Archive for the ‘Intranet’ Category

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Caroline Abrahamsson

Search and content quality – ways of improving your intranet

March 28 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

If you have 6 minutes to spare I would recommend you to watch this interview with Gabriel Olsson from Tetra Pak. During the last years Tetra Pak has been working strategically with turning their intranet into something true end user-centric.

By actually asking the employees what they expect to find and what sort of information that would make their everyday work (tasks) more efficient, Tetra Pak has managed to create a navigation structure based on facts reflecting these needs. The method used is Gerry McGovern’s Task based Customer Carewords.
..and the result?
The ones that scream the loudest are not the most important – the need of the employees is.

Gabriel is also talking about the importance of following up on search by key matches and synonyms.
This, together with content quality initiatives, helps create a solid foundation for search, the simple reasons being:

Use metadata to filter search results (note, not a Tetra Pak picture)

  • If the quality of the information is good (clear headings, good metadata, frequent keywords), the information found through search will be good as well. If you have a lot of old content and duplicates this will be just as visible, making it hard for the users to determinate what is qualitative and trustworthy.Good quality will also make it possible to group and categorize information.
  • Synonyms makes it easy to adjust the corporate language to the one used by the employees. Let people search for “report” when they want to find a “bulletin”. A simple synonym list, based on search statistics will make users find what they want, without thinking about how to phrase the query.The synonyms can used in the background (without the users knowledge) or as ‘did you mean-suggestions’:

    Synonyms used for 'Did you mean" functionality (note, not a Tetra Pak picture)

  • Key matches (also referred to as sponsored links, best bets or editor’s pick) are used to manually force the first hit in the search result list to refer to a specific page or document. By following up on search statistics and knowing what sort of information that is frequently most asked for, it is easy to adjust the search result list. However, this take  time and effort to follow up.

Tetra Pak is not alone when it comes to adjusting their intranets to true end-user needs. During the spring there will be a number of conferences where our customers will be sharing experiences from their initiatives. Among others Ability Partner, and the recently completed IntraTeam.

Apart from this, our own breakfast seminaries is a, as always, announced on our homepage and on twitter.
Looking forward to seeing you!

Björn Klockljung Johansson

Search and accessability

March 19 - 2010 | Björn Klockljung Johansson

Västra Götalands regionen has introduced a new search solution that Findwise created together with Netrelations. We have also blogged about it earlier (see How to create better search – VGR leads the way). One important part of the creation of this solution was to create an interface that is accessible to everyone.

Today the web offers access to information and interaction for people around the world. But many sites today have barriers that make it difficult, and sometimes even impossible for people with different disabilities to navigate and interact with the site. It is important to design for accessibility  – so that no one is excluded because of their disabilities.

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact and contribute to the Web. But web accessibility is not only for people that use screen readers, as is often portrayed. It is also for people with just poor eyesight who need to increase the text size or for people with cognitive disabilities (or sometimes even for those without disabilities). Web accessibility can benefit people without disabilities, such as when using a slow Internet connection, using a mobile phone to access the web or when someone is having a broken arm. Even such a thing as using a web browser without javascript because of company policy can be a disability on the web and should be considered when designing websites.

So how do you build accessible websites?
One of the easiest things is to make sure that the xhtml validates. This means that the code is correct, adheres to the latest standard from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and that the code is semantically correct i.e. that the different parts of the website use the correct html ”tags” and in the correct context. For example that the most important heading of a page is marked up with ”h1” and that the second most important is ”h2” (among other things important when making websites accessible for people using screen readers).

It is also important that a site can easily be navigated only by keyboard, so that people who cannot use a mouse still can access the site. Here it is important to test in which order the different elements of the web page is selected when using the keyboard to navigate through the page. One thing that is often overlooked is that a site often is inaccessible for people with cognitive disabilities because the site contains content that uses complex words, sentences or structure. By making content less complex and more structured it  will be readable for everyone.

Examples from VGR
In the search application at VGR elements in the interface that use java script will only be shown if the user has a browser with java script enabled. This will remove any situations where elements do not do anything because java script is turned off. The interface will still be usable, but you will not get all functionality. The VGR search solution also works well with only the keyboard, and there is a handy link that takes the user directly to the results. This way the user can skip unwanted information and navigation.

