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Blog

The Magical Answer to Search the INTRANET the Same Way you Search the INTERNET

Posted on February 22, 2017June 28, 2020 by Don Miller - SALES DIRECTOR

We use search every hour and every day of the week, and it is awesome because it just works.  Every day you use Bing, Amazon, Google or Siri and you never stop to think about why the topic, result or document that you are looking for came back on top.  It just feels so easy – start typing or talking and automatically Google or Bing starts providing you suggestions to whatever your question may be.

So why then, when you go to work the next morning and you must find a specific file, manual, document record, graphic or image within your organization, does search not work?

What invisible barrier stopped you from getting access to the right document?  What happened to auto suggest? Why is there no easy way to filter out results like if I was doing a product search and only wanted to see the 40” TVs at Best Buy or Amazon?  What happened?

The invisible answer is metadata.

For the Bings and Amazons of the world to make money, they need you to be able to find the right information or products.  So besides building some of the largest search indexes in the world, they have a person or teams of people who are responsible for metadata.  In fact, the whole SEO industry came about since metadata and web page optimization are needed for a site to be found. Metadata is information about information.  It is what allows you to select the type of car you are searching for by brand on Autotrader as well as the year, color and model.  The same goes for Best Buy when searching for TVs by size, manufacturer and screen type.  There is no “magical metadata fairy” that goes into the computer and sprinkles metadata onto each product.  The metadata is actually hand crafted by a person who has specifically built out a vocabulary and determined that this type of metadata is needed, on this type of product, and the value to the customer is that they will be able to find it (if there is a specific product) within a couple of seconds by just selecting a box or two on the left hand side of their browser that will quickly filter a set of results to the size, manufacturer, budget and/or whatever else the owner of the site has decided is relevant.

There is not a set and forget mentality. The company knows that you need to apply good metadata to content if you want happy users who will spend money on products.

So, what happens when you go into the office?  Most likely nothing, and that is the problem.  While most employees can search the intranet and there is an index of results that show if you type in a query, there has been no time spent nurturing a company’s vocabulary to assist the users with finding the right document.  98% of the time this is because there is no metadata or if there is metadata, then it is not descriptive metadata.  Why is there no descriptive metadata? Because nobody is willing to take the time to make it work.  The problem is that Bing, Yahoo and Amazon are not going to assign their people to fix your metadata problem.  And one of the key problems is realizing that what works outside the firewall will not work inside the firewall. In fact, the work outside the firewall often involves individual pages, while inside the firewall things get more challenging because the documents exist in many formats and are dispersed across different repositories with little or no linkages to other content, with a lot of key information in each.  Not fixing this problem is costing organizations millions of dollars in lost productivity. In addition to lost time trying to find information, there is duplication of effort and re-creation of work already done rather than reusing what has been created.  You need to assign people (more than one) to build out your company vocabulary.  This should be done as a reiterative process, but in the end, it will allow you to build a vocabulary that aligns with your company.  The internal search engine will be able to leverage it consistently and it will improve search.

Okay, we did all that, and enterprise search still is terrible.  So why did we do it?

Well, step one is building the vocabulary, and step two is getting people to apply the vocabulary to their content.  Did the Amazons and Bings do this?  You betcha, because they have to – it is in their best interest.  So how do we get end users to tag their own content?  One suggestion would be to gamify, make a simple game to get users to add five tags for a reward.  The more content that is tagged, the more reward for a department, with a special prize to the best tagger.

However, we all know that this is still tough, because it is still a mountain of a project that requires a lot of manual effort.  Well, if you agree that metadata is critical, then what the Amazons and Bings also do is auto tag.  They have tools to auto apply metadata to content.  Is it perfect?  Nope.  Is it faster and more consistent then manually doing it, you betcha!  Is the trade-off worth it?  In 80% of the situations, yes.  That is what you will have to decide once you have realized that there is no magical way to fix search, but with a little time and effort, your organization can effectively search the intranet too by just building a vocabulary and adding a little metadata.

While Bigfoot, Yeti and the Lochness Monster are all fictional characters and will never be found, metadata is the real deal and is already here.  Metadata is data about data.  Metadata improves search and can drive findability across your enterprise.  Good finding!

Contact us today to learn more.

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Enterprise Search, Metadata.
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Perspectives from our CEO,
Massood Zarrabian

Organizations have long been struggling with how to make knowledge assets available to employees, partners, and customers. Although there have been major technological advances in how this information is captured and made available over the past two decades, these have mostly been around a single business process. For example, when I joined Servicesoft, we were pioneering the idea of using search and classification engines to help transfer information to customers as part of the emerging eService market. At OutStart, we initiated the idea of objectifying learning and making the development of learning component-based so that it could be consumed via a “just-in-time” model. This meant that learners interacted only with learning objects that helped them increase their knowledge, and therefore their value, to the organization. In the last decade, another silo of information capture has emerged in the form of Social Business Software, making it easier than ever to capture nuggets of knowledge that can help others.  The interesting dynamic in all of this is that there are large investments being made to capture information and knowledge assets, but very little of it is actually accessible by employees or customers.

