Why It’s Time to Embrace The Intranet of Everywhere
“Organizations can define and document as much knowledge as they want, but if employees cannot access that knowledge—or if they don’t know where to find it when they need it—then the flow [of knowledge] breaks down and the entire process is considered moot.”—APQC1
When was the last time you contributed anything to your intranet? Or managed to find what you were looking for? If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. A 2013 Worldwide Intranet Challenge survey suggests that 90% of staff don’t regularly contribute to their corporate intranet, and 50% never do. And it’s not that people don’t want to share; they’ve merely found another system that is easier to use, or has features they personally prefer.
In an era marked by increasingly empowered and mobile knowledge workers—each using an ever wider range of tools and applications—the new reality is that the modern-day intranet is everywhere your knowledge workers are. And with the continued “consumerization of IT,” and no end in sight to the broader “BYOD” movement, we shouldn’t expect a momentum shift in this regard anytime soon.
With knowledge and content dispersed across an ever-increasing range of tools and services, how can your team members identify (and connect with) subject-matter experts who might be able to assist on a particular task, project or customer issue? How do you ensure your team members have access to the latest, most up-to-date information? In other words, how do companies empower workers to efficiently (and securely) create, share, explore, find and reuse enterprise knowledge in the era of the “intranet of everywhere?” For most organizations, the answer is to deploy an intelligent, unified search-driven architecture.
The Search-Driven Architecture: Embracing Diversity
Essentially, an intelligent search solution serves as the “fabric” that integrates the diverse content streams. It connects, consolidates and contextualizes all the content being created by your knowledge workers, across all of their preferred systems and tools, before delivering it through intuitive, role-specific interfaces that empower users to engage with this knowledge effectively wherever they are. These capabilities allow knowledge workers to access the entirety of knowledge your organization has created (represented in the figure as both the “head” and the “long tail” of knowledge.)
Specifically, an intelligent search-driven architecture can facilitate knowledge access and solve the top “findability” challenges faced by knowledge workers (both not being able to find content and not even knowing where to look) by delivering the following features:
Support for a large variety of systems and file formats, so that all of the organization’s content (along with their item-level security attributes) can be crawled and distilled within a unified index. To do so, the solution must utilize fully productized connectors that enable the precise scoping of crawls, and the swift mapping of securities to ensure users only see the content they are entitled to see at query-time.
Provide advanced text analytics and data enrichment capabilities to develop a full awareness of the “who, what, when, where and why” of each piece of content. This includes not only the ability to understand what the content is about, but also to identify individuals within the organization who are experts on various topics, based upon their actual work-product contributions. A successful search solution should be able to automatically enrich the company’s diverse content with enterprise-approved metadata, and should easily integrate with (and use) any taxonomy and term store used by the company. Even more, the solution should be able to auto-generate a taxonomy based upon its analysis of the content, should administrators wish to deploy an enterprise taxonomy without the burden of manually creating one.
Deliver a compelling, role-specific search interface so that users can intuitively and quickly explore, filter and sort their search results. For example, a knowledge worker within an R&D department who regularly works on highly technical projects with colleagues located around the globe, might find relevant content more efficiently if she is provided an intuitive tool to filter her search results by both “project number” and “project lead location.” A sales representative at the same company, however, might be able to find relevant content more quickly if provided a tool to quickly filter his results by “customer industry” and “deal close date.” A search experience that is designed with the specific user in mind dramatically improves that likelihood the user will find what he or she is looking for.
For more insights into how you can embrace the intranet of everywhere to enable better knowledge access in your organization, download The Intranet of Everywhere solution brief.
Coveo provides search solutions that deliver actionable, personalized knowledge to every employee, support agent, customer, and website visitor. Coveo is a strategic partner of several leading software companies such as Salesforce.com and Sitecore, and has been recognized by Gartner as the most visionary leader in the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search. For more info, visit www.coveo.com, info@coveo.com, North America: +1.800.635.5476, EMEA: +31 (0)20 658 6334
1 APQC, “Best Practices Report: Transferring and Applying Critical Knowledge,” 2013