A lot of companies around the world are going through changes in their organization. Caused by changes in demands, customers and people working for them. The new world of work is a great concept which enlightens their view and helps them to go through that change. Also tools like Factor 4 and Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimalization from Microsoft will help to define the companies maturity level and steps to reach a higher level.
Almost any company is based on information. Information around processes, work, products, people and so on. That information will help the company to perform its tasks and to grow bigger. Today a lot of this information is stored in unstructured information silos and even sometimes only available on paper. Searching through unstructured information is a big problem and reflects on the performances of the company and its employees. So you can imagine how important it is to find the right information at the right time. This can only be reached when information is structured and search is correctly implemented
I have created a presentation around The new world of work and Search which i use to explain about the importance of Search. I think its important to share some of this information with you guys.
When a company is growing in for example the amount of people working there, doing international business, getting a larger relation network, the amount of information like mail, notes, paper, documents and other business related information is growing exponentially. Often you see that:
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Companies are large
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The network of people working at the company is large
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People work at a variety of locations
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Specialized back-end systems (customized)
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SharePoint is there, but what now?
If you look at the The new world of work, you can differentiate 4 areas:
One world of business
In a one world of business you are combining information which causes that there are no boundaries anymore. In such a world the global economic integration pushes people, cultures and companies much more closely together. This can be addressed by:
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Combining information into one environment
By combining information into one searchable source in which information about relations, customers, people, economic issues and your own organization is found. Secondly relating all this information together by metadata and equally found pieces of content.
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Protection of your own organization
Because there is now one world of information you need to think about protecting your critical content like information about your company which should not be available to competitors.
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Security trimmed results
Not all information for relations and people at your company should be available. According to their security clearance profile information is provided
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Unlock business value
Because all information is combined, you can easily find other areas of business which you can profit from. Also working together with relations and partners can be one of your envolvements into the future.
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Tackle demanding search challenges
Information is getting more and more which will cause a greater demand for results. You don't want to get too much information (information overload) but only that information which is relevant to you at a specific moment in time.
Always on, always connected
The current technology gives people the possibility to connect in completly different ways then 10 years ago. That means that the people of the future will communicate and work together differently then we are used to. The demand of knowing who is responsible and how to connect to those becomes very important.
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Presence information
By combining presence information included in your search results do you know who is for example owner of the content and how you can reach that person
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Search and communication
Expanding information results through search with communication technologies like SMS, Email, Live Communication and Portal Technology (Discussion boards, forums, Wiki's and blogs).
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Information is everywhere
Try to think outside boundaries. Information can be found everywhere meaning that search is implemented to search through communication channels
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Information from anywhere
Implementing search in such a way that it can be used on public environments, mobile devices and even offline locations (search through cache)
Transparency
Economies, organizations and people evolve. This causes change in management within organizations. By thinking out of the box when looking for relevant information you need, information silos need to be transparent. It means that information is still clustered by metadata or categories but has underlaying relationships between them. By combining all those information silos relevant information is found more easily.
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Single start point of search
Looking for information needs to be clear for everybody. People don't want to work with large and dificult systems and forms to get to their relevant information. Having a single search field and still getting the relevant result is the best search you can imagine.
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Combining search results from the real world and your organization
Search should combine information from the real world like public communities, Wikis (wikipedia) and other online sources with their own information silos. Linking this can deliver more relevant information to the person who is performing the search but it could also cause information overload.
Work-force evolution
There is a big change going on under the work-force in organizations. Workers are more and more replaced by young workers who have other believes about their ways of work, communication and location. They also combine their private environment more with their work environment. Organizations need to be thinking differently about their current organizational structure, processes and protocols around workers. This reflects the way how information is processed, stored and found. Younger workers are used to public communities, wikis and blogs, while organizations try to keep their information inside walls. But do not forget, your business is your people.
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Younger and newer workers have other needs
As i already said, younger and newer workers have other needs for communication and collaboration. This will reflect the way how search is implemented. There are more information silos to be searched inside and outside the organization.
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Search through all available information sources
Workers are no longer interested in searching content within the organization. They want to search through all available content inside and outside the organization. This includes communities, internet pages, newsgroups and even other partner spaces.
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Smart Search
Because the demand for search will increase, more and more information is searched through. This can cause information overload (too much information delivered to the worker). Implementing search in a smart way can prevent this. For example:
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Including the profile information of the worker
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Ranking of search results
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Analyze clicked search results which will bring some results higher in the result list
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Exclude information of non-importance (by looking at the words the worker is using in search)
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Categorizing the information into silos in stead of information areas (online, internal, e.d.)
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Creation of new user experience (UX)
Delivering relevant information in a different format to the worker using tools like SilverLight. In stead of returning some presentations in a list, those same presentations are displayed in a three-dimensional space and can be brought forward based on clicks of the worker. Secondly visualizing the relations between different content.
As you can see search is gonna play a big role in the future of companies. Information is growing rapidly inside and outside the organizations. Unstructured information must become structured information in for example information silos which makes it easier to implement better search capabilities. The new world of work can help organizations to think differently about information and search.