Companies are threatened by an immense loss of knowledge - and consequently a dramatic loss of competitiveness. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, by 2036 almost 13 million workers will have statutory retirement age. This corresponds to just under one third of the workforce available on the labor market at the time of the survey. Companies therefore need to think in good time about how they can retain the extensive knowledge of soon-to-be retirees and pass it on to their successors.
"The transfer of knowledge to future generations is of strategic importance to companies and requires targeted measures," explains Franz Kögl, CEO at IntraFind. "Most companies are aware of this. For example, they ensure that future retirees personally pass on their knowledge to their successors in training sessions or document it for them in knowledge management systems. But enterprise search systems also play a key role, because they allow new employees to retrieve recorded knowledge efficiently and reliably at any time.”
Modern enterprise search systems are able to connect all conceivable data sources with connectors, be it internal file systems, company portals, wikis, e-mail systems or cloud platforms, and search them across the board with a central dashboard. Using advanced text analytics and artificial intelligence methods, including large language models (AI), they understand data, can identify relationships in large volumes of data, and intelligently link data. This enables employees in the company to quickly and comprehensively tap into existing information on a specific topic.
"With Enterprise Search, users can find not only information that is stored in a structured way in knowledge management systems, but also presentations or meeting notes, as well as documents that are lying around on servers somewhere and that no one has thought to include in documentation," explains Kögl. "In this way, companies ensure that employees can also find unstructured information and that nothing important gets lost in the abundance of data."
Junior employees benefit from Enterprise Search in many ways in their daily work. For example, they can find information on previous projects and reuse it for their projects. Or they use presentations from former sales colleagues as templates when working on their own presentations for similar sales cases. In service management, they can quickly solve a customers' problem, even if they don't have the same depth of knowledge of the installed equipment like their predecessors, because they are guided directly to the required, appropriate information in the service documents and relevant content can be retrieved in a networked manner.
"What experienced employees often simply had in their heads after many years on the job, young junior staff first have to find out through research," says Kögl. "Enterprise Search ensures that these searches are as fast and efficient as possible. In doing so, they help companies better compensate for the departure of baby boomers, thereby being more competitive and saving themselves a lot of money and time."
