Implementing an Enterprise Index

The impact of indexing your content that is accessed daily can be significant, no matter the type of company in question. Searching for information is a regular part of the office routine for a multitude of knowledge workers and a smaller but still vital task for nearly every type of role. If those attempts to find a particular piece of content take too long or fail outright, the end result will be wasted time, at a minimum. The global economy is fragile and competition is fierce, meaning such lost productivity is unacceptable. In this way indexing, which is a subtle process that operates in the background of corporate operations, can become one of the absolute key processes in any IT setup.

Evolving environments promise challenges

The lack of a comprehensive data index can derail enterprise search and retrieval efforts, causing operations to grind to a halt. Finding the right content for a given process would be easy if the enterprise was static, with the same employees operating the same applications for years on end. This is very far from the way things actually work, with offices constantly in flux. New software is always debuting, creating different silos for saved data. This information can be in a new format, and saved to a different location within the infrastructure. The employees operating these vital systems will also change periodically, with even the most appealing firms going through some staff churn. Incoming data from sources like document imaging can also make its presence felt in daily operations, further underlining the need for a reliable index. Employees want to be able to search for files based on its actual content rather than just the file names or tags attached. Scanned pages may not fall into this category, meaning the potentially massive scanned archives companies are accumulating could be just as hard to find in the digital realm as in their antiquated filing cabinets, or even more so. All of these environmental factors can conspire to make information nearly impenetrable, and they call out for the subtle touch of indexing.

A slight adjustment

Indexing and its positive effects on enterprise search operations are subtle, in a way. Adding information to an index doesn't move information out of its physical location or drastically change its format. Therefore, the change is quick and painless. Placing all content into an easy-to-search infrastructure is a vital undertaking, and it is made all the better by not tearing up whatever organization strategies are already in place. Without the disruption that comes from a full migration, companies can functionally change their content environments. ViaWorks by VirtualWorks can be the engine behind this kind of change. Using this solution to index information is the low-impact way to get results that employees will appreciate at once. Cataloging each new or revised document as it comes in and combing through the whole archive to make older content available are two of its key uses. It also makes all of this functionality available through an intuitive search interface that makes it easy for workers from any and every department to harness their information.