How is accessibility related to findability?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/4274260576/in/set-72157623208480316/


Accessibility is important for findability because it is about making search solutions accessible and usable for everyone. The need to find information is not less important if you are blind,  if you have a broken arm or if you have dyslexia. If you cannot use a search interface you cannot find the information you need. And “what you find changes who you become” -Peter Morville

In his book Search Patterns Peter Morville visualizes this in the ”user experience honeycomb”. As can been seen in the picture accessibility is as much a part of the user experience as usability or findability is and a search solution will be less usable without any of them.

Andreas Franzon

Search Driven Portals – Personalizing Search

March 2 - 2010 | Andreas Franzon

To stay in the front edge within search technology, Findwise has a focus on research, both in the form of larger research projects and with different thesis projects. Mohammad Shadab and I just finished our thesis work at Findwise, where we have explored an idea of search user interfaces which we call search driven portals. User interfaces are mostly based on analysis of a smaller audience but the final interface is then put in production which targets a much wider range of users. The solution is in many cases static and cannot easily be changed or adapted. With Search driven portals, which is a portlet based UI, the users or administrators can adapt the interface specially designed to fulfill the need for different groups. Developers design and develop several searchlets (portlets powered by search technology), where every searchlet provides a specific functionality such as faceted search, results list, related information etc. Users can then choose to add the searchlets with functionality that suits them into their page on a preferred location. From architectural perspective, searchlets are standalone components independent from each other and are also easy to reuse.

Such functionality includes faceted search which serves as filters to narrow a search. These facets might need to be different based on what kind of role, department or background users have. Developers can create a set of facets and let the users choose the ones that satisfy their needs. Search driven portals is a great tool to make sure that sites don’t get flooded with information as new functionalities are developed. If a new need evolves, or if the provider comes with new ideas, the functionality is put into new searchlets which are deployed into the searchlet library. The administrator can broadcast new functionality to users by putting new searchlets on the master page, which affects every user’s own site. However, the users can still adjust new changes by removing the new functionality provided.

Search driven portals opens new ways of working, both in developer and usage perspective. It is one step away from the one size fits all concept, which many sites is supposed to fulfill. Providers such as Findwise can build a large component library which can be customized into packages for different customers. With help of the searchlet library, web administrators can set up designs for different groups, project managers can set up a project adjusted layout and employees can adjust their site after their own requirements. With search-driven portals, a wider range of users needs can more easily be covered.

Caroline Abrahamsson

How to create better search – VGR leads the way

January 11 - 2010 | Caroline Abrahamsson

I realise we are a bit late. Fredrik Wackå, a senior IT-strategist, has already written an excellent article on his blog (in Swedish). He has, among other things, been interviewing Kristian Norling (at Twitter), who has been working with portal strategies and search for many years at Västra Götalands regionen.
Although, for all our non-Swedish speaking guests here is a short summary:

Findwise has during the last few months been working on a new search solution for Västra Götalands regionen.  The two main goals have been to deliver a search experience that seems both fast and accurate.
The result?
Today making a search at VGR takes about 0,1-0,2 seconds, faster than a Google search on the web.

Furthermore, there was a need for context. Large amount of information requires ways to filter and sort – otherwise the users will drown in the result list.
By giving the end-users the ability to sort the search result the users can look for general information within an area as well as quickly narrow down to a specific piece (for example by two clicks be able to see only the PDF-files created in 2009). The filters (and thereby metadata standard) includes:

• Information type
• Where the document resides
• Where it belongs in the organization
• What source it has
• When it was last changed
• Who has written it
• What format it resides in
• Keywords that has been created

VGR

VGR

The search solution also includes a metadata service. As so many others VGR has been struggling with getting the metadata in place.
Apart from the metadata supported by the system (where Dublin Core is being used) the metadata service is doing two things:
• Analyses the content in the text, compares it to taxonomy and gives the writer suggestions of keywords that he/she can use
• Gives the writer the ability to add additional keywords

Apart from this the end-users will be able to add etiquettes (tags). These will be compared with two lists. If the tags appears in the “white list” it will be published right away, if they are in the “blacklist” they will be deleted. Anything inbetween are controlled before they are published.

