Effective information access is absolutely critical to the success of the knowledge worker, and the organization he/she works for.

Studies show that users are deeply dissatisfied with out-of-the-box enterprise search deployments, whether they are using high-end search engines or legacy, rudimentary search tools. The drivers of such widespread dissatisfaction are all essentially the consequence of a single problem: Enterprise Search Engines do not deliver a unified, relevant, and actionable user interface out-of-the-box.

Unified Results: Users want a single point-of-access to search across all enterprise data. Most enterprise search engines, however, are notoriously difficult to integrate with backend systems in a reliable and secure fashion. This leads to knowledge workers having to conduct multiple searches across different enterprise systems in order to find the information, people, and expertise they are looking for.

Relevant Results: 50% of all unsuccessful search queries are due to the fact that the sought-after content was simply not indexed by the search engine. To other 50% of unsuccessful queries are largely due to the fact that search engines do not provide the tools and functionality users need to filter through results quickly and assess relevance efficiently. In response to a query, users are offered dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) or blue links, with no means to filter them by file type, source, or other property. To determine whether a particular document is indeed something they were looking for, the users must download the entire file, open it in its native client application, and manually review it for relevance. This is an incredibly inefficient process, so it is logical that such inadequacies are major drivers of dissatisfaction.

Actionable Results: Once relevant information has been found, it must be effectively consumed or acted upon. Offering a rich set of contextual actions, such as preview, tag, bookmark, put on hold, archive, summarize, copy & paste, print, assemble a new document, or share, is critical to boosting end-user productivity and increasing satisfaction. Without such tools at hand directly within the context of the search engine interface, users must resort to legacy client application interfaces to get the work done, resulting in lost productivity.

To address these shortcomings, many organizations invest vast sums of money in an attempt to custom build the solutions their end-users demand.