With data volumes growing by 200 percent a year, knowledge workers are spending around 30 percent of their time trying to extract useful information. Furthermore a recent U.S. study asserted that knowledge workers spend more than twice as much time re-creating already created content as they spend creating new content. In addition to this time spent on maintaining structures for storing incoming unstructured information (e.g. mail, documents etc) is increasing rapidly. Enabling search solutions makes information easy to find, however the key is to transform this information into knowledge. This is normally not done by simple intranet search functionality, however the intranet portal can act as a portal to a knowledge management system based on advanced search functionality withadded collaborative functions. This transforms your organization into a “knowledge finding organization”, creating an even more competitive organization. Knowledge Management systems based on an Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) can, if implemented properly, significantly improve the efficiency of an organization. IDC Research suggests in their latest report (April 2006) “Hidden cost of information Work” that the cost for wasted time on the part of professional searching, but not finding relevant information, amounts to $5.3 million annually for an enterprise with 1000 knowledge workers.

1. Increase your competitive advantage
Create a KM system from your Intranet portal
Findwise Göteborg
2009-02-25
Helge Legernes
helge.legernes@findwise.se
www.findwise .se | info@findwise.se | +46 31 288 400 | Drottningg. 5 | 411 14 Göteborg

2. Abstract
With data volumes growing by 200 percent a year, knowledge workers are spending around 30 percent of their
time trying to extract useful information. Furthermore a recent U.S. study asserted that knowledge workers
spend more than twice as much time re-creating already created content as they spend creating new content.
In addition to this time spent on maintaining structures for storing incoming unstructured information (e.g.
mail, documents etc) is increasing rapidly.
Enabling search solutions makes information easy to find, however the key is to transform this information into
knowledge. This is normally not done by simple intranet search functionality, however the intranet portal can
act as a portal to a knowledge management system based on advanced search functionality withadded
collaborative functions. This transforms your organization into a “knowledge finding organization”, creating an
even more competitive organization.
Knowledge Management systems based on an Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) can, if implemented properly,
significantly improve the efficiency of an organization. IDC Research suggests in their latest report (April 2006)
“Hidden cost of information Work” that the cost for wasted time on the part of professional searching, but not
finding relevant information, amounts to $5.3 million annually for an enterprise with 1000 knowledge workers.
© 2009 Findwise AB 1

3. Table of Contents
Traditional search ..........................................................................................................3
Search behaviour...........................................................................................................3
Enterprise search technology .........................................................................................3
Requirements for a KM solution .....................................................................................4
Knowledge discovery through Enterprise Search..............................................................4
Turn your intranet portal into a KM system .....................................................................6
Horizontal communication & corporate boundaries .........................................................8
Finding people with knowledge ......................................................................................8
Information as a corporate asset ....................................................................................9
© 2009 Findwise AB 2

4. Traditionalsearch
The handling of corporate knowledge through effective knowledge management will become one the most
critical competitive advantages in the future. The more people work as “knowledge workers”, the more time is
spent on searching for the right information. The common factor to all information in a typical enterprise is
unstructured content which is hard to find with traditional techniques. U.S. and European analysts agree that
about 80 percent of information within an enterprise is unstructured.
Traditional search functionality is included in many IT-solutions, as a tool for finding stored data. Normally the
functionality gives access to data stored in the current application e.g. search functionality in a mail client or in
a CRM application. However these search tools normally are isolated functions and do not contribute to
sharing knowledge across the organization.
Searchbehaviour
Looking at people’s behaviour when using search, they seldom find the right information. According to user
surveys 50% of online search is not successful and 22% of all searches have no result. People also find it difficult
to use search engines; 44% of users are not sure what to type into a search engine and 39% of users misspell
queries, which potentially provides poor result set.
Enterprise search technology
Today’s enterprise search technologies provide a common extraction and access layer for both structured and
unstructured information. The technology focuses on performance and scalability for rapid and efficient
retrieval of all informationin a common way. Structured information is content residing in mainframes,
databases, enterprise applications and other forms of storage with a static data model. Unstructured
information is all kind of documents (Word, Excel, PDF, etc) stored on fileservers, Web content, rich media,
mail etc.
Figure 1 – Enterprise Search Platform (ESP)
© 2009 Findwise AB 3

