7. Governance
Many, especially business executives, are surprised that enterprise search requires constant effort and maintenance to stay relevant. Just like critical organisations, search needs governance. Why? Because user needs change, business needs change, and content changes constantly. Without governance, search performance will gradually decay. Search governance ensures that search remains relevant amid these changes.
Governance usually includes:
- Roles and responsibilities
- Policies, guidelines and procedures
Roles and responsibilities
There are many roles to play in search governance, depending on the scale and importance of search in the organisation. These are roles, not full-time positions. Usually, one or two people can play many roles.
Search manager
- Developing and delivering an enterprise search strategy to meet business objectives
- Overseeing and reporting on all search budgets
- Overseeing all search deployments and ensuring search standards are met
- Managing relationships between search technology providers and the organisation's IT team
- Overseeing and reporting on overall search performance
Search analyst
- Gathering user requirements
- Gathering content requirements
- Defining search outcomes
- Reviewing search analytics
- Defining content improvements
Search frontend engineer
- Developing search frontend interfaces
- Developing rich snippets
- Developing search visualisations
- Developing search dashboards
Search backend engineer
- Acquiring, designing and building backend search technologies
- Configuring and integrating technologies for specific search projects
- Acquiring or building search connectors to content collections in different systems
- Designing and implementing access and security parameters
- Designing disaster management parameters
Search relevancy engineer
- Analysing search logs to identify gaps
- Tuning search ranking parameters to improve relevancy
- Building interventions to improve search relevancy
Policies, guidelines and procedures
Policies are high-level compliance statements (e.g., records should have metadata). Guidelines describe good practices. Procedures show how to carry out key activities.
Policies connote rigidity. If you are starting with enterprise search, you want fewer controls. It would help if you opted for a lightweight approach to governance rather than a heavyweight one. It is better to start with simple guidelines and procedures to start search thinking. For example, focus on key search tasks, analyse search logs every week, etc.
“Think big, start small, scale fast” is an approach that Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect at KAPS Group, advises to build corporate taxonomies. It seems the same method may apply to developing a search governance. Yes, you need to know the big picture and the assumptions that come with it. But it would be best to start small and scale fast so that you don't allow the sceptics to reject this new thinking on search.