Is your business drowning in information?
Do you think it's getting harder to find the crucial information you need to manage and run your business?
Is your company producing so much paperwork that your staff are drowning in it all? Are they failing to provide your customers with the best information as a result?
If so, research conducted by the IDC confirms your suspicions. They found that 'knowledge workers' spend between 15% and 30% of their time searching for information. What's more, their searches were at best only 50% successful.
How much effort is being wasted like this in your business? How much is it costing you?
Busy organisations tend towards mess.
Many businesses have networks and directories for sharing files. Even in the best organised businesses, such "file sharing" directories have a natural tendency to become messy and complicated as they grow, making it hard to find important documents.
A lot of businesses also have databases (e.g.: Access, SQL Server or Oracle) that hold information about orders, customers etc. Businesses that have invested more heavily in IT might also have Content Management Systems (CMS) or Document Stores, or even Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM).
The information that you and your staff need to serve your customers can often be spread throughout these different systems.
In order to retrieve it, your staff will need to put together a picture of where all this information lives, and hunt each piece down. This can be a complicated task, even for the most experienced employee.
What this situation requires is a single point of entry to all the different systems, to allow staff to search for information across them all in one go.
Search from a single point of entry.
If a single entry point to all the best information about a specific job or customer existed:
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Your staff would be able to find all the information they needed in one place, rather than having to build it all up by hunting individual pieces of the puzzle down.
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They would be able to get the whole picture, and not miss out that vital piece of information that the customer needed.
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They would be able to respond to customers' needs quicker and more effectively. This would make your business look better.
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Your staff would be able to do their jobs more quickly, which saves you money.
Enterprise Search Engines are the single entry point.
Fortunately, products that allow a single search across multiple stores of information exist. They are called Enterprise Search Engines.
An Enterprise Search Engine works almost exactly like an Internet Search Engine such as Google or Yahoo:
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It crawls your shared files, databases, CMS and CRM looking for information.
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It builds an index of that information.
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It displays a search page on your company Intranet that staff logged into your network can access.
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It lets staff search for documents using keywords such as customer names, product names, job numbers etc.
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It returns all the information linked to that keyword from all of your systems.
This ensures that your staff will have access to all the information they need in one place, so they won't have to search within each system separately and they won't miss anything.
How much time and expense might this save your business? Why don't you ask your employees? Why not try and put a figure on it?
Trovo have Enterprise Search Engine training.
We are trained Google Enterprise Search Professionals and can advise you on how to put a Google-powered Enterprise Search Engine on your network and have it up and running within weeks if not days.
We are also Microsoft Partners, which means that we can suggest solutions provided by another of the biggest names in Enterprise Search - FAST Search and Transfer.
Not being tied to one particular Enterprise Search provider means
we can recommend the solution that suits your company best. So why not
arrange a time for us to call you to find out what you need?
Or call us at any time on 0116 232 5147.