Only one in five organizations has a search strategy. The objective of this workshop is to ensure that all attendees leave with a framework that they can use immediately to prepare or enhance their enterprise search strategy. The workshop also gives a lot of opportunity to share experiences of search strategy and governance. Run in a set of four 30-minute sessions with attendees working in small groups focusing on four aspects of a search strategy, the strategies are pulled together at the end. The sessions covers stakeholder requirements, content quality, technology support, and search management. Each group covers all four topics.

Above a certain basic level of functionality, successful implementation of enterprise search is more dependent on methodology than platform. Companies that spend tens of thousands of dollars to acquire and implement enterprise search technology still consider search a “fire and forget” application. Web search platforms such as Google work so well, managers tend to assume that search must be easy, because—on the web at least—it just works. But the Google search experience doesn’t just happen. Skilled engineers (and applications) work every day, analyzing billions of searches to understand user intent; recognize and process anomalies; and make the user search experience satisfying. Even when you don’t have the data volume of Google, you can implement monitoring and continuous improvement. In this platform-agnostic session, you learn the basics of making enterprise search work, including what to monitor—and how; methodologies to analyze and understand user intent; engaging users to help in the process; managing your search platform; and tools that help you improve search.