major enabler of the success of other new communication channels such as weblogs, which themselves are having a profound impact on how information is created and published. It is possible to take technologies such as Google or weblogs for granted and it is useful to step back from our role as day to day users and consider what we can learn from their industry.
Thinking differently
Google is a good starting point for reflection because they are the largest and most influential search engine at the moment, and their influence in fact goes far beyond that of a traditional search portal. That is the first thing to notice about Google — that their web site has a very zen–minimalist look. They have chosen not to build a portal (although they have some experiments going that add some portal style features). A portal aims to become a destination web site itself, where users stay within website to get their business done. Google takes the opposite approach where they try to redirect you to the site that you are looking for as soon as possible — their interest is in you spending as little time on Google as possible; hence the effort they put into optimising the time it takes to search. Part of the effort to optimise the search engine has resulted in Google building one of the biggest computing platforms in the world — but they have not built it on mainframes, but instead have strung together more than 150,000 standard PCs using their own customised operating system. This is innovative, but more importantly, it demonstrates the commitment of the organisation to make the decisions that it feels are best for the company and not simply follow the crowd. Not many organisations have the courage to tackle their strategy in this way and (sometimes against the odds or common opinion) make decisions that are contrarian.
Strategic focus
Google is pursuing a strategy of making all things searchable. They started with the internet itself and are progressing to print media, music, film and video and for example, maps of the physical world (Google Earth). This approach isn't without controversy, especially from the copyright owners of some of the material that they will index. What it does reflect is the benefit of immense corporate focus. They have a real determination to make the world's information searchable and this has become the primary driver of their strategic execution. Many organisations that try to be too many things to their customers could learn from Google's example.
Empowering people through information
Google has changed the balance of power in many industries by putting easy access to information in the hands of consumers. Today, it is easy for consumers to compare the prices of products before making a purchasing decision. It is also easy for consumers to search out reviews or commentaries on products whilst they make a purchasing decision. Most consumers enter into high–value purchase decisions with much better information than they ever have before. This means that organisations can no longer assume they have complete control over the sales channel for their products.
The retrieval of information has also changed since search engines have become cost effective and fast. Most organisations have networked file servers littered with information that is neither well categorised or searchable. Modern search engines that are available today can cut right through the information chaos that exists on many corporate networks and assist employees find the information to support their work.
An extension of this ability to organise information is the growing ability of search engines to see patterns in large amounts of information. So not only can a search engine find a document, it can also tell you what other documents are probably related and what other documents were read by other people reading whatever you are looking at. This type of relational integration of information starts to address the information overload that most people feel in modern organisations. In the next few years we will see these technologies appearing in day to day office tools like email (they already exist in Google's email service) making it easier to find old email and removing the need to constantly sort and file incoming email messages. Apple's OS X operating system has a function called Spotlight built in that provides a realtime search capability of documents, applications and activities making most users one click away from their target without having to navigate through directories or menus.
Making information easier to work with is going to have a profound affect on knowledge workers and on customers — no organisation is immune and they should be thinking of how to harness their information better through the use of search.
Creating business opportunities
As an organisation, Google has created enormous opportunity for itself, and also created an economy around itself that becomes self supporting. And as the leader of the search industry, gives most corporate leaders an opportunity to observe, reflect and learn from a very successful and focused organisation.
Search will change how organisations use information was published as Strategym #33 in January 2006.
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