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What is enterprise search?
Enterprise search allows organizations to quickly and easily find the information they need, regardless of its location or format.
Executive summary
- Enterprise search enables organizations to quickly and easily find the information they need, regardless of its location or format. It provides capabilities like discovering information around a topic or theme, monitoring search results for new developments and deriving insights from information extracted based on certain criteria.
- Enterprise search benefits include reducing the time it takes to locate information, boosting performance and productivity, improving decision-making and minimizing business risk and exposure of confidential information.
- Key steps for implementing enterprise search include assessing your information landscape, choosing the right solution, developing a data integration strategy, ensuring security and compliance, customizing the user experience, training and supporting employees, and monitoring and optimizing performance.
The definition of enterprise search
Enterprise search enables you to access content across all locations in the enterprise, be it email, databases, websites, applications, legacy systems and more. It turns up results for structured and unstructured data, and even image files that would otherwise remain siloed in their respective repositories.
Beyond keyword-based search functions, enterprise search also provides capabilities like discovering information around a topic or theme, monitoring search results for new developments and deriving insight from information extracted based on certain criteria.
40% of leaders say their workers spend too much time looking for needed information
A study from Forrester, commissioned by Hyland, revealed a 21-point increase from 2019 in the number of respondents who say their workers spend too much time looking for needed information (40% vs 19%). The same study revealed 42% have large amounts of critical content hiding in information silos across their enterprise.
>Benefits of enterprise search
An unprecedented amount of information is generated and received by organizations each day, which are then filed away by different people in different locations. It is impossible to expect that every employee will know exactly where to find the information they need without a search function that connects these disparate systems.
Enterprise search provides benefits like:
- Ability to locate information faster. An intuitive and fast enterprise search function makes it easy to find, access and analyze information. This reduces the frustration that employees experience when failing or taking too long to find the information they need.
- Increased productivity. Employees are able to securely access critical information even when they are out of office by using their mobile devices. This ensures that work does not have to come to a halt because employees do not have access to corporate systems.
- Better decision-making and more empowered employees. Every employee can quickly find and share information, which leads to more informed and efficient decision-making. This helps to avoid improper analysis, lost business opportunities and wasted time.
- More effective governance and less security risk. Organizations can mitigate legal and regulatory compliance risks with a complete view of all information. Any missing or confidential information can be easily identified and proper action taken to reduce potential exposure or penalties.
- More meaningful insight from content. With intelligent enterprise search, users can better understand and draw insights from the relationships between your content with interactive information maps.
Enterprise search: How it works
Enterprise search is one of the key capabilities of a modern content management platform. It leverages faceted navigation, conversational search and natural language support to intuitively return search results.
Enterprise search:
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Unifies information access. Users can search for information of any type from any device while maintaining predefined security and user rights.
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Returns perfect results even when a search query isn’t perfectly entered. Intuitive, menu-assisted and natural language search options allow users to build customized queries with contextual filters that produce more accurate results.
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Extracts more meaning and insight from content. Conversational search predicts the context of your search and provides suggestions. Users can also drill down into content relationships and open up new lines of investigation to further understand the information needed.
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Adds value to business processes. Search results can be made usable and actionable to other users, and exported in different formats.
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Allows access to advanced search functions from anywhere. A modern ECM lets searchers work from any browser or operating system and can handle complex processes with minimal hardware requirements.
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Brings AI capabilities into the mix. Intelligent enterprise search capabilities can intuit more insightful relationships among data points, no matter where the content is housed. Additionally, generative AI can jump in to take the search to the next level by providing insight and answers.
How to implement enterprise search?
Implementing enterprise search involves integrating a solution to access and utilize information across all systems and data repositories efficiently
Here are the key steps:
- Assess your information landscape: Identify all data sources and understand your data's variety and volume is crucial for choosing the right solution.
- Choose the right solution: Select a platform that fits your goals and technical requirements. Consider scalability, compatibility and support for both structured and unstructured data.
- Develop a data integration strategy: Decide on federated or unified search to integrate data from various sources.
- Ensure security and compliance: Implement security measures to protect sensitive information and comply with regulations. Define user roles and access rights to ensure authorized access.
- Customize the user experience: Tailor the search interface for different user roles and departments. Use features like contextual filters and conversational search to enhance productivity.
- Train and support employees: Provide training to familiarize employees with the search tools. Offer support to address technical issues and user concerns.
- Monitor and optimize performance: Regularly monitor system performance and user feedback to improve search accuracy and effectiveness. Update and optimize the system to align with organizational goals.
By following these steps, organizations can effectively implement enterprise search, improving efficiency, productivity, and decision-making.
> Learn more | How federated search consolidates multiple search results from various sources
