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Workplace Search

# Why Government Departments Are Replacing Their Intranet Search — and What They're Moving To

SC

Siobhan Clarke

Government Practice Lead, Keyspider

March 2025

12 min read

Ask any caseworker, policy officer, or frontline public servant how they find information at work, and you will rarely hear 'I search the intranet'. You will hear 'I ask my colleague', 'I check an old email', 'I have a folder I keep myself', or 'I just call the policy team'. The intranet search exists. Nobody uses it. This is not an attitude problem. It is a design problem.

In government departments across Australia, the UK, Canada, and the United States, the same pattern repeats: a SharePoint intranet that was stood up eight years ago, search that was never configured properly, an index that includes fifteen-year-old documents alongside current ones, and no mechanism to distinguish between the two. The result is a workforce that has given up on the official channel and built shadow workarounds — personal document folders, WhatsApp groups for policy questions, and the institutional memory of whoever has been in the team longest. Keyspider Workplace Search is designed specifically to close this gap.

This is not a minor inefficiency. For a department of 3,000 staff, each losing an average of 45 minutes per day to information search — a conservative estimate from multiple workforce studies — the annual cost in lost productivity is in the millions. For caseworkers whose decisions affect the lives of vulnerable citizens, the cost of acting on outdated or incorrect information is harder to quantify but far more significant.

## Why SharePoint Search Is Not the Answer

SharePoint is the dominant intranet platform across government globally, and SharePoint search is the most commonly cited reason why government staff don't trust intranet search. This is worth examining in detail, because the failure modes of SharePoint search are instructive about what good workplace search actually requires.

### The relevance ranking problem

SharePoint's out-of-the-box search uses a keyword-based ranking algorithm that has not changed substantially in over a decade. It does not understand semantic relationships between terms. It ranks results by keyword frequency and recency without any understanding of which documents are authoritative, current, or relevant to the specific user's context.

For a policy department where the same topic has been addressed in successive versions of the same document over five years, SharePoint search typically returns all five versions with approximately equal ranking — and no indication of which is current. The caseworker opens the most recent-looking document. Sometimes it is the right one. Sometimes it is not.

### The permissions complexity problem

SharePoint permissions are powerful but complex to manage. In practice, most government SharePoint implementations have accumulated permission inconsistencies over years of organic growth — sites created by different teams, inherited permissions that no longer reflect actual access requirements, and a document management governance process that was thorough in year one and progressively neglected thereafter.

The result: staff either see too much (documents from other business units that create confusion about which policy applies to their context) or too little (being denied access to documents they legitimately need, with no clear process for requesting access). Both outcomes erode trust in search.

### The siloed scope problem

SharePoint search searches SharePoint. It does not search the HR system. It does not search ServiceNow. It does not search the case management platform, the document management system, the finance system, or the team's shared email inbox. For a caseworker who needs to cross-reference a client's housing history, their benefit payment records, and the relevant policy document in a single workflow, four separate system logins and four separate searches are the current reality.

> We counted eleven different systems our frontline housing officers needed to access daily. Each had its own login, its own search, and its own terminology for the same concepts. When we replaced that with a single search interface, the change in how officers described their working day was immediate.

> — Director of Digital Services, local council (UK)

## What Modern Workplace Search Looks Like

Modern AI-powered workplace search addresses the three core failures of legacy intranet search: relevance, permissions, and scope.

### Semantic relevance across all your systems

A modern workplace search platform uses vector embeddings — the same technology that powers AI search on consumer products — to understand the meaning of queries and match them to relevant content regardless of terminology differences. A caseworker searching 'domestic violence rental exemption' finds the relevant policy section even if the policy document uses the term 'family violence tenancy exception'.

Crucially, semantic ranking understands document authority and currency in ways that keyword search does not. A properly configured platform can weight current policy documents above superseded versions, verified guidance above draft documents, and official sources above informal team notes.

### Permission inheritance from source systems

The only sustainable permissions model for workplace search in government is one that inherits and enforces permissions from the source systems — Active Directory groups, SharePoint site-level permissions, ServiceNow access roles — rather than attempting to replicate or override them.

This means the search index sees the same documents a given user can access in the source system. Nothing more. When a user's permissions change in the HR system, the change is reflected in search results immediately — no sync lag, no manual update. For departments with strict information barriers — justice, child protection, intelligence functions — this is not a preference. It is a compliance requirement.

### Cross-system indexing with one search bar

The transformative capability of modern workplace search is the ability to index across all an organisation's systems simultaneously — SharePoint, ServiceNow, SAP, the HRIS, the document management system, the case management platform — and expose them through a single search interface.

A caseworker searching for information about a client no longer needs to know which system holds which information. They type a natural language query — 'eligibility review process for rental supplement after income change' — and see relevant results from policy documents in SharePoint, procedure notes in ServiceNow, and reference forms in the document management system, all in a single ranked list, with the most relevant at the top.

AI-generated answers for internal search

Modern workplace search goes beyond returning a list of relevant documents. An AI answer layer synthesises the most relevant passages from retrieved documents into a direct answer — with citations — so caseworkers get the policy summary they need without reading the full document. This is not about shortcutting due diligence on complex cases; it is about eliminating the friction of finding the right section in a 150-page policy manual for the routine queries that make up the majority of the working day.

## The Organisational Transformation: Beyond Technology

Departments that have deployed modern workplace search consistently report that the technology change reveals — and in some cases forces resolution of — underlying organisational information management issues that predate the search deployment by years.

