Competitive Advantage with Enterprise Search Capability
The amount of data is growing exponentially, and the data needed for work is scattered across various locations such as email, file systems, as well as CRM and ERP systems. This blog provides an overview and practical tools for the comprehensive development of your organization’s information retrieval capabilities. Quick access to crucial organizational information is a core strategic capability.
Enterprise Search capability is built on expertise, processes, and technology that enable staff to access the information they need for their job from one centralized location.
Content
1. How much does information retrieval cost for your organization?
In this blog, information retrieval refers to obtaining the necessary information for work through:
- Searching with keywords
- Browsing options in one place
- Accessing the source of information in order to edit it
The total staff time wasted on information retrieval in various tasks piles up. From an organizational perspective, time waste is an unnecessary cost.
In a broader sense, it is a question of data-centricity and how efficiently employees collectively learn in their work and how well they can leverage the organization’s intellectual capital to create customer value.
Information retrieval is therefore about creating customer value from the organization’s internal information. Inefficiencies in accessing the information needed for knowledge work directly affect the competitiveness as well as the financial results of an enterprise in the era of data economy. Read more about value creation through transparency (Post in Finnish).
The traditional way to search for information within an organization is by opening different IT-systems separately and manually collecting information.
Single search solutions used to be very expensive and only available to larger organizations. The situation has now changed and organizations, regardless of (their) size and field, can quickly allow access to organizational information in their own systems.
By leveraging Enterprise Search technology and enhancing search capabilities, information can be gathered in one place and available for the staff with a few hours worth of investment. The payback period is very short and does not require hiring an entire army of consultants.
In the short term, problems related to finding information cause everyday issues and inefficiency. In the long run, maintaining an organisation’s competitiveness becomes a challenge when compared to organisations whose staff have faster access to the information they need for their work.
When pursuing a self-driven data-centric environment, data transparency is a key strategic capability and enabler of scalable customer value. Top professionals expect their employers to provide them with the best tools for their job.
Identifying time waste caused by unnecessary work is worthwhile, regardless of the organization’s sector. It is rewarding as it quickly improves the organization’s capability and competitiveness.
Determining the Value of Lost Staff Time
To start the assessment of inefficient labour input costs related to information retrieval, first determine the following three things:
- In which tasks does time waste occur?
- Which job role does it affect?
- How could the work of many employees be made more efficient?
First, list all the tasks where information retrieval plays a crucial role and time waste is known to occur. A list can be quickly compiled by someone familiar with the organization by recalling feedback from staff or annual employee survey responses to the question “Do I find the information needed for my job easily?“. Next, assign a value to these identified tasks by job role.
Note the definition of information retrieval mentioned above. Information transparency and accessibility is not always a task linked to a specific job role, but a broader process that includes searching, browsing, previewing, and selecting the right information.
For example, if according to the staff, information cannot be found in your organization’s intranet, identify the related job task. You could call the task, for instance: information retrieval from the intranet. In a narrow sense, the question is not about anyone’s specific job task. In a broader sense, it could be a job task for all job roles.
Information retrieval tasks in a modern workplace can also be seemingly insignificant microtasks, but the cumulative time waste from these tasks can have a significant impact on your organization’s productivity.
Even tasks that appear minor should be included in the calculation if they are repetitive and cause unnecessary waste of time.
By adding up the time waste from all tasks, you can get an overall understanding of the value of challenges in accessing information in terms of labour costs.
If completing a task requires the input of multiple individuals, the loss of value is multiplied and affects the overall work time on a company level, thus affecting the service delivery time, which in turn, has an impact on the quality of the service from the customer’s perspective. The combined value of the individual tasks does not include this aspect.
Determining the value of an improved employee experience should also be considered separately. Converting time waste into added value does naturally not include an assessment of the benefits to the organization of an improved employee experience and enhanced customer experience.
Calculating Labour Input Costs
To obtain an overview of your organization’s labour costs related to information access, calculate the value of the annual potential savings using the formula provided below.
With our Search Cost Calculator, you can easily estimate the cost of the staff time freed up by Ilves Search.
The service is available here. In the advanced mode, you can calculate labour input costs task by task. The select menu already includes common information retrieval tasks. You can also add other tasks to your calculation and share the summary by email with your colleagues, for example, for a management team discussion.
See the list of tasks, defined by an international team of legal professionals during the Brainfactory workshop at the Legal Design Summit 2019.
Focus on Digital Employee Experience
An increasing number of companies are paying attention to their Digital Employee Experience (DEX) as easy and quick improvements in customer experience have already been made. As time has passed, it has become clear that the employee experience has a direct impact on customer experience.
