Introduction

It is not easy to build a business case for investing in search applications. The benefits of a search engine are very difficult to measure, even though there is good evidence from surveys that searching for information is timeconsuming and often frustrating. In the case of content management software applications often relatively standard processes are being undertaken on a regular basis. Search is not like that. Implementing a search engine may reduce the time spent on searching for information, but in most organizations that is not a measurable quantity. As with most productivity tools, is the time freed up then used for other tasks, or is it still used for searching but now over a wider range of documents and with increasing care being taken to find the most relevant?

When implementing content management software, many companies have found that the costs of professional support from the vendor or systems integrator are considerably more than the base licence cost. However, once the implementation has been accomplished the staff costs associated with maintaining the software are quite low. This is not the case with search software, where there will be a continual requirement to optimize its performance.

This is also the hidden cost of using open source software. Although the use of open source software is still very low in enterprise applications, there are many open source products that can be used for website searching, where in many respects the requirements are less demanding.

One of the standard approaches to justifying investment in software is a return on investment (ROI) analysis. Generally speaking, only in the professional services sector is time logged and costed on a sufficiently normalized basis for a case to be made about the impact of productivity tools. Even then, trying to build a business case that will satisfy an accountant is a major challenge.

Chapters 9 and 10 cover some of the issues that need to be considered when making a business case for investment in search for a website and for an intranet, but this chapter sets out some generic issues about the development of a business case.