(6) Issue – Delays experienced when searching information

Posted by on January 30, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized

A lot of companies have a hard time finding information from meetings from as an example 4 weeks ago. A big majority of that information is kept in stakeholders email inboxes or someone’s spread sheet.

A company that employs around 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.

If you think that’s bad? A survey this month of 1,000 middle managers found that more than half of the information they find during searches is useless.

There seem to be no shortage of enterprise search applications that help companies find information hidden within their appropriate networks. So why are searches ineffective?

Most enterprises are not using the most up-to-date search applications properly. Not only that, enterprises aren’t using the applications they have as effectively as they should.

SharePoint Technology can enable organizations to overcome these search constraints as it relates to meetings.

Companies spend lots and lots of money on architecting portal systems, intranets, dashboards and databases and everything else. Search, typically, for internal applications, companies don’t spend a lot of time on it. SharePoint has a lot of built in search capabilities and company’s don’t need to spend a lot of time architecting search.

Research has shown that Ninety percent of the documents that are created have no useful metadata. Until we get more of that metadata it is going to be an uphill struggle to get better results out of these very capable search technologies one would argue. SharePoint gives you the ability to easily apply the metadata and get the search results that you need. SharePoint can do more than just pick out the main words and index them. SharePoint can look at parts of the document, the document title and headings and work out what the document is about, and use that in the future to help you retrieve information that is of a similar nature.

Research has found that information workers waste 3.5 hours each week on searches that don’t turn up the right information. Assuming an average salary of $60,000, including benefits – a figure based on 2004 Bureau of Labor Statistics data – the cost of ineffective search is $5,251 per worker per year. For 1,000 workers, the cost is $5.25 million.

Utilize SharePoint to locate your required meeting related documents can save your company time and money.