Many modern businesses rely on third-party tools and services as part of their work operations. This could include using CRM software for customer management, accounting software for business finances, and specialised SaaS solutions for various business purposes.
This can result in company data being spread out across multiple systems, all too often resulting in company’s having very fragmented data. This means missing out on valuable insights into your business data and makes it difficult to find what you need. Enterprise search provides the solution to this, rendering business data as easily accessible and searchable as a web search.
Unify your data sources
Many businesses want to adopt data-driven policies with good reason, but this requires having good data to begin with. Very often this data is spread across multiple sources in various different data formats and any kind of attempt at analysis requires a large amount of manual effort to extract and unite the various sources of business data.
Making this data gathering simple is crucial for businesses wishing to gain real-time insight into their business data. Many enterprise search solutions therefore make this task simple, by coming with pre-built connectors for hundreds of different data sources and formats. This simplifies an otherwise massively complicated and time-consuming data gathering process. It also does not matter what format your data is in, as enterprise search is capable of working with heterogeneous data sources.
Unlock hidden insights into your business
Keeping these data sources separate prevents real-time access and insight into your business data. Enterprise search solutions can both gather this data for you and make it readily accessible to both technical and non-technical staff. Discovering patterns and trends in data requires being able to find and use it, which is why so much effort is put into creating a clean and user-friendly search interface.
Under the hood, enterprise search leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to tweak and optimise search results. Natural language processing (NLP) is used to understand search queries as humans would describe them and helps to deliver the most accurate and relevant results for any particular search. This is because enterprise search is much more advanced than relying on simple keywords.
Enterprise search solutions offer advanced search features that use context and technologies like NLP to analyse, index and deliver search results from across large, heterogeneous data sources. Staff can use the same search interface and receive personalised results that are most relevant to them. This can include factors such as user location, native language, data access levels, role within the company, and plenty more. The highly customisable search results also fully respect all relevant data protection laws.
Optimise your business processes
Making data-driven decisions can help optimize your business processes and aid in maximising productivity. Business decisions can be made based on hard data rather than educated guesses and rough approximations. This can be particularly powerful for businesses with very large historical data sets, as they open up ample opportunity to analyse and discover patterns.
Real-time data delivery provides up-to-date information that can be used to massively speed up data analytics and provide more timely information to staff. This enables companies to be more nimble and agile with their business processes. Data-driven links can be made between staff performance and sales, budgeting and forecasting can use higher-quality data for greater accuracy, relationships and inefficiencies can be identified between different business components, and plenty more.
Cut down on time and effort
Manually gathering and curating data for data analysis is a very expensive and time-consuming process. Finding hidden relationships between different, seemingly disconnected data sources can be very tricky to spot sometimes, even for data scientists. Without having this information available to run analysis on, knowing what is useful and what is not is almost impossible to identify ahead of time.
It is for this reason that enterprise search can often lead to surprising discoveries and insights for many businesses. Most businesses simply don’t know what they don’t know – industry research suggests as much as 60%-73% of all data gathered by businesses goes unanalysed. The cost of time and effort to analyse gathered data is high, so many businesses simply do not do so.
Enterprise search solutions make it much simpler to gather, index, analyse and present company data in a format that is easy to search and access. Having all this information available and putting it to good use can help provide a competitive edge to companies over competitors who likely are not putting their business data to use.
Enterprise search solutions can help businesses gain valuable deeper insights into their business data and processes by making more data available and easily accessible. A user-friendly search UI similar to those used by web search engines makes searching for company data simple, while powerful machine learning and NLP processes take search queries and run them against hundreds to thousands of heterogeneous files to find the most relevant results for whatever is being searched.
