BA Insight, Massood Zarrabian, CEO: View From the Top

While Internet Search has evolved rapidly, Enterprise Search has not. Internet Search has gone from being a keyword-driven catchall to a personalized, multi-vertical experience like Google. Enterprise users are used to the Google experience and expect the same from their intranets and portals. This often leads enterprises into thinking that using the Google appliance to solve their enterprise search problem is the right strategy.

The reality is that it is not about the search appliance, but rather these key characteristics:

1. It is a targeted implementation of search. It was designed to support a specific, measurable business objective—generating revenue.
2. Although we think they index everything, the reality is that they do not.
3. They make it clear to content owners that if they wish to be found via organic search, then they must tag their content.
4. They prioritize authoritative sources to provide meaningful results.
5. They invest thousands of hours each day in relevancy tuning.

Our analysis of Google and other leading consumer search applications has led us to identify a simple set of Best Practices to significantly improve the chances of a successful Enterprise Search implementation:

1. Have a Plan that incorporates meaningful business drivers.

2. Follow the ‘pillars’ of search:

a) Connectivity: Like Google, you do not need to index everything. Work with your users to identify authoritative sources of content and connect your intranet to them.

b) Tagging: Invest in technology to automatically tag content. In the Enterprise search world, “your search is only as good as your tags”.

c) User Experience: Analyze your users to identify key elements such as their information needs and how they would like to refine search results. You are then positioned to build best-in-class search experiences that will delight them.

This approach offers businesses a rapid, low risk way to eliminate some of the peskiest and most common information systems challenges such as: siloed data, poor relevancy, and lack of users following metadata standards.

SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 is built with search in mind and set up to support multiple portals/intranets running on the same infrastructure. However, SharePoint 2013 does not meet all enterprise search requirements. It does not include many of the connectivity, text analytics, and applications that enhance the user experience. Its focus is on providing a general purpose, mass market infrastructure with pre-integrated workloads.

BA Insight’s Knowledge Integration Platform extends the core capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint to enable organizations to leverage their existing investment and rapidly deliver Intranets without the risk and cost of custom development.

Our platform, which is pre-integrated with SharePoint, consists of three engines:

User Experience Engine—provides applications and UI components to help with preview, the creation of knowledge centers, and refinement.

Classification Engine—increases findability using automated classification, metadata generation, and text analytics.

Connectivity Engine—provides secure connectivity to a wide variety of content systems, enabling unified views of all knowledge assets.

Our platform is flexible and can be implemented as a comprehensive solution or as individual components.

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BA Insight
20 Park Plaza, Suite 1115
Boston, MA 02116

PH: 339.368.7234
Contact: sales@bainsight.com
Web: www.bainsight.com

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