A Pharmaceutical Company Enables Comprehensive Enterprise Search

The client has many separate sources of internal and external information, but had no search and retrieval solution capable of pulling the sources together. The client’s employees were forced to use numerous tools when attempting to search for and access information. The client sought a solution that would be all-encompassing, yet configurable for multiple contexts to enable the return of highly relevant results. The Knowledge Management department engaged West Pole to help scope the project, identify achievable requirements and develop a solution that would provide a single tool capable of searching and accessing all enterprise content.

Integrating Information to Support the Front Line

West Pole worked with the client business and technical team members to clarify the requirements and related business processes for both near-term and future states of search, and to prioritize feature delivery to best leverage the existing state of the client’s architecture. The client had identified a vendor to provide the technical architecture, and West Pole worked with the entire team to iteratively clarify and refine the functionality of the system using a rapid prototyping design and development cycle. West Pole acted as liaison across various development projects that intersected search, and managed the roll-out of multiple strategic versions of the search solution.

Delivering Truly Enterprise-Wide Smart Search

West Pole created an information architecture (IA) that visually and structurally exposed the different types of information within a result set. Additionally, the IA leveraged the established and emerging proprietary taxonomy schemes to allow the optimized discovery of not only content, but related people, communities, web applications and topic summaries. West Pole also delivered interaction design expertise to ensure effective support for the user workflow after delivery of a result set. Follow-up support included, allowing for the refinement of search, following “related” paths, and exporting the results for additional processing or exploration. The system interface is simple, yet structured to allow for growth and customization of the search tool to improve the relevancy of results. As a result of this effort the Knowledge Management department now delivers extensible search to the enterprise that is designed to grow in scope and feature set – and the client’s employees have a single point of access for easily finding content throughout the enterprise.

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