The Importance of Search

Mohana Radhakrishnan - 5/10/12

Whether a company has a legacy LMS or is building a learning portal, it’s worth investing in new search tools, such as federated, full-text and semantic search technologies.

Enterprise learning is undergoing a dramatic shift. Organizations have squeezed all of the efficiency they can from their legacy learning management systems (LMS) and are now starting to ask some tough questions: Is their learning technology advancing the business? Is it connecting their enterprise and partners/customers? Can their employees depend on it to help them improve performance? Does it leverage the value found in informal and social learning?

As forward-thinking enterprises look for answers, they’re finding a significant gap between where they are today and where they need to be with regards to their learning infrastructure. Continued growth in the LMS market — more than 10 percent globally according to Bersin & Associates’ report “Learning Systems 2011” — indicates the desire to acquire more effective learning technologies.

The Problem With the LMS
The legacy learning management system space is well recognized for its low customer satisfaction. In 2010, learning services company Expertus and Training Industry Inc. conducted a survey of learning professionals within 88 Fortune 1000 learning organizations (Editor’s note: the author works for Expertus). The No. 1 challenge for their learners was LMS usability — difficulty searching and finding learning. Further, nearly half of the professionals polled gave their existing LMS a grade of C, D or F.

This usability issue is ironic considering the ultimate value of any enterprise learning system is its ability to help users find the information they need to do their jobs and do them well. Further, that statistic suggests that antiquated learning management systems with ineffective search capabilities — previously disregarded as a usability flaw — are now posing real problems that need to be addressed.

There are numerous other costs associated with poor search, including low productivity, high risk and an organization’s failure to compete.

Low productivity: The cost of employees or partners failing to find the information they need when they need it can be extraordinary when multiplied across the enterprise and extended enterprise. According to studies from Accenture and Bersin & Associates, time spent searching for knowledge and resources averages 20 percent of a worker’s day, which significantly degrades productivity.