Today’s guest blogger is Thom Goodwin, Business Development Manager at SADA Systems.
How quickly can you find what you’re looking for on the Internet? Search engines, such as Google, have made sifting through billions of records nearly instantaneous. Quality, relevant information is a click away.
In contrast, how quickly can you find relevant information within your own organization? Maybe you’re looking for a report from last year with a chart that you need to reference in your presentation tomorrow. Maybe it’s on the SharePoint portal? Maybe it’s on the company X: drive? Maybe the project manager knows where it is?
Perhaps you are in sales or customer support services and need access to the latest spec sheets, marketing material, or knowledge articles. You can very easily spend up to a half an hour looking for this information or asking someone else to find it for you.
Unfortunately, we often chalk this up to “the way it is” or “it’s just part of the job”. From time to time, though, management will look for ways to speed things up, such as increasing bandwidth or creating “more efficient workflows”. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it isn’t.
Taking it a step further, maybe you work with a ton of data, such as medical codes, resumes, media clips, press releases, claims information, research and development lab test results, invoices, blueprints, etc. How many clicks does it take to get the exact information you need when you need it? Or maybe you travel quite a bit and need a better way to find information while on the road.
Here’s where I’m going with this: What if you could do a Google search within your organization’s data? What if you could hit the exact document or record you need within seconds rather than minutes? What if in doing that search you find information that you forgot was even there?
Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Um, we have a search bar in SharePoint, in the file servers, on the portal…” And you would be right. But how relevant are the results? Do you have to format the document just right so it can be indexed? Are these searches digging deep into the documents or just looking at the titles? What if you could do that search from one location, sort of like google.com, rather than trying to remember which place to go to?
There is, in fact, a very simple solution–one that takes relatively little time to set up and doesn’t tax IT resources when it comes to managing it. It’s basically google.com for your organization.
Google Enterprise Search is helping thousands of companies do just that. They are using it internally and on their public websites. They are saving countless hours. According to the recent IDC Study, Google Search reduced search time by 74% and improved productivity across the company by 1.5%. More importantly, businesses are using it to improve the way they conduct business. Check out some of the customer stories. Overall, the implementation of Google Enterprise Search generated an average ROI of 411%.
Think about this… What data, information, content do you work with on a daily basis? How quickly can you get to it? How much of it is lying unused? What if you could squeeze more life out of it?
As a Premier Google Enterprise Partner, we would love an opportunity to help you think through the possibilities. If you are interested in further information or have any questions, don’t hesitate to visit our website or contact us at [email protected].