Enterprise Search Boost 2021

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Decentralization of corporate structures

Many jobs were outsourced to the home office in 2020 – a trend that will continue in 2021. With optimal infrastructure, this is a win-win situation for employees and employers, reports Christoph Wendl, CEO of the Austrian enterprise search provider searchIT. “In our experience, the use of internal company search engines has significantly contributed to making work easier and thus greater efficiency for employees working from home,” says Wendl. “Quickly finding data that is important for one’s own work with a wide range of filters and additional information made up for a lack of exchange with colleagues on site. Knowledge management as it should be optimally. Employers benefited not only from increased efficiency in their team, but also from the various evaluation options that provide a quick overview of access and document processing. Even after the pandemic ends, working from home will remain an important topic for many companies and their employees who have come to appreciate the benefits of remote working.”

Support service and support

Optimized knowledge management, supported by AI solutions, has also been an important topic in the service and support departments of a growing number of companies – especially automation and optimized knowledge management. Top-level enterprise search solutions support process automation and optimized knowledge management. The use is primarily in the areas of website, customer portal and the company’s internal search for support staff. “With an in-house search engine, customers and staff in the service and support departments have all the necessary information at their fingertips as quickly as possible and, above all, in the most up-to-date version. This drastically reduces the training time of new employees. Here, too, everyone involved benefits – higher employee satisfaction and cost savings through improved efficiency in customer service,” Wendl reports from practice. “The uncomplicated, decentralized use is of course also an advantage. Whether on the road with customers, a branch in another region or from the home office – the relevant data is available at the touch of a button. In our enterprise search software searchIT, we have integrated an extended PDF preview for documents of all kinds, which further simplifies this decentralized use. This means that documents can also be viewed on mobile devices when used on site, for which no app is otherwise available.”

Artificial intelligence in vogue

Artificial intelligence has been and continues to be a particularly hyped topic in recent years when it comes to information technology. AI algorithms and machine learning have also brought a wealth of improved functions to Enterprise Search Solutions. Automation in the categorization of documents and documents, semantic searches, intelligent filters – to name just a few examples – and even the automated analysis of sentiments, so-called sentiment analyses, have led to a real relief in routine tasks for enterprise search engines from simple full-text searches in documents. “AI in enterprise search applications brings companies real added value today,” explains Wendl. “The AI-based search engines bring a significant gain in working time, which can be used for higher-quality activities. The improved efficiency also saves money – a fact that is not insignificant in difficult years like 2020, but certainly also in 2021.”

Topic Data Protection

Enterprise search and data protection – do they go together? “Yes, yes! The company’s internal search engines not only meet high security standards – but also in terms of data protection,” says Wendl. “We have equipped the company’s internal search engine searchIT, which we developed, with a GDPR plugin that offers support for data management and the obligation to provide information. This is intended to significantly reduce the working time for processing data protection information, deletion and correction requests, which has increased considerably over the years. At the same time, the cross-source search in the mountains of data, automated documentation and history function, as well as a controlled 4-eyes deletion release brings additional security here.”

Enterprise search solutions have gained enormously in importance in recent years, especially in the pandemic year 2020. Wendl predicts that this trend will continue and even intensify in 2021. “2021 will lead to a real boost in enterprise search applications,” Wendl is convinced.