To conclude: a lot of effort has been put into creating a good search experience and VGR continues to deliver functionality and solutions that are light-years ahead of many others. The combination of supporting systems and using the “collected intelligence” of the writers and end-users will make it even better over time.
Search is about both supporting systems, content and people.

Read more in Fredrik Wackås blog

Caroline Abrahamsson

Do you know something I don’t? The art of benchmarking

December 1 - 2009 | Caroline Abrahamsson

During the autumn we have been trying to keep our customers and others up to date with the search world by hosting breakfast seminars.
By sharing experiences and discussing with others the participants have taken giant leaps in understanding what search can deliver in true value.
The same goes for sharing experiences between companies, where you often find yourself struggling with the same problems, regardless of business or company size.

We have been discussing how Enterprise search can help intranets, extranets, external sites and support centers to capitalize on their knowledge.
Some of the things that have been discussed:

…Business Cases:
How can search help companies save 100 million SEK/year?
How do you count return on investment (ROI) for search?

…Search functionality:
How and why should you work with:
Key Matches to promote certain content (similar to Google’s sponsored links on the web)
Synonyms (to make sure that the end-users language corresponds to the corporate without having to change the information)
Query completion and suggestion to give the user an overview of what other people have been searching for when they start to type (similar to Apples web site search).

…End-user experience
How can different interfaces serve different information needs and user-groups?
How does your user interface serve your end-users?

…Information Quality
Do taxonomies and folksonomies help us find information faster?
Can search be used to improve the quality of your content?

During the spring we will continue to hold seminars, keeping you up-to date. If you’re not on our mailing list, please send us an e-mail and we’ll make sure you will get an invitation.

During Wednesday and Thursday this week we will be attending the Ability conference to discuss search. Hope to see you there!

Henrik Strindberg

Findwise in cooperation with Borås University College receives research grant

November 2 - 2009 | Henrik Strindberg

In recent decades Swedish and Western industry have had to adapt to the new paradigm. Moving from classical production industry organizations towards knowledge companies in which sales of services and knowledge are often bundled with a product – resulting in a complete solution. This change is vital for the survival of the Western world’s economy which previously has been built upon organizations of heavy industrial giants optimizing production processes and factory outputs by reducing overheads and increasing quality.

The threat to the industry from low cost countries, which no longer only compete just on low cost, but also with high quality and competence, forces Western organizations to develop new strategies to sustain their growth and competitive advantage. Cutting margins in order to compete with low cost countries is a downward spiral. Instead changing the model, to be able to provide knowledge and holistic understanding of customers needs and the ability to rapidly deliver a complete solution is now becoming the key competitive advantage. This however requires investment in IT and knowledge exchange tools. By moving away from selling physical products and components to solutions higher margins are possible because more business value is exchanged in the transactions.

The organizations adapting to this change, are identifiable by the fact that they consider knowledge and information as corporate assets – treated and cared for as any other asset. One example is the Swedish company SKF Group whose new vision is the “Knowledge Engineering Company” where the company going through a change from component supplier to a holistic supplier of both products and services.

A key success factor in this transformation from products to solutions is that the supply of knowledge and information to the employees is effective, easy to use and complete. The organization succeeds in providing that extra value, thereby allowing higher margins. Historical key performing indicators (KPIs) such as factory output, reduction of defects and increasing of quality, are dealing with physical production efficiency to ensure as little cost per unit manufactured and as high quality as possible. Individuals are used to measuring these KPIs and provide a way to manage the operational production processes. The turnover and efficiency of information and knowledge exchange lacks these models and measurement tools, thereby not allowing them to be managed. What you can’t measure, you can’t manage, or improve..

One technical solution which has the capabilities to enable complete, rapid and reduced turnover time for knowledge and information exchange, is Enterprise Search. This has been recognized by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, which granted Findwise AB research funds to tackle this problem in cooperation with the College University of Borås in the Strategic Mobility program. The funded project will study the usefulness and value of a well functioning search engine for work-related information use. It will also identify performing indicators for information and knowledge exchange through search and to achieve results that systematically will illustrate the quantitative direct effects together with soft indirect effects.

