Increase Competitiveness With Intelligent Search
The success of a company depends on its ability to fully leverage its own information, knowledge and expertise. At the same time, the amount of information a company stores is doubled every year. Knowledge workers are forced to spend more and more time trying to extract useful information. In addition, several studies have shown that knowledge workers spend more than twice as much time recreating already existing content as they spend on creating brand new content. Last but not least, the time spent on maintaining structures for storing incoming unstructured information (e.g. mail and documents) is increasing rapidly.
Traditional approaches such as implementing a company-specific taxonomy that the users need to use when storing information or introducing enterprise search solutions is not enough. In the ever-accelerating competitive race, knowledge workers need much more to be able to fully capitalize on the company's intellectual assets.
Introducing Findabilty
One solution to the challenge of providing contextually relevant knowledge to the co-workers is to introduce a findability solution, based on intelligent search.
A findability solution ensures that the information the knowledge worker is presented with is contextually relevant, i.e. it is tailored for the user's role in the organization and it meets the user's intent when he first posed the question.
A findability solution is built by using an enterprise search solution with intelligent search technology capabilities in combination with business knowledge of the specific business domain.
What kind of characteristic is required of the search technology used? The growth of unstructured data volumes and the need for just-in-time delivery of information requires advanced text analytic capabilities. The traditional keyword-only data-mining model for classification can be flawed and time-consuming for true business decision-making. For any company or organization that requires insights found in unstructured data to perform different actions—such as, for example, customer service—it is critical to use deep, automatic analytics to parse, process and classify text. Only the ability to understand the true meaning and relationships between people, places, things and issues provides accurate enough output on which companies can take appropriate action.
Implementing Findability
How do you implement a true findability solution and what technology do you need? First of all, well-enriched information is the basis for a findability solution. By use of advanced text analytics one can gain understanding of the content, thus being able to enrich and enhance the information, i.e performing intelligent tagging of the information. Unstructured information is automatically tagged and relationally organized according to company-specific taxonomies.
The text analysis can be used when storing the information or when building the search index. The intelligent tags added by the text analytics modules are used in the search result set as facets/navigators in order to refine the results. The tags are also used for enhancing the relevance and for finding related information.
Where does one find the text analytics modules and which enterprise search platforms should one integrate them with? There are several commercial text analytics platforms on the market, but there are also well functioning open source alternatives, such as the GATE framework developed at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
The different text analytics platforms are applicable to many of the established enterprise search platforms.
What is needed in a findability solution? First of all a flexible enterprise search platform, which serves as a common extraction and access layer for both structured and unstructured information in different data repositories throughout the company. The search platform needs to be interoperable, so that a text analytics module can be plugged in. Furthermore the platform needs to have a security access module as well as search analytics capabilities. Once the tools are there, the findability work looking at business and organizational requirements can start. The result will be a findability solution in which intelligent search is utilized to support and leverage the business needs and goals.
What are the results and effects of a findability solution? We implemented a findability solution for a leading industrial supplier. The solution has been operational for four years and has been a success from the start. In the paradigm shift of this specific company—in which they turned from an industrial company among many to a true knowledge engineering company—the search application became a key tool for information retrieval available for all employees. The tool helped increase work efficiency and allows capitalization of the in-house corporate wisdom. Today more than 10,000 unique users per month use the application, creating more than 100,000 queries. 96% of the users find the information that they get both relevant and useful. 87% save time in their daily work because of the application.
Findwise is a vendor-independent expert with knowledge and experience from the leading enterprise search technology platforms in conjunction with advanced text analysis as well as business and organizational understanding.