Haystack EU 2023: Learnings and reflections from our team
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Director of AI Engineering
Imagine you’re an employee who just got back from a business trip and needs to submit a reimbursement request for your trip expenses. You enter keywords “expense reimbursement form” to search your company’s intranet, and the site crawler pulls up multiple versions of the form.
You scan the list and select what appears to be the most current one based on the date in the description. You download it. You open it and spend 20 minutes filling it out with your meal details, then email it to the department manager.
The next day, you get a return email admonishing you for using an outdated reimbursement request form, with a link to where the (renamed) updated version had apparently been hiding on the intranet.
Hmm. Is it Friday yet?
These types of information-retrieval snafus are to be expected when a company’s intranet is not well maintained. Intranets are simply not well-oiled machines like the Web; they often leave much to be desired in terms of how easy it is to find information, and, as a result, there’s a negative impact on employee efficiency and productivity (not to mention moods and attitudes) in the digital workplace.
First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page in terms of the nature and definition of an intranet site. Conventional wisdom says an intranet is:
Intranets were spawned along with the World Wide Web (the Internet) in the 1990s. However, they were and still are considerably different from the Internet, as well as from extranets and enterprise search systems. Some differentiators:
“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant,” said app developer and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor.
That’s not the case with most intranets. Not even close. In Kapor’s context, the average intranet might be akin to turning on an old, kinked-up garden hose and eventually getting a trickle of water. We can assume that no modern intranet will approach the Internet in information overload or usability. Especially if it hasn’t been populated with the right information in a consistent way or maintained and kept up to date.
Still, if you can look past this unfortunate fact and consider the advantages, disadvantages, and special needs of intranets in a corporate context, you’d probably agree that an intranet has some distinctly redeeming qualities.
When it comes to the well-meaning concept of corporate camaraderie, what’s not to love about an intranet?
In terms of functionality, an intranet can wear many “hats,” such as:
The most substantive reward of a well-functioning intranet is arguably saving employees’ time, which leads to higher efficiency and thereby better productivity.
Workers who rely on information to do their jobs have been found to squander significant amounts of time due to not having the right facts and figures in front of them. According to IDC, “Data professionals are spending more of their time governing, searching and preparing data than they are on extracting value.”
The cost of all of this time wasting adds up: IDC adds that companies forfeit almost $2.5 million per year because employees simply can’t get their hands on the information they critically need.
Of course, maintaining an intranet — keeping its content up to date, making sure all the links still work, keeping employees from losing interest in using it — also takes plenty of time and focused energy. And to be fair, any company considering setting up an intranet platform from scratch should be aware of a few additional facts and figures related to such an undertaking.
What are the low points and potential pitfalls of having an intranet?
We’ve touched on the most commonly cited one: employees, who are used to awe-inspiring Google search experiences and equally pleasant excursions on ecommerce sites, have super-inflated high expectations for finding information on their companies’ intranets. And by those standards, intranets can’t help but disappoint.
Intranets also operate differently than the Internet in order to meet companies’ varying internal needs and requirements. According to KMWorld, “Unlike Web search, enterprise search makes different demands on an information access platform: for better accuracy; security; more formats; more reporting tools; more language understanding; and better interaction design.”
So for a number of reasons, the right information can be difficult to track down on an intranet, either in a timely fashion or at all.
According to McKinsey and Company, “Employees spend 1.8 hours every day – 9.2 hours per week, on average – searching and gathering information.”
Intranet challenges can be a major factor in that wheel spinning. Typical complaints include:
For any or all of these reasons, employees can get disillusioned by the user experience on their company intranet, with the result being that they naturally use it less often or simply abandon it altogether.
But wait…all hope is not lost. A company can significantly increase its workplace efficiency by providing modern, AI-driven, personalized search for helping employees find what they need on the intranet.
One option is the open-source route (think Microsoft SharePoint, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch). This works perfectly for some companies, while others prefer a complete intranet search solution that can handle both operations and search management, plus conceivably require less tinkering down the road.
If a company already has an intranet, the search function may technically work but be unimpressive, for example, by providing search results that aren’t organized by relevance, or with less-relevant items clogging up the primary results page. Another suboptimal scenario: entering a search term doesn’t turn up everything that could potentially be useful to the employee.
According to the Journal of Information Science, companies that emphasize “‘systems thinking’ and bimodal approaches towards search strategy and information behavior may improve capabilities.”
In other words, when intranet search functionality comes first, significant amounts of time can be saved, and the overall way employees feel about the intranet (not to mention the company) can be wildly improved.
You may be wondering how, exactly, an intranet search engine is different from other types of search engines. That’s a good question. And it has a straightforward answer: intranet search is simply enterprise search applied in a way that’s geared toward helping employees painlessly find the internal company information they need, when they need it.
In a nutshell, an intranet with fast, relevant search can do two impressive things in a work environment:
With those two major bases covered, an intranet search engine is off to a fabulous start. Ideally, an intranet search engine also:
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably now convinced that top-notch intranet search can bring a company a ton of operational benefits, which can subsequently layer nicely on one another to fuel a positive corporate vibe.
To sum up, an excellent enterprise search tool is the backbone of a thriving corporate intranet. With an optimally searchable intranet, your company can usher in:
With a flexible search API, Algolia offers instantaneous, relevant intranet search that can translate into higher employee productivity and all that other good stuff above.
Our complete, quick-to-implement solution doesn’t require much technical expertise, and it’s fully configurable and customizable based on your company’s needs and preferences for your intranet. We also make our intranet rollouts affordable by offering tiered, pay-as-you-go pricing.
What’s your intranet waiting for? Fill in this short form and let’s get you started.
For more information: Enterprise search solutions, for customers and the workplace
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