Enterprise Search in the Digital Workplace

Any knowledge-intensive organization of significant size either has a digital workplace or is scrambling to establish one.

As Gartner so clearly stated back in 2017, the goal of the digital workplace as a business strategy is to boost employee engagement and agility through a more “consumerized” work environment. Employees should be empowered and motivated to get the information they need and then act on it to further the goals of the organization. The tools and resources provided to employees should seem familiar—like those used outside of work — in order to drive adoption and maximize ongoing productivity.

Building the Foundation

Gartner’s “building block” diagram illustrates the components necessary to enable and sustain an effective digital workplace. Note the “Information” building block, described as data and content being delivered in context.

As organizations continue to pursue initiatives around digitization and digital transformation, they often create new challenges for their employees to overcome. Many of these challenges emanate from content and data that is accumulating quickly and constantly across siloed repositories in different formats and languages. For employees, navigating this complexity means wasted time, missed insights, and lost opportunities. The answer to this problem is enterprise search.

Collaboration that Scales

A modern enterprise search platform includes a combination of capabilities that work together to provide information from enterprise content and data. It provides information relevance that is tuned to user needs and can improve through self-learning over time. It can scale in multiple directions, enabling many end-users to simultaneously access relevant information and insights from huge, diverse volumes of content and data.

Modern search provides speedy response times, even in the most complex and demanding environments where time is literally money. The user experience can be easily configured to accommodate specialty use cases. Analytics are automated wherever possible, allowing the machine to do analysis while users apply judgment and make decisions.

Driving Business Value

Depending on the environment and application of enterprise search, the business impact can take on different forms. In some cases, enterprise search can drive revenue. This has been proven in large pharma companies that are able to bring new drugs to market faster and in manufacturing and service organizations that can generate more proposals without sacrificing quality. In other cases, enterprise search drives cost optimization, accelerated productivity, and responsive compliance.