Enterprise search will never be able to search the enterprise

http://dominicfallows.co.uk/2009/05/14/it-is-getting-too-clever-by-half/

Users of enterprise search technologies report that the enterprise will never be searchable ­ – there is just too much private (and valuable) information sitting on PCs and in obscure systems that use strange data formats. Service-oriented architectures typically fail to provide services and degrade into expensive mechanisms for providing limited interoperability between systems. And so on.

I am sure that there is some organisation somewhere that lives up to the glossy images we find in supplier brochures ­ – where everything is under control, and senior management look on approvingly as some smart, attractive, thirty-something professionals adjust a few parameters in the business performance management system. It's just that I've never come across such a thing ­ – and neither will you.

I must disagree with the author on this. Of course it is a challenge to make all data in an organization searchable. With the current indexing and search tools like Autonomy or Google most problems and obscure data formats can be handled. The experience that we have is that there a very few organizations that have a vision on that field.