Search and the Strategic Value to the Enterprise
It's impossible to know how much content on your intranet or corporate Web site people need to find but can't. What is known is the amount of critical information generated across an enterprise continues to multiply like never before. According to the Delphi Group, the average knowledge worker now spends an astonishing 25% of his or her day looking for information. But how much of that information is embedded in documents that have been forgotten, mislabeled or misplaced? How much is locked in incompatible repositories, on dedicated servers or individual desktops—and as a result is unavailable to employees, partners or customers, because it takes too much work to find it?
In many business environments, people struggle to find the content they need with the tools they already have in place. But consider human nature: If people are frustrated because they can't get the information they need, they simply quit looking. Or if they find what they're looking for too late, they may never again turn to that search method. Multiply that inaction by the number of people in an enterprise and the results can be devastating—in terms of lost productivity, missed opportunities, faulty decisions and duplicated effort. It's remarkable how much value can be lost from a single Web page, spreadsheet or document that's not available to the people who need it the most.
On the IT side, an enterprise search solution that isn't delivering the information people need can be equally damaging. Organizations today have little tolerance for any integration, training or maintenance challenges that would unnecessarily burden their limited IT resources. So IT managers should be rightfully cautious regarding the universal claim of great ROI that many enterprise search solution companies make. Today, three out of four Internet users use Google.com to find what they need on the Web. When consumers are confident with the way a technology works, they tend to use it, rely on it and tell others about it. If they aren't comfortable, they don't use it. Even though enterprise users are often unable to choose their tools, this same behavior holds true for them. High adoption rates drive ROI—and IT managers can attest to poor ROI when corporate users are slow to adopt unpopular or ineffective tools.
ROI—People Finding Answers
In today's cost-sensitive environment, no enterprise can afford to waste resources or miss opportunities. So removing the barriers and frustration that keep people from the content they need is vital. Helping everyone in an enterprise to quickly and efficiently find the relevant information they need benefits your organization internally in countless ways: improved decision-making, less duplication of work, increased revenues and improved customer satisfaction.
Externally, the positives are just as impressive when people are connected to the content they need. Sales and revenues increase. Customer support costs decrease as their satisfaction grows. And website visitors increase both the number of page views and session length at a site. It all makes a compelling case for an enterprise search solution that is widely accepted because of the quality results it delivers. Following are some real-world examples of companies who are using Google search tools to achieve ROI in their organizations:
NEXTEL
Overview: A Fortune 200 company, Nextel Communications is a leading provider of wireless communications services. Nextel has built the largest all-digital wireless network in the country. Nextel and Nextel Partners, Inc. currently serve 295 of the top 300 U.S. markets, where approximately 252 million people live or work.
The Challenge: With thousands of customers calling daily for help with phone setup, account changes, service changes, technical issues, order status, upgrades and accessory sales, Nextel needed to provide its customer support staff with a fast way to search its extensive intranet knowledgebase for the right document at the right time. Its overwhelming need was for a search solution that could improve customer service by providing reps with the right information in real time to help resolve issues and get customers up and running. "The calls put us on the front lines," says Peter Taddeo, senior vice president of marketing for Nextel. "It's paramount to have excellent customer service."
Recognizing the need for a different approach, Nextel began the search for tools to help reps find answers efficiently, reduce call times and provide the best possible customer service.
The Solution: Nextel chose the Google Search Appliance to install on the Telesales and Web Sales intranet, which houses thousands of HTML, PDF and ASP documents on a single server. It is dedicated to customer service search help.
End Results: The Nextel team is able to post more documents to the intranet quickly and with confidence, knowing that they will be located efficiently using Google search technology. In addition, Taddeo reports that more calls are resolved on first contact—an important measure of positive customer experience and productivity.
DISCOVERY
Overview: Discovery Communications, Inc. (DCI) is a leading media and entertainment company. With operations in 152 countries with 180 million total subscribers, DCI's 33 networks of distinctive programming represent 14 entertainment brands, including TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health Channel, Discovery Kids, and a family of digital channels. Other DCI properties include Discovery.com and 165 Discovery Channel retail stores. DCI also distributes BBC America in the United States.
