Modern organisations have a multitude of corporate information systems. In order to locate necessary information, users can be forced to perform individual searches against each of these systems. For example, to get an overview of a customer's interaction with your organisation, users will need to search against the CRM, support and finance systems, at least. Other repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint, Internet and Intranet sites will also contain content regularly needed by your users. Valuable time is wasted searching each system separately. Experts like Gartner widely recognise this problem as a major waste of employee productivity.
Another productivity sink arises from users recreating needed documents that cannot be located. From a compliance perspective, some organisations face large financial penalties for failing to produce required regulatory documents.
Organisations invest vast sums every year in providing corporate information systems, storing increasingly large amounts of information. These costs include hardware and infrastructure, product licencing, software maintenance, virus protection and backup, skilled IT staff and configuration management, to name but a few. To fully realise these investments, the organisation must squeeze every cent of value from this stored information. Ensuring users have intuitive, simple and effective access to this information is critical.
Our Value
We have over twenty years of proven expertise in delivering Enterprise Search solutions for organisations just like yours. Our team are experts in understanding your business needs and developing innovative answers to address your business problems.
We can help you to maximise the value of your existing investments, contact us to learn more.
The Role of Enterpise Search
What is required is an umbrella which brings together, the enterprise's information resources, an enterprise-wide search capability, most commonly called Enterprise Search.
Our implementations bring all of the relevant information to your users in a single search, with the most relevant results first. Respecting the native security of each system, relevant information is securely made available to your users. Navigation aids support your users in pinpointing the required information.
Perhaps the information stored in a single corporate systems doesn't fully paint the customer picture and a synthesis of information from other corporate systems is required. We have the expertise to make enterprise content sensible to your users.
Modern Enterprise Search Platform Requirements
A successful, modern enterprise search platform makes searchable all corporate information sources. On this basis, it is essential that the platform will affordably scale. As a core enterprise application, ensuring it is always available is critical. The modern platform should support replication across data centers for ultimate availability.
Modern platforms learn from user interaction. The documents users read in response to a given query will result in the relevance of these documents being increased. The platform will deliver better results as users interact with it, and because the learning is an integral part of the platform, no on-going manual maintenance is required.
The bar for enterprise applications has risen significantly with the advent of consumer applications like Facebook and Instagram – users expect this level of experience from their enterprise applications. Modern search platforms also provide an attractive user interface operating seamlessly on both mobile and desktop devices.
Collaboration
Additionally, a modern enterprise search application will support collaboration through mechanisms like bookmarking result items, saving searches, liking and creating notes on result items. Delivering on this level of functionality can be expensive, although the user productivity benefits can be huge.
Artificial Intelligence
Natural language tools can be used to enrich enterprise content in support of user searches and navigation. Machine learning approaches will provide advanced capabilities like document categorisation and document recommendation, assisting users to find the answers they seek.
As experience with your organisations use of the platform grows, more artificial intelligence techniques will bring greater value to your organisation through the application of deeper insights. Understanding your user's query expectation (query intent) means that the enterprise search platform will provide the user with better, more targetted results. The artifical intelligence models providing these insights must be maintained to evolve as your organisation evolves in its ever changing business context. It is essential that enterprise search platforms for the twenty first century offer these capabilities.
Siloed operation is a common problem in all large organisations. Your future enterprise search platform will securely recommend corporate information to users based upon its insights, drawn from user interactions. Users will be proactively informed of relevant content from different business areas, facilitating greater organisational insight.
The promises of artificial intelligence – enhanced user productivity and better decision making.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is about the application of modern technology to drive user productivity. Single point technology investments do not fit with this model, the underlying enterprise search platform should drive business innovation, enabling future solutions to as yet unknown problems. A future where an enterprise search system provides the basis for enterprise analytics - answering questions like:
- What are the evolving trends in your environment?
- What are the key pieces of information indicative of this trend?
The enterprise search platform knows all of your corporate information and must be a platform for service delivery. The County of Sacremento uses their enterprise search platform to deliver geographical information to its constituents. A benefit which was not even contemplated when they choose the platform to replace their legacy Google Search Appliance. This enterprise search platform is now a key technology component of their corporate information ecosystem. What if you could, in-house, quickly and affordably deliver secure, information mining applications to key business teams? What productivity benefits would you deliver to your organisation?
Big Data and analytics are key drivers of modern business innovation. Modern enterprise search platforms should support big data and analytics applications, as well as the core enterprise search application. A platform which works with existing analytics tools, such as Tableau, enables greater utility and drives value for the platform across the organisation. Leveraging existing non-IT analytics skills within the organisation delivers a significant business advantage.
Tell us about your challenges
Your organisation will have some of the above challenges, and others as well. Allow us to understand your business challenges and partner with you to address them.
