Rethinking Enterprise Search Q&A with Massood Zarrabian CEO of BA Insight, and Sean Coleman, Chief Customer Officer of BA Insight

JW: And Sean, can you share some of the ways that you've helped companies to take advantage of their information more effectively?

SC: I was on a call the other day with an investment company, and they have people that are looking at investments and are looking at purchasing companies. And they had this issue where they had to analyze all these contracts that come in, and there are little pieces they look for and they're all in different formats. They said, "How can you make it easier for an analysis team to get that information?" And that was a very targeted project that involved feeding all these documents into a funnel and looking for certain keywords and extracting the information around it, and then integrating it with some AI services to process that.

On the flip side, we work with major pharmaceutical companies who deal with researching and developing new drugs. They're trying to make sure that their employees are able to find what they're looking for. And, oh, by the way, they've acquired five companies in the last eight years, and they say, "There are three SharePoints, I've got two other search indexes over here. I've got this research group that built an Elastic index. And I've got that research group that implemented this document management system and this one, and no one knows how to bring it all together." So, on a large project like that, you bring in the magic Google search bar that Massood talked about, but you do it with a targeted, personalized approach so that it sees, "Oh, you're a researcher, these key pieces of information are important to you. I'm going to put them to the forefront. And I'm going to provide that to you,” or “You're in IT, which means you need these pieces of information from here.”

MZ: There is a belief, as people think about enterprise-driven search, that you need change management, and to roll out this and roll out that. And sometimes when I talk to customers, I ask them if people actually need change management to use Google? Did any of them have to go through training? So, if you can make the experience similar to Google, really close to it, you don't really need to worry about change management.

These things can be done much, much more easily than they used to be—to the degree where, honestly, in some cases, where the customer is not convinced, we will do a PoC with them, and we don't even charge for the software. We just do a PoC with them in a few weeks so that they can envision the solution for their employees or their customers or clients. And, by the way, all the work that we do, with our prospects or customers in a PoC, applies to a real implementation. So, if they start to continue on, they’re not throwing things away, it's not some hack. It's not, "Now that we've done that, let's start again.” It actually applies to the future.

JW: That's great. So, Massood, how does an organization know then if they need an enterprise search solution from BA Insight, and where do they get more information?

MZ: So, my answer to your first question is, how does that person know if they need food or they need Google? It's just not the question of knowing; it's a necessity. In my opinion, solving the search problem at the enterprise level is a necessity. And in terms of more information: www.BAInsight.com, and you can always email me at mzarrabian@bainsight.com or Sean at scoleman@bainsight.com.