Today we're talking Search 3.0. OK, we stole that from the Web 2.0 crowd, but bear with us. This isn't about pure search functionality—the technology to crawl, index, and slice and dice information stored on the desktop, network, and Internet is well beyond its infancy. Major players including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have expanded their search offerings, looking to challenge veterans like Autonomy, Endeca, and Vivisimo. All continue to invest heavily via new releases or acquisitions.

Rather, we're talking about creating a system that leverages the plethora of available searching, ranking, and indexing engines and combines them with a new business practice of monitoring and managing employee searches and modifying content, delivery methods, and results based on patterns of behavior.

Think of how many places we ask employees to look for the data they need to do their jobs—in our InformationWeek Analytics Enterprise Search Survey of 552 business technology professionals, fully 13 search tools registered double-digit usage levels. Very few are hitting across the spectrum; in fact, when we correlated the number of organizations that search all key data repositories, allow expanded e-mail search, support desktop search engines, and use a common Internet search engine, we got a big fat zero.

Implementing such a broad, federated system is technically viable right now, and it's worth doing: enterprise search has the potential to dynamically alter how our people work and produce a dramatic boost in productivity. The holdup is about organizational change: A new level of trust and control must be given to IT, and that means rehashing old battles around privacy, information access, and the technologist's role.

In this report we take a look at the challenges that must be overcome to implement a true enterprise search platform. The target: A utopian state of search that lets an employee query all the core information inside the network while also leveraging the external browsing and search patterns of fellow workers. Along the way, organizations will be able to map their current search capabilities and identify ways to ready their systems for the future.

Download the full InformationWeek Analytics report at: Enterprise Search 3.0: Overcoming Organizational Hurdles