Burwood City Council in Sydney has rolled out an enterprise search solution claiming it has improved productivity tenfold.

The local government authority is using ISYS Search Software for its ability to provide a contextually relevant excerpt with each result and its out-of-the-box functionality.

Burwood Council's senior manager of information services, Ernie White, said the organization is utilizing ISYS:web to enable search via its Intranet and ISYS:desktop to power search functionality on network drives, databases and individual users' workstations.

White said every organisation seeks the 'information at your fingertips' paradigm, but software is required to get there.

"Fingertip access to all of our information has improved productivity tenfold and provides us with flexibility and opportunities to shape our infrastructure in the future," White said.

Established in 1988 and headquartered in Sydney, ISYS customers include Qantas, the WA Department of Justice, and eTrade Australia.

According to IDC research, a company that employs 1000 information workers can expect more than $US5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it.

The research found most enterprises are not using the most up-to-date search applications. Not only that, enterprises aren't using the applications they have as effectively as they should.

"They've never invested a whole lot in it," says Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

"Companies will spend lots and lots of money on architecting portal systems, Intranets, dashboards and databases and everything else. Search, typically, for internal applications, companies don't spend a lot of time on it," he said.

The Butler Group analyst, Richard Edwards, blames a lack of metadata as one of the key problems.

"Ninety percent of the documents that are created have no useful metadata," Edwards said.

"Until we get more of that metadata it is going to be an uphill struggle to get better results out of these very capable search technologies."