The project will start early 2010 and run through the entire year. As part of the project, Dr. Katriina Byström will join Findwise and work together with Findwise employees in this joint research project. Findwise customers are invited to participate in the project and will have the availability to influence its direction. For more information contact Henrik Strindberg.

About Dr. Katriina Byström
Dr. Katriina Byström is an associate professor in the Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University College of Borås & Goteborg University, Sweden. She is one of initiators and director of the IA bachelor’s programme at Swedish School of Library and Information Science, and she is a chair for the programme with teaching involvement broadly across the curricula. Furthermore , Katriina is associate editor and co-founder at the Journal of Information Architecture. Katriina’s degree is in information studies, and her research focus on task-based information seeking, information retrieval and information architecture.

Daniel Johansson

Smooth CMS migration through Enterprise Search

May 12 - 2009 | Daniel Johansson

Recently Findwise participated in a successful project for a worldwide customer in the furniture business.

The goal of the project was to migrate from an old Content Management System (CMS) to a new CMS to meet the new demands of the organisation, and at the same time making least possible impact for the end-user throughout the migration process.

With support from Findwise and using the connectivity possibilities of an Enterprise Search Platform , content from both CMS’s could be indexed and searchable concurrently as more and more content got migrated to the new CMS. Also the new navigation structure of the Intranet was introduced step by step and reflected in the Search solution.

The power of Enterprise Search technology have once again been proven to provide an abstraction layer to underlying information sources and support the business, even when the information architecture is changing dramatically.

No Comments   Topics: Intranet

Mickel Gronroos

High Expectations to Googlify the Company

May 3 - 2009 | Mickel Gronroos

It is not a coincidence that the verb “to google” has been added to several renowned dictionaries, such as those from Oxford and Merriam-Webster. Search has been the de facto gateway to the Web for some years now. But when employees turn to Google on the Web to find information about the company they work for, your alarm bells should be ringing. Do you have a Findability problem within the firewall?

The Google Effect on User Expectations

“Give us something like Google or better.” “Compared to Google, our Intranet search is almost unusable.” “Most of the time it is easier to find enterprise information by using Google.”

The citations above come from a study Findwise conducted during 2008-2009 for a customer, who was on the verge of taking the first steps towards a real Enterprise Search application. The old Intranet search tool had become obsolete, providing access to a limited set of information sources only and ranking outdated information over the relevant documents that were in fact available. To put it short, search was causing frustration and lots of it.

However, the executives at this company were wise enough to act on the problem. The goal was set pretty high: Everybody should be able to find the corporate information they need faster and more accurately than before. To accomplish this, an extensive Enterprise Search project was launched.

This is where the contradiction comes into play. Today users are so accustomed to using search as the main gateway to the Web, that the look and feel of Google is often seen as equal to the type of information access solution you need behind the firewall as well. The reasons are obvious; on the Web, Google is fast and it is relevant. But can you—and more importantly should you—without question adopt a solution from the Web within the firewall as well?

Enterprise Search and Web Search are different

  1. Within the firewall, information is stored in various proprietary information systems, databases and applications, on various file shares, in a myriad of formats and with sophisticated security and version control issues to take into account. On the Web, what your web crawler can find is what it indexes.
  2. Within the firewall, you know every single logged in user, the main information access needs she has, the people she knows, the projects she is taking part in and the documents she has written. On the Web, you have less precise knowledge about the context the user is in.
  3. Within the firewall, you have less links and other clear inter-document dependencies that you can use for ranking search results. On the Web, everything is linked together providing an excellent starting point for algorithms such as Google’s PageRank.

Clearly, the settings differ as do user needs. Therefore, the internal search application will be different from a search service on the web; at least if you want it to really work as intended.

Start by Setting up a Findability Strategy

When you know where you are and where you want to be in terms of Findability—i.e. when you have a Findability strategy—you can design and implement your search solution using the search platform that best fits the needs of your company. It might well be Google’s Search Appliance. Just do not forget, the GSA is a totally different beast compared to the Google your users are accustomed to on the Web!

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googling

Mickel Gronroos

The ROI of Enterprise Search—Where’s the Beef?