5. Requirementsfor a KMsolution
Today’s Knowledge Management (KM) system must serve all groups of people in an organization, with fast and
correct information about how to act towards customers, create values and improve performance. The basic
features are a search portal on the intranet with navigators, collaboration possibilities and clustering
techniques to create dynamic structures for grouping information “on-the-fly.
But a good KM solution must also understand the content deeply, organize it automatically and deliver it
intuitively to all users, whenever needed. To have the possibility to provide this, the solution need to access all
information across the traditional data sources, locations, user devices, languages and geographies.
Furthermore the demand of finding and processing the most recent information in the never-ending
information flow for each organization must be handled.
An organization that plans to build a KM system based upon a searchplatform must use a platform which
meets the demand of high customisation possibilities e.g. support for relevancy tuning, high tunability in
content processing, support for profiles (handles organizational platforms differences). Otherwise one might
fall into challenging implementation issues after the initial phase.
Knowledge discoverythrough Enterprise Search
By using experts that have experience in strengthening the knowledge-sharing within organizations by means
of enterprise search technology combined with a customized intranet portal, a company will be well prepared
to meet the ever growing demand for efficient working. Using search as a foundation for retrieving and making
the company’s KNOWLEDGE visible by finding information and knowledge from earlier experiences and
previous projects is a low cost strategy for managing the corporate knowledge.
Since search technology is able to form a layer above all content within an organization, building knowledge
systems upon this serves as the ultimate base, i.e. the content from all information silos is gathered together in
one common index. This enables the organization to refine and utilize the corporate wisdom from one single
access point.
This will give people easy access to knowledge they know about, but not where to find. But it will also open a
path to information and knowledge they didn’t know existed. This is normally the majority of information and
gives all employees the opportunity to increase their knowledge with information from new areas and combine
this with already known knowledge.
Figure 2 - Three types of information
© 2009 Findwise AB 4

6. In the everyday increasing information cannonade; the ability to find the right information at the right time will
be a future success factor. This will create dynamic knowledge “on demand”, suitable for the moment.
Figure 3 – Knowledge on demand
If it is easy to find and retrieve the “right” information when needed, then “dynamic knowledge” can be build
up for each separate task or mission. The ability to dynamically find, extract, structure and understand
information is a measure of “dynamic knowledge”.
The resultant quality of the system is not only dependent on the features of the enterprise search engine, but
also on the content. The basis for building functionality is highly dependenton the quality of content. Therefore
a process for relevance tuning is required.
Figure 4 – Relevancy tuning process
© 2009 Findwise AB 5

7. It is vital for the organization to work with the content internally by taking advantage of content owners’
knowledge and making sure that important content aspects aren’t overlooked. This process is necessary, since
search brings out content issues into the real light when bringing together earlier separated sources of content.
Turn your intranet portal into a KM system
By turning the intranet into a portal to corporate knowledge through advanced search functionality, you
change people’s view of the intranet, from a mixture of information of unknown quality, to a reliable source of
mission-critical content and expertise. Knowledge workers need simple and effective access to corporate
information across silos and organizational boundaries, bridging the structured and unstructured world of data.
The ability to meaningfully aggregate any information from anywhere and deliver it anywhere will support
effective collaboration around the organization. This will ensure information, knowledge and expertise sharing
across the organization, transforming individual knowledge (human capital) to a common corporate asset
available for all employees. This is a way to improve the corporate knowledge structure and the social capital
as a corporate asset for the organization.
Figure 5 – Transform human capital into corporate assets
The fundamental components found in an enterprise search engine are typically: security, tailored relevancy
models, semantic indexing, contextual mining of data and advanced processing tools. These are all put to good
to use in a knowledge management system. One should also be able to provide search across all types of
content, from standard documents to multi-media files such as images and video.
© 2009 Findwise AB 6

