Imagine you’re creating a proposal for an existing client and need to pull up some related documents.
You enter a keyword to search your content management system, but the results that come up don’t seem relevant or helpful. You scan through pages of results, mostly from outdated content, and only find one of the documents you need to complete the proposal.
Many organizations let poor search tools hold them back and may not realize how much it costs them in terms of lost institutional knowledge and productivity. When employees can’t find the information they need to do their jobs, it’s a huge drain on the entire organization.
While it’s fairly obvious when you need better search tools, a lot of organizations have yet to adopt enterprise search technology. If you’re working with an older content management system, for example, it may not offer a search mechanism. Organizations that still manage their documents through file shares and collaborate primarily over email probably have no search capabilities at all.
In fact, enterprise search is one of the main reasons why organizations are looking to graduate out of file shares and email and adopt an enterprise content management (ECM) system or an intranet.
How Search And Knowledge Management Drive Productivity
Search tools are one of the best ways to improve your employees’ access to information and ability to share ideas with one another. At this point, people are so accustomed to using internet search engines that we use “Googling” as a verb.
Finding ways to introduce this type of search experience into your organization has a significant impact on knowledge management and overall productivity. Effective knowledge management helps you stop reinventing the wheel. You’re leveraging the collective experience of your workforce to share ideas and innovate, rather than relying on individual expertise.
Different users may think about the same piece of content in very different ways, and use a mixture of searching and browsing techniques to find what they need. When you browse for information, for example, you navigate to a site, and then look down a long list to find what you’re looking for. With searching, you type a keyword in a window, and then scan that list of results.
Both of these approaches have their advantages, and people tend to favor one or the other. The key is to combine enterprise search with strong information architecture, building contextual relationships within your content that make it easy for both types of users to find what they need.
If your organization doesn’t currently have robust search as part of your content management system, there are a number of options. Many companies with older SharePoint systems, for example, choose to augment those systems by adding an enterprise search solution. Those “bolt-on” solutions have become less popular since the launch of SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, which include improved search capabilities.
Improving the findability of your information has many benefits for knowledge-based businesses, such as professional services firms. When people are getting things done more quickly and sharing ideas, they have greater capacity to innovate, which definitely offers a competitive advantage. Search and knowledge management also improve your organization’s ability to implement changes and streamline operations, because it’s easier to share institutional knowledge and best practices.
Learn more about the benefits of today’s enterprise search capabilities by downloading our free white paper, “The Business Value Of Office 365 To The Enterprise”
