Auto-Generated drill-down faceted navigation.

Auto-Generated drill-down faceted navigation.

How do you ensure employees are leveraging all information assets not just relying on what is found on found on the first or second pages?

How are users encouraged to discover new information?

Can users quickly perform a deep dive and narrow the result set down from several thousand documents to a handful of the most relevant ones with a couple of clicks?

Rather than, Unlike:

Not just millions of text links, a la Google. If answer is not found on page 1 or page 2 the user is required to craft a new query. No insights or intelligence is provided onlt the recovery of text links where answers may be found. There is no discover information they may not have know existed. How can I have knowledge of what I don’t know exists?

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Educating employees beyond information they already know exists.

More knowledgeable employees can make better decisions.

We can fully activate all knowledge – long tail – not just popular articles.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Factiva, a premier information services provider powers their search on the FAST platform. About 3 years ago now, they came to the realization that, hey, information is free. We are part of the google genearation. So users do not want to pay for information they can get for free. They need to shift their unique value proposition. They realized they needed to create a richer user-experience that would bring time savings and added intelligence to clients over a free web search. After conducting due diligence, they finalised on search powered by FAST.

FAST’s search platform enables users to have a ‘conversation with the data’.

If I type in Yahoo, I can then drill down by source. I can see different key concepts emerging. Comapny names such as Microsoft bubble to the surface. Certain dates spike. This intelligence is telling me that something involving Yahoo and Microsoft has happened on this particular date. Low and behold, this was the day of the Microsoft attempted acquisition announcement.

So we engage users in a dialogue. If you were new to an area, and you wanted to find a restaurant. Upon asking your concierge for a nice place to eat you would not expect a directory listing all restaurant names to be dumped in front of you, would you? No. You would expect to engage in dialogue with the concierge. What type of cusine? How far do you wish to travel? What price are you willing to pay? These questions would help you narrow the decision to the best fit for you. Without those questions this is not easy to do. This is essentially what FAST’s technology does versus your favourite online search engine.

You may be sitting on a vast storehouse of knowledge, but much of it is underused. As a former HP CEO said. If HP knew, what HP knows, HP would be 3 times more profitable.

We need an effective means to enable deep dives on information. To slice open the content corpus to get reachthe nuggets of information.

Synonym Studio

Synonym Studio

Do employees find it difficult to generate the right keywords to use?

Are employees often presented with 0-results after dispatching a query?

Rather than, Unlike:

FAST understand that users can be subjective - you may say largest and I may say biggest, you may say broker and I may say agent. The use of colloquialisms an acronyms can further complicate things.

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Increase the findability of information.

Less time spent gathering. More time on high-value tasks.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

At Dell.com, which is powered by FAST. They utilised our Search Business Centre to analyze their logs and found a high number of searches for Ipod. However, Dell do not stock ipods so users were being retuned 0 results. previously 0 results – missed opportunities – mapped ipod to mp3 player :: Serving relevant results> increase in profits

Document Preview & HTML Hit highlighter

Document Preview & HTML Hit highlighter

What is the impact on bandwidth for this organisation by having so many users downloading – some times non-pertinent documents? Is there ample bandwidth or is this a problem?

Rather than, Unlike:

In large organisations where bandwidth resources are limited FAST can provide document previews so that users can pre-qualify document before actioning a download.

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Reduce bandwidth costs and constraints.

Reduced bandwidth cost.

Increase speed to access intelligence.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Norton Rose, one of the magic circle UK Law Firm had a challenge in that lawyers were forced to research a corpus of several hundred thousand documents. Each document was several hundred pages long. Finding a hit in a document becomes a less powerful means of determining relevancy in this case. FAST has now allowed lawyers to identify word matches down to a particular paragraph and sentence. In order to expedite the time to find relevant intelligence FAST provides a heat map over a cached HTML version.

The benefits are two fold. Lawyers can quickly identify areas of interest through an overview of the relevant sections. So less time locating more time making decisions based on relevant information.

Also, the HTML version precludes the need for downloading the original image heavy document which may be several megabytes in size. We can quickly download the several kilobyte HTML replicate in seconds.

Data Cleansing Module - Content Integration Studio

Data Cleansing Module - Content Integration Studio

Are you finding that the data within your company is not 100% reliable? What is the cost of this?

Are you finding conflicting and duplicated data?

Are your business decisions relying on this spurious data?

Rather than, Unlike:

Through Mergers, Acquisitions and newly introduced data stores across the organisation there may be several representations of a single customer entity. FAST can cleanse data to create a single Master Copy of reference data. Would this enable better decision making and reduce cycles?

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Content Rationalization.

Consolidate “multiple versions of the truth”.

Base decisions on high quality information.

Single true master representation of entities.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

A Norwegian FAST customer and leading European Media Company, Schibsted utilised FAST technology to develop its award winning white pages. It harvests content such as address, opening hours, contact details in varying formats from various public available repositories and sites. From this unstructure it creates a structured representation of an entity. This achieved using approximate and fuzzy matching in a fraction of the time databases take to achieve this.

In another example a Norwegian telco had multiple customer databases across the organization that needed to be updated when customer information changed. This lead to inconsistent customer data. They haemorrhaged thousands of pounds sending costly hourly paid engineers to wrong address and bills to wrong households before turning to FAST for a solution. FAST consolidated customer data from several DBs to single index. From this index they could write back into a single database that would contain the master data going forward.

The savings in both cases are quite evident.