Why internal search is crucial to large companies

With organizations worldwide embarking on their digital transformation journeys, they acquire a lot of data about their operations. Every digital workplace solution, the tools and other digital systems the organization use, and the underlying infrastructure that supports them generates mountains of data. With proper analysis, this data can reveal insights that can help improve their operations and help them produce more profit margins.

Besides this, an organization’s data and information are also crucial to drive its processes. Employees rely on it to perform their tasks and produce their deliverables on time. Therefore organizations must curate their data carefully and make them readily accessible.

Internal search is one of the tools businesses can use to do this.

What is internal search?

Internal search is more or less like a Google within an organization. Employees use internal search to go through large volumes of organizational data and quickly find the information they need. For instance, the HR team may look up contracts and NDAs, while the sales team may use it to find the pricing for different products.

An internal search is also essential for data analysts to find raw data about an organization’s operations. They may then use this data to optimize processes or help make better decisions.

As companies make their operations digital, they have the opportunity to make long-term data-centric decisions. Every tool they use — ERP systems, CRMs, OLTP, and other internal platforms can collect granular data about their daily operations.

But this data is often scattered across the company. Even within an organization, teams often use many different tools to manage their projects. This makes it difficult for organizations to find and collect data about a particular process or activity.

An internal search tool can go through all of this data quickly and find the necessary information.

How does internal search benefit your employees?

An internal search tool can start helping an employee the day they join the organization. After a new employee joins the team, it may take them a while to get used to the organization. The difference between a new employee and someone who has been in the organization for a while is the information they have.

New employees may need assistance learning processes and how the different teams interact before they start contributing as part of the workforce. Organizations often invest in training programs to shorten this period.

An internal search tool can help fast-track this process. New employees can use the search tool to quickly find what they need, from the dress code to how they can access or request the solutions they need for their job.

Even for existing employees, the inaccessibility of organizational information is often a roadblock to productivity. Employees often spend a lot of time and energy asking around and figuring out how certain things are done or even looking up who has a piece of information.

For example, if someone wants to prepare a new contract, they may have to ask and look around for existing templates. Even when they realize who has the information or knows where it is stored, it will still take a lot of time to get it.

An internal search streamlines this process to a large extent. It can make employees more self-reliant and figure out things by themselves.

Internal search engines will also empower employees to make decisions to a large extent. When they have all the information they need, they can confidently make decisions without waiting around for responses from their managers or other senior employees.

Why create an internal search engine

One of the main roadblocks to organizations’ digital transformation initiatives is data siloes. Businesses often use a lot of tools and solutions to store and process their data. And as discussed above, they also rely on many digital workplace platforms to communicate, collaborate, and organize their workflows. These solutions rarely work with each other and create separate datasets. Employees or stakeholders may have to go through these systems to find the information they need.

Internal search solutions can break down these data siloes. It can aggregate and bring together structured and unstructured data from different solutions and make it more accessible.

Internal search engines can also help businesses better leverage their data. While organizations often invest in building data analysis teams and tools, it’s difficult to extract the relevant data from their organizations.

In many instances, businesses have to manually collect the data for analysis. With an internal search engine, analysts and data experts can easily look up the data they need. They can find patterns or trends in the client, better understand their customers, and use them to better position their business.

Executive teams can also make better decisions in a short time with an internal search engine. They won’t have to raise a request for data and wait around for their team to find and deliver it. Instead, they can easily look up what they need using the search engine.

Organizations can significantly improve the customer and client experience with an internal search engine. If a customer has a query regarding a product or a service, the customer service team can quickly look up the info and provide detailed answers to their question. Customers won’t have to wait around for the service desk to contact experts and find answers.