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Making content manageable for knowledge workers with enterprise search
Your knowledge workers are some of your organization's most valuable assets. But through no fault of their own, these employees waste a great deal of time and energy inefficiently navigating the vast amounts of information available to them-both inside and outside of the content management repository.
In a recent survey of over 600 companies, IDC asked respondents how long they spent at various content-related tasks. To no one's surprise, searching for and accessing content consumed over 24% of the typical information worker's time. Using conservative metrics for average workers, IDC estimates this cost at over $14,000 per worker per year. In addition, these workers often spend three and a half hours per week unsuccessfully searching for information, costing more than $5,000 per worker per year on unproductive work.
Why is it so difficult for knowledge workers to find what they're looking for? First, information volumes are exploding and information itself is becoming more complex. Finding business-relevant information-scattered across disparate internal and external sources such as file systems, web pages, e-mail systems, databases, document management systems, collaboration platforms, websites, search engines, content sources such as LexisNexis, industry and government sources, and others-is extremely difficult and time-consuming. The frequency and scope of global business mergers and acquisitions, as well as consolidation, often make matters worse. And, to further complicate matters, information is often stored in multiple languages.
Insufficient search capabilities and a lack of integrated access to all enterprise collections of information are the source of this wasted time. The result: employees spend hours searching for information (sometimes unsuccessfully) or often start projects from a blank slate, unaware of similar or duplicate work that has taken place elsewhere in the organization. In other words-a colossal waste of employee time.
Organizations are seeking a better way for knowledge workers to find the information assets they need to work effectively. According to Gartner, more than 70% of enterprises will want a unified desktop and enterprise search product by the end of 2008. To effectively deal with these challenges, IT organizations must combine content management and search solutions in order to: effectively reuse their existing IT assets; easily adapt to changes, both internally and externally; enable discovery of relevant...