Knowledge is Power Best Practices in Semantics Management
With semantics-as-a-service, organizations can:
- Build a common framework to facilitate collaboration and governance for all uses across the enterprise;
- Control the power of business lexicon/ information;
- Unlock the corporate assets of brands, products, services, human capital and know-how for competitive advantage; u Leverage communities of participation to make intelligent business decisions based on improved data quality, collaboration and business agility; and
- Manage the corporate memory of business decisions for compliance.
IBM: Managing Human Resources
IBM is well known for its worldwide team of 190,000 employees spread throughout more than 160 countries. As one of the world's largest organizations, IBM is also one of the richest sources of data and human capital. With thousands of employees spread across scores of countries, the ability to connect the company's human resources with the specific and relevant job listing data is vital to helping IBM and its service contract outsourcing operate more efficiently.
With no easy way to catalog employees and sort them into a glossary of technical skills for easy access, project managers had a difficult time finding the required obscure or unique skills within IBM's talent pool, and as a result, IBM recognized an over-reliance on contractors, which were creating margin problems for service contract budgets. The company initiated a worldwide collaboration effort for its enterprise taxonomy in which the semantics that describe employees' skills, roles and categories are described in a corporate-wide semantics model. The resulting expertise taxonomy is published to IBM's corporate expertise portal to enable organizations across IBM to locate and manage corporate expertise as an efficient and dynamic process.
As a result of initiating this effort to better manage the information about its consultants and employees, IBM was able to reduce its dependence on outside contractors by 7%. The company now has worldwide collaborative management for its global enterprise taxonomy, making it easier to find the right person or skill set for specific assignments. The company also increased the utilization rate for consultants, and improved the profitability of service engagements. IBM's Opportunity Marketplace, a Web-based service, which employs the enterprise taxonomy and features a searchable database of its global talent pool, saves IBM an estimated $680,000 a year.
Kellysearch: Managing Search
While IBM focused on using business semantics management to manage its collective knowledge about its human resources, Kellysearch, the largest business-to-business (B2B) search portal in Europe, was faced with a growing taxonomy that its infrastructure could not adequately manage.
The company's growing taxonomy included more than 200,000 phrases and 400,000 sub-phrases that were attached to more than 2 million businesses. Unfortunately, the company's current infrastructure and manual taxonomy processes were not capable of scaling to manage the growing amounts of data, which resulted in an increase in time-to-market for developing and publishing advertiser information to the Web.
Kellysearch, a division of Reed Elsevier, needed a knowledge management solution that could drive queue time down and improve the speed and quality of search results in order to increase market share and the revenue stream of its online model. Kellysearch turned to the semantics-as-a-service model to link search with content to drive revenues and move the classical advertising print business to the paid search market on the Internet. Kellysearch now has the capability to establish and build corporate semantics by initially harvesting data from Kellysearch's multiple company and product listings. The information is then rationalized so that it is established, evolved and distributed across Kellysearch. The variances in naming terminology among companies are quickly resolved to a common set of terminology, making it easier to match global B2B queries for specific goods and services. By implementing a business semantics solution, embedded knowledge is monetized via an improved search and ad-revenue model.
Kellysearch now has the ability to quickly expand internationally to accelerate revenue; business processes have been streamlined and content contributors empowered; and enhanced search results have increased the quantity and quality of leads to paid advertisers.
In both the IBM and Kellysearch examples, information that has typically been difficult to manage or out of reach, is now available to everyone, driven by semantics-as-a-service. Delivered through an SOA framework, semantics-as-a-service provides organizations with the flexibility and scalability to meet the demands of their growing businesses, manage the contributions from all areas of the enterprise and increase the speed of change.
Knowledge can be a variety of things to different companies. For some, it's the magic sauce or company trade secrets; for others it is the intellectual property found in approved patents. Today's enterprises need a common semantics model to manage information across the enterprise. Semantics-as-a-service is emerging as a business-critical application, and for companies like IBM and Kellysearch, has become a mission-critical application for their services-oriented architectures.
More than 400 years from its origin, the phrase "knowledge is power" couldn't be truer. The ability to unlock the corporate assets of human capital and products for competitive advantage; to make business decisions based on improved data quality, collaboration and agility; and to better manage information and knowledge for the benefit of the entire enterprise is true power.
SchemaLogic is a leading provider of business semantics management (BSM) solutions. BSM provides a framework that enables companies to model the structures and relationships of business semantics that define corporate knowledge and content. SchemaLogic facilitates dynamic changes to the business semantic models through a Web-based governance and collaboration process that enables participation across organizational, corporate and industry boundaries.
SchemaLogic enables enterprises to increase competitive advantage and reduce operational costs through better information management, increased data quality and more agile, intelligent business decisions. SchemaLogic has licensed its solution to some of the best known and largest companies in the world.
For more information about SchemaLogic, call 425-885-9695 or visit www.schemalogic.com
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