Integrated Enterprise Search: Agricultural Innovator Empowers Employees and Cuts Costs
Decision-makers in Monsanto’s IT department saw the value of the enterprise search capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 deeply intertwined with
its other communication and knowledge management features. This matched the company’s long-term IT strategies.
“Microsoft’s advantage was that its strategy with Office SharePoint Server 2007 fits our strategy for the Information Workplace Project, like our plans to deploy the 2007 Microsoft Office system as part of our collaborative desktop,” says Clark. “I can’t see the 2007 release of Microsoft Office in the enterprise without Office SharePoint Server 2007. It’s a natural extension that delivers business value as a complete platform for information management.”
Building the Search Solution
Monsanto quickly got up to speed on the new technology. The team converted its public-facing Web site in the United Kingdom as a proof of concept project. David Brawley, software architect, wrote a small Web service that acts as an interface between any of Monsanto’s websites or applications and the Office SharePoint Server 2007 search engine. “That’s one of the reasons we really liked working in this development environment,” he says. “We created a mechanism for any Monsanto HTML developer to deploy the search engine anywhere to any domain that we serve, and present a seamless experience to the user. Compared to the previous inflexible tool, this makes it easy to extend the benefits of search throughout the enterprise.”
“We planned for the conversion of monsanto.com to take one to two days, but it was completed in 45 minutes,” says Trent Overton, information workplace, portals and collaboration technical lead. “This allowed us to easily convert the rest of our sites before deadline.”
Benefits
Monsanto has already seen significant benefits from its new deployment. Avoiding the renewal deadline has saved the company approximately $250,000 in licensing expense and eliminated the possibilities of any further expensive support costs generated by the previous solution. However, replacing an outdated and inflexible search engine with one that provides better results at lower costs are only the initial benefits, according to Clark. Monsanto acquired a better search engine to answer its immediate needs but, more importantly, it gained an extensible information management solution for enterprise content management that would also improve business insight, increase collaboration and empower its IT department to make a strategic impact on corporate goals.
“Monsanto’s investment helped achieve immediate business results. We are already seeing a search engine that’s returning more relevant and accurate results,” says Clark.
Finding Resources and Sharing Knowledge
Previously, the idea of enterprise search remained unattainable at the level of IT resources Monsanto was able to provide. Because the new search engine enables access to both structured and unstructured information, it opens the way for Monsanto to provide enterprisewide access to documents, application data, email, lists and a host of other unstructured data sources.
“We wanted to go beyond Web crawling to searching business databases,” adds Arter. “Now we can unlock the information in our SAP solution and better leverage the data there to further reap the benefits from our SAP investment.”
However, it’s the ability to connect people with each other that has Clark the most excited. “The opportunities to search for people and subject-matter experts are huge, given our globally dispersed workforce,” says Clark. “We have been getting calls from all over the world, asking when we can start.”
Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables Monsanto IT staffers to answer the needs of the enterprise by providing a rich, efficient developer environment that staffers can use to deliver on the goals of the Information Workplace Program. At the same time, the deployment requires less effort for Monsanto IT staff to manage and administer than its predecessor. Today, with improved analysis tools, it’s possible to analyze the nature and frequency of searches on different sites to fine tune indices for optimal results. IT staffers can work on requests from the field, like integrating a large seed catalog into the search engine on one of its main Internet sites.
“For the first time, we can take real steps to connect people with each other and with the information they need to improve individual and team productivity,” says Clark. “We had deployed a lot of different technology for teams and people and it was a challenge to integrate them to provide a single gateway to corporate knowledge and resources. Now we can do it all within one, easy-to-use interface, within the framework of one complete architecture. Ultimately, that allows the IT organization to be more responsive to new business needs at less cost to the company.”
Streamlining Processes, Improving Business Insight
Monsanto IT staffers are also looking forward to fulfilling corporate goals to improve workflow applications, routing for approvals and other paper-based business processes by taking advantage of the integration between Office SharePoint Server 2007, and the 2007 Office system core programs their workers are already familiar with.
“The bottom line is now that we have a search engine that works, we know that our employees will have better access to reliable information to improve business decisions,” concludes Clark. “A year ago, we did some initial brainstorming around bringing the Information Workplace Project to life. We never thought we’d find the tools we picked from that session in one integrated solution.”
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