Knowledge search and discovery

User stories from the knowledge front

New search and categorization software will help employees of Rabobank, a large retail bank in the Netherlands, find what they're looking for.

The solution, which will power the Rabobank Enterprise Information Portal, consists of Convera's RetrievalWare and Knowledge Concepts' (knowledge-concepts.com) Content Enabler language processing tools. Knowledge Concepts is a Dutch integrator that specializes in human language technology for the knowledge management industry. Language processing tools will tailor the linguistics environment for both English and Dutch to best support the vocabulary of Rabobank.

Olaf Brugman, senior knowledge engineer at Rabobank, says, "Knowledge Concepts has given us access to search and retrieval technology from Convera and provided us with a powerful, scalable and flexible solution that has already shown major improvements in how information is searched and retrieved by our employees."

Initially the solution will be rolled out to 15,000 employees nationally. The second phase will extend the system to 43,000 workers worldwide. As a result, Rabobank employees will be able to search across corporate knowledge, regardless of data format, location or language.

Iain Fletcher, international sales director at Convera, says, "In partnership with local linguistic specialists such as Knowledge Concepts, we can provide a level of search accuracy, in both Dutch and English, that can directly affect our customers' bottom lines. The Rabobank is a big company with a lot of data, and unless search technology can deliver an appropriate level of accuracy, people can search, but they won't find."