Empowering Employees Working From Home With Enterprise Search

Empowering Remote Work with Effective Enterprise Search

The pivot to working from home following the global pandemic left many businesses with whiplash. Much emphasis had been placed on how businesses store and secure data, but less had been placed on another crucial aspect of the proper usage of data: retrieval. For many businesses, their data is fragmented across many different systems, files and formats. This makes it difficult for employees working from home to find the data they need in a timely fashion or, in some cases, at all. This is one of the problems what enterprise search seeks to solve.

What’s the problem? 

For many businesses, remote working became the only feasible way to continue business during lockdowns around the globe. Though these are being relaxed in many places, COVID has not gone away and many businesses have chosen to continue with remote working policies for the foreseeable future. The problem is that many were unprepared for this change, and many business practices relied on employees having physical access to the devices within which crucial data was stored. If they were unable to access those devices, they couldn’t do the work they needed to do.

What about cloud storage solutions? 

Cloud storage solutions have helped to bridge the gap somewhat, by allowing employees working from home to access critical files and data remotely. However, cloud storage solutions by themselves are simply large data repositories. Without well-respected and maintained data organisation, employees may struggle to find the data they need in a timely fashion, even if they do technically have access to it. This time spent searching for files is not time spent productively.

Enterprise search solutions aim to empower employees to find the data they need quickly and easily, without knowing where it is stored or even what format it is in. Relying on keywords to find particular files or documents only works if employees know which keywords to search for. Otherwise, they must spend time crawling through potentially hundreds to thousands of files and folders in order to find what they are looking for.

How does enterprise search help? 

Enterprise search works in a similar fashion to the search engines we are all used to. Much like Google or Bing knows how to deliver the most relevant results for ambiguous search terms like, “today’s weather”, similarly enterprise search solutions provide search results that can be customised on a per-user basis. This means tailoring results to each employee, by delivering results that are most relevant to their role within a business, as well as respecting restrictions such as data access policies.

Likewise, enterprise search solutions also include technology such as Natural Language Processing, which means that employees can find files using the same sort of language they would when describing a file to others, rather than having to rely on very specific keywords to find particular files and documents. These inclusions are critical to discovering and delivering relevant data quickly, and help set enterprise search solutions apart from the basic search functions found in cloud storage solutions.

What other benefits does enterprise search provide? 

For many businesses, their data is not stored in a homogeneous format. Company data likely includes a plethora of file types and formats, from word documents to spreadsheets, video files, database notations and plenty more. Many storage solutions cannot interpret these formats and rely on more primitive search technology, such as only searching file names or relying on tags to help identify files. Due to these limitations, many businesses have to rely on employees following very particular file naming/tagging conventions, or they risk rendering files difficult to find and end up orphaning them unintentionally.

Enterprise search solutions can handle heterogeneous data formats and return results that are based not only on file names and tags, but also by interpreting data from within the files themselves, regardless of the format. This makes data discovery much easier and more user-friendly compared to other alternatives. Employees don’t need to spend time figuring out the precise keywords needed to find the files they are looking for. Instead, they can search in ways similar to the web search engines that they are already familiar with. Data retrieval is fast and allows employees to simply get on with their jobs, rather than spend time searching.

Conclusion 

Enterprise search helps to tame the disorganised and heterogeneous data sets that typically make up a large part of a company’s business operations. Whether those files are stored on internal or external networks, enabling employees to find files and data using familiar search terms like the ones they are already used to helps make data discovery simple. When employees don’t have to spend time picking apart folders and attempting to discover the very specific keywords required in order to find the files they need, they can instead put that time and effort into doing the tasks they need to. Whether employees are working remotely or in the office, fast data retrieval empowers employees to work faster and more productively.

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