Smarter searching in the age of digital transformation

For modern organizations, supporting a digital transformation initiative usually means having to process and store more information while investing in more applications. In fact, software spending is projected to grow by 9 percent in 2019, pushing IT budgets to $1.8 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to Forrester’s 2019 Tech Budget Outlook. Such significant investment in new business technology brings exciting new opportunities to organizations, improving the customer experience and enabling growth. However, as they add new applications to their arsenals, organizations often inadvertently impact user productivity. With more tools and systems at their disposal, users now may need to consult information from multiple sources to complete their tasks. Not only do they need to know exactly what to look for, they must also know where to look for it. This is not always an easy task, given that organizations often use hundreds – even thousands – of applications including content repositories, SharePoint sites, email systems, network shares, intranets, extranets, partner websites, databases and even those legacy systems that still hold valuable data but were too cost-prohibitive to migrate. Having to search for information in various places can take considerable time out of the workday and can lead to some important information hidden in silos, never to be discovered. Besides impacting productivity, this can also create serious delays in situations like litigation, eDiscovery, audits, information requests and breach forensics.

Search from a single place

The fact that business-critical information no longer lives in a single system is just part of today’s reality, and it is not going to change anytime soon. Therefore, the next best thing to searching in a single place is searching from a single place. This is where enterprise search comes in handy. It empowers users with the ability to find information across all enterprise systems and repositories from a single, intuitive search interface. But, of course, searching across millions of files can produce more results than the user would be able to review. That’s why enterprise search applications also provide smart features that make it easy to find the right information. These features include: Query-building tools that help you search by phrases, patterns, synonyms and even misspelled terms Refiners that make it easy to narrow the results by topics, sources, dates and other contextually relevant options Subscriptions to queries that notify you when new documents matching your search are available The ability to search files in multiple languages Real-time renderings of files, regardless of file format

Empower your users

The right enterprise search tool will enhance many business processes across your organization, saving time and empowering users with information. Ready to learn more about the use cases and benefits of enterprise search?