An IDC study reported that on an average knowledge workers spent about 30% of their time searching for information. While one cannot do away with this time altogether, there are a few steps one can take to significantly reduce this.
Enterprise search must understand the relationship of the document with the user and the relationship of the document creator and the user and rank documents accordingly.
Sometimes, intelligent tools can share summary information to relevant users using advanced social techniques. This will help keep teams aware and up to date with the high level state of stuff. This can be done using personalized emails or news streams.
Eventually, one needs to browse a set of documents to reach the right information one needs. Automatic summarization of documents can be of great help here.