How Enterprise Search Can Compensate for Corona-Related Employee and Skill Losses

“You can imagine this as a gigantic data stream of tens of millions of words per year, to which are also added the data flows of customers, suppliers, competitors and authorities,” explains Christoph Wendl, CEO of the Viennese IT company Iphos IT Solutions, to the developers of the innovative in-house search engine searchIT. “We are already familiar with the exponential growth in data, i.e. the fact that the global amount of data is doubling at ever shorter intervals, from various studies by hard drive and memory manufacturers. But our experience also shows that even medium-sized companies are already producing files in the single-digit million range – mostly distributed across various heterogeneous information systems such as file servers, intranet and groupware systems, WIKIs and production databases and the like. With the data from the communication sector, such as e-mails, chat logs, etc., the amount is already in the double-digit million range, for corporations and internationally active organizations in the billions.”

“The problem with these data volumes,” Wendl continues, “is that it is difficult to retrieve and link the knowledge collected in this way in the conventional way. Searching is usually limited to just one data source, and if different software was used to create it, the search for in-house knowledge becomes an extremely complex and extremely time-consuming – and therefore of course expensive – affair.” Corona has further exacerbated this already difficult situation. Long, illness-related absences of employees, but above all due to personnel savings that have often become necessary, leave the input they provide fallow. Theoretically, their knowledge is probably available for the company, but the targeted and timely finding of the data is often not given. Productivity and quality of the companies affected by this are suffering, which can also have an impact on the profits of companies that are already battered by the Corona crisis.

“When carrying out their work, people like to orient themselves on knowledge that has already been tried and tested. Solution strategies and data that have already been successful and useful in the past are ideally reused. So you don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel. This is where search engines like searchIT come into play,” says Wendl.

Countermeasures with internal company search engines

In-house search engines offer a reliable way to counteract the loss of knowledge caused by departing employees. Data from a wide variety of sources – emails, documents, databases, web applications, etc. – is searched at lightning speed and analyzed by AI-based algorithms and presented to the user in a structured, clear form. “On the Internet, the most powerful data stream, this concept has been successfully relied on for over 25 years. We all tap into existing data streams via Google and Co. every day to find information. With in-house search engines, so-called enterprise search engines, this principle can also be made usable for companies,” explains Wendl. Even in times of non-crisis, employees spend a huge amount of time searching for documents, e-mails, etc. in the company’s internal data stream. Now there is also the loss of staff, often also a lack of communication by the employees working remotely. This costs companies a lot of money. Enterprise search solutions make it possible to use existing knowledge more efficiently with fewer staff.

Recently, such search technologies have also become affordable for smaller companies. In addition to quickly searching the internal data stream at the touch of a button, these search term-based enterprise search solutions such as searchIT also offer the possibility to direct and classify it. Automated sorting of documents and information by search terms saves additional time and increases productive output, but also the level of knowledge of employees.

“With the enterprise search solution searchIT, we have set ourselves the goal of creating an internal search engine that allows even small companies to use this groundbreaking technology. The entry costs are low – the investment pays for itself practically from day one due to the saved working time. Those who do not invest in technology now must be careful that the loss of knowledge does not lead to further collapses,” Wendl is convinced.