Four Results to Expect from Enterprise Search
With Proof From Four Customers
There is finally a better way for people to quickly and easily find the relevant information they need, and you can save your enterprise significant costs by bringing it to them. Better enterprise search is at last made possible by new technology that goes far beyond that offered by legacy search giants. Now that it's here, you need to set higher demands for your vendors—not just for more effective searching, but also for deep cost savings from reduced IT workload and lower total cost of ownership. When you write your next RFP, don't stop at search—make sure you're demanding the kind of results the best information access solutions can deliver:
RESULT 1: Enterprise search should actually help people find what they're looking for.
RESULT 2: Enterprise search should wring the full value out of all your content—structured, unstructured and semi-structured.
RESULT 3: Enterprise search should lessen your information management burden. RESULT 4: Enterprise search should demonstrate its value in a live proof of concept.
These Results Are Real
Our customers have already earned tens of millions of dollars in ROI from their search solutions, from increased knowledge worker efficiency, lower total cost of ownership due to reduced information management costs and competitive advantage from superior information services. And new technology makes it possible to meet persistent IT challenges that have never been solved until now, like high-performance searching at scales massive enough to reach all your enterprise data.
Result 1: Enterprise search should actually help people find what they're looking for. Too many people have resigned themselves to a frustrating search experience because they don't know there's an alternative. Fortunately, new technology advances have completely reset expectations about how fast and easy it can be to find relevant information. Software sold by the legacy search vendors typically over-promises and under-delivers, leaving people struggling to find what they're looking for. On average, two out of three searches either overwhelm users with a long list of results, or return no results at all. The desired content is often lost in a flood of records, and relevance ranking does little to ease the problem. Meanwhile, the searches themselves are far too slow.
Another problem: It's nearly impossible to find information you don't already know exists without the ability to browse. Browsing and searching are complementary aspects of finding, but in legacy search solutions, they're disconnected. And legacy solutions typically offer dense menus and taxonomies that offer just one path to each record. Users have to think like librarians if they're ever going to reach the content they need.
Enterprise search applications that combine Guided Navigation with the next generation of search technology (such as Endeca ProFind™) match up the meaning and intent of each query to the underlying data, with robust spelling correction, word-form variations and conceptual synonyms. Guided Navigation wraps search results in smart navigation that shows users all the productive ways to refine their search and explore further. By weaving together these new kinds of searching and browsing, it is faster and easier for knowledge workers, decision makers and business partners to finally find what they're looking for—with a measurable efficacy far beyond what search engines alone deliver.
Proof 1: Increasing information downloads at Cabot. Cabot Corporation, a global specialty chemicals company, selected Endeca ProFind to enable user self-service on its public-facing Website. In just the first month of deployment, Cabot recorded phenomenal success as their new search and Guided Navigation solution helped users find far more of the business information they were looking for. Datasheet downloads increased by 17% to 87%, corresponding to a decrease of 21% in the volume of requests through telephone and e-mail for information also available on the site.
Result 2: Enterprise search should wring the full value out of all your content—structured, unstructured and semi-structured. With data taking more and more forms, you're not alone if you're confused about the best way to access and search it. The newest enterprise search technology is designed to make the most of your enterprise's content, no matter how it's structured. E-mail, financial information, sales collateral, research papers, transactions, inventory data, Web pages, documentation, directories—your data is taking on more and more kinds of structure. And it's being stored in a wide variety of source systems—file servers, content management systems, datamarts, enterprise systems—in hundreds of formats and languages.
What's the best way to search all this? There is a new breed of enterprise search technology designed specifically to leverage this new hybrid of data structures. Industry analysts like IDC and Forrester have identified them: visionary technologies designed to merge content and data, marrying structured and unstructured information to create new searching and browsing opportunities for end-users.
Proof 2: Unlocking value from a Fortune 100 intranet "content stew."A Fortune 100 financial services company compared new-generation search tools against legacy search vendors for searching and browsing their entire corporate intranet—a mass of enterprise content with a heterogeneous mix of structures. In a proof-of-concept competition, ProFind exposed rich pockets of structure that it converted to Guided Navigation. It delivered powerful search and relevancy ranking on unstructured content. And it allowed browsing through semi-structured data that users could only search before.
Result 3: Enterprise search should lessen your information management burden. To most CIOs, the prospect of adding sophisticated information browsing capabilities rings the alarm for an expensive and frustrating effort to structure data, build taxonomies and force content creators to follow rigid metadata standards. For the bulk of enterprise content, the perceived cost of adding structure through information management processes seems to put better content navigation out of reach.
In fact, new technologies such as Guided Navigation should actually lower your overall investment in information management processes. It begins by unlocking more value from your content in its current state, without the need for any expensive restructuring, while accommodating normal data messiness.