December 15 - 2008 | Mickel Gronroos

When faced with the large up-front investment of an Enterprise Search installation, executives are asking for proof that the investment will pay up. Whereas it is easy to quantify the value of search on an e-commerce site or as part of the company helpdesk—increased sales, shorter response times—how do you go about verifying that your million-dollar Enterprise Search application has the desired effects on your revenue stream?

Search engines on the Web have changed the landscape of information access. Today, employees are asking for similar search capabilities within the firewall as they are used to having on the Web. Search has become the preferred way of finding information quickly and accurately.

Top executives at large corporations have heard the plea and nowadays see the benefits of efficient Findability. However, it costs to turn the company information overload from a storage problem of the IT department to a valuable asset and business enabler for everybody. So how do you prove the investment worthwhile?
 
The Effects of Enterprise Search

Before you can prove anything, you need to establish the effects you would like your Enterprise Search solution to have on your organization. Normally, you would want an Enterprise Search solution to:

 – Enable people to work faster

 – Enable people to produce better quality

 – Provide the means for information reuse

 – Inspire your employees to innovate and invent

These are all effects that a well-designed and maintained Enterprise Search application will help you address. However, the challenge when calculating the return on investment is that you are attempting to have an effect on workflows that are not clearly visible on your revenue stream. There is no easy way to interlink saved or earned dollars to employees being more innovative.

So how do you prove that you are not wasting money?

There are two straightforward ways to address the problem: Studying how users really interact with the Enterprise Search application and asking them how they value it.

User Behavior through Search Logs

By extracting statistics from the logs of your Enterprise Search application, you can monitor how users interact with the tool. There are several statistic measures that can be interesting to look at in order to establish a positive influence on one or more of the targeted effects.

A key performance indicator for calculating if the Enterprise Search application enables people to work faster is to monitor the average ranking of a clicked hit in the result list. If people tend to scroll down the result set before clicking a hit and opening up a document, this implies the application does not provide proper ranking of the results. In other words, users are forced to review the result set, which obviously slows them down.

By monitoring the amount of users that are using the system, by following the number of different documents they open up through search and by observing the complexity of the queries they perform, you can estimate the level of information your users are expecting to find through searching.

If the application is trusted to render relevant, up-to-date results, more users will use it, they will carry out more complex queries and they will open up a wider range of different documents. If your users do not trust the system, however, they will not use it or they will only search for a limited set of simple things such as “news”, “today’s menu” or “accounting office”. If this is the case, you can hardly say your Enterprise Search application has met the requirements posed on it.

Conversely, if the users access a wide set of documents through search and you have a large number of unique users and queries, then this implies your Enterprise Search application is a valued information access tool that promotes information reuse and innovation based on existing corporate knowledge.

User Expectations through Surveys 

Another way to collect information for assessing the return of investment of your Enterprise Search initiative is to ask the users what they think. If you ask a representative subset of your intended users how well the Enterprise Search application fits their specific purposes, you will have an estimate of the quality of the application.

There are a lot of other questions you can ask: Does the application help the user to find relevant corporate information? Are the results ranked properly? Does the application help the user to get an overall picture of a topic? Does it enable the user to get new ideas or find new opportunities? Does it help him avoid duplicating work already done elsewhere within the organization?

A Combination of Increased Usage and Perceived Value

As we have seen, the return on investment of an Enterprise Search initiative is often hard to quantify, but the impact such an application has on a set of targeted effects can be measured using search logs and user surveys. The data collected this way provides an estimate of the value of Findability within the firewall of an organization.

Nowadays, hardly anybody questions the marketing value of a good corporate web site or the impact email has on the way we communicate. Such channels and services are self-evident business enablers today. In this respect, the benefits of precise and quick information access within the corporation should be self-evident. The trick is to get the tool just right.

Tobias Berg

Try the GSA Virtual Edition

November 20 - 2008 | Tobias Berg

 

One drawback with the Google Search Appliance (GSA) has been that you cannot test it before you buy it. You could go to a Google Partner and ask them to index your content but that only works well with  public content. If it’s content behind your firewall it gets worse and you most probably have to buy your own GSA just to try it out. (more…)

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