### Document versioning and currency

When search works well, the problem of outdated documents being found as easily as current ones becomes visible in a way it wasn't before. Search analytics showing staff regularly accessing superseded policy versions create a clear business case for implementing proper document lifecycle management — something departments have known they needed but never had the forcing function to prioritise.

### Knowledge capture from retiring staff

The most valuable knowledge in most government departments exists in the heads of 15-year veterans who carry institutional memory that was never documented. Workplace search analytics that show staff searching for information that returns no results represent the specific gaps where knowledge has never been codified. This creates a structured programme for knowledge capture before it walks out the door with a retiring colleague.

### Reducing dependence on informal networks

The informal WhatsApp group for policy questions, the unofficial Word document that the team maintains in a personal drive, the 'just ask Sarah — she knows everything' dynamic: these are symptoms of a search failure, not solutions to it. They also represent significant equity and governance risks. When Sarah leaves, that knowledge leaves. When the unofficial policy interpretation in the WhatsApp group diverges from current guidance, caseworkers make decisions based on outdated information without realising it.

Modern workplace search does not eliminate the need for experienced colleagues. But it eliminates the necessity of informal workarounds for routine information retrieval — and in doing so, makes the formal information architecture worth maintaining.

45 min

Average time government staff spend searching for information daily (McKinsey)

60%

Of government information requests resolved without escalation with AI workplace search

3×

Faster onboarding for new caseworkers with unified workplace search

30%

Reduction in HR and policy ticket volume in first 90 days

## Implementation: What to Expect in a Government Context

### Timeline

A well-scoped workplace search deployment in a government context — connecting SharePoint, ServiceNow, and one or two additional systems — can realistically go from contract signature to live deployment for a pilot team in under two weeks. Full department-wide rollout is typically four to eight weeks, depending on the number of systems, permissions complexity, and change management requirements.

This is significantly faster than the traditional procurement and implementation cycle for enterprise software in government. SLED organisations accustomed to 12-month implementation projects should treat a two-week proof of concept as table stakes — if a vendor cannot demonstrate live search on your actual content in two weeks, question their implementation approach.

### Procurement considerations

Workplace search for government typically requires procurement through an approved panel or standing offer arrangement. In Australia, this includes the Digital Marketplace and state-specific ICT procurement frameworks. In the UK, G-Cloud and the Crown Commercial Service technology frameworks are the primary channels. In the US, GSA Schedule and SEWP provide compliant procurement paths for federal and state agencies.

SLED organisations should ensure that data sovereignty requirements are addressed in the statement of work — specifically, that all indexed content remains within the relevant jurisdiction and that query logs are not used for vendor model training.

### Change management

The technology component of a workplace search deployment is the straightforward part. The change management component — getting staff to use the new tool, trust the results, and abandon the shadow workarounds they have been using for years — requires deliberate effort.

The most effective change management approach is not training sessions or email campaigns. It is demonstrating, in front of specific teams with specific queries, that the new search returns better results than what they have been using. A caseworker who types their most frustrating daily query and sees the right answer return immediately is converted in that moment.

## The Business Case in Numbers

For CFOs and budget committees, the business case for workplace search investment in government rests on three measurable outcomes:

- Productivity recovery: At 45 minutes per staff member per day, a department of 1,000 staff is losing 750 staff-hours daily to inefficient information search. Even a 50% improvement — conservative in deployments with modern AI search — represents 375 hours recovered daily, or approximately 2 FTE equivalents per 100 staff.
- Reduced escalation cost: IT, HR, and policy helpdesk tickets that exist because staff cannot find information self-service represent a substantial cost. Departments consistently report 20–40% reductions in these ticket categories in the first quarter after deployment.
- Compliance and risk reduction: The cost of a policy decision made on outdated information — particularly in child protection, housing, or justice contexts — is difficult to quantify but real. Ensuring frontline staff consistently access current policy is a risk management investment as much as a productivity one.

## Looking Forward: Workplace Search as Infrastructure

The most forward-looking government digital leaders are not treating workplace search as a stand-alone tool. They are treating it as the foundational layer for a broader AI capability: a well-maintained, semantically rich index of the organisation's knowledge that can power not just search and chat, but future applications — automated policy drafting assistance, briefing note generation, casework decision support — that are currently in pilot or roadmap stages.

The investment in getting your knowledge base properly indexed, maintained, and permission-governed today is not just about improving search results this year. It is about building the information infrastructure that future AI capabilities in your organisation will depend on.

Related reading

Keyspider Workplace Search — product overview How unified workplace search works across SharePoint, ServiceNow, SAP, and 40+ systems.
AI Search for Government & Public Sector Full picture of how SLED organisations are deploying AI search and chat.
How to Stop Your AI Chatbot from Making Things Up Governance architecture for responsible AI deployment in government.
Your Search Analytics Are Your Best Content Strategy Tool Use search data to identify knowledge gaps before they create casework risk.
All integrations — 40+ connectors SharePoint, ServiceNow, SAP, Workday and more.

Where to start

The single most impactful first step for most government departments is a two-week proof of concept connecting their SharePoint intranet and one secondary system — typically their ITSM or case management tool — to a modern AI search platform. The POC should be evaluated not just on search quality, but on: permission inheritance accuracy, search analytics capabilities, and the deployment team's understanding of your governance requirements.

### Ready to see it in action?

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