Moving forward, it sets you on the path to substantial time and cost savings from more efficient information management processes. New search technology is based on more efficient information models that optimally leverage any structure available in your data. It automatically uncovers every relationship latent in your content, and converts those relationships into millions of navigation paths. It then combines these data-driven relationships with smart editorial input from you.
Proof 3: Simplifying information management processes at IHS. IHS Engineering provides a leading information service to design engineers, offering access to seven terabytes of parts specifications. With information consolidated from thousands of sources—from semi-structured datasheets and PDFs to structured data stored in databases—IHS thought they could only offer their users basic search capabilities. With Guided Navigation it can consolidate multiple search applications onto a single platform, saving millions of dollars by eliminating hardware and simplifying information management processes.
Result 4: Enterprise search should demonstrate its value in a live proof of concept. Your data is unique, your application requirements are specific to your business, and your operational environment is one-of-a-kind. This makes it difficult to compare solutions from different vendors based on their scripted demos or flagship applications. The only way to slice through jargon, hype and promises is with a live proof of concept, running on your own data. Unfortunately, most vendors are reluctant to build a proof of concept, let alone allow customers to test drive it on their own.
This should worry you. Will the application ever deliver the functionality it promises? When evaluating a new search solution, a proof of concept is a sensible way to minimize your risk. A live proof of concept not only demonstrates the value end users will see from your data, it also confirms that your IT department will be able to deploy the application. A quickly built proof of concept also foretells a speedy production deployment that will allow the project to deliver ROI faster.
Proof 4: A high-scale prototype in under a week at Arrow Electronics. Arrow Electronics, one of the world's largest electronic components distributors, created a new information service to deliver design specifications for a database of over 20 million components. After an expensive six-month engagement to develop an effective search solution with a major software, hardware and consulting firm, Arrow saw little progress and no reasonable path to scalability. In under a week, Endeca built a high-scale, working prototype that showed the value of Guided Navigation on Arrow's own data, and proved that the application could deploy quickly and scale easily.
Endeca ProFind™ for Enterprise Search
Endeca ProFind will reset your expectations about how fast and easy it can be to find relevant enterprise content. ProFind combines the next generation of unstructured Search with a powerful new innovation called Guided Navigation® that takes the science of information access far beyond the limits of earlier solutions. At the same time, the new technology that makes Endeca ProFind possible helps IT experts meet their most aggressive scale and performance goals, while also substantially lowering total cost of ownership.
Some of the most common solutions our customers build with Endeca ProFind are:
>B>Intranet & Portal Search: Making sure that your users can effectively find and reuse business information is essential, both for employees to be able to quickly leverage the investment made in enterprise content, and so they don't spend time recreating information that already exists. For customers like Walgreens, NASA, and Lehman Brothers, Endeca's integrated search and navigation technology allows users to find what they are looking for more easily, increasing user efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, Endeca's intuitive tools make for ease of maintenance and rapid application development, lowering the total cost of ownership.
Website Search: Improving the search capabilities on your website not only improves user satisfaction, it decreases support costs by making users more self-sufficient. For customers like Boston Scientific, the Congressional Research Service, and ABN AMRO, Endeca's integrated search and navigation technology users can not only quickly find what they are looking for, but also discover information on the Website that they didn't know existed. Endeca's ability to offer streamlined access to information from multiple sources improves the customer experience and meets your users' needs through a low cost web channel, rather than more expensive call-centers. In addition to improving the user experience, Endeca's intuitive tools make for ease of maintenance and rapid application development, lowering the total cost of ownership.
Directory Search: For leaders like Classmates.com, Harvard University, and MIT, Endeca's integrated search and navigation technology allow users to quickly find the people, companies, and other directory listings they are looking for, as well as discover listings that they didn't know existed. Intuitive access to large directories composed of multiple sources of information improves customer loyalty and satisfaction, all through a low cost online channel. In addition to the improved customer experience, Endeca's intuitive tools make for ease of maintenance and rapid application development, lowering the total cost of ownership. and
Self-service: At Bank of America, IBM, and Tibco, integrating search and navigation with Endeca allows users to quickly find what they are looking for, as well as discover information that they didn't know existed. This streamlined access to information from multiple sources, improved customer loyalty and satisfaction, all through a low cost web channel rather than more expensive call-centers. In addition to the improved customer experience, Endeca's intuitive tools make for ease of maintenance rapid application development, lowering the total cost of ownership.
For more information on Endeca and how we can help solve your enterprise information challenges, contact: Chris Reisig, vice president, worldwide sales, sales@endeca.com. Endeca, 55 Cambridge Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02142. 617-577-7999 Fax 617-577-7766, E-mail: info@endeca.com. Endeca