There is a persistent myth along the lines of “if we just pay enough money for a fancy enough search engine then all the stuff that our staff know will become available to us and we will make better decisions and become incredibly efficient and successful”
Bollocks, all you usually end up with, if you’re lucky, is someone else’s badly written out of date document.
Much better to take the time and effort it takes to build lively and engaging online conversations amongst staff so that what people know surfaces in a timely and contextual manner.
Don’t worry if you think the question has been asked before, ask it again. The answer will probably have changed over time and someone else who is prompted by the question will think hard about the subject again and probably come up with something new. At the very least someone in the network will realise that your question is answered by one of those badly written out of date documents and point you to it with a URL.
Oh and don’t be suckered into spending the money you would have spent on a search engine on a “enterprise social media platform” instead. Same mugs game. The reason staff don’t take part in lively online work conversations isn’t because of the tools you have, or haven’t, given them, it goes way deeper than that and is much harder to sort.
The Obvious? 
Euan, reminds me of an encounter with an HR manager at a KM Conference when KM was fashionable in the 1990s. KM , I was told, was all about scraping all the information out of employees heads and putting it in a database for the benefit of the company.
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I always thought that “knowledge extraction “ sounded about as attractive as a visit to the dentist.
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