For employees, the dispersion of information and the increasing volume of data means more unnecessary time spent on manually searching for information. It takes time away from creating customer value, i.e. productivity.
By focusing organizational development and innovation on the digital encounters employees have in their work, the improvement of the employee experience can simultaneously be focused on streamlining core processes within the organization.
Quick information retrieval is a key strategic capability in a modern knowledge workplace and a fundamental building block for a positive employee experience.
Business Development and Information Retrieval
Within the Ilves team, we are contemplating the root causes of issues related to information access, their impact on daily operations, and value creation. As a result of our discussions and collective analysis, we arrived at the following:
We set ourselves the goal of identifying causal relationships for things that spontaneously came to our team’s minds regarding the topic. In this context, we do not claim that the compared issues are the only correct ones, but many of them are familiar to people working with information.
We compared the following things brought up in our discussion:
- Missing guidelines and policies for work
- Getting used to slow information retrieval
- Usability of systems
- Number of systems
- Double-work
- Laboriousness of information retrieval
- Hidden value of information
- Inefficiency and interruptions in work
- Lack of a sense of meaning in the work
We conducted the comparison to find out how many times each of the aforementioned things was a cause or effect compared to all the other factors.
This approach allowed us to establish an order in the causal relationships between the discussed things and we created a summary based on the image. The greatest value is likely in identifying root causes.
Our conclusion is that issues related to information retrieval have the causal relationships described above and an impact on the productivity/profitability of organizations.
Similarly, you can assess the challenges in your own organization. We believe that the most effective way to eliminate wasted staff time is by focusing on removing root causes.
2. Business Strategy as a Starting Point
The above mentioned approach makes it easy to identify concrete areas for improvement. Additionally, contemplating the root causes helps focus development measures on the most impactful aspects—those with a positive influence on as many consequential issues as possible.
In our experience, when developing Enterprise Search capabilities, it is advisable to start with clarifying and defining the objective. This helps avoid disappointment and generate business value as quickly as possible.
It is a good idea to target tasks and processes that are crucial for the organization’s value creation and profitability.
A clear customer strategy makes it easy to target development areas effectively. Typical quality indicators related to knowledge work include expertise, service speed, and proactivity. Customer relationships are measured by factors such as advisor skills and industry expertise. Information transparency is linked to all these customer values.
The objective for strategic access to information can be formulated, for example, as follows: “We provide the necessary information transparently.” The implementation of Enterprise Search technology will fulfill this objective, and results can be seen quickly.
Again, it is advisable to focus on solving a well-known organizational problem (use case) when implementing the technology, so that staff can benefit from the service immediately and feel enthusiastic about it.
Examples of initial use cases might include:
- Finding Teams conversations and documents
- Finding old emails
- Increasing the use of CRM
- Finding sample and template documents
- Cloud search
Next, let’s take a closer look at what Enterprise Search capabilities are before looking in more detail into how the technology works and creates benefits.
Transparent Intellectual Capital as a Competitive Advantage
We live in the era of data and the strategic agenda of most organizations revolves around transforming company data into customer value and thus into success stories.
Technology is rapidly changing the game, constantly creating new opportunities to stand out from competitors.
In this blog, we refer to an organization’s ability to support its employees in finding the information they need to do their job as Enterprise Search capability and information retrieval capability. We see this as enabling staff to succeed.
Internal information within an organization is not valuable as such, even if there is a large amount of it. A large amount of data is also an expense. Depending on the estimate, one terabyte of information/data costs between 3 000 € and 10 000 € per year. Information becomes customer value only when it can be utilized for customer service.
Forward-thinking companies are actively facilitating their staff’s access to the company’s data masses. Responsibility for ensuring that information is accessible and that capabilities are continuously developed is delegated and organized. Often, information retrieval is also supported by search technology.
It is a strategic capability in most expert and service roles, as the staff’s ability to use the organization’s structural knowledge/information base to support their knowledge is ultimately measured by the expertise and quality of service provided to the customer.
What such capability is called varies from one organization to another. In situations where the organization’s strategy includes concepts such as data capability, information management, knowledge management, data-driven management, and data-centricity, it involves the same subject matter.
In expert service industries, the question is whether experts use the organization’s structural knowledge or information to provide answers or solutions.
In a truly data-centric organization, work is organized so that the staff has access to the information they need in one place, ensuring data-centricity. This makes utilizing structural knowledge capital as support for human capital and expertise possible.
Effectively utilizing structural knowledge capital allows experts to continuously improve in their work. By choosing this as a strategic focus area, staff can expect to easily access their information from one place.
