Searching for a Reason
When Information is Part of Your Core Business Processes
We all search the Internet, sometimes for fun, sometimes to purchase something, often for educational purposes. Thanks to the Web search companies (and their advertisers who pay for it), the tools that enable us to find what we need on the Internet generally work just fine. For the most part they are limited to search, and they have little need to interact with any other applications. Furthermore, when you've completed your search, you typically go off on your way, only rarely coming back later to repeat that search and see what's new. In our business lives, things are different—we're searching for a specific reason. Information is almost always tied to a business purpose, and usually behind that purpose is a business process. The things we do with information vary, based on the organizations we work for, and our role within them:
- In the pharmaceutical R&D environment, where the goal is to develop new treatments for disease, leveraging the vast amount of knowledge in your organization can mean the difference between a blockbuster drug or a dead-end. Complicating things is the fact that the process of bringing that new drug to market is extremely well-defined and strictly regulated.
- In government and intelligence, the ability to piece together seemingly unrelated bits of information is under intense scrutiny. Those clues are found in e-mails, multiple document formats and news reports that are written in virtually every major language spoken around the globe. Failure to connect them is a matter of national security.
- In a customer-support organization, service reps are bombarded with questions and complaints. Here, identifying, capturing and leveraging the expertise of individual reps will not only drive costs down dramatically, it can be the deciding factor in whether your most valued customers are satisfied with your company or whether they'll decide to find another vendor.
The key things these all have in common are:
- The critical need to find information fast, whether to beat a competitor to market, uncover suspicious activity, or satisfy a customer;
- The information that people need to find is not in one repository, one format or even one language—it is spread across departments and geographies; and
- A process that can be defined and repeated to produce results that are consistent across the company, and can be shown to comply with best practices or regulations.
Solving the needs of the business or government end user looking for information must take these requirements into account. Many companies, looking at the Internet, simply put a standalone search engine up on their network, hoping to satisfy users by giving them a way to find things. While this is certainly better than having no way to find information, it misses the mark in many ways. Some of the capabilities of today's more business-targeted solutions are required to meet the varied reasons your end-users are searching for information.
More Ways to Find Information
he traditional search box, working against all of an organization's data, is only one way to find information—and the more data, the more repositories and formats, the more languages...the less effective that search box on its own becomes. With thousands, or tens of thousands, of results coming back to some queries, a way to organize content in meaningful ways for your end users is critical. Limiting searches to specific content, based on a "task-based interface," can help users find exactly the information they need. Giving users directories or taxonomies with meaningfully labeled folders or categories through which they can navigate or "drill down" has also been shown to dramatically increase both the speed and success with which they can find information.
Similarly, some users may require the ability to sort through or filter information on the fly. In the place of static directories or taxonomies, this requires an interface that lets them select desired attributes, presents them with other attributes that can be combined with the first, and finally lets them use a search box to pinpoint specific documents in the matching documents if necessary.
Access to More Information
On the Internet, companies typically publish (to their Website) all of the content that might be of interest to a potential user. In business environments, the reality is that this just doesn't work. The information that might be of interest to each of your employees is found in a host of applications and repositories, not on a single Website. Getting access to the information in these applications and repositories is not a trivial task. It requires special interfaces to each individual application. And as we all know, every application, every repository and every software vendor approaches the same function differently. One example is security. Unlike a Web search environment, not all users are allowed to access all your data. In fact, there are some documents you don't even want them to know exist. That's why each application in your company has a sophisticated security model to let you decide who can access the system at all, and controls precisely what they can and cannot see. If your search solution's interfaces to your enterprise applications don't support those security models, you're probably better off not letting people search the information in them in the first place.
Now consider the information outside of your enterprise: content on the Web, subscription-based content, and so on. This brings up a whole new set of requirements. Just like the information in all the different sources within your enterprise, the content outside your enterprise is most valuable when users can see it in the context of the problem they're trying to solve. This means they have to be able to see results from a Web search ranked in the same list as results from your internal search solution. Or be able to drill down through your corporate taxonomy to find subscription news feeds. Federated search and classification presents all of this data consistently, regardless of the source.
