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How to balance employee privacy and enterprise search technology
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July 21, 2005 (Computerworld) -- Enterprise search is one of the fastest-growing corporate IT applications. Businesses are actively using search applications to find documents and to manage content. They also use the tools to search employee contacts to uncover useful relationships that help the company to win more business.
This particular type of search, enterprise relationship search, has emerged as the business application of the much-hyped "social networking technology." Every company knows that personal relationships drive new business growth, and enterprise relationship search allows them to tap the full scope of employee contacts. In doing so, there are important questions of employee privacy and control that must be considered.
Managers know that having a system to share data and contacts is essential, but protecting the privacy of sensitive or personal data is equally critical. How can you protect employees' personal information and relationships and at the same time fully support collaboration to make the best use of your company's collective network of contacts?
Finding the right balance between data sharing and employee privacy and, more importantly, finding new ways to achieve the best of both, have driven several innovations in this area.
Let's first look at how relationship-search technology works. The technology comes into play when an employee wants to uncover "Who knows this target customer?" The employee knows that some colleagues must have relevant relationships, but he doesn't know where to begin. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems might be a place to start, but most contain only active prospects and customers entered by sales and marketing. Typically, this amounts to about 5% of the true extended networks of all employees. An effective search includes more data than just CRM entries.
An enterprise-class relationship-search application is an automated analysis and search system that runs on an internal server behind the firewall. Similar to an Internet search engine, it "crawls" internal data and creates a structured index. Some vendors index directly from other servers (such as Exchange or Domino), and some require desktop deployments to extract data from Outlook or Notes. An analysis engine then recognizes and ranks relationships by noticing contacts and e-mail patterns. End users can then query the indexed database for results.
While fully accessing an employee network is critical to an effective search, employees may initially be wary of an enterprise tool that accesses personal contacts and data.
The very data that makes relationship search so powerful is the extensive pre-existing relationships that employees have. Companies must realize that to successfully adopt relationship-search tools, they need to set corporate policies that respect employees' privacy and control. Such policies govern opt-in/opt-out, individual user privacy settings, search access, and options for participants to view and manage their own data.
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