Wednesday May 21, 2008
BREAKOUT F
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
F-1: Build a Business Case for an Enterprise Search Platform
Breakout F-1 — Build a Business Case for an Enterprise Search Platform
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Shawn Ivey, Director of ECM/KM, Information Technology, Grant Thornton, LLP
People have been preaching the potential value of search as a true enterprise platform for many years, yet few organizations truly implement holistic solutions in this manner. In this session, Shawn Ivey will share insights regarding how Grant Thornton was able to leverage many years’ experience with knowledge management, content management, and business intelligence initiatives to ultimately build a business case for a unified search platform, and its approach to align business and technology efforts accordingly.
Beyond Silos: Change “Hide & Seek” to “Index & Go Find”
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Joe Hilger, Practice Manager, Washington, DC Office, Avalon Consulting, LLC
This session will explore the possibilities and benefits of a unified search solution on the Vignette platform and will examine how to convey the value of these initiatives to key decision makers. The discussion will balance technical depth and business relevancy, illustrating how these solutions are implemented and what their impact will be. Emphasis will be placed on being able to communicate the value of an enterprise search solution, including systems maintainability, user experience, and return on investment. The need to respect security across disparate data sources will be discussed, as will learning how to use enterprise search for any and all readonly applications within the enterprise.
F-2: How Faceted Navigation Aids Discovery
How Faceted Navigation Aids Discovery
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Seth Earley, President, Earley & Associates Inc.
Faceted navigation is one of the most interesting approaches to improving search precision and recall to appear within the past several years. There are a number of considerations to making the most of faceted navigation: choosing the correct facets, developing data models, leveraging explicit and implicit metadata, and testing application usability. Seth Earley will provide a high-level survey of these issues in this nuts-and-bolts session.
Helge Legernes, Co-founder, Findwise
This sessions asks, and strives to answer, a number of questions: How do you enable intelligent search for information retrieval? How have some of the world’s leading companies been using features such as faceted navigation, clustering, and contextual search to help guide the users through vast amounts of data? How can visualization contribute to collaborative innovation? And how can search results be visualized in new ways?
F-3: Search Analytics: Theory & Practice
Search Analytics: Theory & Practice
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Avi Rappoport, Consultant, Search Tools Consulting
Search is one of the few instances in which site visitors will actually tell you what they want in queries of one to four words. Search analytics allows you to read these words and gives you context to make sense of them, which may lead to changes in the site content, navigation, search engine functionality, or user interface. Avi Rappoport will provide an overview of the kinds of analytics available and mention some examples in which analytics led to a significant improvement in the user experience.
Managing Your Search Engine
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Ravi Mynampaty, Software Engineer, Information Architecture Group, Harvard University
To ensure the best possible results are being presented to users, search is a tool that needs to be actively monitored and managed. This presentation describes the work going on at Harvard Business School (HBS) in this regard. The HBS User Experience team has been tracking and analyzing search queries and associated click streams, using this information to tune our search engine. Learn how this process is improving the search engine. Implementation details will be discussed and screen shots of the different custom-built analytics dashboards will be presented.
BREAKOUT G
9:45 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
G-1: Accenture’s Enterprise Search Implementation
Kevin A. Dana, Collaboration Applications Capability Lead, Accenture
From the enterprise search site to search-embedded applications to expertise discovery, Accenture’s enterprise search solution starts with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Kevin Dana will outline the key factors in the decision-making process, demonstrate the current applications, and discuss implementation challenges and how they were overcome. He will also discuss the future direction of search inside Accenture.
G-2: Navigation Through Social Computing
Brad Allen, Founder & CTO, Siderean Software
It’s no longer good enough to have a site that is just “sticky” because you have information that people are willing to come back for. Today, sites that enable more dynamic user interaction along with social computing techniques such as user tagging, voting, analytics, and social interaction (like blogs and wikis) deliver a whole new dimension of community that not only fosters longer time on the site but a new level of network effect through more “active engagement.” This session will explore the relationship between relational navigation and the development of new social computing software strategies that elevate the average information portal to new heights of active engagement.
G-3: Selecting a Search Analytics Package
Selecting a Search Analytics Package
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Vivian Bliss, Taxonomy & IA Consultant, Earley & Associates
Now that analytics are recognized as a valuable tool to help understand user behavior, tune site search, or even provide ROI data for stakeholders, choosing a search analytics package that meets your needs is an important task. Don’t let the analytics package choose you; take the driver’s seat. This presentation will help you understand what you really need by defining business requirements and key performance indicators, identifying what you may already have and what is needed to fill the gaps.
