Somewhere on your network is a document you wrote last year. You remember it clearly, even the filename—something like final-final-v3.docx. But when you inevitably need it, it’s gone. You search. You scroll. You give up and rewrite it. Congratulations: you’ve just rediscovered your own work.
Across knowledge-driven organizations—law firms, consultancies, and other professional services—knowledge workers spend countless hours hunting for information that already exists. The loss isn’t only in hours. It’s also in trust. People lose trust in systems, organizational processes, and in the idea that knowledge should be a shared resource.
In our first article in this series, The End of the Knowledge Silo, we explored what a unified knowledge center looks like. This next step in the Presto in Practice series examines how moving from searching to finding transforms everything.
The Cost of Knowing Less Than You Know
When information is scattered across systems, drives, and archives, searching becomes part of everyone’s job description. Every unproductive search slows decisions, duplicates work, and erodes confidence. Over time, this inefficiency becomes invisible; it’s simply “how we work.”
The statistics around KM are clear. Recent studies suggest organizations still lose close to a tenth of their working week to inefficient search and knowledge retrieval. Even more alarming, 47% of professionals spend between one and five hours each day searching for specific information. That’s not just unproductive time, it’s a lot of wasted billable hours.
Legacy systems compound the situation. At the Sudbury Archives, an outdated database with limited browser compatibility frustrated staff and users. The University of Windsor’s Law Library team faced the same problem—finding the origins of a single policy meant opening PDFs and using “find” manually, page by page. Even after creating an Excel index, information retrieval remained painful.
All the information might be there, but the time spent searching for it is gone for good.
The Shift: From Searching to Finding
Presto prevents waste and removes friction so users can spend less time looking and more time using what they find. This is a deliberate design philosophy that recognizes how people actually look for information.
With Presto, a single search reaches across your firm’s knowledge—documents, proprietary expertise, data, archives, and feeds—and brings back what matters, not just what matches a keyword. You can narrow results by topic, browse collections, or set up alerts, so new material finds you.
This is not just about speed; it’s about confidence. When users trust they will find what they need, knowledge sharing becomes habitual, not optional.
How Presto Transformed Clients’ Search Experience
Real examples tell the story best.
When the Crawfordsville District Public Library introduced Presto, user behavior changed overnight. Visitors began “doing their homework” online, discovering materials they never knew existed. One patron even found the ledger containing her great-grandmother’s naturalization record—an emotional moment that turned curiosity into connection and showed how digital discovery can reignite interest in physical collections.
At the University of Windsor Paul Martin Law Library, digitization and metadata tagging transformed a painful manual search into instant discovery. Prior to Presto, when the Law School celebrated its 50-year anniversary, staff had to go through everything manually, page by page. Now, those same materials are digitized, tagged, and easy to search. Preparing for the 60-year anniversary project, once a marathon task, will be easier.
Meanwhile, several municipal records offices have successfully configured Presto for a very different audience: users not trained in search logic at all. By keeping the interface visual and intuitive, and building in preconfigured “canned searches” for common queries, these organizations ensure that even novice researchers can find what they need quickly and confidently.
These examples show more than technical improvement; they represent cultural change. When knowledge and information professionals can manage and configure their system directly, refining metadata, updating layouts, and tailoring discovery pathways, findability returns. Presto evolves with its users, keeping knowledge active and accessible.
Turning Discovery into Productivity
The moment you move from searching to finding, everything changes. Productivity rises and projects accelerate. Individuals feel reassured and open to sharing. The organization becomes responsive rather than reactive. Specialized knowledge stops gathering dust and starts generating value again.
The real hidden cost of not knowing what you already know isn’t the hours lost—it’s the opportunities missed.
Next in our Presto in Practice series, Metadata with Meaning explores why discovery depends on structure, and how meaningful metadata makes finding effortless.
Ready to discover how Presto turns searching into finding—and knowledge into action? Book your demo today.
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