Enterprise search vs. navigation

Hi, my name's Brian Babineau, and I'm an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group. And today I'd like to talk to you about two concepts in the information management software world. The first is enterprise search and the second is enterprise navigation. And I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the difference between the two.

Enterprise search helps us find things when we know what we're looking for. We enter in a term and we get a series of links based on relevancy of that term. Enterprise navigation helps us understand and find information when we may have an idea or a basic premise of what we're looking for, but we need to see more information grouped. Now they can be the same technology, just a different indexing capability and a different grouping capability when you get the results.

But to illustrate it, let me give you a little bit of an example. Assume we're searching on the term dog. We're going to get a series of links that could involve breeders, dog breeds, dog groomers and so on. Each one represents a link to a different website. Now if we did the same search and we used navigation capabilities with unique indexing, we would actually get a group of links that all relate to breeders, breeds, groomers and any other category. So here, instead of getting links we'd get groups of links and then we can further navigate based on those categories.

Now let's turn our attention to enterprise search. If I'm a new sales rep, I may want to find all the presentations given to a customer by my company. When I do a search, the results will be numbers, millions of PowerPoint presentations that may be from executives, from HR, from the Finance Department, and some may include customer presentations. It could take me a very long time to find exactly what I'm looking for.

However, as a sales rep, I may want to start by looking at all the presentations and then finding the ones that apply to me. That same search term but using navigation technology I would get all the executive presentations as a category, all of the HR and the customer presentations. When I further expand my navigation, I would get links to files of healthcare customers, manufacturing, retail, and because I'm going to be selling to the healthcare community, I can find a subset of files that are the most relevant to me.

The difference in enterprise search and enterprise navigation is really how the results are presented. Search presents you links that you can go quickly and follow. Enterprise navigation groups those links into relevant results for you to then further refine what you're looking for.

Utilize enterprise search if you have an idea and know what you're looking for. Utilize enterprise navigation if you're basically starting from scratch. If you're an IT user evaluating enterprise search to help you find files, emails and database information, you want to make sure that you also evaluate products that include enterprise navigation. The reason being is that you never know when you're going to have to start from scratch to find what you're looking for.