In the ‘90s, multiple software vendors tried to address the issue of information access by providing software to implement portals, whether they were used for helpdesk integration, customer support, intranets, or R&D to help with the collaboration and reuse of IP.  As the technology evolved and search engines and appliances became available, the portals were replaced with implementations of enterprise search. The problem with this approach is that it views the search engine as a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as opposed to viewing it as an enabling technology that helps organizations address a business issue. Failed enterprise search projects became the norm as companies tried, and continue trying, to resolve their information access challenges by implementing new search appliances while they still have underlying issues around integration with other systems, classification and tagging, and a sub-par user experience.

I joined BA Insight because I saw an immense opportunity to transform the way enterprise search is being implemented.  I am sure you know that the amount of content that is being generated is growing exponentially across an increasing number of sources, and the inability to find the information assets our people need is costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity while leading to low morale and customer dissatisfaction.

When I evaluated the opportunity at BA Insight, I found the company to be uniquely positioned to provide a new approach to the unification of information that stops the pattern of enterprise search failures.  We do this by transforming SharePoint, which has become ubiquitous across enterprises, into a unified information access platform that enables fast implementation of search-driven applications at a fraction of the cost of other options while de-risking search projects.

There are many notable and successful search-driven applications available on the Consumer Internet. Many are ‘killer apps’, and as a class they have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information.  However, in comparison, corporate Intranets, customer support portals, helpdesk applications or knowledge management solutions don’t come close to being killer apps, nor do they provide a remarkable user experience.

I found it intriguing that BA Insight has the technology, people, and partners to help catapult enterprise search to the next level.  We replace a people-intensive, SI-oriented approach to implementation with a technology-based approach that is lower cost, lower risk, easier to implement, and easier to upgrade. We do the heavy lifting to make our products work with different versions of SharePoint as well as various versions of other software applications that exist within a customer’s infrastructure.  We automate how content is tagged to improve findability and also provide out of the box capabilities to improve the user experience with how information is found and accessed.

I believe that in order for a company to be wildly successful, it must demonstrate the following five important attributes:

First is customer-centricity. Customers put their trust in startups with a vision, and we must partner with them to make sure they succeed. I am so proud of all of the customers I have had the honor of serving, as well as their achievements, and I consider it the cornerstone of my past success and BA Insight’s future success.

Second is our team. Our people have the experience and the desire to help our customers implement and deploy incredibly powerful applications. We want to help our customers build killer apps, as opposed to search portals. This is a team of high energy, committed, customer-centric experts who have embraced the idea that search-driven applications could be a lot better and are working to change how they get implemented.  I am fortunate enough to have become part of the BA Insight team and am so proud of everyone who works here. In a short period of time, we have made incredible progress on many fronts and I feel strongly that everyone’s loyalty and belief in the company will continue to provide an incredible depth for us and help our customers transform how they work with search technology.

Third is the technology. We have a broad set of capabilities that extend the value of existing SharePoint investments, so we eliminate the need to change the underlying infrastructure, saving a lot of time and money.  We have over 90 out of the box connectors, a world class auto-tagging engine for content within and outside of SharePoint, visual refiners to let users drill down and find information quickly, an active workspace with content assembly, and document preview capabilities.  We also provide a lot of flexibility in how our technology can be implemented.  Our full platform, for example, is particularly well-suited for new projects.  On the other hand, if search-driven applications have already been implemented within an organization, then components of our platform can be leveraged to augment the existing technology to improve results.

Fourth is to be financially responsible. Company success is about investment and return on that investment, and it needs to be measured in two fronts:

    1. ROI, which is the pure quantitative and financial analysis, often measured as productivity gains.
    2. My preferred approach is return on value (ROV), which is qualitative and focused on items such as customer loyalty, employee morale, better decision-making, and the ability to find information faster to increase customer responsiveness. Many of these things impact productivity and are therefore ROI, but they aren’t often measured and are therefore difficult to quantify. Isn’t the impact of finding the right knowledge to be able to do one’s job priceless? If we are smart about how we invest our time, money, and energy based on return on value, then we will naturally bring tremendous value to our customers and market and end up as a growing, profitable company that is resilient through the ups and downs of the economy and market.

And fifth is promoting a strong work/life balance. Work is important, but we cannot forget our families and shouldn’t compromise being with them due to office pressures.  For a long period of time I was a workaholic, but after my first son was born I committed to change. Over the years I have done my best to practice what I preach, successfully balancing work and family life, and I encourage our employees to do the same. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my incredible wife and our great boys.

These attributes are prevalent at BA Insight, and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead.  I am extremely confident that we are well positioned to enable the future of unified information access as we help visionary organizations around the world realize the value of the collective intelligence that is being captured every day within the massive volumes of content they produce.

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