Search Engine Designers need to look at how to harvest expert knowledge in your organization, how to balance access and exposure as well as search with security, and more.

Making search engines work

What features should your intranets search engine offer users? What are users expectations? How easy is it for employees to formulate their query and get results that help them? Learn how to effectively lay out and position search results for your users. Are your employees finding what they need? Learn how to make the backend indexer and search engine work with your data. Find out how to use your search logs to improve your intranet.

Taxonomies, Lexicons, & Organizing Knowledge

We have processes and can utilize an abundance of tools necessary for taxonomy creation –from defining meaningful categories to using automatic document clustering techniques. We know how to build a carefully crafted content map to enhance the users search experience and to uncover hidden themes in existing corporate data. We can provide real time taxonomy examples from our experience in the software industry.

How to Balance search with security

Imagine this scenario: you’re looking for research by a co-worker, so you type the name into the company intranet and you find the research along with your colleague’s salary information. This situation illustrates the balancing act enterprises must maintain: providing increased access to company information online while simultaneously ensuring that sensitive information remains secure. This session offers insight on how to strike a balance between implementing a comprehensive search solution that can retrieve data throughout the network while keeping data integrity intact.

Rationalizing multiple portals and their Taxonomies

When planning enterprise portal implementations, organizations must wrestle with the issue of whether and how to support multiple portals. In a multiple portal environment, individual’s portals might serve the needs of specific organizations (a subsidiary or business unit), franchises (a specific product or product line), or functions (accounting, IT, sales). A multiple solution is clearly powerful and flexible, but it also poses significant challenges. Can a nested, multiportal structure be presented in a simple and coherent way to it’s users? How is the “enterprise portal” represented within this environment? How does navigation work, and where does the enterprises taxonomy fit in? We can provide guidelines on how to rationalize multiple portals and their taxonomies, and illustrate with real-world examples.

-------------Our Model--------------

Strategy and Assessment

The Strategy and Assessment phase is the first step in the process of delivering Enterprise Search and Information Retrieval Solutions. KM Equity works with project business owners to determine the solution and implementation strategy that will best meet the business objectives of the project while working within the project?s technical and organizational constraints. From this effort KM Equity:
• Develops the project?s ?Governing Strategies?
• Develops solution-specific architectures, recommendations, and plans
• Defines design direction, project scope, and implementation plans

Design and Development

The composition of the Design and Development phase varies depending on the needs of the project. For most enterprise scale projects, this phase consists of four parallel design and development workstreams: User Experience, Ontology and Relevancy, Technology and Integration, and Quality Assurance. The activities conducted will vary by project and will be determined during the Strategy and Assessment phase.

KM Equity places a strong emphasis on the Quality Assurance workstream. For Information Retrieval projects, measuring the quality of a deliverable means more than ensuring that functionality is implemented as specified and that technical requirements are met. We understand that the system must also provide results that are accurate, have a high degree of perceived relevance, and support the organization’s business rules.

Integration and Transition

While the four workstreams of the Design and Development phase are interrelated, the Integration and Transition phase ensures that all activities come together into a cohesive deliverable that is integrated with the production environment and is user tested as a complete solution.

KM Equity places a high degree of importance on the Quality Assurance and Transition phase. For information retrieval projects, measuring the quality of a deliverable means more than ensuring that functionality is implemented as specified and that technical requirements are met. We understand that the system must also provide results that are accurate and have a high degree of perceived relevance while supporting the organization?s business rules.

This phase also ensures that the proper maintenance routines are in place, and that the organization is ready to take over ownership of the solution. As an Information Retrieval solution is a "living" entity, it must be monitored and maintained, and be able to adapt to the changing information models and structures of a dynamic organization.

Analytics and Recommendation

KM Equity believes that the project does not end when the solution goes live. KM Equity has developed an analytics and recommendation service that monitors the business and technical performance of the system after deployment, and provides actionable lists of improvements and modifications based on the unique business needs of the organization.

Support and Management

During the Integration and Transition Phase, KM Equity trains members of your team to provide ongoing support and management of the solution. KM Equity also provides outsourced Support and Management services to monitor the business and technical performance of a system, manage taxonomies, perform system tuning, and oversee general system maintenance.