Skip to content
BA InsightBA Insight
  • Request a Demo
  • Request a Demo
  • Products
    • BA Insight for Amazon Kendra
    • BA Insight for Amazon OpenSearch Service
    • BA Insight for Azure Cognitive Search
    • BA Insight for Elasticsearch
    • BA Insight for Microsoft 365
    • BA Insight for Microsoft Teams
    • BA Insight for NetDocuments
    • BA Insight for ServiceNow
    • BA Insight for Solr
    • WorkHub Search
  • Technology
    • SmartHub
    • Connectors
    • AutoClassifier
    • AppBus
  • Solutions
    • Enterprise Search
    • Customer Portal Search
    • Website Search
    • Search for Legal
    • Search for Life Sciences
    • Clinical Trials
  • Resources
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • Product Resources
    • Newsletters
    • Articles
    • Webinars
    • Blog
    • News
  • About Us
    • Company Overview
    • Partners
    • Contact Us
Blog

Let’s Get Personal

Posted on July 17, 2018June 24, 2020 by Randy Brown - SALES DIRECTOR
I remember becoming interested in joining BA Insight a couple of years ago. At that time, the market was called “Enterprise Search”. In the past few years, both Gartner and Forrester have renamed the category. Gartner calls it Insight Engines and emphasizes the use of relevancy methods and proactive or interactive information delivery in context. Forrester refers to it as Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery, highlighting the use of AI technologies such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Along with this renaming, there have been additional attributes discussed by both analyst firms, which in my opinion, are imported from internet applications including AI, Machine learning and specifically…personalization. Does personalization improve the employee search experience? I think the response is a resounding, “It depends.” Let’s say you have deployed personalization and it is really, really good. Now let’s say one of your team members searches for something that is in another system.  In the results, the employee won’t find the information needed because there is no access to it.  So, do you go and personalize every enterprise and business system that you have? Even if you did, do employees know which system(s) to go to? For personalization to work, the search platform needs to be connected to key business systems. An employee might need to find a contract in Documentum, a product description in SharePoint, and service requests out of ServiceNow in order to do his/her job in a particular week. Without connections to these systems, relevant information will never be found, and the employee will either have to search multiple systems (unlikely) or simply give up (more likely). Do we want personalized and irrelevant? No amount of personalization will help here as the relevant information is not available. Even when there is a connection to other systems, this may not be enough to bring back relevant information. When you have multiple systems, unless you have a strategy to make sure information is tagged properly, then the results will be a keyword search. That is a no-no when it comes to search. The search results will be all over the place and will not meet the user’s expectations. Manual tagging has not worked and it will not work. You must consider ways to put technology in place to meta tag information. As search expert Martin White astutely brings up in a recent article, personalization can be detrimental without proper context and search basics. White describes a common scenario where an employee may move to a different location and department within an organization. How long does it take for search personalization to realize this move (if ever)?  A week? Two weeks? In that time, the employee’s queries will be relevant only to his old position/location, which may cause him to lose trust in the enterprise search solution and stop using it. So why do the majority of enterprise search projects fail? The promises of Cognitive Search or Insight Engines with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Process Language (NLP) will not be achieved if the basics of connectivity and proper meta-tagging are not in place. The same is true with personalization. There is no short cut to a good search experience.
This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Enterprise Search, Metadata, Personalization.
The Microsoft Search Ecosystem – An Outsiders View (Part Two)
Are We in an AI Revolution? Part One of Three
Author Profiles | Blog Home
Tags
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • AutoClassification
  • AzureBA Insight
  • Cloud SSA
  • Cognitive Search
  • Connectors
  • Content
  • Customer Portals
  • DelveDocumentum
  • Dynamics
  • Elasticsearch
  • Enterprise Search
  • European SharePoint Conference
  • Expertise Locator
  • Federated Search
  • Google Search Appliance
  • Hybrid SharePoint
  • InfoApps
  • Information Strategy
  • InfoSites
  • Intelligent Search
  • Knowledge Integration Platform
  •  Knowledge Management
  • Legal
  • Machine Learning
  • Metadata
  • Office 365
  • Office Graph
  • Personalization
  •  Portals and Intranets
  •  SearchFirstMigration
  •  Security
  • SEO
  • SharePoint
  • SharePoint 2010
  • SharePoint 2013
  • SharePoint 2016
  • SharePoint Search
  •  Smart Analytics
  • Taxonomies
  • Unified Information Access
  • Visual Refiners
  •  Webinar

BA Insight logo 2022AI-driven intelligent enterprise search software

Askable knowledge

Reward questions with results.

BA Insight Headquarters
7 Liberty Square, Suite 3
Boston, MA 02109-5812, USA
+1.339.368.7234
sales@BAinsight.com

BA Insight UK Office
London, St James
4th Floor, Rex House
4 – 12 Regent Street
London, SW1Y 4PE

BA Insight Romania Office
C.A Rosetti Street No 17
Office 009ResCo-work01
District 2 Bucharest 020011

Find out how internet-like search can be implemented inside your organization

  • Enterprise Search
  • Search for Legal
  • Search for Life Sciences
  • Elasticsearch
  • SharePoint Search
  • Search Orchestration
  • Enterprise System Connectors
  • Autoclassification
  • Expert Locator
  • Search for Dynamics
  • Search for Salesforce
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • White Papers
  • Product Resources
  • Privacy/Cookie Policy
BA Insight © 2023
  • Products
    • BA Insight for Amazon Kendra
    • BA Insight for Amazon OpenSearch Service
    • BA Insight for Azure Cognitive Search
    • BA Insight for Elasticsearch
    • BA Insight for Microsoft 365
    • BA Insight for Microsoft Teams
    • BA Insight for NetDocuments
    • BA Insight for ServiceNow
    • BA Insight for Solr
    • WorkHub Search
  • Technology
    • SmartHub
    • Connectors
    • AutoClassifier
    • AppBus
  • Solutions
    • Enterprise Search
    • Customer Portal Search
    • Website Search
    • Search for Legal
    • Search for Life Sciences
    • Clinical Trials
  • Resources
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • Product Resources
    • Newsletters
    • Articles
    • Webinars
    • Blog
    • News
  • About Us
    • Company Overview
    • Partners
    • Contact Us

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.

Join the BA Insight Mailing List