From an employee’s perspective, Enterprise Search capability is therefore about developing expertise that is visible to the customer using the company’s own intellectual capital. It is about converting the organization’s own data into customer value as part of the service provided to the customer.
The implementation of the strategy from a management perspective would be flawed if there was no determined effort to make information easily accessible in a situation where the organization is aiming for data-centricity.
Information Retrieval from Organizational Data
The established technology term Enterprise Search (“ES”) directly implies information retrieval within an organization’s own data and intranet.
Finto (Finnish thesaurus and ontology service) defines the term information retrieval as a part of information acquisition where desired information is sought from information sources. See here
Searching the organization’s own information or, for example, searching for information within an organization’s/company’s internal network would convey a similar idea, although not as concisely. We welcome suggestions for a Finnish equivalent.
Despite the terminology, the concept revolves around facilitating the discovery of unstructured and structured data within an organization’s internal network.
Organizations’ structured knowledge includes data stored in fields of an ERP system, while unstructured data includes, for example, information written in emails. A significant portion of a company’s structured knowledge is stored this way, holding a lot of untapped potential.
The internal network is also referred to as an intranet (vs Internet, extranet). In this context, it does not specifically mean intranet systems, as they are viewed as data sources just like any other information source from the perspective of Enterprise Search technology.
The concept of “Intranet Search” may be associated with Enterprise Search technology. Typically, an organization’s intranet search looks for information in specific organizational data sources or only within content stored on the intranet.
By integrating Enterprise Search technology into the intranet search, search results can include all of the company’s data sources, significantly enhancing internal information flow.
Enterprise Search technology covers capabilities beyond traditional intranet search, making it a viable and cost-effective alternative to traditional intranets for organizations aiming for transparency and minimizing manual work in internal staff communication.
The differentiation and competitiveness of companies is fundamentally based on their own knowledge and expertise, together with information available on the Internet. Innovators are already combining both external and internal information using Enterprise Search platforms.
Make a Single Search
What does “Search” actually mean in this context? We’ve already discussed the broader significance of the term from an organizational perspective.
The term has evolved over time. Nowadays, it means more than just searching. It also involves finding information that employees may not have known they were looking for. Therefore, it’s about discovering entirely new perspectives on the current tasks at hand. This can also be supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This phenomenon is familiar to all of us from browsing the internet with search engines and listening to services like Spotify. We’re already accustomed to consumer services knowing and understanding our needs. Using the same logic, technology can assist in the modern workplace. Intelligent technology helps people discover information relevant to them and gain more knowledge with less effort.
The challenge in the Enterprise Search context, however, is the sheer volume of information. In an internal environment, there are rarely enough data and users for machine learning to efficiently optimize search results. Nevertheless, the relevance of search results can be successfully optimized through other means.
Enterprise Search technology serves as a handy platform for implementing artificial intelligence. It collects work-related data in one place through APIs and easily accessible data source integrations. This reduces the need for custom integrations and lowers the costs of AI implementations.
See, for example, the Ilveshaku OCR extension, where Enterprise Search technology serves as a platform for utilizing Tesseract Neural Networks for daily tasks:
https://www.ilvessolutions.fi/en/products/ilves-search/features/intelligent-text-recognition/
3. Developing Organizational Information Retrieval
In the future, companies that can manage their organizational knowledge search capabilities better than their competitors will lead knowledge-intensive industries. As technology continues to advance, we are likely to see an increasing difference in companies’ ability to leverage their data.
To simplify, Enterprise Search capability can be divided into the following three levels:
Information Retrieval Strategy and Organizational Culture
An information retrieval strategy aims to enhance a company’s productivity and competitiveness. Quick access to information enables the transformation of data into customer value and revenue. (Post in Finnish)
In practice, this means that the right information is delivered to employees’ work processes on time. This is the goal since the value remains hidden if the information is not being use.
Building information retrieval capability is not solely an IT matter. The implementation of search technology is not a traditional IT project either because it involves ready-made software that can be tried out by the company in a couple of days. However, IT can also benefit significantly from Ilves Search.
In busy workplaces, there is also a need to pay attention to choosing a solution that supports information transparency and is easy to implement. Anyone in a hurry must be able to find and use information without any special instructions.
Executives
Having easy access to the information you need at work is part of the modern workplace. It is therefore important to ensure that a person is assigned the responsibility for information retrieval.
Job titles may vary, but it is essential that responsibility for the continuous improvement of information retrieval is assigned to someone.
