If you’re interested in an enterprise search platform for your organization, there are many benefits. Take into account the following:
- Employees and users can perform their job duties with more expediency. They can then decrease the time they have to spend jumping back and forth between various informational platforms to find what they need.
- More information means having enhanced access to more thoughtful answers and data-driven outcomes. With a diverse pool of information, employees and users may even infuse more creativity into their decision-making processes.
- Enterprise search can help to decrease the frustration that results from spending hours scouring through disparate indexes of company-wide data. If you can cut down on the amount of time it takes to find what you need, then you can improve both productivity and efficiency.
There are several highly-recommended practices to ensure you are extracting the most optimal results from your enterprise search platform. Examine these best practices below:
- Create a search support team: A search support team is able to better watch enterprise searching to ensure your organization is getting the full benefits of a platform. An effective team will be able to understand results with no engagement, popular topics and words, and failures. They can understand the language and activities of the business so that new issues in search failure can be identified as soon as possible.
- Define business objectives: Understanding your goals and needs are critical to making sure you are gathering the most accurate and relevant content out there.
- Determine end user characteristics: As important as it is to define the needs and goals of the business, you must also understand the needs and goals of the users. Are they getting what they need from the search results? User experience is an important part of the search platform. You must also ensure that they are satisfied with the results. If not, define areas of improvement and capitalize on them.
- Use functionality as a guide for platform selection: You want the search engine to be functional to all. Although it may be hard to plan for the project in advance, ensuring that the platform is functional will increase the success of enterprise search.
- Decide what information needs to be made searchable: Determine the needed document management systems, websites, databases, and publication tools. And, make sure they are available for search.
- Make it available via multiple interfaces: Smartphones, tablets, and laptops should also be successful in the search, rather than just on a desktop computer. Search applications are more efficient and productive when they can access necessary information from multiple devices and locations.
- Browse, search, and alert: Users should be able to search, browse, and set alerts as needed. These three options can lead to a more effective search environment.
- Use search log files: These search log files can include the most clicked results, users performing the most searches, traffic of search over time, and the correlation of search. These files can also be used to predict new and upcoming search requirements.
- Include scalability: Ensuring that the database can handle multiple queries at once can decrease the time spent searching and increase productivity. Also, organizational needs can change and increase over time.
- Index diverse content: The more the content is diversified, the better the chance that the type of information being searched for will be found.
- Don’t forget about your people: Make sure to include the ability to find other ratings, expertise, and individuals within the organization.
A successful enterprise search implementation is an effective means for boosting the productivity of an organization. When enterprise search is optimized, everyone is happy—employees, management, and organizations as a whole. It’s a win-win-win.