Delivering 'Consumer-like' search experience to business users on top of Microsoft SharePoint
Today, an IT Executive or a Director of Applications needs to be not only an ace technologist, but also an acute businessperson. Their IT groups need to support the business, and contribute positively to its bottom line. A key function of just about any IT group is to enable information sharing, ideally via a single point of access or portal. This is the promise that platforms such as SharePoint are supposed to deliver.
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Unfortunately, many IT leaders report that even with a collaboration tool in place, users often have difficulty finding what they need. Too many systems, too much content. "We have all this content," CIOs lament, "but our users can't get to it!" Knowledge workers need to navigate between various applications just to gather information they need to get the job done.
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Consumerization of IT |
Business users, who are also everyday consumers, expect more out of their Enterprise applications nowadays. They increasingly rely on a new class of applications, or Apps, to bypass irrelevant information and achieve their search objectives in seconds. These context-aware 'search-based applications', such as a restaurant, travel, or hotel finder, are optimized to deliver a query result set that is specific to the needs of the searcher.
While these search-based applications are commonplace in the consumer world, they are only now making inroads in the Enterprise. Such Apps offer an elegant solution to a number of the information access challenges caused by the enormous amount of data being trapped in disparate sources throughout an organization. And the vast majority of new data - as in emails, documents, social media - is unstructured, which means it is hard to manage and cannot be organized in traditional databases.
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Increasingly Line-of-Business managers are defining the need to directly access information instantly, regardless of where it is located. They may not ask for search technology by name, but certainly refer to it in the business challenges they express: - I need to give my staff one place to go to access our organization's collective, archived knowledge on a particular topic, so they can get their jobs done more quickly and effectively
- We need to gain a 360-degree view of customer relationships in order to improve customer service and increase customer loyalty
- The information our accounting group needs to accelerate invoicing is locked in a back-end system that we can't easily access – how can we make that process more seamless?
These business problems can be solved using search-based applications.
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Agile Information Integration, Your Grounds for Search Innovation |
Though mature in the consumer world, search driven, targeted business applications are a relatively new approach to information integration – in fact, BA Insight was the first company to introduce packaged search applications, called TotalView, specifically for Microsoft SharePoint and FAST. These applications take BA Insight's award-winning Advanced Search Technology from an end-to-end enterprise search solution to a role-based, targeted business application.
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BA Insight's Agile Information Integration platform provides a perfect enabler for rapidly delivering search-based applications, by not only facilitating access to siloed data, structured and unstructured, but also providing the means for knowledge workers to make sense of it.
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