All of these organizations had already implemented an enterprise directory or were planning the deployment of such a service. An enterprise directory is a special purpose database that stores information about objects including information about people, organizational information, corporate assets, etc. An enterprise directory may be designed to provide access to individuals and as a general purpose infrastructure for many applications such as email, employee white pages, workflow automation, e-commerce, customer service, sales and marketing and knowledge management. An enterprise directory can also be used as a central corporate repository or registry for commonly and widely used information. The Investment is Substantial Even though the investment is substantial, relatively few organizations identified the numerous business benefits of an enterprise directory including the ability to deploy new applications and the productivity gains that can accrue from the use of such directories as one of the reasons for deployment.
Most companies justify the costs based on cost savings and the efficiencies they expect to gain.
The average time for design through pilot is 5,800 person-hours, accounted for mostly by needs and migration assessment, as shown in the figure below. The elapsed time to complete the design and pilot of an enterprise directory project is also substantial, as shown below in Table 1. This means that it takes an average of five months to bring the enterprise directory system to the point at which it is ready for deployment. Consultants are used by about 41 percent of organizations for at least some aspect of their enterprise directory projects. Consultants are used primarily for designing the architecture, design review, and implementation and operation activities.