Business Semantics Management
Empowered Enterprise Search Drives Competitive Advantage

For Global 5000 enterprises, the ability to optimize information management for competitive advantage will drive growth in market share while increasing margins through greater business process efficiencies. Your employees and partners need the ability to access the right information at the right time to make the day-to-day business decisions that support your enterprise. While optimized access to information is crucial, it won't be achieved until your enterprise systems can efficiently sift through your large and growing body of content to deliver relevant, comprehensive results. Business semantics management (BSM) enables greater findability for key assets across the hundreds of content and data repositories that exist in the typical global enterprise of today. BSM manages the ever-changing semantics of the business—throughout its lifecycle

For most large companies today, one thing stands in the way of optimized information access: semantic inconsistency. IT organizations in large companies have typically deployed numerous information management systems, which have never learned to speak the same language. For example, the application that manages content generated by the R&D group for a major pharmaceutical company knows the newest product offering as CardioFDATrial3, while marketing, purchasing and shipping know it as Heart Health. In the event of a recall or proposed product name change, how will the pharmaceutical company find all of the information related to that product necessary to support an FDA recall or global re-branding effort?

BSM technology allows organizations to specifically address this universal problem. And, as we'll discuss in detail in this article, the business benefits extend further than most companies realize.

The Evolution of Enterprise Information
Nearly two decades ago, companies began to introduce databases and enterprise applications to manage financial, manufacturing and supply chain transactions for lines of business. The data these programs generated was typically the result of a transaction (Invoice posted, inventory depleted, sales order shipped) resulting in data being stored in rows and columns in a database table. Access to this data, however, was limited to a handful of technical and knowledge workers. The result was rigid systems unable to respond to changes within the business and not representative of how over 80% of the information assets in today's typical company are created, stored and accessed.

Since that time, the amount of unstructured information generated by companies—information contained in documents, spreadsheets, email and Web sites—has exploded. This type of content represents the majority of a typical company's information assets. Because unstructured content is incredibly complex, the different applications used to manage this information have each developed their own languages/semantics for categorizing and classifying it. At the same time this information evolution was occurring, companies were becoming increasingly more virtual and global. The resulting cultural and language differences introduced even more inconsistency.

The systems that manage unstructured information do so within a certain context or perspective—one that is shared exclusively by the employees or groups that use the systems. For a large enterprise, employees need to access all relevant information that will help them do their jobs and make day-to-day business decisions, regardless of the original context of that information. Unfortunately, this is not possible in today's enterprise information environment.