Data Creation and Adding Value
The modern company is in the business of data creation, weather that data comes from invoices, product design and ideas or emails. If a company uses a fixed amount of money to create each data point in the system, it makes sense that an Enterprise Search return would add value to those data points. I’ll give you an example: You have an engineer that gets a call from a customer that needs a replacement of a product that you sold to him 30 years ago. The original engineer is long gone and the new engineer has never heard of the part. He gets a little information from the customer on what that part is and does and enters it into the Enterprise Search bar. He gets a return with five possibilities and finds the original scanned drawing in under a minute.
Now the question that firms have to ask themselves is, how much does it cost to have an Enterprise Search tool (fixed cost)? How much does it cost to manage the tool (variable cost)? How much are they saving by non-duplication of work? Its obvious from a company standpoint that the engineer that was on the phone with the client costs money to employ and that the work that he would have done to re-do a part that was “lost” would have cost the company money, but that didn’t happen. The fixed cost that an engineer charged 30 years ago to produce the drawings for the part that was needed, is still adding value to the company today! That is the effect of Enterprise Search systems.
Companies just need to figure out how much to invest in search tools and the management that must go with it to add value to their company. That is the big money question.
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