Working with large volumes of documents has long since moved to a digital format. Contracts, minutes of disagreements, powers of attorney, internal regulations, correspondence, scans, or photocopies of documents—all of these exist as files. Technically, the documents “are available within the company,” but in practice, they often turn out to be “invisible” when needed.
The paradox is that most organizations have already invested in storage—network folders, local drives, and other corporate storage solutions—but investments in knowledge accessibility usually lag behind. As a result, employees pay the price in lost time, while the company faces operational risks and a decline in work quality.
Let’s examine a few typical scenarios in which businesses lose time and money
Scenario 1. “Loss of Corporate Memory”
For example, you need to draft a contract for a new counterparty, find the right wording for liability limits, or recall how a complex clause was negotiated a year ago. In theory, this is corporate memory. In practice, it’s an exhausting search through folders, personal correspondence, and colleagues’ chat histories.
The result: an employee either drafts the wording from scratch or uses a random, “roughly similar”—and often outdated—template.
Scenario 2. “The Risk of Signing the Wrong Document”
The same contract exists in dozens of copies and versions: with the initiator, in the project folder, on a network drive, in correspondence, and in the “archive.” Minor discrepancies in just a couple of lines can radically alter the parties’ obligations, but searching by file and folder names is ineffective here.
Result: The risk of signing or sending the wrong version of a document increases, and in large companies, such a mistake instantly leads to reputational and, consequently, financial damage.
Scenario 3. “Search Blind Spot”
A significant portion of the data archive consists of scans and image files: signed contracts, attachments, letters, powers of attorney, and certificates. To the system, a simple file without an OCR-processed text layer is just an “image,” and the archive itself is treated as a “closed directory.” The internal search cannot find it, and the document falls out of corporate memory.
The result: critically important information is technically stored in the system, but is effectively “dead”—until someone happens to remember its exact location.
Scenario 4. “The Conflict Between Security and Efficiency”
Many corporate departments operate under strict confidentiality requirements: M&A projects, legal disputes, personal data, compliance, trade secrets, and many other matters require the segmentation of access rights. However, standard search engines either ignore these permissions (creating a risk of data leaks) or restrict them so severely that searches fail to return even authorized results.
The result: employees waste time submitting access requests to the IT department administrator, and business processes slow down.
