By Tara Penner

In terms of work place efficiency, there is arguably nothing more important than giving employees the tools necessary to do their jobs.

Over time, however, businesses add new tools to their repertoire, sometimes unwittingly making work more difficult for the employees who are supposed to benefit the most. Document and data management technologies are certainly no exception, particularly as small businesses adopt many of the consumer-grade cloud offerings that have flooded the marketplace in recent years.

Where is my data?

There are often many opportunities to streamline the management of your information so that documents and data are more accessible and easily found. If you are storing this content using a variety of techniques and locations, any employee looking to access stored information may have to wade through multiple databases in order to find what they need.

As more businesses depend on technological innovation to increase productivity, the need for an accessible means to retrieve data from multiple sources is growing. As a possible solution to the problem, in comes the term Enterprise Search (ES).

ES is a method of data location and retrieval similar to search engines and localized searches on your computer. However, where a web search on Google will peruse the entirety of the visible Internet to calculate the most relevant search results, an enterprise search tool will browse only predetermined databases inside your company.

Why waste time?

Try to imagine, for example, the location of data stored between employees at a business that’s been around for 20 years. For the first 10 to 15 years, most of the data would be located on magnetic disk drives now considered archaic. These legacy storage systems will be on their own machines, in their own rooms, and perhaps even on their own network.

Now, consider the data stored over the last five to 10 years, which is likely going to reside on networked computers, phones, tablets, netbooks, and any other internet-capable device. Some businesses may also be keeping external drives or DVDs with their historical data.

If an employee needs access to information stored in any of these countless potential locations, they may end up searching high and low before they are able to move on to the work that necessitated the search in the first place.

By implementing enterprise searching tools, however, the employee is able to enter the relevant search terms into the ES engine, locate what they need, and move on with their day.

The increase in employee productivity could be staggering, especially for companies who are heavily invested in knowledge-based industries.

What to expect

ES comes in many shapes and sizes, ranging from installed physical hardware to licensed software applications. While some companies may offer a package that requires on-premise resources to house their search algorithms, a competitor may offer a more streamlined approach in the way of software that can be installed over multiple devices. The only real consistency between the options is that they help employees spend more time working.

In it to win it

Increased employee productivity is always a boon for business, and while spending extra money on a new system of data management is not the most attractive of propositions, the benefits can far outweigh the costs.

It’s imperative to keep in mind the rapid shifts technology will be making over the coming years, much less the coming decades. An investment now in enterprise search technology can be an enormous leg up in the future.

– Tara Penner is the Principal Consultant at Pivot Data, a document and data management consulting practice located in Kimberley. An AIIM-Certified Information Professional, her experience includes work with small businesses and not-for-profits to some of the largest engineering companies in the world. When not sitting in front of her laptop, you’ll generally find Tara in the trails or on the ski hill with her human and animal family and friends. For more information or to contact Tara, visit www.pivotdata.ca.

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