Jump-Starting Collaboration with Social Search
Social search provides a ready-made platform to serve as a collaboration vehicle for these market analysts as well as a self-service information portal for the rest of the organization. The working homepage of the search interface for competitive intelligence workers can include the most recently indexed blog, newswire and reports published on a list of competitors and hot topics. Each analyst can have a set of virtual folders to drop new search results into for current or ongoing projects. Team folders can be set up for multi-analyst collaboration or to disperse information to company executives. General interest information can be placed into company-wide folders.
Social tagging capabilities give these teams new, faster ways to communicate with one another on time-sensitive projects. For example, when reviewing published reports regarding potential acquisition targets, analysts can provide snapshot summaries by annotating the search result for each report, making the review process by business development much quicker. In addition, each report can be privately tagged with the project code name, making it easy to later find all documents associated with that project.
Research and development. To thrive in an increasingly competitive environment, R&D must rely on collaboration to drive innovation. Achieving the required level of collaboration can be difficult, though, as researchers are often located across the globe. The technology required to enable true collaboration across all available information sources has not been available—until the advent of social search.
By annotating results from a search query, a researcher in the United States can begin a virtual conversation with a colleague in Germany. That two-way conversation can expand as other workers from around the world add their commentary. Suddenly a whole new product direction or feature is born—all from a simple search.
Social search can also help organizations leverage their internal social networks by pointing users to experts in their own organizations. By tracking the documents a worker tags or adds comments to, the social search platform can identify subject matter authorities in the field.
Take the example of an engineer working for an automaker. The engineer marks several search results with a "fuel efficiency" tag for easy identification. The search platform records each tag the engineer has made, so when a colleague performs a search for fuel efficiency, the first engineer is identified as a fuel efficiency expert via an enterprise mash-up that displays his profile and contact information.
The searcher can access other files the engineer has tagged or contact the engineer directly. The two can then collaborate either in real time or virtually to add value to their organization.
In both examples, the social search-inspired collaboration and innovation comes not from management or technology, but by an organization’s most valuable resource—its workers.
Human resources. Search can provide real value in administrative departments, such as human resources, as well.
Regardless of an organization’s size, one of the most grueling tasks for any HR department is sifting through resumes to find the most qualified applicants to fill open positions. Frustration typically exists between recruiters sending resumes for review to business managers, only to hear constant rejection. Recruiters continue their search sifting through new and old resumes, but struggle to remember why candidates have been rejected in the past or to find candidates who meet all requirements of an open position.
An innovative solution to promote collaboration and foster better communication throughout the entire hiring process is to enable users to tag and annotate resumes. As resumes come into HR, recruiters can rate and tag each resume describing key characteristics. Now instead of filing applicants into a single category, a resume can have multiple tags to search against in the future. And as additional recruiters review applicants, they can augment the tags and adjust ratings as needed.
As resumes become ready to share, recruiters can bookmark the resumes within the search interface for review and assign them to the appropriate hiring manager. Hiring managers can then annotate these results, posting questions to ask in follow-up calls or explaining why an applicant has been rejected. The advantage of such collaboration techniques is that all the annotations and tags can be used in the future. The next time a recruiter does a search, they will be able to see past hiring manager comments and quickly determine if there is value in sending it out for a different position. A rejected candidate for one position might be appropriate for another with slightly different requirements. Ultimately, this speeds up the hiring process and helps ensure qualified applicants don’t get overlooked.
The Best of Web 2.0
By taking the best ideas from Web 2.0-based concepts, such as social tagging, social bookmarking and networking, and marrying them with the power of business search, social search gives enterprises the ability to tap into and make use of the vast amount of human knowledge within their own organizations. As the examples above show, social search provides the means to go beyond just finding information to actually freeing it from the confines of applications, allowing organizations to increase collaboration and accelerate innovation—all while gaining valuable insight into the collective intelligence of the organization.
Vivísimo does search right by combining the simplicity and innovation of consumer search with the flexibility and control of enterprise software. The company works with customers to understand their goals and quickly deploy solutions that maximize the business value of information—with an interface users love. Vivísimo serves its global client base through headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA, and Paris, France, and partners throughout the world. Please visit
www.vivisimo.com to learn more about us.