Business Semantics Management
Today’s rapid-paced business environment is forcing companies to find new ways to respond to an increasingly dynamic marketplace. Forward-thinking enterprises are finding new ways to increase competitive advantage by better leveraging their information to enable faster response to new opportunities while coping with the difficulties of managing the globalization of the enterprise.
The global economy is becoming increasingly defined by the flow of information, and this information-centric economy rewards companies that can harness information assets to deliver products with speed and efficiency. These companies are working to improve collaboration between information workers as a way to distribute and share the knowledge of the enterprise more effectively.
Systems that enable collaboration improve "people efficiency" by providing one common location to create, access and store information. Increasingly, business teams are using collaboration technologies to share files, ideas and messages.
The New Challenge
The implementation and rapid adoption of collaboration technologies is creating a burden for IT, which is frequently caught in the middle between two sets of requirements. On one hand, business process owners want management control, security and predictability; on the other hand, project teams want speed, flexibility and accessibility. It is essential for dispersed teams to be productive while working within corporate information governance parameters. In every situation, it is in the best interests of the company to be able to leverage project results by being able to locate information.
IT also faces the challenge of integrating rapidly proliferating collaboration sites into the complex corporate infrastructure. The proliferation of data sources and need to empower people with real-time information becomes more complex as collaboration sites distribute corporate assets more broadly and with less control.
As information is created and stored in separate systems, the information becomes increasingly more difficult to retrieve. If a set of terms is not established and maintained to ensure that information is described consistently, enterprises will be unable to utilize content effectively across a distributed workforce. This same problem makes it impossible for enterprises to govern and audit information consistently.
This broad distribution of "unstructured" information is also a challenge for enterprises working to achieve compliance standards, maintain corporate security and meet industry regulations.
The Solution
Enterprises have tried to respond to this challenge by developing corporate standards for the terms, or semantics, that describe content and information. However, these corporate standards are difficult to enforce in a dynamic collaboration environment because standards are slow moving, do not scale and are typically focused on technical, rather than business, users.
Business semantics management (BSM) solves this problem by allowing enterprises to describe information consistently so it can be organized and easily located when it’s needed. BSM enables enterprises to describe the relationships between the terms to provide context, again, making the "right" information easier to find. The semantics "model" is published to existing information management systems so up-to-date information can be categorized and ultimately retrieved when it is needed. As a result, employees access the most complete, relevant information for any given subject. This enterprisewide semantics model increases flexibility, enables real time response and allows all participants in the collaboration environment to easily classify or tag information quickly and consistently.
Knowledge workers across an enterprise benefit from improved access to enterprise content and information. BSM enables enterprises to model the relationships of enterprise content, publish these models to content management and collaboration systems and instigate governance and change management to the model. Once BSM is deployed across the enterprise, participants continue to develop and enrich the model as change occurs in the organization in real time.
Improved Access with BSM
Companies that use collaboration tools effectively to leverage the value of information can achieve significant competitive advantage. By using BSM to improve access to the information that results from these collaborations, companies can build new products faster, provide better service for their customers, identify and respond quickly to new market trends and operate more efficiently.
Business semantics management solutions allow enterprises to access information with greater accuracy and efficiency. By focusing on improving the consistency and accuracy of the words used to describe corporate information assets, business semantics management solves a key business issue prevalent in enterprises today.
The SchemaLogic Solution
SchemaLogic provides software to enable companies to build a scalable BSM system across the enterprise. The SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite facilitates dynamic changes to the business semantics model through a Web-based governance and collaboration process that enables participation across organizational, corporate and industry boundaries, and facilitates the development of business semantics in a constantly changing environment.
SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite allows organizations to deploy new business models by accelerating information access and delivery, helping customers reduce operational costs through better information management, increase collaboration and data quality and make more agile, intelligent business decisions.
For more information, or to read about enterprise customer implementations, please visit
www.schemalogic.com.