I’ve always thought that managing an internal capability or technology platform requires the same processes, artifacts and resources as you use in managing an external technology product such as Websphere or Vignette.

6 months ago, a couple of colleagues (Craig Lonsdale and Pete Crawford) and I were discussing our plan for improving search within our company, we wanted to document our progress as well as define where we were on our journery and where our target for the future was. I had used the CMMI framework before to quantify how well organisations delivered projects and it felt perfect to try and use the same framework in defining on well an organisation managed their search capabilities.

The Search Capability Maturity Model that we came up with looks to quantify the stages an organization goes throught as they become more mature in managing search as a true capability as opposed to just installing it and hoping it works.

Organisations move through the different levels as they grow and become more adept and knowledgable, fundamental to the model is that it’s very difficult to jump levels, I know this from experience, especially when you look at the upper levels of the model such as utilizing external collaborators.

I have worked in a number of organisations and they rarely get past the adhoc level unless you are talking about the Google’s of the world and because of this they don’t get to see the huge benefits a good search capability can deliver (to be honest this model can be taken beyond search and can be used to track the management maturity of any type of capability).

Search is a capability that changes over time, search patterns change as user experience changes, language moves forward or content is updated all of this means you need to dedicate resources to managing search.

Start off easy, set up a reporting program in order to quantify how well your search is meeting user expectations. Simple things like zero results can point you in the direction of big problems. Once you have identified the obvious issues you can start to use path analysis to pick up commons search types. Focus on these and you will see your user satisfaction soar. Then in the words of agile development, lather, rinse and repeat.