Interesting topic came up at work the other day about the real value of search to a business. McKinsey recently published some data about this, and by their research, U.S. enterprises realize $74 to $110 of increased productivity per knowledge worker per month. That's $890 - $1330 of value per year. The full report is definitely worth a read, and I'm thrilled to see that it comprehends social networking tools like Facebook.
It's only with social network content that search realizes its full potential. The most value and benefit will be realized when you can search structured data, documents, blogs, project artifacts, web sites, and everything in between all in one consolidated view.
Here's a scenario: Plant manager misses a profitability metric. One should be able to search a Product Line Profitability dashboard, do a decomposition tree to find which product or part has the biggest impact on the miss. Let's say there's a quality issue - too much scrap. One should then be able to search for Six Sigma projects focusing on scrap, and come up with projects on similar product lines. The plant manager could then scan the BlackBelt's blog, glean information from the posts, and scan their activity stream to see if they're working on a similar project. At some point, one could send an Instant Message requesting assistance with the issue.
In the long term, the real value of search isn't in how much more efficient it makes us when finding information, it's the ability to connect us with the people and ideas that we hadn't originally comprehended, make new associations, and help us synthesize concepts.
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