8. Figure 6 – Knowledge Management system complexity
The following functionality can be implemented in a KM system based on an enterprise search platform:
Organizational platform specific personalization of search (role-based)
Management point to information through search (promote certain content)
Connect between search result and human knowledge
Collaboration functionality through social networks
Reuse knowledge from existing/previous projects
If the content of a KM portal is irrelevant, the users leave it. This makes it necessary to provide different
categories of people with different information, i.e. role-based search.
To have a personalized home page for each user based on their topics of interest. Selected information is
presented based on the users’ past behaviour.
Another part of a KM system is to facilitate collaboration among people, through assisting the users in sharing
their knowledge with a wider audience. This gives the organization a way to take full advantage of all the
expertise within the company. The search solution is used as a gateway for both experts and knowledge
seekers to meet.
© 2009 Findwise AB 7

9. Horizontal communication & corporate boundaries
Large organizations are divided into different organizational units and use different processes to simplify
administration, allowing true focus on the core-business and to achieve specific goals. The work-tasks
performed by people in these organizational units are tailor-made to best support the organizational common
goal: earning money for the company’s stockholders. The people in these units need information and
knowledge in order to perform their work-tasks efficiently.
The awareness of information and knowledge resources is not shared in a corporate context, but resides in the
minds of the different individuals. These individuals, through their work-tasks, interact mainly with other
people in their own organizational unit or process – these people are their main resource for getting awareness
of other information and knowledge resources (corporate intranets etc excluded).
Today, enterprise search engines are providing these individuals access to both structured and unstructured
information and are becoming the main resource or gatekeeper to the information – but these engines do not
bring people together, therefore the tacit knowledge isneither captured nor shared across the organizational
boundaries, i.e.: interaction across process or unit belonging is not supported.
To fully utilize an enterprise search engine one could capture the search patterns of individuals, finding out
what they are looking for, what they have looked at. These patterns can deduce an insight of what these
people are working with. People who are working with similar things are also in the need of similar information
and knowledge – but most of all, they all have different tacit knowledge and their own expertise. So, by
connecting these individuals we could support tacit knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries.
By applying unsupervised clustering techniques to mine query-logs and click-stream data we can identify
groups of people with similar information needs across organizational boundaries and connect these people
utilizing Instant Messaging technique. We can also provide KM and HR people with deep insight on what the
entire organization is about!
Finding people with knowledge
Expert capture and location could be implemented in an enterprise search solution, and the experts could be
connected to the content when searching. There are a number of ways to determine who is an expert on what.
The easiest way is to let people promote themselves as experts in a given domain, or to keep this information
in a separate system. Often there is some problem keeping the information updated.
Another way is to let the search platform collect information about the creator of the content. This method
needs to take into account the weighting and confidence of different information sources, and draw
associations between people mentioned within content and the possible expertise context itself.
When a user interacts with the search system in a corporate environment they implicitly convey their areas of
interest and their expertise. The search user interface could track searches, viewed results and stored searches
to define and measure the expertise level.
© 2009 Findwise AB 8

10. Information as a corporate asset
Modern enterprise organizations need to increase the value of the information, turning the information into
the most valuable corporate asset. The value, of course, depends on the actual “status” of the information
asset. The “status” could be measured upon if the information is easy to find, available, relevant in the actual
content and easy accessible for people when needed.
If the information fulfills this requirements it will turn into corporate knowledge and the enterprise will not
only be more efficient, but also improves relationships with customer, partners and suppliers. The information
turns into a corporate asset, the most valuable assets in the future information based economy.
Figure 7 – Corporate assets
© 2009 Findwise AB 9