You are invited to attend a Google Webinar!

Professional Services:

The Quest for Knowledge Sharing

Wednesday, September 19th
1:00-2:00 pm PDT

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Search: A Highly Practical Alternative

universal search simplifies the knowledge sharing challenge immensely. Instead of trying to organize all 'knowledge' hierarchically and dictate what is important centrally, search enables a distributed organization to behave normally - in a distributed manner. Knowledge will be scattered in all corners of the organizations -- and in all file systems. Trying to consolidate it has been proven extremely difficult, so why bother?

Search: Access All Relevant Systems

Search has many advantages:

  • Its what the end-users want - End-users are accustomed to using Google.com to find anything on the Internet; they would love to use the same tool to find anything on their Intranet. They simply don't want to search through five repositories or manually navigate through other systems.
  • Useful for non client-facing employees - Its not just the practice professionals that benefit from an universal search system. Sales and marketing teams would be able to access RFP's and other documents. Finance people can view retrieve financial documents with summary views. And, senior management can view company dashboards.
  • No duplicative file systems - With a good search system in place, there is no need to save files once in project repositories and then separately on a 'knowledge management' database. The search tool will find the relevant file for the right user at the right time.
  • No dedicated staff - This is because there is no 'content prepping' required -- no dedicated staff are needed to organize, filter, or prepare the information to be searchable. Further, no dedicated technical staff are required to maintain the system. Google's search systems require less than one man hour of maintenance per month.
  • Extremely Low Cost - An entry point to an universal search system can be as low as a few thousand dollars. By connecting employees with valuable information, the payback from search can be almost immediate.

With a search system in place, the end-user can search all of firm's content -- without IT worrying about integrating systems together.