One of the biggest challenges organizations have to face these days is information overload. We get more and more information each day, and we also produce more and more. We not only have to store this huge volume but also need to read and process: we have to understand, analyze, and work with the information. Statistics show that the average person today processes more information in a single day than a person in the 1500s did in an entire lifetime. (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8316534/Welcome-to-the-information-age-174-newspapers-a-day.html)
Have you ever thought about the effects of this tendency?!
This volume of information gets really crazy when, over time, we accumulate it within an organization. There are more and more enterprises with the challenge of having hundreds of millions(!) of documents, stored in many different systems. Dealing with this amount of content is a real problem that creates a serious headache for many.
Although storing documents and other items in SharePoint and Office 365 is a standard practice, it is not a solution for everyone’s needs. Therefore, organizations use several other content management systems as well as databases. The variety of systems used across an organization multiplies the complexity of Findability. Users have to open several applications to collect the information they need. These applications all have different information architecture, have a different user interface, and different Search experience.
This massive information overload results in that finding the information we need to get our jobs done takes more and more time. Sometimes we cannot even find what we are looking for, and we re-create the same content, over and over again. This leads to more and more duplicated and multiplied content, and besides the Findability challenges it is also hard (or sometimes impossible) to decide which document is the most valid, up-to-date version.
The result is more time spent with searching and less success with finding what we need.
These challenges all drive us to the conclusion: we need something that helps us.
Enterprise Search is one tool that comes to the rescue.
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