Arup tried again, this time using the high-end Autonomy search platform. The new system can tap into the company’s databases, financial and human resources systems, and free-form content, either directly or via add-on software. This unified search platform made critical business sense, says Sheehan. The result: Engineers now share the same knowledge no matter where they are based, providing a consistent global level of quality, he says.

National Instruments faced a similar problem. “Our search tools grew over time as the company was learning what search could do,” says Jeff Watts, the instrumentation maker’s former search and communities manager. “With multiple systems, there’s no source of complete information, plus you end up with specialized employees whose knowledge is lost as they leave the company or rotate to other departments,” he says. When the company decided to standardize its Web presence across the globe—providing a single platform that could support multiple languages, local product catalogs and online customer self-service—it also took the opportunity to standardize its internal search platform using a high-end Fast Search & Transfer system.

Law firm Morrison & Foerster knew from the beginning that it wanted a centralized search platform to avoid just such fragmentation, says CIO Jo Haraf. So the thousand-member firm took its time to find a tool that met its needs, rather than deploy interim technologies, she says. The firm ultimately selected midrange solution Recommind because it could do what Haraf calls “gray-area search”—that is, it has the ability to pull in results suggested by, but not explicitly within, the search query—which for a law firm provides a real edge in finding unexpectedly related cases.

Notably, Arup, Harris and National Instruments all realized that they needed to impose their own context and organizational structure to search results to better tune them to their business needs—even though the midrange and high-end systems can infer context as part of their indexing. For example, National Instruments imposed structure and context on its information to help searches across multiple systems more easily find similar information. And Arup imposed its own categories on data—such as projects and people—to ensure that search results would be grouped in the mental baskets used in the company. Watts and Sheehan call the effort difficult but worthwhile.

Take Search Further

What would these search users like to do next with search for their enterprises? Sheehan is considering implementing search actively, not waiting for users to ask questions. The idea: The search engine pulls relevant information into a window as the user types—for instance, providing links to other cantilevered bridge designs if a user is writing a proposal for that kind of structure. “For me, this is the future of search,” he says.