BREAKOUT H
10:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
H-1: Pan-Enterprise Search Platforms: Moving Beyond Single-Application Search
Jerry Hawk, Founder & Principal, Advantage Professionals
During this executive briefing, Hawk will discuss the latest technologies and deployment approaches for automating the retrieval, processing, and management of information throughout a global organization. Known as pan-enterprise search, these platforms transcend company divisions, operating systems, language barriers and file types to deliver the highest business value. Numerous real world case studies will be discussed across media, financial services, health care and life sciences leveraging Hawk's extensive experience with advanced search deployments. Advanced capabilities such as categorization, clustering, eduction, trending, visualization, and sentiment analysis will be discussed. Platform scalability, high availability, performance, and security approaches will also be covered.
H-2: Mining Additional Value From Enterprise Search
Trent Parkhill, Director of IT Services, Vice President, Haley & Aldrich, Inc.
Knowledge is found in two primary areas in any organization: in the minds of its people and in its stores of structured and unstructured information. With rapid growth on both fronts, Haley & Aldrich found an innovative way to leverage search technology to provide real-time access to its knowledge capital for all of its workforce from anywhere in the world. Haley & Aldrich professionals can now find people with specific expertise and/or actionable content to support any aspect of their work at any stage of a project. This people/expertise finder application has rapidly become the heart of Haley & Aldrich’s collaboration infrastructure.
H-3: Using Analytics to Drive Search: Lessons Learned
Marshall Bessieres, Product Manager, SCS Division, Omniture
You have a lot of content and employees who are unwilling to wade through it all, so you turn to site search. You’ve done everything right. You have immaculate metadata, synonyms, hyponyms, alternate word endings—everything possible to help your users find matches to their queries. But even success has its pitfalls as this often can result in hundreds of right answers. Now you’re back to where you started: a lot of content and site visitors unwilling to weed through it. Increasingly, sites are turning to their own business intelligence to solve this problem. Using analytics, not only can you give right answers, you can give the best right answer. Marshall Bessieres will discuss how to leverage your analytics data to maximize the effectiveness of search.
COFFEE BREAK
10:45 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Designing the Search Interface
11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Whitney Quesenbery, Consultant/Researcher, WQ Usability
This presentation leverages a case study based on research undertaken at a large university website to provide a view of search interface usability as an integral part of site design—and how both work together to provide a good user experience. Quesenbery’s team analyzed data from search logs and site traffic patterns and compared the results of different search algorithms; it also undertook qualitative research including usability testing with eye tracking and interviews with the student advisory service staff. The resulting information paints a vivid picture of the role the search interface plays within an organization.
ATTENDEE LUNCH
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
KEYNOTE PANEL: Take a 30,000-Foot View of Enterprise Search Implementation
1:30 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
Moderator: Susan E. Feldman, Research Vice President, Search and DiscoveryTechnologies, IDCKevin A. Dana, Collaboration Applications Capability Lead, AccentureSam Detweiler, Vice President, Technical Support, Systems, Computer AssociatesKenneth M. Ritchhart, CIO, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Join leading search industry analyst Sue Feldman for a panel discussion that will provide a high-level view of the reality of an enterprise search implementation. Feldman will discuss the intricacies of the search deployment process in truly enterprise settings with top executives from leading organizations. Drawing on her rich background in the search market, Feldman will prompt lively discussion of what it’s like for enterprises to tackle key issues of imple- Corporate Sponsor mentation including customization, security, globalization, managing multiple engines, scalability, and evaluating the value of enterprise search tools.
COFFEE BREAK: Visit the Showcase
2:15 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Evaluating the ROI of Search
2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Susan Aldrich, Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold GroupMartin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd
While web search tools often provide an immediate tangible return on investment—delivered in the form of customers finding and buying products and services, for example— the value of effective internal search can be difficult to quantify. Attend this session to hear from two leading thinkers about the ways in which you can evaluate the value your enterprise search solution brings to your organization’s bottom line.
The Future of Search
3:15 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Moderator: Theresa Regli, Principal, Real Story GroupEd Chi, Area Manager and Senior Research Consultant, PARCMike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, Content Discovery, IBMCyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager, GoogleChris Cleveland, CEO, Dieselpoint, Inc.
Enterprise search is a booming market with solutions taking shape in every form, from appliances and simple search boxes to multifaceted navigation and actionable intelligence. In this exciting space, search solutions continue to emerge. In this session, we will offer a glimpse at some of the surprises the search landscape will reveal in the near future.
Finding Meaning: What We’ve Learned
4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Stephen E. Arnold, Managing Director, ArnoldIT.com
The enterprise search landscape is vast, varied, and continues to expand and evolve. Join us for an endnote discussion with well-known enterprise search industry expert Stephen Arnold. He will provide a high-level view of the key themes that emerged in this year’s event and will help attendees put it all into perspective in a no-nonsense way.