Challenge

• A leading Canadian telecommunications company wanted to increase employee knowledge-sharing and improve human resource utilization by tracking their employees’ expertise and interests.
• The sponsors of the project speculated that the documents written by each employee indicated his or her expertise. Similarly, interest could be determined by the documents that each employee read.
• They asked us, “Can you develop a system to support 50,000 users and scan and track half a million pieces of company-wide content, coming from a range of document management systems, websites and collaboration platforms?”

Solution

• Architech Solutions investigated the feasibility of using Autonomy’s IDOL technology, which the client already used for enterprise search.
• A proof-of-concept system was “trained” to perform the document tracking, using one of the customer’s Sharepoint-based repositories that contained many different file types.
• The Web-based prototype accurately identified “experts” by using keywords, searcher’s user  profiles, and document content analysis.
• The application proved its ability to suggest documents to users based on user-interest profiles.
• Complete reports and user guides described project findings, software installation and configuration, and recommendations for implementing a scalable enterprise-wide solution.

Results

• The project successfully demonstrated that existing document repositories and Autonomy’s IDOL technology can be used for expertise and interest profiling.
• The client gained valuable insight into performance and maintenance factors that impact an enterprise-wide implementation, plus potential avenues of investigation for solution enhancements.
• The client chose Architech Solutions to develop the application programming interface in preparation for full deployment across the entire company.