What Is The Cost Of Poor Search For Your Organisation?
What Is The Cost Of Poor Search For Your Organisation?
In today's knowledge economy, information is the lifeblood of organizations.
And knowledge in organisations is expanding every day. Imagine your daily routine: you likely work with at least five documents, some old and some newly created.
And this is just one employee within a company with thousands of employees. The volume of knowledge is continually growing and with that is the growing knowledge management challenge. Infact, this increasing scale of knowledge has been studied and there are some stark learnings.
The concept of “Knowledge Doubling” over time was first introduced by Buckminster Fuller in 1982 in his book Critical Path. He noted that human knowledge doubled linearly until 1900. By 1945, it was doubling every 25 years. Today, knowledge in organisations doubles every 13 months.
This rapid increase in knowledge is driven by technological advancements such as the Internet of Things (IoT), vast amounts of data from diverse sources, and a collaborative culture among people. However, as knowledge doubles at such a fast pace, our ability to retain it diminishes. This overwhelming volume of information often creates more problems than it solves.
An even larger issue is that knowledge is becoming outdated or irrelevant faster than ever before. This phenomenon, known as the half-life of knowledge, refers to the time it takes for knowledge to lose half of its value. The half-life of knowledge is shrinking across many fields, including science, technology, marketing, and finance. Information that was valuable for 12 months a decade ago is now estimated to be relevant for just six months. For students in a four-year technical degree, this means that half of what they learn in their freshman year will be outdated by their junior year.
Yet, the constant influx of data has created a paradox: we have more information than ever before, but finding what we need has become increasingly difficult. This challenge is not just frustrating; it's costly.
This influx of knowledge has become an enterprise-wide challenge, burdening your employees and driving up organizational search costs. Countless productive hours are lost as employees struggle with frustration and inefficiency while searching for information. Ultimately, it’s your employees who suffer, and valuable productive hours that are wasted.
Therefore, finding information at the right time is critical. Effective search functions don’t just retrieve information; they bring you what you need when you need it. They also help users sort and sift through vast amounts of data more quickly, preventing them from being overwhelmed by tons of this information.
Why Is Enterprise Knowledge Search So Difficult In Organizations?
Despite the vast amount of information we handle daily, searching for the right information when we need it remains a common struggle for employees, highlighting a significant knowledge management challenge. The root of this problem lies in several factors:
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Scattered Knowledge:
Enterprise knowledge is often dispersed across multiple platforms. Different teams use different software—your marketing team might rely on a CRM, your accounting team on Tally, and your project teams on a PLM.
Gartner found that desk workers used nearly twice as many apps in 2023 as they did in 2019. These disconnected systems create silos, making it challenging to access information across the organization, and giving employees search fatigue.
Even attempts to centralize knowledge using tools like SharePoint-based QMS often fall short in addressing enterprise search challenges and facilitating effective knowledge management.
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Outdated Knowledge:
According to a 2019 study by Dun & Bradstreet, 19% of companies lost customers due to inaccurate information, and 15% failed to secure new contracts for the same reason. This highlights a significant knowledge management challenge, where outdated or expired knowledge can be more harmful than no knowledge at all. Effective enterprise knowledge search is crucial to prevent such issues and ensure that accurate, up-to-date information is readily available.
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Information Overload:
The sheer volume of new knowledge created daily is overwhelming. Employees constantly generate new documents and data, much of which never makes it to a common repository. This not only exacerbates the enterprise search challenge but also increases organizational search costs, further complicating information retrieval for others.
How Much Does This Enterprise Search Challenge Cost Your Company?
The difficulty in finding the right knowledge has significant repercussions for organizations. While technologies like content management systems, corporate portals, and workflow solutions aim to improve knowledge access, they often contribute to information overload. The inefficiencies of poor search capabilities are not just psychological but have tangible organizational search costs:
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Productivity Cost:
Research shows that workers spend an average of 2.5 hours per day searching for information. With an average annual salary of $80,000, this inefficiency costs a company with 1,000 employees about $25 million per year.
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Duplication
In one case, a manager at a leading aeronautics company discovered that engineers in different locations were working on the same problem—an issue with wing construction on both military aircraft and Airbus planes. This kind of duplication is common and costly; a company with 1,000 employees may waste $5 million per year due to redundant efforts.
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Employee Turnover:
According to a Nintex report, turnover rates across industries have steadily increased since 2011. While natural factors contribute to this trend, employee frustration from not finding relevant information—caused by broken corporate processes—also plays a significant role, driving employee frustration and higher attrition rates.
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Delays in Decision-Making:
Inefficient search processes lead to delays in decision-making, which can result in lost opportunities and slow market responses. Completing projects faster saves employee time and increases potential revenue, but delays often occur due to poor search capabilities and the need to recreate existing information.
The more you consider it, the more evident it becomes that something as simple as search inefficiency can cost an organization a significant amount of money.
An Era Of Efficient Enterprise Knowledge Search
The need for efficient search capabilities is more pressing than ever in today’s era of exponential knowledge growth. An effective search system can reduce costs and help organizations thrive by leveraging the knowledge they already possess.
Here’s what you need to curb the organizational search costs:
Context-Based Search:
Traditional search methods based on tags are no longer sufficient. What's needed is a technology that understands the context of your query and delivers the most relevant information. BHyve’s search capabilities do just that by analyzing your content comprehensively and presenting the most pertinent knowledge.
Retrieval:
Even when information is found, employees often spend considerable time sifting through it to understand and apply it. This is where Generative AI comes into play. BHyve’s Generative AI uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in natural language processing to deliver concise, relevant answers to search queries, saving time and effort.
Recommendations:
Often, employees don’t know exactly what to search for. In these cases, a platform that proactively suggests relevant content becomes invaluable. With BHyve, employees receive personalized content feeds based on their skills, much like social media platforms. This ensures that relevant information, including older knowledge, is always on their radar.
Conclusion: Avoid the pitfalls of enterprise search challenges—make information retrieval easier and more efficient.
The need for effective enterprise knowledge search is more crucial than ever, driving the shift towards newer, more efficient ways of managing knowledge through an enhanced search experience. It's time to move beyond traditional search methods, break down departmental silos, and address your knowledge management challenges. Discover a cost-effective and time-saving search solution with BHyve. Schedule a demo today to experience the transformative benefits of advanced search and knowledge management.