Enterprise management undervalues the power of search in digital transformation efforts

A new study from Coveo shows 81 percent of IT and business stakeholders agree that it's hard to engage management when talking about search.

The study of 600 people carried out by Dimensional Research shows 83 percent of respondents say that enterprise search is crucial to digital transformation efforts, but that company leadership rarely talks about it.

The responses note key use cases for enterprise search, including for use in intranets (65 percent) to drive employee productivity, self-service portals (55 percent) to reduce training and support costs, and within the CRM (43 percent) to make the sales process more efficient.

Search analytics is seen as valuable too. Over 90 percent use search analytics to inform their business decisions, with two-thirds using analytics to improve the user's digital journey. More than half of respondents leverage search analytics to profile user preferences and audience attributes (56 percent) or to inform additional content needs (52 percent).

"The many independent conversations that we have with c-level executives indicate how they value the end results of digital transformation. This study confirms that they are not necessarily aware that those results are built on the foundation of enterprise search," says Dominic Lajoie, CIO at Coveo. "The lack of strategic emphasis on enterprise search can lead to massive inefficiencies and misplaced priorities across a company. We believe organizations that prioritize the strategic importance of enterprise search will put themselves in a strong competitive position while increasing revenue, accelerating ramp-up time to productivity, and improving web user satisfaction."

System integration (68 percent) and data challenges (59 percent) lead the cited technical challenges to search implementation. Among the 96 percent of organizations noting business challenges, managing stakeholder business needs and preferences (57 percent) and a lack of stakeholder domain expertise (54 percent) top the list.

Deployed enterprise search capabilities remain rather primitive too. 99 percent of organizations surveyed need at least some manual tuning to improve their search results. While only 17 percent have made AI-based search capabilities available to users.

Almost nine-out-of-ten (88 percent) report that their search implementations typically face issues and delays. This includes 29 percent that characterize the problems as significant. This isn't helped by the skills shortage, with 96 percent struggling to find enterprise search expertise.

You can find out more on the Coveo blog.

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