Martin White

Martin White
Managing Director
Intranet Focus Ltd
Martin White has gained international reputation over the last twenty years for his understanding of how to manage enterprise and intranet search applications for the benefit of the organisation. His first major project was for the International Monetary Fund, starting the day before 9/11 and still finishing on schedule. Many of his clients have been multi-national organisations with complex information management and information discovery challenges, including Atlas Copco, Bayer, Boeringer Ingelheim, Ericsson Telecommunications, Hoffman La Roche, Hogan Lovells, NATO, Novozymes, Trelleborg, Ubisoft, the United Nations, White & Case and the World Bank. A successful search strategy project he undertook for MITRE in the USA was carried out virtually from the UK. He specialises in finding solutions for organisations working in multiple languages.
Martin has written four of the five books on enterprise search management, including Making Search Work in 2008 and the second edition of Enterprise Search in 2015. His report on Achieving Enterprise Search Satisfaction was published in 2018 and he is currently writing a book about the Enterprise Search Experience. He is the author of a monthly search column in CMSWire and is Editor of Informer, the newsletter of the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Martin has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield, since 2002, specialising in information management and interactive information retrieval (IIR).
Martin is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. In March 2020 he ran a search workshop at the IntraTeam Event, Copenhagen, which scored 5/5 for content and delivery. Among the assessment comments from participants were
“What a wealth of insight! He anticipates every comment”
“Very inspirational, deep knowledge and a very tailored workshop”
Martin is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (USA). He is a chemist by training and an information scientist by profession. Martin is also an organist and has been fortunate to have played for services in a number of cathedrals in the UK.
Publications
A selection of recent articles and columns authored by Martin White is listed below
Columns
Managing Enterprise Search Security
Where Have All the Experts Gone? The Hunt for Corporate Expertise
Distributed Information Management: The Oxygen of Your Organization
Searching for a Content Integration Technology?
Enterprise Search Development: Start With the User Interface
Assess Search Performance With Search Tasks
Delving Into Enterprise Search Query Logs
Asking the Right Questions: Query Expansion in Enterprise Search
When Improving Search Performance, Don’t Follow the Clicks
Can You Talk to Your Search Vendor?
Articles
Where does enterprise search go next?
“Time spent searching” – a chronology of the myth and some recent research
Why enterprise search is a ‘wicked problem’
Working from Home – the impact of dyslexia
Seven stress tests for your enterprise search and intranet applications