The Challenge: Discovery hosts sites for each of its 14 channels, featuring schedules and information for each series and program. These information-packed sites are comprised of some 60,000 files, which garner 120,000 search queries a day.
For the Discovery Web team, the previous search solution required extensive resources to maintain, provided ineffective search results and was limiting Web page views by site visitors. Even adding new content to the site in order to provide visitors with the freshest information was difficult and time-consuming.
A change was clearly needed in order to simplify search maintenance, provide more useful search results, and gain better control of the Discovery site's content.
The Solution: "The Google Search Appliance is easier to set up than your home PC," says IT department representative Patrick Gardella. And, adds Carl Lewin, Web developer, "Deployment was straightforward—there was nothing to it." He adds that the appliance easily incorporates three data libraries (collections) into one, so that a single search returns an integrated set of relevant results.
Discovery also uses Google's keymatch feature to suggest "Editor's Picks," search results reflecting the most popular search queries. And the spell-check feature is very useful in recommending the correct spelling and appropriate links to relevant information.
Perhaps best of all, says Patrick Gardella, "the Google Search Appliance requires very little maintenance. It's so easy to use and manage, we sometimes can't believe it." End Results: Not only have page views increased, the number of daily searches has grown 70% based on the value of searching with Google. "More people are finding information they need, which means they stay longer to read, search further and shop," says Mark Irwin, VP of Operations. "Users are familiar with how to use Google," says Patrick Gardella. Adding the Google logo to the bottom of our pages "gives people more confidence in search results," adds Carl Lewin.
NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
Overview: Founded in 1959 with headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, National Semiconductor Corporation produces chips that power mobile and cordless phones, wired and wireless local area networks, TV set-top boxes, DVD players and a host of other electronic devices that connect people to information.
In the complex and rapidly changing chip design and production business, efficient exchange of information between employees is critical to success.
The Challenge: The National Semiconductor intranet is distributed over more than 200 servers globally and contains more than 500,000 documents, including HTML, Microsoft Office and PDF documents.
And as Bill Corley, National Semiconductor's manager of intranet technology explains, "We needed a solution that could scale with the growth of information inside National, while at the same time helping employees quickly find the information they need."
The Solution: National Semiconductor and Corley recognized Google's open-standards approach to search and chose the Google Search Appliance. "When we look at where we're going with other applications and Web services in general, clearly that's a benefit. "Google delivered the Google Search Appliance in the morning, and we had it crawling and indexing on our network that afternoon. It's amazing how simple it was to install," says Corley. "What's more, the Google Search Appliance is easy to administer and saves time by streamlining the process of finding and organizing all our intranet data. In fact, with Google, we doubled the number of documents our employees can search."
End Result: "We now perform eight to 10 times more searches each day," adds Corley. "Our employees are inspired to use our intranet search when they hear it's powered by Google. They love Google because it helps them to be more productive."
Google's Search Solutions
Using the same technology that powers Google.com, Google offers organizations of any size, from an online storefront to a global enterprise, search solutions that meet their needs and budget.
The Google Search Appliance, for large business, and the Google Mini, for small and medium business, are plug-and-play search solutions that integrate hardware, software and support into one complete package. The Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini were designed to deliver the most relevant content possible, quickly and accurately, just like Google.com. And to achieve that goal, these unique enterprise search solutions crawl content on intranets or public facing Web sites and capture data in over 220 file types on highly distributed, heterogeneous networks. This allows administrators and end users to get a single coherent view of all of their content.
With other search solutions, document creators and administrators may have to manually weight, rank or tweak content to ensure efficient retrieval. Google's automated "come-as-you-are" approach to indexing makes far more sense. After all, data that requires a laborious makeover to be included in search results is not only going to be time-intensive, it will be costly. The Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini make deploying content as easy as finding it—a strong competitive advantage.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top Web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall Web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit Google. Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc.
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