From an organisational point of view, these are tasks related to various IT management areas, from strategy and architecture to IT service production.
Search management or enterprise search management tasks are related to managing information quality, ensuring data consistency, developing work processes and better design.
On the other hand, they also extend to HR tasks in organisations where HR is already responsible for managing employee experience or digital employee experience. According to our survey conducted in October 2018, this was still relatively uncommon.
We did phone interviews with a total of 68 people responsible for IT in their organizations’ executive teams. Based on the open-ended responses from IT management, centralized access to information would improve the employee experience across a wide range of different job roles. This reinforced our underlying assumption about the connection between information capability and employee experience.
Based on the survey, we got the impression that there is a demand for closer collaboration between IT and HR and for defining common responsibilities related to information retrieval.
If Enterprise Search technology is used, the responsibilities of the executives include collaboration with the technology provider. The core task is to develop Search Relevance based on staff feedback and search analytics.
The Enterprise Search technology provider (together with the designated search team) ensures that the ES technology is optimized by data sources according to the organization’s needs. Most of the work is done by the supplier during the implementation phase.
The collaboration continues regularly to ensure that employees can easily access the information they need in their daily work. The search team should include a broad representation of people with different job functions to provide feedback to the attention of more technical search experts.
From the employee’s perspective, tasks related to search take less attention and working hours the more advanced the organization’s operations are. Searching for information from multiple sources complicates and slows down task execution. Centralized access to information simplifies and speeds up tasks.
Search Competence/skills
In most workplaces, finding necessary information for work is a matter of common interest.
The ability of employees to find information is a fundamental skill. An increasing demand for continuous access to information emphasize the need to enhance search competence/skills within organisations.
Traditionally, staff is expected to have system-specific expertise and employees typically need to know in which system the information is located. They must also know how to perform a search within that particular system.
The operational logic of searches varies and, for example, searches in document management systems can be so complex or slow that a search is not carried out at all. Searching through e-mails on the other hand may be technically restricted, making it difficult to quickly access old messages. Multiple systems and varying search practices place unnecessary skill requirements and burden on staff.
Enterprise Search skill requirements are considerably lower. In practice, there are virtually no basic search competency requirements anymore, as the logic of modern Enterprise Search is the same as that of Internet search engines. Everyone can use them.
More complex searches, on the other hand, may require skills such as making Boolean searches.
See more information here https://www.ilvessolutions.fi/en/products/ilves-search/features/using-search-syntax/
The same skill is needed for effective use of Internet search engines, so it is advisable to include this skill in the competency requirements for workplace information retrieval.
Enterprise Search technology removes the need to know which system the information is stored in, as all systems are connected as information sources for the search. Searches can then be carried out quickly from one place.
Once the required information is found, the user can preview and, if necessary, access the original content in the source system to edit it.
Employees often don’t need to open the source system at all, as the information obtained through the ES interface’s intelligent preview is sufficient for performing the task. It is also easy to copy information without opening the source systems.
Search and Value-Creating Core Processes
Search tasks and competence are related to the core processes by which an organization creates value for its customers. The significance of search processes for business varies across industries.
When expertise is the core value offered to customers, search processes become an essential part of the core processes. Examples of such industries include legal and consulting services. Read our blog post on making legal work more efficient:
Within the broader definition of search, transparency and quick access to information make search processes relevant for value creation in most industries, as described earlier in this blog. Enterprise Search technology reduces search processes by centralising the activity in one place.
It also simplifies the work of those responsible for information retrieval. Work processes related to information retrieval can be connected to the same system consistently.
Enterprise Search as a Technology
What does the term Enterprise Search, often referred to in this blog, mean from a purely technological point of view?
What is commonly referred to as Enterprise Search in the blog, purely from a technological perspective, means the following:
The term refers to an internal service within an organization that facilitates the easy retrieval of any information within the organization’s internal network—similar to how information is found on the Internet by using search engines like Google.
It is an in-house service that allows any information to be easily found on the organization’s internal network – in the same way that information can be found by googling it on the Internet.
Enterprise Search systems have the following characteristics:
- It pulls and indexes information and documents from various sources, such as file systems, intranets, document management systems, e-mail or databases.
- It integrates structured and unstructured data in the same index (database).
Search is a multidimensional term from a technological point of view. It refers to an underlying process that requires deep knowledge, where the content is made easy to find for the information seeker through a variety of methods such as linguistics, information management, integration and design.
This deep expertise is rarely developed in-house by companies because the development and maintenance of such processes are highly demanding and expensive. Only the largest companies build their own enterprise search technologies. Most organizations use ready-to-use Enterprise Search software, tailored for their sector and industry-specific vocabulary used by the company with the help of experts.
