Integrated Enterprise Search: Agricultural Innovator Empowers Employees and Cuts Costs

Monsanto Company is a global agricultural business that applies biotechnology and genomics (the science that improves plant breeding by mining and mapping a plant’s genetic material) to help farmers improve their operations.

Monsanto has administrative and sales offices, manufacturing plants, seed production facilities and research centers in 47 countries. Fostering global communications—both between the company and its customers, distributors, and partners and among its employees—means that team collaboration and ubiquitous access to corporate information has long been a focus for the IT organization.

The company faced a license-renewal deadline for its search engine used in more than 20 public websites and numerous intranet sites. Search results did not live up to expectations, and the tool was costly and cumbersome to manage. Monsanto evaluated Google and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. It chose Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a search solution that extended enterprise search
capabilities from traditional corporate information to people and expertise. Integration between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the familiar Microsoft Office system programs was another reason for Monsanto’s decision. Monsanto saved $250,000 in licensing fees and gained an easily deployable search solution—it took 45 minutes to migrate www.monsanto.com—that it expects to boost productivity.

Information Sharing a Competitive Advantage

In his role as IT strategy and communications lead at Monsanto, Lou Clark helps to develop strategic roadmaps for IT acquisitions that best support Monsanto’s business goals. “The whole area of how we help people work together as teams on a global basis has been an objective of Monsanto and the IT organization for a long time,” he says. “Recent accelerated growth and acquisitions within the company, and a higher level of interaction with customers and partners, drive the demand to better connect people and share information.”

Internally, the IT organization heard similar demands for reliable access to information. It saw this demand as part of its rationale for developing an integrated communication and collaboration strategy that would increase productivity and help link global teams and employees. “We consider the way in which we work together as one of our competitive advantages,” says Greg Evans, information workplace program manager. “So we have developed a three-pillar initiative called the Information Workplace Program to improve access to information and global communications to help Monsanto increase our competitive advantage.”

The Importance of Search

Monsanto began looking for technologies, tools and services that would support the Information Workplace Program. A key initiative under the Information Workplace Program is improving upon the company’s legacy search engine. Monsanto wanted to extend the capabilities of the company’s search technology to better serve members of the public, its customers, and its employees as they look for both structured and unstructured corporate information.

Several factors contributed to the importance of search within the initial stages of the Information Workplace Program at Monsanto. The company’s legacy search solution was due for an expensive license renewal and the IT organization had a strict deadline to deliver a new solution before the expiration date. The existing solution provided search capabilities on 20 public-facing company Internet sites; however, when IT staffers performed an analysis of search results they saw that in the majority of cases searches were not delivering accurate or relevant results. “We did not want members of the public, or our customers and investors, to come away with a negative experience,” says Clark.

An employee survey conducted as part of the Information Workplace Program documented an equally unimpressive scenario among staffers trying to find information. “We had feedback like, ‘Who decides where to hide this stuff?’” recalls Clark. “Within the numerous intranet sites indexed by our previous search engine, people couldn’t rely on search results. This wasted time as they looked for information, too many times not finding the data they needed. We knew people were working with partial or outdated information.”

The solution was also a drain on IT resources. “There were technical limitations as to how we could deploy the product. It was inflexible and required a lot of custom coding for each site. Hence we
didn’t get very far with it,” explains Vince Arter, information workplace, portals and collaboration project lead. “We also had security concerns with the product. It was difficult to administer, and the support just wasn’t there.”

The company faced a decision. It could replace or upgrade its legacy search solution for now, and look for additional products and technologies later to support other Workplace Information Program goals, like building a collaborative desktop to help staff share information using everyday tools, and boosting real-time interaction. Or it could acquire search capabilities within a communications and collaboration platform that would more accurately map to Monsanto’s business goals, effectively achieving two things at once.

The Solution

Monsanto reevaluated its existing search solution as well as some other pure-play vendors like Google and determined that the level of resources required to take advantage of these products was simply too high and the evaluated solutions were not extensible to future needs beyond Search. “We didn’t want to hire people to manage our search solution,” says Arter.