Laura Willemse 
Organizational knowledge is sitting across dozens of tools, making it difficult to even know where to find content – as modern companies have anywhere from 90 to 200 SaaS tools on average. Welcome to real-life Acme Corp! Here’s access to dozens of tools and dozens of colleagues. This of course reduces productivity and can create a negative employee experience.
Of course, a new employee will get to know their close colleagues and their managers really well as they interact with them almost daily. Similarly, they will understand the ins and outs of the tools they work in on a daily basis: a UI/UX designer might be in Figma all day while an engineer might be in GitHub, and both will become independent to find information to get through their daily workflows. However, the frustration rises when an employee is looking for knowledge across orgs: an engineer is looking for a design, an HR person is looking for a branded presentation template, a support person is looking for holiday guidelines or product release notes. In a previous post, we went in-depth on the dizzying search modern workers face daily, now we’re sharing our unique and nuanced approach to help workers find more and seek less.
Find information quickly – no matter what tool it is in.
How can organizations help people search the blackhole of content and data?
We have to start with one approach that used to work but fails in today’s environment: attempting to put all organizational information into one application. The problem is that modern workflows require different applications for different teams and information wants to be free. While consolidating relevant information is a noble goal, it is nearly impossible to execute with a modern team, especially one that is hybrid, remote, or distributed.
If that’s not the solution and content wants to be free, then what?
Start by thinking about the kinds of information employees constantly look for.
- People information: Who does what? Who is working with whom? What department is that person in? Who is the product lead or lead engineer? And so on.
- Status: Where do various projects stand? How’s the latest product release? Where does a prospective customer stand?
- Updates and News: Is there a company-wide announcement that needs to be read or addressed? Is the latest notification in Slack, email, sales enablement tools, engineering tools, other chat apps, or somewhere else?
Our solution: three layers to Cleary’s search:
- Solve for the first search problem – employees staring at a blank browser tab and not knowing what app to go into to search for something. The brand guidelines – where could that be? With our Cleary Chrome extension, someone can simply search for content in the browser and it will forward to the application where the marketing team may have put this information into.
- Direct integrations with tools to help find information in one place. With direct search integrations with tools like Google Drive and Confluence someone can find information across apps right in the Cleary search browser.
- Comb through native content. Cleary products can host a plethora of key company information within profiles, News, Pages, All-Hands, Q&As, and more.
How do we do this seamlessly?
No more toggling. Go/links easily connect multiple apps into the search function. Here’s an example, someone on the sales team can create “go/contract” for a contract template. It will pop up by typing “go/contacts” into a Chrome browser with an added extension, no matter the app it is stored in.
Next, connecting sources of truth stored inside various softwares by integrating tools – like HRIS, wikis, and more. Employees will no longer have to switch between apps searching “contact” to find it or be forced to add to notification noise by asking someone. Cleary will do the searching through the different integrated apps and bring up relevant content in a results page.
As for native Cleary content, where company-wide and department specific information can live, the “Search for anything” bar scans through both native content and integrated tools to create a categorized results page.