Metadata processing, data classification, and taxonomy techniques enable the efficient collection of data from the company’s information systems into one place, accessible to the staff.
The user interface plays a crucial role in the usability of enterprise search technology. Intuitive interface design transforms “searching” into an extension for expert work. Therefore, the interface must align with the requirements of the industry work processes.
For example, in the legal industry, advanced preview with OCR functionality is a feature that significantly speeds up the use of information. This is because source systems don’t need to be opened to leverage previously generated structured data and knowledge. This is also an example of daily recurring micro-processes, where the time waste generated is challenging to detect unless these processes are listed and evaluated as a whole.
4. How Does Enterprise Search Technology Work?
Enterprise Search technology enables the consolidation of information into a single location accessible to the staff. It is a particularly useful development for organizations for which expertise is a strategic and systematically developed concern for management.
All companies will benefit from the transparency that technology brings to corporate data sets/masses, together with other significant advantages. For example, staff members do not have to remember where information or files are stored. Consequently, it elevates the company’s information capabilities to a new level.
The components of enterprise search systems are usually divided into the following five processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_search
Animation: Content Awareness using Enterprise Search technology
Data is gathered and extracted from connected data sources into the Enterprise Search software, to which the application has access.
- In the push model, a source system is integrated with the search engine so that new data is automatically updated by pushing it into the search engine’s API. This model is used when real-time indexing of information is important.
- In the pull model, the software gathers content from data sources using connectors that regularly check for new, updated, or deleted information in the data source.
Content Processing and Analysis
Contents are normalized into a unified format to enable quick retrieval of information. At this phase, data is organized and indexed so that the ES search engine is aware of the availability of new information.
- The texts of the gathered documents are de-formatted and converted to plain text.
- The content is split into groups (tokenization) so that the search can be targeted to a matching unit.
- All characters are converted into lower case so that the search can be performed regardless of whether the search phrase is written in upper or lower case letters or numbers.
Indexing
Animation: Indexing Data with Enterprise Search Technology
Next, an index database is created, enabling fast information retrieval through the interface. In the previous phase, the normalized text content is stored in an index, which is optimized for quick lookups (specific to the organization).
- Metadata extraction and automatic summarization are performed at this phase.
- The data is grouped into logical categories, which in turn can be searched and quickly returned as search results to users.
- Third party analysis services can also be used in this phase, for example for text recognition using artificial intelligence.
Query processing
Animation: Information Retrieval with Enterprise Search Service.
Users can now issue a query to the Enterprise Search system through the search interface.
- The user can use one or more search terms.
- Queries can also be performed through navigation links created in the interface.
- The user can refine their query using Boolean operators among others.
- Users can efficiently narrow down queries with intelligent filters and leverage AI capabilities to refine them.
Matching
In the final phase, the user’s query is compared to the stored index, and the best matches are returned to the user.
- Enterprise Search technology compares the query made by the user to the index and organizes the information based on relevance.
- The user receives search results corresponding to the query.
- Search results are formatted and presented in the desired format.
Access Rights to the Data
The Enterprise Search system always respects the access rights of the source systems.
Access rights are checked either in advance during the indexing phase by associating access rights with collected information, or it can be done later when information is retrieved. Methods can also be used simultaneously.
Enterprise Search systems can be connected to multiple access management systems. This allows multiple organizations to leverage the same Enterprise Search system and its data. This is convenient if an organization wants to enhance collaboration between different branches by providing access to selected information beyond organizational boundaries. It also enables the realization of “one firm” goals aimed at a unified culture and operating models in expert organizations.
Failure to integrate is a significant risk in acquisitions. Support for multiple access management systems allows the staff of the acquiring company to access the acquired company’s data after the transaction. If the acquiring company already has Enterprise Search technology in use, the systems can be connected, allowing time for the final migrations to take place, and reducing the risk of the acquisition failing.
5. Enterprise Search + AI, ML ja NLP
In the upcoming blog, we will reflect on how artificial intelligence enhances Enterprise Search capabilities in organizations that already use Enterprise Search technology.
This involves adding AI, ML, and NLP capabilities to the Enterprise Search service, referred to as Insight Engine technology according to Gartner.
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Keywords: enterprise search, information retrieval, transparency, access to information, digital employee experience, customer experience, data capability, data strategy, data-driven decision-making, information management, strategic management, IT services, strategy, company strategy, business development, information system, data flow, self-directedness, self-directed organization, data, artificial intelligence, remote work.
