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.

Boosting Blocking Studio

How do you promote content to all employees?

How do you focus employees attention on the most relevant information?

Rather than, Unlike:

Rather than relying on set in stone, rigid incorrigible relevancy. We can now augment the relevancy to promote particular content based on seasonal peaks, newly launched projects and initiatives and user feedback.

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Promote awareness of important information.

Expedite promotion of content.

Direct users to the highest yield information.

Tune the search experience.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

At Dell.com, a FAST customer. They utilised our Search Business Centre to analyse logs and report on the search activities. They found that generic searches for 'laptop' where quite prominent. This is a very generic term so it is difficult for a user to determine the relevancy of one over the other, but interestingly those laptops at the top of the stack yielded more sales. Armed with this information Dell were able to boost those products with the greatest margins to the top of the stack. This has lead to higher conversions on high margin items and increased profits.

Dell have also developed a rules engine that utilises FAST to block or promote items based on availability. If surplus, promote for increased conversions. If out of stock, temporarily block from results.

How can you get the best out of yout team and enjoy your job?

As Edward Muzio describes in his book, Four Secrets to Liking Your Work, by understanding your own behavior, negotiating tasks, and mastering your motivation you can grow to love your job.

Not that this is a problem for me I should point out if you are listening Boss!!

Think of a job as a relationship, as if the job itself were another person.
Sure, some are abusive, and the best thing to do is get out.
But many rescued with a little focused effort.

Here are 4 secrets that can help.

1. Observing Behavior:
- Some people tend be more outgoing. While others are more introverted.

-Some focus on budgets, timelines, and tasks. while others are more concerned with the other
people involved?

The different permutations of these behavioral tendencies generate 4 different personality types:

Directiveness - an assertive focus on results.
Inspiration - an extroverted focus on other people.
Stabilization - is a reserved, supportive focus on the team s needs.
Regulation - is an analytical focus on facts.

We can all behave in any of these ways, but the fact is that we have preferences.

I might prefer to Inspire, for example, but you might prefer to Regulate. Clearly we ll have conflict if we don t recognize the diversity between us and learn to benefit from our differences.

Consider what behavior your job wants from you.

Does it want you to Direct? Inspire? Stabilize? Regulate?

How does your job's preference compare to your own? If the two of you are too far apart, it's a problem. You may not need to quit, but you may need to negotiate.


2. Mastering Motivation

If behavior is how we act at work, motivation is what drives us. Here is a list of six motivating factors:
- Reward -obtaining money or results
- Autonomy - steering your own ship
- Coaching - helping others
- Cooperating - experiencing harmony
- Consistency - being consistent.
- Continuous Learning - being challenged and discovering new things
[RA4C]

Which of these sound most compelling to you? Which of them sound unimportant? Give them a scoring from 1 to 5. With 5 being most important.

The fact is, we are all motivated by different combinations of these six factors. If I m trying to help other people, and you re trying to make money, imagine how much conflict we might have in a selling situation!

What s more, we won't even realize why we disagree. We'll just be silently pushing for totally different goals.

Again, this secret helps you understand both the people you work with, and your job itself.

How is your job trying to motivate you? If you are in a research position but don t care about discovering truth, or you re a commissioned salesperson who cares more about harmony than money, there may be a mismatch.

3. Harmonizing Tasks.

Did you know that everything you do at work falls into one of only three categories?

- Routine Tasks - like filling out a time sheet or expense report.
- Problem-solving Task - like repairing a buggy program or creating a new application
- Strategic long range project - like redesigning a business process or generating a framework

Each of us has a unique preference for the amount of each type of task we get. Whatever blend you want, you will begin to feel frustrated with your work if you re not getting it.

Remedies:
- When restless at work, be sure to change task types when you change tasks.

- Try to get really good at the task types you dislike that way you can get them done more quickly!

- Try to negotiate trades with coworkers. If you re getting too much problem solving, and someone else isn t getting enough, a trade will help both of you.

4. Get the Right Skills

Get good at what you need to succeed.

What you could learn to make your life easier? This is especially important when your job changes. Many people move into management, for example, without re-examining their skill sets. Skills like influencing or facilitation that were less important before can now mean the difference between happiness and misery at work.

In summary, Observe Behavior, Master Motivation, Harmonize Tasks, and Get The Right Skills.

Open & Flexible Relevancy Model

Open & Flexible Relevancy Model

How easy is it for users to find the information they are looking for?

Do different business units and departments rely on particular data sources more than others?

Do different regional and international offices rely on particular data sources more than others?

In that case, would you say that they have a somewhat idiosyncratic view to what is relevant?

Rather than, Unlike:

No longer a one-size-fits-all relevancy, take a user’s context into consideration to provide personalized results.

Business Objectives, business challenges:

Serve up content specific to a users context.

Less time spent trawling through irrelevant results. More time on high value tasks.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Let’s say I go to my favourite web search engine and type in “Java”. Irrespective of whether I am a coffee enthusiast looking to find information on my favourite brew or a programmer looking to skill up on the Jva programming language, I am presented with the same results based on same relevancy. The search engine doesn’t know who I am, doesn’t know what my interests are, doesn’t know what my objectives are.

Extending this to inside the firewall, different business units will have different perceptions on “What is relevant”. The IT department may place a premium on the most cited documentation for a topic, while sales may put a premium on the most recently added documentation.

If we can better serve heterogeneous business units with results to match their specific tasks we can reduce the amount of searching and gathering they need to do to produce more effective employees.

Compliance Solutions

Are you exposed to compliance risks?

How do you avoid the heavy fines associated with non regulatory compliance?

Is this a manual effort?

What regulatory breaches is your data potential exposing you to?

Business Objectives, business challenges:

Avoid costly fines for breach of regulatory compliance. FAST acts as the gatekeeper to all organisations information. Business rules can be generated to flag any suspect data.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Employees maybe exposing you to risk during daily operations. IDC estimates 75% of company documents are circulated via email. FAST can monitor the flow of illegal content like pornography, insider information disclosure, illegal employee actions, misuse of company assets etc. This can help companies avoid costly penalties.

Our fraud and compliance solutions are utilised by the Norwegian and Swedish Police as well as security agencies here in the UK and US.