Information Before You Know You Need It
One of the fundamental concepts of search is that it is user-initiated. You're looking for something and you go find it. Unfortunately, in business all information is time-sensitive to one degree or another. Waiting for someone to realize they need to look for something may mean they get that information too late to take action on it.
Effective search turns this on its head. Instead of people finding relevant information, relevant information finds people. As content is created or received from subscription services, the search solution evaluates it in real time, decides whether it matches any user profiles (based on explicit information they provide or by monitoring their past behavior), and notifies those users of the new information. It's hard to imagine an industry in which real-time notification of high-value information wouldn't be useful.
Sometimes, Finding a Person is Even Better
Do you believe that your company's greatest asset is its people? After all, you hired them because you need the expertise they bring to the table. That's why when you're searching in a business context, often the best "result" is not a document at all, but a recommended expert elsewhere in your enterprise. Take the example of a petroleum engineer in an office in Houston looking for information on horizontal drilling. Using the search box, he finds a number of reports that mention horizontal drilling was used in a number of wells, but not why it was used and whether he should consider it for the project he's working on. What if that same results list was accompanied by the names of engineers in the company's Denver and London offices who were knowledgeable about horizontal drilling? Expertise location tied tightly with search provides this capability.
Answering Your Question, Not Just Search Results
There are times when you really want to see everything your organization knows about a given topic, and paging through screens of results, 20 at a time, is a way to discover what's out there. But, there are times when your query is really best answered by one correct result.
Whether it's a simple question ("What is the address of our office in Paris?") or a more involved one ("What steps do I follow to add a dependent to my medical insurance?"), returning all the documents that contain the keywords of those queries is not nearly as useful as giving you the answer. Recent products, such as Verity Response, let users ask questions in natural language and, based on understanding what they are looking for, provides the right answer, saving time poring over results lists.
Finding is But One Step in the Process
Why are we looking for information in the first place? Again, it's usually for a good reason, and in business it is often driven by a process. Let's go back to the example above of the employee searching for information on how to add a dependent to his medical plan. Once he finds the form, he fills it out, it must be routed to the right person in HR for approval, and then on to another person to make the actual changes. People are searching all along the way, but with a specific context and as part of a specific process. If we look at this as merely a search problem, searching for the form, searching for the person to send it to, searching to see whether it has yet been approved, etc., then we've only touched a part of the problem. By integrating deeply with the process (for example, using Verity Teleform or LiquidOffice solutions) we can accelerate the movement of information, ultimately saving time and costs.
Consistency Drives Compliance
Whether you're trying to comply with internal best practices to save money, or with regulations you must adhere to for your business, many aspects of your business benefit from repeatable, traceable processes. For example, the recent focus on meeting the compliance requirements for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has driven many organizations to re-work their business processes and document them thoroughly. Ensuring that all transactions are following that same process is made more achievable by automating key steps with workflow tools like Verity LiquidOffice. As you enter the audit process, being able to conduct a comprehensive search that surfaces all related information can save considerable time demonstrating compliance. Even better, by proactively identifying any transactions that may not be following the documented processes, technologies like classification and profiling can help your organization get in front of these issues, addressing them before they become problems.
The examples above all require that you solve more than just the simple search problem in your enterprise. When you view the problem as "connecting people with the information they need around a business process," the tools and integration to achieve that require much more than search. In business, each search is done for a reason, and each reason is unique. For some, a simple search box may be enough, but more often than not the solution requires a combination of the tools described above. Taxonomies, security, workflow, expert location...these are just few of the features you need to consider.
Verity provides software that enables organizations to maximize the return on their intellectual capital investment. The company's intellectual capital management (ICM) solutions provide integrated search, classification, recommendation, monitoring and analytics across the real-time flow of enterprise information, along with self-service Q & A. In addition, Verity's business process management and content capture solutions activate information and accelerate its flow from person to person and between systems. Verity technology also serves as a core component of more than 260 applications from leading independent software vendors.