IT Pro recently featured an article on enterprise search that brings some welcome clarity to an otherwise often muddied topic. Entitled “Why enterprise search is not internet search“, the article points to distinctions that we’ve been talking about for a while: namely, that the requirements for search within an enterprise are very different than the needs of a user searching the Internet. (For a couple additional reports on the topic, check out “The Google Bamboozle,” an article we penned in iMediaConnection.com a few months ago, or “A Fork in the Road: Why Enterprise and Web Search are Going Their Separate Ways“, which was published recently on DMReview.com.)
The article leads with a common question:
“…Google is where most of us turn when we need to find something on the web. Wouldn’t it make sense to use the same techniques to make it easier to find information within the enterprise?”
Given the broad usage of Google today, if that were the case, enterprises would today find themselves much better off when it comes to serving employees’ knowledge needs. But the article goes on to feature the following stats, which demonstrate that’s clearly not the case:
“Depending on which survey you look at, businesses waste the equivalent of 10 per cent of salary costs (says the Butler Group) or information workers waste around three to four hours a week – a total of five weeks a year - because they don’t find the information they’re looking for a third to a half of the time (IDC and HP).”
These stats point to a fact that knowledge management folks have been clear on for some time: For all its benefits and ubiquity, Google can’t address an enterprise’s need to equip users with fast, easy access to corporate resources. To give just one practical example, when a customer agent requires quick access to solutions that help a customer address an issue, that information needs to be available immediately—and a Web search tool won’t cut it. Plus, search is just one important piece of the knowledge management ecosystem, which requires capabilities for developing, collaborating, and delivering corporate knowledge.
While this may be common knowledge to many, a lot of confusion around search remains. For many, “Google” has become synonymous with “search”, but it is clear there are a whole host of uses, audiences, technologies, and purposes within this broad category. It’s nice to see IT Pro shedding some light on the topic, which will hopefully help foster more productive discussions around search in the enterprise.
To read the full article, which also includes a quote from InQuira customer Serena Software, here’s the url:
When Serena asked its customers “how can we improve the support experience?”, what they discovered was somewhat surprising. Instead of focusing on call hold times or support rep performance, customers expressed the need for a better online experience - one where searching for information was easy and the information received was accurate, up-to-date and consistent with what they would receive from a support rep.
In this customer testimonial, Peter Sianchuk, VP of Worldwide Customer Service at Serena, discusses how InQuira’s solutions have allowed Serena to deflect 18% of support calls and improve call resolution speed by 35% - by simply improving the way support reps and customers access the right information at the right time.
To keep up with the latest trends in customer service, collaboration and search tools, I am always scouring the Web to soak up as much information as I can. In no particular order, here are just some of the blogs that I read on a regular basis – the list is a combination of knowledge management, customer service, collaboration, search, and CRM sites, because the nature of our business means we need to stay on top all these issues. This is only some of the great information that is available from some of the smartest people who are working in the trenches every day. Let me know what sites you read to stay informed and I will add it to my growing list!
1. KM Edge: The American Productivity & Quality Center’s (APQC) Knowledge Management blog- Carla O’Dell and Lauren Trees and some insightful commentary to news and trends.
2. John Ragsdale’s Eye on Service: VP of of Technology Research at Service and Support Professionals Assocation (SSPA), the Association for Services Management International (AFSMI), and the Technical Professional Services Association (TPSA), shares information, news and analysis on the latest technologies intended to improve customer service.
3. Content Management Connection:George Dearing’s blog combines insight from content management experts with an emphasis on collaboration tools. The blog touches on content management through various aspects including customer service, Wikis, social networks, search engines, and Web services.
4. Bill Ives’ Blog: Bill Ives’ blog discussing practical applications of portals, blogs, and knowledge management.
5. Enterprise Search Practice Blog: This blog hosted by The Gilbane Group offers analysis and the latest news on enterprise search technologies and implementations
Given the recent noise and consolidation in the world of semantic or natural language search, I was recently asked by a journalist if NLP would take over the consumer web. My response? The enormous potential of natural language search on the web is matched by the enormous difficulty of pulling it off successfully. The combination of the sheer scope of information on the web, the wide variety of contexts and concepts and different intentions of use makes this extremely complex. Humans have an extraordinary facility with learning, inference and language. Just watching a toddler acquire and use words to great effect is proof. In fact, language is so easy for humans that we sometimes assume that it therefore can’t be terribly hard for computers to master.If nothing else, the long history of natural language processing has demonstrated just how hard this problem is.Natural language search across the entire web implies that a system will have a human-like language ability corresponding to every available subject, and that’s an extremely tall order. Will it happen someday? Probably. But HAL-like capabilities certainly didn’t happen by 2001, and if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they probably won’t happen by 2101 either.
Enterprise search, on the other hand, is a perfect playground for incorporating natural language processing.
1)In the context of an enterprise website or intranet, there is a much smaller set of intended actions than you get on google.com.For example, visitors to a banking website generally want to complete one of about 20 different transactions.If we can understand very thoroughly how those users ask to complete those transactions, then we’ve carved out a large and useful chunk of natural language understanding, which can make a real difference in how easy the banking site is to use.
2)On an enterprise site, there is a specific industry vocabulary used.A banking site doesn’t have to worry about recognizing names of US presidents or hybrid minivans.If we invest in understanding the specific vocabulary that is used in the context of an enterprise-specific search, we have taken another step forward in making natural language processing genuinely applicable across that particular industry vertical.
3)For a search engine that works across the entire web, the relationship between search and content is more or less antagonistic.People make web pages that bully their way to the top of the search results by employing a whole grab-bag of tricks, one of which is not a content-quality filter. With enterprise search, on the other hand, the people who make the content are on our side. They want the right content to be shown in the right context, to the right user. They understand what the content is trying to say, and they are willing to revise content or write more if that turns out to be useful.A virtuous cycle that includes automated analysis of content needs as expressed through search queries, which in turn triggers a workflow process for content changes, is a big advance, and one whose effects we will be witnessing in the next several years.
Seriously, NLP is about to have its day in the sun, and we expect it to be a long day at that.
Any company operating in this information economy can benefit from natural language search solutions. Think about it. Knowledge workers today are confronted with a proliferation of information (which at least one firm believes contributes to a $650B drag on the economy), and it just gets worse with every new day. At the same time, it has become harder for the worker to find and apply the critical knowledge they need to do their jobs. Numerous studies show the average knowledge worker spends at least 15% of their time searching for the knowledge they need to be productive. Why? Because that critical enterprise knowledge tends to exist in unstructured form that makes it hard to harvest without technologies like natural language search solutions that can understand the intent behind the worker’s search, and indexes the searchable information sources for their actual meaning. Keyword-based search tools often fail in an enterprise environment because the searchable content is not nearly as disparate as you might find on the Web. With higher keyword frequency and density, keyword-based searches return results lists that are too long to be meaningful.
Natural language search on its own, though, will not be the panacea to increasing productivity. Search is only as valuable as the content it searches. Companies that have had the greatest success with natural language search solutions recognize that search informs content strategy, and an integrated analytics mechanism is needed to determine if the search technology and content management tool are working in concert to deliver the expected value to the knowledge worker. We have customers that apply natural language search to applications for web self-help, call center support and internal knowledge management. Companies like Serena Software and Mentor Graphics radically changed their service models on the back of InQuira’s platform to emphasize a changing customer profile. The integrated platform allows us to build applications for a wide range of business needs. The Ministry of Defence in the UK deployed InQuira’s natural language search and knowledge management solution to the agents staffing its HR call centers.
