Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?
April 24, 2007: While Internet search targets the conduit between consumers and products online, the battle for the enterprise is different – linking users with information to help facilitate business.
Queensland based niche business intelligence and corporate performance management consultancy, Catapult BI recently deployed an ISYS desktop search platform for its 30 staff. It’s only a small company, as Richard Green points out, but like most businesses, he wanted his staff to be able to find what they’re looking for.
He particularly likes the ability for his staff to see the relationships between documents, helping with identifying older prospects and pulling together a more complete picture. The ROI, says Green, is the time spent on finding information and ensuring a more complete view of corporate content.
“We have a lot of documents - customer documents, proposals, tenders, email - and just trying to find the bits and pieces you need is often very difficult. We have a fairly large email base. If something occurs where you need to find information from 12 months ago and need to find documents, recall the situation and also that customer whose name you forgot about, you need something to help you find that fast.”
Green values the software’s ability to deliver names of related parties to an individual search which prompts users to look at more information than just the single document. “It gives you ideas to look through,” says Green.
Though declining to mention which vendors, he says he looked at some big brand enterprise search solutions, but found that indexing slowed his PC down and didn’t deliver the results he knew existed in his folders.
On the structured content side, most major BI vendors are now including search capabilities in their offerings but according to Green these offerings still need more maturing before they become effective.